Whether you have just started employing people or you’ve been an employer for some time, you need to have the right documents in place for your business.
Whether it is about setting the aims and mission of your department or making sure you don’t fall foul of employment law, you need to make sure you are in a good place.
Read on to find out what HR documents you absolutely must have and why you should have them.
In this post;
- The employee handbook
- 1 – HR department strategy document
- 2 – Disciplinary procedure
- 3 – A grievance procedure
- 4 – Recruitment and selection procedure
- 5 – Attendance policies
- 6 – Whistleblower policy
- 7 – Anti-discrimination policy
- 8 – Data protection/GDPR policy
The employee handbook
The starting point for many HR departments is the employee handbook.
The aim of this is to give employees a central point of reference for their rights and responsibilities.
The approach that companies use varies. In some cases, the company will use the handbook to point the employee towards other policy documents and in others, the employer will put all of the policies and procedures actually in the handbook itself.
There are benefits and downsides to each approach. If you produce hard copy handbooks then every time you make a change, you’ll need to issue the whole book again. If you produce separate policies, you will only need to issue the changed part.
Many employers use electronic methods of distributing a handbook or storing policies in a central area such as Sharepoint. This has the benefit that it is easy to change either a handbook or policy document very quickly and with little or no cost.
But the aim of both of these methods is that the employee can find out everything they need to know by referring to the handbook, so this is a logical starting point and once you have this in place, you can then move on to producing the individual parts.
1 – HR department strategy document
So you may have expected that the first document you needed would have been something to do with employment law but not so.
Because before you do anything else you need to know what the point of the HR department is.
How do your directors want to focus their recruitment efforts, what culture do they want to build, how do they want to build it?
These are all questions you’ll need to answer before you start setting up any policies and procedures.
For example, imagine that your directors tell you that they want a young, vibrant culture that is a livewire place to work. That will guide the way that you approach things like your hiring policies but it will also tell you that you need to make sure your directors don’t recruit based on age, as that will be discriminatory.
Understanding your HR mission is the very first place to start and you’ll find that asking the right basic questions helps you to identify where problems may exist.
2 – Disciplinary procedure
This is one that everyone hates and we certainly hope that you never have to use it but you absolutely have to have one.
The biggest reason that employers lose at employment tribunals isn’t that they have done something explicitly wrong, but because they haven’t followed a fair procedure. Often this is because they didn’t have a procedure in the first place!
Your disciplinary procedure won’t just show how you would go about sacking someone, it will also include information about the rights and responsibilities that the employee has.
This is certainly one policy document that you must have from day one.
3 – A grievance procedure
In an ideal world, an employee would be able to raise any issue informally and it could be dealt with to the satisfaction of both parties but sadly, we do not live in an ideal world.
We know that things will go wrong either because of a miscommunication or because of ill-will on one or more peoples’ parts.
So in this case you will need a way of dealing with it and that is where the grievance procedure comes in.
The grievance procedure is a really important part of employment law because if the worst comes to the worst you have to be able to show a tribunal that as an employer you have an established procedure and you followed it correctly.
But tribunals are relatively rare and so the grievance procedure can be seen as being an effective way for employees to be supported should events take a wrong turn.
A grievance procedure should;
- Make it clear that you will deal with grievances sensitively, fairly and consistently
- Show that you will investigate the issue
- Tell them who to raise their grievance with and how
- Give an idea of timescales
- Explain the hearing procedure
- Tell them about the appeal procedure
- Include details about a whistleblowing policy
Recruitment and selection procedure
What would you do if someone decided to sue you because they feel your recruitment procedure is discriminatory?
How would you make sure that you’d followed the rules?
Well, the best way to do this is to have a recruitment policy that clearly sets out how you will attract new staff and what your decision-making process will be.
It will set out where you will advertise, who will interview, how many interviews there will be and what background checks you may do such as DBS and reference checks.
Your procedure document may also have authorised letters and emails that invite people to interview, reject their application or offer them the job.
This is an exceptionally useful document where HR isn’t directly involved in the recruitment of employees to at least try and keep managers on the straight and narrow.
And to answer our first question, as long as you have a compliant recruitment procedure and you can show you followed it all the way through then you’ll be fine.
Attendance policies
What do you do when people don’t turn up for work?
How many times do you allow them to be late?
What sanctions can you apply if you have a persistent offender?
All of these (and more) are answered in your attendance policy.
Why should you have one of these? Imagine you are in a disciplinary meeting with someone who always turns up 15 minutes late for work and they ask where it says that they should turn up on time. What would you say?
If you never explicitly tell people what the rules are then you can’t be surprised when they break them, either intentionally or not.
Whistleblower policy
If you had a manager who was behaving inappropriately to members of staff. Where would the employees go for help?
What would happen if they reported lawbreaking by a director to the authorities?
A whistleblower policy is designed to protect employees who try to do the right thing.
It’s a rare company indeed where this happens and if it does then you’d need to ask some serious questions but when an employee feels the need to blow the whistle then they need to be supported.
Remember that if you dismiss an employee who correctly reports wrongdoing then you could face action for unfair dismissal so make sure you protect your company.
Anti-discrimination policy
This is another policy document that we hope you will never have cause to refer to as any company nowadays shouldn’t be in a position where it is discriminating for any reason.
The document will set out that discrimination for any characteristic such as age,
religion or ethnicity is not acceptable and shows what employees can do if they feel discriminated against.
Discrimination is another area that gives rise to a lot of employment tribunal cases and it is important that you have a sound policy in place so that you can show you have full awareness of the issues.
Data protection/GDPR policy
This isn’t always in the remit of HR but if you don’t have an active GDPR lead, then you may find it landing on your desk.
Either way, HR professionals and company directors need to be fully aware of the requirements of GDPR as it applies to employee data.
Often HR will have access to sensitive information and so making sure that this is kept safe and secure should be central to the way that HR is managed.
Penalties can be severe and the reputational damage to your company of a data breach can be very bad indeed so this is a document that you need to get in place as soon as possible.
HR documents shouldn’t be an afterthought
It is really important that employers don’t see HR documents as something you can just ‘knock-up’ when they really need them.
In many cases the documents need to be in place before something bad happens and, taking a positive approach can actually play a part in making sure that people understand and abide by the rules.
But we are fully aware that running a business can get very busy indeed and producing compliant documentation can often get pushed back down the list.
If you want to make sure you are fully protected and that your HR procedures are watertight then why not get in touch and let us show you how we can help?