You will have seen various reports about the government’s Employment Rights Bill, which is due to make things significantly more complicated, time consuming and costly for employers who wish to part company with problem employees later this year.
Fortunately, some of the initial proposals in the Bill have been watered down a little as the reality and difficulties of running the country hits, and hopefully that will continue. For example there is now unlikely to be an outright ban on zero-hour contracts as the government has recognised they can be a useful option that benefits all parties. However, they will still be massively scaled back. A concession but the headache remains.
Crucially, one thing that won’t change is that, almost certainly from October this year, employees will get a ‘day one’ right to be able to claim for Unfair Dismissal, a big change to the current requirement for employees to have 2 years’ service before they can make such a claim.
Therefore, if you have any relatively new employees i.e. with less than 2 years’ service, that aren’t working out you really should consider acting now and tackling their behaviours to hopefully improve them but if that does not work, starting the dismissal process.
The problem for most employers is that there are always more important priorities than tackling this, but you may well regret not doing so before the new law comes in. We can do pretty much all the work for you if you would like, at a very reasonable cost.
One thing you can be pretty sure of. Awkward employees almost always know their employment rights and will be aware when the law changes. Failing to act now is likely to lead to a very time consuming and costly process.
When organisations we support end up paying a large sum to make such cases go away, it is difficult to put into words the emotions and anger the employer feels when they end up having to pay off a poor performer or someone with a bad attitude.
But that is likely to be the outcome, once the individual has the right to make an unfair dismissal claim. You have been warned!!
The process of parting company with employees with less than 2 years’ service is often surprisingly straight forward, but you do need to take advice and follow a reasonable process.
If you have difficult employees that you need to discuss please contact us. We will be delighted to help, with a free initial consultation.
With our Monthly HR Support Package we look after the HR for small and medium sized companies throughout North West England and beyond who don’t have their own HR departments. It is a high quality, low cost product where we do most of the HR work for you, leaving you to concentrate on what you do best. Please Contact us for more details about the product, or with any other HR queries you may have.