“Recommended by a professional associate, Jane worked on my behalf to sell my wholesale fruit and veg business. Working on a capped fee basis, Jane’s no-nonsense, direct, yet friendly style suited me very well. I always knew what was going on, any and all communications were relayed to me promptly and tricky issues sorted with little fuss but plenty of experience. I always felt Jane had my best interests at heart and nothing escaped her watchful eye.”
Richard Sykes, York Box Ltd
Take the time to ensure that your employees’ rights are protected and in turn protect your business from common mistakes, misunderstandings and avoidable arbitration.
If you employ people to work within your business or company you need to be aware of your responsibilities, together with current legislation.
You must make sure that the text of your job adverts does not breach the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). You should never include any criteria in a job advert that is not objectively justifiable as a specific and necessary requirement of the job that is being recruited to, as this could be deemed to be discriminatory under the DDA.
You must not ask an interviewee to either answer questions or undertake any particular task during an interview process which is not wholly pertinent to the job being interviewed for otherwise this could be deemed as discriminatory under the DDA depending on the job and the particular interviewee. It’s also worth noting for both advertising of positions and interviewing of candidates that the definition of ‘disability’ under the DDA is wide and may not necessarily be seen by you as a disability. Care must be taken.
When you take on a new employee it is your legal duty to give him/her a Contract of Employment. The contract of employment must contain certain statutory minimum requirements but it is usual to include extra terms and refer to additional policies that relate to that employee.
Generally all directors of a company are also employees of their company and they should have contracts of employment which take the form of Service Agreements. These not only contain the basic requirements required in contracts of employment but also obligations on the company and the director employee that are far more wide ranging and specific to their senior position.
If you are going to award any employee benefits then the entitlement to these should be set out in the Contract of Employment.
You might want to reward employees in the long-term based on the future performance and value of your company. There are a number of different types of employee share scheme including:
The type of scheme that you adopt will entirely depend on how and when you want to benefit your employees.
As from 2012 all employers who do not already provide a pension scheme for their employees (and this does not include a Stakeholder Pension Scheme) will have to become part of the new statutory Personal Account Scheme. This will mean that the employer will have to contribute 4% of salary to the scheme and the employee will have to contribute 3% of their salary to the scheme. There is no minimum number of employees before the scheme is applicable, so even if you only have one employee the scheme will apply to you. The full, final details of the scheme have yet to be published and details are currently being ‘drip fed’ into the public domain. This is a serious change and employers should start to prepare themselves now for this increase in expenditure and plan for its impact on monthly cash flow and general profitability of the business.