Contracts & Policy Development

• Are your terms and conditions of employment as old as your business?
• Have your staff actually got an employment contract?
• Do you frequently miss your organisation’s key performance targets?
• Are your contracts of employment worth the paper they are written on?
• Do your staff mope around in a blame culture of bureaucracy?
• Do they have too little or too much to do?
• Do you need a Modern Slavery Statement for a tender?

The world of employment law is complex and rapidly changing especially as we have found when the Government changes the goal posts as often as they did with the Covid-19 response. UK legislation is updated regularly at a minimum twice a year.

If your HR policies and contracts of employment are in breach of this rapidly changing legislation, then in the event of for example, not complying with recruitment legislation on employing overseas staff, undertaking a potential employee’s right to work checks, a dispute on contractual conditions, or even a Tribunal, outdated policies can count heavily against you.

Many organisations now insist on suppliers submitting policies as part of the tender process. Recently we have found that even small businesses and charities are being asked to provide details of policies and procedures as part of grant funding applications or the tendering process.

The latest of these is a Modern Slavery Statement which includes human trafficking and should state your businesses approach to this and what you as an organisation are doing to prevent it. We can supply our clients with a customised Modern Slavery Statement for your business from as little as £100 complete with advice on how to implement the policy.

The internet has opened up a world of opportunity for buying policies and procedures online at a greatly reduced price, the problem is that many of the sites do not specifically cover UK and EU legislation and may only be correct at that point in time. To keep up to date you may need to purchase the whole lot again which in the long term may cost you much more.

Over the years we have found that many businesses either don’t have any contracts in place or have contracts that do not reflect current UK employment legislation, and they have no policies or procedures in place to support them for changes going forward. At Jay Webb Consultancy we can help you to ensure that not only are your contracts of employment worth the paper they are written on, but also that the policies and procedures within your business are fit for purpose, reflect your industry, and comply with current legislation.

As the central administrative core of every company and organisation, policies and procedures can make or break a business. More importantly, they can have either a positive or negative effect on your workforce. For instance, if your policies reduce your employee’s ability to be effective in the workplace, staff may not have enough to do or may be limited in what they can achieve resulting in them becoming bored and uninspired, leading to a downturn in production. At the other extreme, over-cracking the whip could leave you wide open to grievances relating to stress.

It is vital to nurture a positive performance led working culture within your company through the selection and development of appropriate policies and clearly communicating your policies to all your staff, setting clear standards for behaviour at work.

Equally, it’s also necessary to look to the future when making or developing policies. For example, although your business may be ticking along nicely now, having a redundancy procedure in place “just in case” is a prudent move that will save you sleepless nights later on.

We can support you with the consultation process to implement any new contracts, handbooks, or policies.  Additionally, we can provide policies and procedures for those organisations that just need help with writing them rather than implementing them.

For further information about our policies and procedures service Contact Us