Welcome to our latest newsletter, we hope you like the content. Stay safe and well – we hope to see you soon!
BREATHE
HRCentral Ltd are a Gold Breathe Partner having received the accolade in February 2020; we were also recognised as the Breathe Advocate for the year in 2019. Breathe is an easy to use HR Information System that we offer to all our clients. With Breathe you can keep all your HR information in one place from employee next of kin details and bank details to contracts of employment and pay and pension information.
You can also manage holiday bookings and monitor sickness along with managing performance and creating a training record. By automating time-consuming HR Admin tasks, the management of your HR administration function will be transformed. We are currently offering a 50% discount on the annual license fee for Breathe until end May 2020 and donating the remaining 50% to the NHS. Access to this can we found at: https://app.breathehr.com/signup?hrp=HRCE01
WETHRIVE
We offer our clients access to WeThrive, an interactive employee engagement platform that allows you to understand how your people truly feel, enabling managers to create highly effective teams, retain key staff for longer and deliver better business results. The WeThrive platform seamlessly delivers everything you need to listen, review and take action with real-time reports, automatically generated coaching recommendations, an ever-growing library of line manager learning content and centralised post survey action tracking.
WeThrive have an amazing offer – they will run their standard survey with a set of WFH questions to help you get a clear picture of how everyone is doing and give you full access to the reports, actions and learning content – all completely free. Access to this can be found at: https://wethrive.net/wethrive-for-free-until-end-of-may-2020/
HIREFUL
We offer our retained clients access to a complimentary Company branded Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in conjunction with hireful to assist with all your resourcing needs. This system allows us (in collaboration with you) to provide a great candidate experience at each and every stage of the recruitment process. It is completely secure and compliant with the GDPR regulations.
We are able to post jobs and adverts via the system which are immediately published on the most frequently visited and popular UK jobsites. Via the system we can send emails directly to candidates, track applications at every stage, arrange interviews and store CVs and application forms all in one central place. Not only that but we can also schedule interviews for you when you are ready to meet our shortlisted candidates rather than you having to do so.
In many respects an automated system, hireful cuts down the time spent on recruitment administration to ensure we can instead focus on finding great candidates for you so that you get the right people in place and fast.
We have a wealth of experience in recruiting and headhunting for a variety of positions at all levels of seniority and in every industry sector. If you need a hairdresser, Financial Director or a role as niche as a Detector Engineer or Research Scientist experienced in electrolytes. We can help hire your next superstar.
We are not a recruitment agency and we do not behave like one. We will work with you to fully understand your needs and become an extension of your business so that we truly understand who would be a great fit for your team. Because we likely know your organisation, we can advise on cultural and personality fit too.
All applicants are contacted by us within 48 hours of applying, irrespective of whether they are suitable or not. Applications will be screened by us and we will undertake initial telephone interviews or face to face interviews for more senior or niche roles.
If one of our candidates is successful, we will charge no more than 14% of their salary as a fee. Most agencies charge at least 18% and sometimes up to 30%! For senior roles we can undertake psychometric testing to truly delve into the working strengths of a candidate.
Did you know that we have successfully filled 40+ vacancies for our clients in the last 18 months, we are really proud that the average total invoice was around 8% of starting salary; no client has paid more than 12% of the starting salary of their new hire.
PAY AND REWARD
Lorna Foster joined HRCentral in February 2020 to support Clients with all areas of pay and reward. She is an experienced reward professional with over 7 years in Reward and a further 20 years within HR, both UK and International. Lorna is passionate about delivering practical and impactful reward solutions and has worked on many reward projects including job evaluation and levelling, salary benchmarking and bonus design.
CORONAVIRUS
From an HR and employment law perspective, the covid-19 outbreak has forced the Government to make rapid and extensive changes to employment legislation in the UK by hastily forcing new employment legislation through the courts to become law. (The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme 2020). Changes to this new piece of legislation have been occurring daily and sometimes near hourly as the Government has responded to the ramping up of the outbreak and the impact this has had on businesses.
This is unprecedented; in our combined HR career lifespan of 35+ years we have never faced anything remotely like this. But, as ever, we have taken this in our stride and have been running alongside the Government to keep abreast of these changes as they have occurred. With each and every alteration we have been reactive and immediately responsive for our clients to put the necessary steps in place to ensure compliance with the new law.
