UK HR policies and procedures

UK employment tribunals look at process as much as substance. An employer with a fair reason to dismiss who followed no procedure usually loses. An employer who followed a clear written procedure is usually defensible even when the decision was difficult. It is what the policies are for; they are not paperwork for its own sake.

What the company must have

• A written statement of employment particulars given on or before the first day of employment. This is a statutory requirement and it has a prescribed list of contents.
• Disciplinary and grievance procedures, and they must be accessible to employees. The statutory code of practice on discipline and grievance is what a tribunal measures you against, and an unreasonable failure to follow it can increase an award by up to a quarter.
• A health and safety policy in writing once you have five or more employees, covered on the health and safety page.

What it should have

Beyond the minimum, the policies that prevent problems rather than resolve them: absence and sickness reporting, holiday and how it is booked, the family leave entitlements, equality and anti-harassment, bullying, whistleblowing, data protection and acceptable IT and social media use, homeworking, and expenses. Each of these is somewhere a dispute starts when there is nothing written down.

The duty that changed recently

Employers now have a positive duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their employees, including by third parties such as customers and suppliers. It is not enough to respond well when something happens; the law expects the employer to have anticipated the risk and acted in advance. A policy, training and a reporting route are the reasonable steps most employers are expected to have taken, and a failure to take them can increase compensation. This is new enough that many overseas groups have not adjusted for it.

Contract or handbook

Which of these sits in the contract and which sits in a non-contractual handbook matters. Anything contractual cannot be changed without agreement; anything in a non-contractual handbook can be updated as the law moves. Groups that put everything in the contract find they cannot update their sickness policy without every employee's consent. We separate them deliberately.

How this is delivered

The policies are produced with our HR partner, an HR consultancy that does this daily, with an employment solicitor available where a matter becomes legal rather than procedural. Buzz runs the payroll, the contracts of employment and the coordination; we do not pretend to be an employment law practice. Our HR delivery covers England, Wales and Scotland. Northern Ireland employment law differs in several respects and we will say so rather than apply the wrong rules.