Staff Handbooks, Policies and Procedures
Your Company needs clear and robust rules and procedures to make people management easier. But, just having the procedures on their own is not enough. Increasingly Employment Tribunals expect employers not only to have clear policies and procedures, but also to have communicated them properly to staff and trained managers in how to operate them. Gone are the days when we could rely on employees to simply read the Company Handbook!
You can either have a set of rules, policies and procedures that are designed specifically for your organisational needs, or you can buy generic 'off-the-shelf' policies indivdiually. Either way if you want to rely on a Company rule, policy or procedure, you will need to have taken steps to ensure the employee(s) knew about it.
Case Study
Our client had an employee handbook containing a full set of policies and procedures to support it. There were however problems with the way in which those procedures were applied across departments, resulting in a number of inconsistencies and complaints from staff.
CHaRM worked with the senior management team to raise awareness of the Company's policies and procedures and ensure consistent compliance through a series of short discussion sessions. This led on to a review of a number of procedures such as absence management, the appraisal process, the application of equal opportunities practices and a review of job descriptions and selection criteria across the business. From each session the managers took away actions and have worked to improve their management of the procedures in these areas.
The result? Much more consistent management of absence and performance issues across the Company with a reduction in the number of grievances and complaints. The procedures were amended where necessary by CHaRM to ensure they fully met the needs of the business, which greatly enouraged the willingness of the managers to apply them.
"We were very pleased with the feedback from our employees as it showed that the developments and changes we had made, even the difficult ones, have been received well and they understand what we are trying to achieve."
