New UK employment regulations came into force in October 2004 in
the form of the Employment Act 2002. This article explains the
impact of these new rules on your business. It also examines how,
as an employer, you can turn the new employment legislation to
the advantage of your business.
In order to understand how to use the new employment regulations
to your advantage, we first need to look at how the new laws
differ from the old employment legislation.
In the old days, an employee might be dismissed without an appeal
and the first sign of trouble for the employer wouldn’t come
until the employee put in a claim for unfair dismissal.
Or an employee might have been unhappy and so decided to resign.
Sometime afterwards, you as the employer could suddenly find the
employee putting in a claim for constructive dismissal.
For the employer, written procedures provided a good defence but
employment tribunals still made their own decisions and defending
your business could cost a lot of time and money.
With all this in mind, the Government decided to do something to
reduce the number of employment tribunal claims. In doing so,
they ended up introducing thirteen new ways that an employee can
claim against an employer at an employment tribunal!
All these new ways of claiming at an employment tribunal are
based on documentation. For example, the tribunal will look at
whether certain letters were written and why, or they will ask
for proof of whether a meeting was held at a sensible time and
place.
The new employment laws mean that if the paperwork is not right,
then the employment tribunal can class the employer as guilty –
without the need for a hearing!
In exchange for this, the new legislation gives employers new
ways of protecting themselves against tribunal proceedings. To
understand how you can protect your business, we need to take a
look at the new employment regulations in more detail.
The new employment regulations state that employees can no longer
claim constructive dismissal unless they can show that they have
tried, and failed, to resolve the problem with their employer.
Employees can no longer claim against their employer for unfair
dismissal unless they can show that they have exhausted every
appeal procedure offered by their employers and still failed to
resolve their differences.
However, if an employer does not have a written dispute
resolution procedure then the employee can go straight to an
employment tribunal and obtain an automatic award!
On that basis, it should be obvious that all employers need to
issue a dispute resolution procedure to all their employees in
order to avoid the risk of automatically losing at an employment
tribunal.
The good news is that a dispute resolution procedure needn’t be
that difficult to implement.
The most basic dispute resolution procedure is simply a structure
by which an employee can register a complaint against you. This
need be nothing more than a statement from you, the employer,
saying “If you have a grievance or feel you have been wrongly
disciplined, then put any appeal or grievance in writing to me.”
However, what if it was you who had carried out the disciplinary
in the first place – and, let’s face it, in a small company this
is quite likely to be the case. Would an employment tribunal
consider this to be fair?
Possibly not. But all that the law actually says is that the
dispute resolution procedure should be “as fair as possible”.
So, as an employer, can you make better use of the employment
legislation than this? Is there an easy way to ensure that you
have a dispute resolution procedure and that it will be
considered fair by an employment tribunal?
The answer, fortunately, is yes. All you need to do is to arrange
for an outside person or organisation to be the point of contact
to whom grievances can be directed. Then just state this in your
dispute resolution procedure.
Once you have done that, you are almost there. All that remains
is to make sure you use all the right bits of paperwork that are
required by the new employment legislation whenever you are
dealing with a disciplinary matter.
This includes ensuring that any disciplinary meetings are
notified to your employees in writing and that you give them at
least 48 hours notice of the meeting. You also have to make sure
you explain the reason for calling the disciplinary meeting and
give the employee copies of any documentation that will be
discussed during the meeting.
One of the easiest ways to achieve all this is to use a good
quality online personnel system. Such a system will allow you to
generate employment contracts for your staff online. It will
include in these contracts all the details of your disciplinary
procedure, along with details of a third party organisation to
whom employees should address any grievances.
In the event that you need to discipline an employee, a fully-
featured online personnel system will allow you to generate all
the necessary letters and documents automatically, thus ensuring
your business complies with the new employment legislation.
The costs of such a system are surprisingly low, especially when
you compare them against the costs of having a full-time
personnel department within your own organisation – something
which is usually prohibitively expensive for most small
businesses.
The Employee Contracts website at www.employee-contracts.co.uk
gives more information on how online personnel systems work and
can help you find a professional employment law consultant to
offer advice on protecting your business with one of these
systems.
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