Mara Thorne's Blog (27)

Of all the management issues you will face in the workplace, a medical certificate signing an employee off with stress, anxiety, depression, or some other form of mental illness, is guaranteed to make your heart sink. A variety of questions spring to mind: how long will the person be away? Is the workplace somehow responsible for the problem? Could you have seen it coming and done something to prevent it? What are you going to say to the person when they do come back? What,…

Following the revelations of sexual harassment and assault - and allegations of rape - by Harvey Weinstein that filled the news media a few weeks ago, I recently heard Sir Tom Jones on the radio admitting that something similar was attempted against him early in his career. There have been many scandals involving sexual harassment and abuse (including child abuse) in recent years; among the most notorious sexual predators here in the UK were Jimmy Saville and Cyril Smith, not to…

My cousin Laura told me when we caught up recently that she’d left her job with nothing else to go to, and she was sure she’d made the right decision. I was surprised: Laura has always been a very solid and responsible woman, and has worked continuously since the children were in their teens. Perhaps she had taken early retirement? No, despite being 62 years of age, that wasn’t it. She’d left because she’d been bullied at work for about six months, and had…

The HR community has been buzzing recently, following the announcement that some very large, high profile organisations including Microsoft and Deloitte have abandoned their formal Appraisal Schemes, in favour of on-going performance discussions between managers and their team members. "How sensible!", many people have said. Appraisals are old hat. They are too bureaucratic. They are tick-box exercises that don’t motivate anybody or improve performance. Far…

I recently received a call from an individual needing some advice about his employment situation. He had seen his own job advertised, which had alarmed him, so he’d gone to talk to the MD. He was told that the company was restructuring to save money and three existing roles were going to be combined into two. This would normally be a redundancy situation but the company wasn’t minded to go through a proper selection process – they were just planning to replace…

The arrest of four people following a raid on a restaurant in Leatherhead in April is a timely reminder of the importance of immigration status checks by employers. In this case, four Bangladeshi men were arrested for over-staying their visas, and a fifth was escorted from the premises pending a decision on whether or not he had the right to remain in the UK.

You may think you have nothing to worry about – all your employees are British nationals so it’s not…

According to the 2012 Skills and Employment Survey, feelings of insecurity and pressure at work among UK employees have reached a 20 year high. Worries over the possible loss of their jobs are highest among public sector workers, who are also anxious about being transferred to less well-paid, less interesting work, with less autonomy. This probably reflects the effects of the Government’s austerity programme on public sector budgets. But the…

On the face of it, you’d think resigning from your job was pretty straight forward. You just pick up the phone or walk into your manager’s office and say “I’m leaving. Bye bye!” Simple, right? Wrong! As with most things in employment, there’s more to it than that.

With obesity levels in the UK topping the 20% mark, making us the fattest nation in Europe, employers are now facing the possibility of employees claiming that their obesity amounts to a disability, and that reasonable adjustments should therefore be made.

Before you scream: “Don’t be ridiculous, the adjustment needed is to lose weight!”, consider the recent decision of the Employment Appeals…

Tis the season to be jolly, but sometimes employees overstep the mark at the office party under the influence of alcohol, and Christmas merriment can lead to New Year disciplinary action or even dismissal.

When I started secondary school, I remember coming across mathematics problems that went something like this: “The total wage bill at the Widgets Factory is £10,000 per week. Men are paid £2.00 per hour, and women are paid £1.50 per hour, for working a 40 hour week. If there are 100 men employed, how many women are employed at the factory?”As it was an all-girls’ school, we were naturally incensed that men and women should be paid at different rates…

This week saw the introduction of the long-awaited “Automatic Enrolment” regime for workplace pensions. Conceived by the last Labour Government, it is now being implemented by the Coalition, with the intention of encouraging the large number of employees without access to a workplace pension scheme to get into the habit of saving for their retirement.

Perhaps surprisingly, a recent survey by Scottish Widows found that more than half of the UK…

A round-robin email inviting people to participate in a workplace sweepstake in the run up to a popular sporting event seems like a bit of innocent fun – no need for an employer to intervene, surely?

In fact, sweepstakes, lotteries and all forms of “betting” in the workplace are regulated by the Gambling Act 2005, so you’d be well-advised to be aware of what it says, to avoid falling foul of its…

Timing is not just crucial for comedians. It’s pretty important for managers too.

In a recent Tribunal case involving the theft of stock, an employer dismissed two employees summarily, i.e. without notice or payment in lieu of notice, following an investigation which proved their involvement. The termination letter stated that the date of dismissal was 5 October 2010. The employees appealed, and after hearing their…

In an ever more complex world, it is not surprising that we find ourselves yearning for simplicity. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pay somebody what we think they are worth, as and when we need them, without worrying about contracts, PAYE, NICs, National Minimum Wage and all the other employment bureaucracy?

Many small businesses baulk at the prospect of taking on employees, thinking it is complicated and onerous, and that it is easier to hire in the services of…

Teachers are in the news again, with allegations that it takes too long and is too difficult to dismiss poorly performing teachers. In the private sector, it is argued, incompetent employees can be given their marching orders much more easily, whereas in the public sector it can take up to a year to remove somebody.

So what are the grounds on which an employee may be fairly dismissed, and what should an employer do, faced with an employee…

Volunteers, interns, youngsters on work experience .... a great source of free labour, no need to worry about paying them the National Minimum Wage, right?

Wrong! There is considerable confusion among employers about when they do and don’t need to pay people they take on for “work experience” purposes.

Various schemes exist to help young people without any…

If one of your employees was signed off sick by their doctor, and sent you a postcard from the Costa del Sol, I expect your hackles would rise. Like most employers, you would probably think somebody who was too sick to work should be too sick to go on holiday.

But it’s not quite that simple. For a start, somebody who is unfit to work due to stress or fatigue, or who is recuperating after surgery, may be perfectly capable of lying on a beach – in fact it may assist…

It’s not always easy to draw the line between what people do in their own time, which is arguably not the employer’s concern, and what happens in the workplace.  Surely, it is not the employer’s place to dictate what their employees do in the evenings or at weekends?

Live and let live!…

What a week for bank bosses!  First Stephen Hester was pressured into foregoing his bonus of 3.6m shares as head of RBS.  Now his predecessor, Fred Goodwin, has been stripped of his knighthood.  And there’s not much sympathy around for either of them, tainted as they are by the unforgivable sin of being “fat cat bankers”.

 It’s interesting that the public furore focuses so much on the “bonus culture”, while little fuss is made of their very substantial salaries: Stephen Hester earns a…