Every business by law needs to have a policy for managing their health & safety; where a business has five employees or more, this policy needs to be written down.
It is important businesses share their policy with their employees, setting out their approach and demonstrating a commitment to health and safety.
Arguably one of the most important policies when you begin to grow and employ more people is your disciplinary policy. This sets out the process to follow in the event of misconduct, poor behaviour, or breach of contract.
A disciplinary policy helps to hold employees accountable for their actions and embed a set of standards you wish your employees to abide by.
A grievance policy is designed to support employees; it provides a clear process to highlight any problems or issues that they may face whilst working for you.
Whether that be from their working environment or a situation with another employee, the grievance policy enables a fair process for dealing with employee concerns.
Your equality, diversity and inclusivity policy ensures that every employee and potential employee is treated equally and fairly, and that no member of the team is disadvantaged.
Creating equal opportunities and having ethical processes in place so no one is left out. Companies are required not to discriminate with regards to, age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability as a minimum.
A good policy should set out to encourage and support all employees when it comes to their work/life balance, how a team operates and how a person progresses. A policy like this should also set out how you interview and employ prospective employees, employ someone based on their competency for the role and how they fit into your culture, nothing else.
An environmental policy states what your companies approach to managing your environmental impact is. This includes what your values are and what you’re actively doing to reduce your companies carbon footprint, as well as targets for overall environmental performance.
With the climate crisis on everyone’s radar, having a policy that actively outlines your business aims and goals with relation to the environment and your companies’ impact, will not only make you more appealing to prospective employees but also prospective business.
An approach that is centred around the employee, flexible working could mean the hours in a day, days in a week or where the employee works from, leaning towards “Hybrid working”.
Historically an employee can request flexible working after their first initial 26 weeks of working for a company.
Recently the government have proposed that employees can request flexible working from day one of employment, which would in turn strengthen employment rights and increase productivity as many more people could create a work/life balance.
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