Achieving bank holiday balance this Spring
There may be no extra bank holidays for coronations or jubilees this Spring, but because Easter is relatively late, it does mean there are four bank holidays within five weeks between 18th April and 26th May.
Bank holiday bonanzas like this often bring the question of annual leave allocation to the front of mind, as staff scramble to efficiently book time off next to the bank holidays, achieving a longer spell of leave for fewer days taken (depending on the nature of your business, of course).
It is a good time to review how you manage annual leave, and other leaves. The gold standard is to use a software package that comes with benefits like self-service reducing your admin burden; team visibility so everyone knows what’s available; and analytics allowing you to look strategically at attendance – particularly helpful for sickness and unauthorised absence. Many businesses still rely on wall planners or spreadsheets, so if you are interested in an upgrade, get in touch and we can help.
But however you choose to administer your annual leave, it must be underpinned by a policy which guides you and staff in how annual leave is allocated. Fairness and transparency is key, with expectations of how it works set from the outset.
The business’s needs must always be balanced against annual leave entitlement and many companies simply cannot operate if everyone wants to go on holiday at the same time.
First come, first served is a well understood model, but not the only one available. At times where there is heavy demand for annual leave, you may consider a rotation system that allows someone who missed out one year, first dibs the following year – as always however: be consistent.
You may have to consider other staffing factors too, especially as the government pushes for flexible working to become the norm: part time, term-time only and other approaches may all have an impact. We are here, if you want a policy review.
One final point. Owing to the way Easter falls late this year, there are actually only seven bank holidays between 1st April 2024 and 31st March 2025. If your employment contract wording says “28 days including bank holidays” there is no problem. However if it says “20 days plus all bank holidays” they will be a day short. This is because the statutory minimum number of days in a year is 28 days and this is normally made up of eight bank holidays and additional leave.
If affected, it is advisable to give them an extra day of leave before 31st March.
Time for a Spring clean?
Despite the daffodils it has still felt pretty cold recently; but Spring is here! It is a time when people traditionally embark on some annual cleaning, freshen things up, out with the old – in with the new.
This year, why not give your HR strategy the same treatment: ensure it is aligned with your business strategy and objectives?
While business strategy is focused on turnover, profitability, products and services among other things; your HR strategy should deliver the people now (and in the future) to be able to come good on the business objectives.
This means it is wide-ranging, encompassing:
- Recruitment
- Training, learning and development
- Compensation
- Evaluation and performance management
- Employee engagement
…maybe more, depending on your business. Translating this into the day-to-day workplace: are you attracting the right people to work for you? Are they productive? Are they being paid enough? Or too much? Are the right ones being developed into future leaders? What’s workplace culture like?
If you ask yourself these questions and the answers are not satisfactory, reviewing your HR strategy is likely to be the most direct way of addressing them.
As independent experts with experience across so many sectors and scenarios, we help many businesses perform HR strategy reviews with clarity and pragmatism. If you would like to explore how we can help you, please get in touch to arrange a conversation.
International working policies
It may read as a horror story for any company trying to accommodate an employee with health difficulties.
But the case of a software firm who permitted a developer to have months (about two years) of career break, plus adjustments at work and the exploration of working remotely from rural Pakistan, ended in a judgement of unfair dismissal earlier this year.
While the judgement itself was entirely based on how the final communications were issued to the worker (a compensation amount will be determined later in the year), we wanted to focus on the non-starter idea of the remote working. It was in a location where the employee herself ceded that there was a significant time difference and little infrastructure, leading to poor internet quality and speed, and even electricity downtime.
In our post-pandemic world, it is important for companies to consider whether they need an international working policy. International working may embody living the dream for an employee And it could even offer some potential benefits for you as an employer – like hanging on to a good employee you would otherwise lose, or broadening a talent pool if you struggle to recruit locally.
But it is much more complex than first meets the eye. Infrastructure and time difference cited above are important. There is also foreign employment and tax law to consider, productivity/remote working concerns, data security and GDPR compliance to think about, to name a few of the issues. If you want to tighten up this area of your business, please talk to us and we can help you develop a policy that protects your business and lets everyone know where they stand.
Have a great day!
“Have a great day”, “Cheers”, and “Best wishes”, are three of the most well-received ways in which to sign-off an email, according to a recent survey of 1,000 office staff by a retailer. If you want to end on a high, chances are you should use one of them or similar, rather than a jolly “tata” a nerdy “May the force be with you” or even a tech default “Sent from my iPhone”.
Other email habits likely to peeve a recipient include unnecessarily cc’ing people in, marking emails as urgent when they are not, using slang terms/text speak like OMG and LOL, and riddling an email with spelling mistakes.
Despite the explosion of digital communications channels, from Zoom to Slack to WhatsApp, the humble and 30ish-year-old email is still a staple of the modern workplace. The average worker receives about 100 a day! So encouraging good email etiquette could be a surprisingly easy way to improve workplace culture and help everyone to “have a great day”.
How responsible are you for your employees’ health?
There is a lot made of employers encouraging or facilitating good health amongst their workforces, particularly through benefits packages – gym membership, cycle-to-work, free fruit, private medical cover in various guises. But how responsible should you actually be?
There’s a lot to consider. Many roles may intrinsically lead to aspects of an unhealthy lifestyle: long sedentary spells, stress, the potential for injury, exposure to hazards. Health and safety will manage some of this risk, but HR plays a part too.
Poor health is likely to lead to poor productivity, higher staff turnover and absenteeism, so there is a mutual benefit as well as perhaps some moral duty to encouraging good health. Ultimately though, there is a limit to how much you can do. As the saying goes: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
