Eight Tips for Employer Good Practice in England

As an employer, you must follow employment law in England. Employment law is a vast area that frequently changes, so ensuring you get it all right can be quite daunting. Otherwise, you could face a potential claim in the employment tribunal claims and risk damaging your business’ reputation. Therefore, this article will outline eight tips for employer good practice in England.

1. Update Your Employee Handbook

An employee handbook is a document that outlines your policies and procedures in the workplace. While it is not a legal requirement to have a handbook, having particular policies written down and easily accessible to your employees is a legal requirement. 

While certain policies and procedures are essential, having too many can cause confusion. For example, you may find employees are less likely to read an overfull or complex handbook. Instead, you should consider only including necessary procedures, such as: 

• disciplinary procedure and rules;
• a grievance procedure;
• health and safety policies; and 
• a maternity policy.

Furthermore, you should update your policies and procedures regularly to ensure that are relevant and useful in your workplace. 

2. Employee Health, Safety and Well-being

As an employer, it is your legal responsibility to look after your employees’ health, safety and well-being. Health and safety imply physical health and include your employees’ mental health, such as reducing stress at work. Showing that you care about your employees’ health, safety and well-being will help ensure your employees feel valued in the workplace. This can lead to greater productivity and better staff rapport. 

3. Get Pay Right!

Yes, it may sound like a prominent part of good practice. But not getting pay procedures correct or not paying your employee their proper entitlements will not go down well with your employees. Ultimately, your employees have rewarded you with their hard work. Therefore, it is crucial to reward them back in turn. This also includes ensuring that you follow your employer’s requirements, such as producing payslips and ensuring that tax and National Insurance are processed correctly.

4. Show Flexibility

As the Covid-19 pandemic has proven, work-life balance is essential. Consequently, you can aid your employees by being open to flexibility. For example, your employees may wish to work part-time or perhaps engage in hybrid working. In addition to being good practice, it is a legal requirement to consider your employees’ flexible work requests where they meet the criteria for making them.

5. Deal With Grievance Issues Correctly

As an employer, it is good practice to deal with grievance issues in particular ways. Firstly, you should ensure you do not delay dealing with grievances by promptly addressing the issue. Not only is this good practice; previous cases prove that a failure to address grievances can amount to a breach of your implied term as an employer of mutual trust and confidence with your employees. 

When dealing with a grievance, you should ensure that you follow the ACAS Code of Practice. Not doing so could increase the compensation an employment tribunal can instruct you to pay.

6. Do Not Discriminate Against Your Employees

As an employer, you are legally obligated not to discriminate against your employees regarding nine protected characteristics. These characteristics include:

• race;
• disability;
• sex;
• religion or belief;
• sexual orientation;
• being pregnant or on maternity leave;
• age;
• being married or in a civil partnership; and 
• gender reassignment.

Ensuring you do not discriminate in employment is related to valuing and promoting a diverse workforce. It is good practice to do this and shows that you possess great people-management skills. Ultimately, valuing your workforce and making employees feel like they can participate to their full potential helps them work more productively and aids their general well-being.

7. Practice Good Performance Management

Your employees make your business successful, so managing their performance is essential good practice as an employer. Performance management is an ongoing activity that requires you to ensure that your employees:

• know what you expect of them;
• are equipped with the rights skills and support to carry out their job; and
• feel motivated and are accountable for their actions.

It is good practice to regularly chat with and listen to your employees, providing helpful and constructive feedback to carry out their roles.

8. Protect Data

As an employer, you are legally required to protect specific data you process, including your employees’ data, such as their bank details. Therefore, it is good practice to state what you do with employees’ data in an Employee Privacy Notice. This includes:

• how you process their data; 
• who you share their data with; and 
• how long you will keep their data.

Key Takeaways

While you have legal obligations towards your employees, it is also essential to carry out good practice. This can aid staff morale, make your employees feel valued, and increase productivity. There are many ways to demonstrate good practice. For example, you should not discriminate against your employees regarding the nine protected characteristics. This way, you can value diversity in the workplace.

If you need help with good practice for employers in England, our experienced employment lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents for a low monthly fee. So call us today on 0808 196 8584 or visit our membership page.

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