Policies And Procedures Solicitors | London, Thame & Gerrards Cross

Employment policies

The right employment policies are an essential part of effective employee management.

Company policies

Ideally, you should have company policies covering all the main human resources issues to help ensure that you know how to deal with common situations and take a consistent approach. However, employment legislation and regulation are subject to frequent amendments, meaning your policies must be regularly updated.

Precedents

To reduce this burden, our employment lawyers have developed a suite of up-to-date precedents for our clients to easily customise to suit their business. Whatever your policies cover, our employment lawyers can advise you on the essential principles to make a tailored company policy clear and effective.

Some employment policies are a legal requirement or can have substantial legal impact. For example, you must have written grievance and disciplinary rules and procedures, and all but the smallest businesses must have a written health and safety policy. Other key policies might include data protection and equal opportunities policies and, more recently, an internet usage and email policy.

Most importantly, unless employees understand an employment policy it will not work. Make sure you draw it to their attention, and if appropriate back it up with training and ensure they are enforced.

Management training

Although HR personnel are often fully aware of the legal obligations on a company when carrying out a disciplinary meeting, a redundancy consultation exercise, hearing grievances etc, in practice it is more frequently a company’s managers who are required to deal with such matters. In our experience, managers often feel that they would have benefitted from basic knowledge of what is required from them and the do’s and don’ts at the outset. In addition, we often discover that clients are daunted by such meetings or the prospect of giving evidence in an Employment Tribunal.

With this in mind, we have formulated a package of in-house training courses, designed to fit our client’s needs. Courses include: Interviewing new staff; How to conduct a grievance hearing; How to conduct a disciplinary hearing; How to conduct a redundancy hearing; Giving evidence in an Employment Tribunal; Collective Consultation; Exiting executives/Settlement negotiations and Diversity training.

These courses can be run as a series of one hour weekly courses or can be run as a half day course or a stand-alone one-off training day. You may wish to experience all of the courses or you can “pick ‘n’ mix” those that you feel would be particularly beneficial to your company’s needs.

If you or any of your colleagues are interested in undertaking this training or any of the above initiatives and/or services, then please get in touch with a member of our employment law team to discuss.