Employment Law Focus

Returns to work are set to become even more challenging with the advent of hybrid and remote working, to the extent that the traditional toolkit may no longer be fit for purpose.

In this episode, our employment and regulatory teams discuss five new challenges for HR and legal teams, and share their insights and advice surrounding:

• Occupational stress
• Supervision and performance management
• Personal injury
• Training and career development
• Long Covid

There are some recurring themes, including:

• The risk that employers underestimate their legal obligations;
• The need to think about the individual employee and take a tailored approach;
• The importance of effective employee communications; and
• Maintaining a complete record of steps taken to support employees and minimise health and safety and other risks.

Our listener question addresses the timely topic of mandatory vaccinations at work, and what we’ve been seeing and advising clients.

Useful link: HSE guidance on home working

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Send us your questions and we'll answer them in a future episode – email [email protected] or Tweet us using the hashtag #TLTemploymentpodcast and tag @TLT_Employment

You can find out more about our employment team at tltsolicitors.com/employment

Sign up to receive our updates at tltsolicitors.com/signup

If you’ve enjoyed listening, please rate us and write a review.

After Me Too and Black Lives Matter, there are growing signs that disability could be the next recipient of a major social media movement, not to mention new legal duties for employers.

In the UK, the government has published a new National Disability Strategy including mandatory reporting for employers, the employment gap is impossible to ignore, and the Tokyo Paralympics sparked the campaign WeThe15 representing the world’s 1.2 billion people with a disability.

But are employers ready for this? Disability varies wildly from other areas of equality law, and as PageGroup CEO and disability rights champion Steve Ingham recently said, many employers simply think: “It’s too complex an issue to grapple with” and therefore don’t engage.

We discuss:

• Why this is such a complex area of employment law, and why employers should act now
• The merits of pay gap reporting and quotas, but more importantly, the need for an inclusive workplace culture
• Employer attitudes when deciding what is/is not a disability
• The different types of disability discrimination and knowledge tests
• The tricky business of using medical reports

We also explain cases covering:

• Concealment of a disability
• Assuming the knowledge of your agents
• “Reasonable” adjustments including cost

Our listener question looks at four-day working weeks and what employers should consider when defining the scope of a trial.

Useful link: EHRC Code of Practice

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Send us your questions and we'll answer them in a future episode – email [email protected] or Tweet us using the hashtag #TLTemploymentpodcast and tag @TLT_Employment

You can find out more about our employment team at tltsolicitors.com/employment

Sign up to receive our updates at tltsolicitors.com/signup

If you’ve enjoyed listening, please rate us and write a review.

Employee wellbeing has risen up the corporate agenda during the pandemic. However, this is set to become an even bigger issue in the coming months, as HR and legal teams navigate the impact of hybrid working, the right to work flexibly, the end of furlough, long Covid and more.

How can employers address the stigma around mental health and wellbeing? What does proportionate support look like? And what new risks and challenges do they face?

In this episode, we discuss:

• The right to disconnect – what is it, how does it work, and could it work in the UK? With insights from Deirdre Lynch, partner at ByrneWallace LLP in the Republic of Ireland.
• Gender equality – with more women planning to work from home after the pandemic than men, is “proximity bias” and backwards progress on gender equality in the workplace inevitable?
• Remote line management – how can employers make sure they’re spotting the signs and giving the right support to line managers and employees working remotely?
• Common themes in employment tribunal claims – including the growth of psychiatric injury claims, and the importance of early intervention and being able to show that you’ve taken proactive steps to support employees with their mental health and wellbeing.

We also explain how TLT is using the Mindful Business Charter to reduce unnecessary stress in the workplace and show respect for colleagues’ wellbeing.

Send us your questions and we'll answer them in a future episode – email [email protected] or tweet us using the hashtag #TLTemploymentpodcast and tag @TLT_Employment

You can find out more about our employment team at tltsolicitors.com/employment

Sign up to receive our updates at tltsolicitors.com/signup

If you’ve enjoyed listening, please rate us and write a review.

Should HR be more involved in the design and rollout of workplace technology?

Will modern technology force us to replace roles (performed by people) with functions (performed by people, technology, robots and algorithms)?

At what point do employees start to resent technology impinging on their jobs? When it can do 10%, 20% or 30% of their role faster and better than they can?

These are just some of the questions we explore in this episode on workplace technology and its impact on employees. Jonathan Rennie and Sarah Maddock in our employment team are joined by Emma Erskine-Fox from our data privacy and cybersecurity team.