There will be some fallout from this situation for businesses, that is sadly inevitable, therefore it is important to look to the future and how you are going to support your people when we come out the other side. You will need to keep your people engaged and ensure that the return to ‘business as usual’ happens as seamlessly as possible.
We can help you with this by:
- getting your employees back to work if they have been furloughed/working from home/working reduced hours or laid off
- providing access to employee engagement surveys
- assisting with your recruitment needs
- reviewing your employment contracts, handbooks and policies and procedures to reflect legislative changes as below
- ensuring your contracts contain the correct clauses in case of an even like COVID19 happening again
There are a multitude of things you will need to think about when we come out the other side of this and we have written some helpful blogs on our website detailing most, if not all, of the challenges employers may be faced with. One thing is certain though, ignoring HR issues at this time, will most certainly lead to Human Resource related issues further down the line.
APRIL 2020 EMPLOYMENT LAW CHANGES – UPDATE!
With everything going on right now it is so easy to forget that the Government’s ‘Good Work Plan’ has resulted in changes to employment legislation, specifically with regards to family friendly leave from work and changes to written statements of terms and conditions of employment.
The changes:
1. Employees must be provided with a contract of employment on the very first day of their employment with you.
Previously employers had two months to provide this to employees after the commenced work. There are penalties for you as an employer. If an employee does not receive a contact on day one of employment, they can complain to the Employment Tribunal. If you are found liable by the Employment Tribunal for failure to provide a written statement of terms and conditions you will be ordered to pay the employee two weeks’ pay (subject to a statutory cap) or, if the tribunal considers it is just and equitable in the circumstances, a higher amount of four weeks’ pay (subject to the statutory cap).
Not only this but claims made in an employment tribunal are a matter of public record. Many of our clients are asked during the sales process to include any legal action taken against them when completing RFIs and RFPs. Therefore, losing at employment tribunal can have a clear detrimental impact on your business and damage your reputation.
2. You must include much more detailed information in employment contracts and there are about 10 new legal additions that must added.
LET US HELP! SEND OVER YOUR CURRENT CONTRACTS AND HANDBOOKS TO US AND WE WILL ENSURE ALL ARE FULLY COMPLIANT WITH THE APRIL 2020 CHANGE SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THIS.
3. There are changes to how much bereavement leave an employee is entitled to in the tragic event that they lose a child under the age of 18 (including still births after 24 weeks of pregnancy). An employee faced with this scenario is now entitled to two weeks paid leave which will be paid at a statutory rate. (Currently £151.20 per week or 90% of weekly earnings if lower).
4. The holiday calculation period for working out a ‘weeks’ pay’ for employees who work irregular hours has been increased from 12 weeks to 52 weeks. (If they have been employed for less than 52 weeks, the total amount of weeks they have been working).
TRAINING
Laura Stirling joined us in March 2020 and along with being an experienced HR professional, she is also an inspired and driven trainer who is passionate about making her development sessions relevant and engaging. Laura will strive to fully understand your business and go the extra mile to develop and deliver the best possible training solutions for your team.
She will provide learning experiences that are fun for your delegates (we guarantee no death by PowerPoint!). We don’t believe in delivering off the shelf answers, we will create bespoke training to suit your business and work collaboratively with you when designing training solutions to suit the nuances of your team; we will also tailor what we provide depending on the current skill level of your employees. Some examples of what we offer are below.
- Training workshops (full or half-day)
- Bite-size training sessions (up to 2 hours)
- One on one coaching
- ‘How to’ Guides
For our inaugural training session, we will be running a seminar on ‘How to get the most out of Zoom and other video conferencing’ Look out for an announcement from us on this shortly!
HAVE A COFFEE WITH US
We’d love to meet up with you to discuss all things HR. Please do get in touch at any time, we are always available to answer any questions you may have. And since we can’t have a coffee in person right now, let’s have a coffee over Zoom instead! We are here to help… contact us.
enquiries@hrcentral.co.uk
www.hrcentral.co.uk
0118 324 2526
07968 787182
If there is anything you’d like us to include in future newsletters then we’d love to hear from you; just drop us a quick email.
©HRCentral Limited April 2020