We dig into this complex topic and highlight the issues HR and legal teams need to be aware of, and share our thoughts, cases and practical tips.

Our news section covers a rare case where the tribunal gave some useful advice and a stark warning against allowing your equalities training to go “stale”.

Our listener’s question asks about dismissal and reengagement or “firing and rehiring”, which has become increasingly popular during the pandemic. Read our short guide to this practice.

Note: since we recorded this episode, the court in the Netherlands has ordered Uber to reinstate the five British drivers who were struck off by robot technology.

Send us your questions and we'll answer them in a future episode – email [email protected] or Tweet us using the hashtag #TLTemploymentpodcast and tag @TLT_Employment

You can find out more about our employment team at tltsolicitors.com/employment

Sign up to receive our updates at tltsolicitors.com/signup

If you’ve enjoyed listening, please rate us and write a review.

Amy: Hello and welcome to the Employment Law Focus podcast. I'm Amy Stokes.

Charlie: And I'm Charlie Ray

Amy: and we're both employment law partners at TLT and today we're going to be discussing the Employment Rights Bill and well all 150 pages of it, well not quite but what we've done is we have discussed amongst ourselves Charlie and I and pulled out our top 10 takeaways from it.

By way of background, this was introduced to Parliament on the 10th of October and is the first phase of delivering the government's plan to make work pay. It brings in 28 individual employment law reforms. And the bill is a wish list of reforms, and it builds in some of the labour manifesto but a watered down version so it's not quite set in stone.

Despite the headlines in the papers, it's a while before any of these changes are going to happen. Much of the details are going to be provided via regulations which won't be passed until consultation with stakeholders has concluded. Four of those consultations were very quickly turned around and have actually already started. Those include on zero hours contracts and their application to agency workers, beefing up the remedies for collective redundancy consultation, all the updates to trade union legislation and also statutory sick pay.

The government doesn't expect to start consultation however for the rest of the reforms until 2025, with the result that most reforms in the bill will not take place until we anticipate at least 2026, although there's been no commitment on that just yet. The bills also got to go through both houses of parliament before it gains royal assent and therefore may be changed along the way after the consultations as well.

So the bottom line is really that the proposals in the bill might well change and employers are going to have plenty of time to feed into the proposals and to prepare for them.

What Charlie and I have done to prepare for this podcast today is that we've picked out what we think are the most interesting elements of the bill, the reforms to the bill, primarily to employers. And we're going to run through them, not in the order of importance, just kind of in a more general order, just to give you a flavour of what they are. So, we'll talk through the background to them, the detail of the reforms, to give you a bit of an explainer on those. And then we're going to give you some of our insights from practice about what we think the real impact of those are going to be.

So, Charlie, do you want to kick us off with your first one?

Charlie: Yeah, we're going to start with probably what's been the main headline grabber from the bill, which is the proposal to remove the unfair dismissal qualifying period. Now, as we know, at the moment, we've had for some time a two -year qualifying period to be able to claim ordinary unfair dismissal. That doesn't take into account automatic unfair dismissals like whistleblowing, for example, where you don't need the two-year service, but for most unfair dismissal claims, two years service is required.

So the idea is that it's going to become a day one right, and that so long as you started work from day one, you will have the right to claim unfair dismissal. The government are proposing to consult on introducing a new statutory probation period. So, the idea is that during that probation period, an employee could be dismissed using a lighter touch process, where if the dismissal is because of capability, or conduct, or contravention of illegal duty, or potentially for some other substantial reason, which are all reasons that we're familiar with now, that that would be a valid reason for an employer to terminate at the end of this probation period.

We need some detail on this, obviously, and one suggestion is that a redundancy dismissal wouldn't be subject to this lighter touch dismissal as a result of the statutory probation period. So it will be interesting to see how that one plays out. The suggestion is that the government's preference is to have a nine -month probation period in this so -called initial period of employment and I think the indication is that they would expect an employer to at least hold a meeting with the employee to explain the concerns about say their performance if that's the reason before making a decision to dismiss. So, it's going to be interesting to see how the government will develop that.

Amy: Yeah it's really interesting actually Charlie, I think that there's going to be the consultation on that's going to bring out some interesting points. But actually, it sounds like it's going to have a really big impact on employers. What do you think in practice that's really going to be?

Charlie: Certainly one of the implications is likely to be that more litigation may follow as a resul...