HR Advice and Guidance - Free

Free Policies, Procedures, Employment Contracts and individual help and advice on all your staffing issues.

 

As a way of assisting small and medium sized businesses who may not have access to, or wish to use a Human Resources Professional, Human Resource Solutions has provided a number of useful free resources. In particular numerous template HR policies and procedures can be downloaded from the links on the left and adapted for your own business. We also provide many other useful related documents which can also be downloaded for use, as well as links to other relevant web sites and a number of helpful book recommendations.

Free Resources - some highlights..

  1. A free Employment Contract Template
  2. A free 40 page professionally written and designed Staff Handbook template
  3. A complete HR Policy Manual for free download and use
  4. A facility to submit a question for consideration by one of our professional HR Consultants. This is a free service, and many of the questions and answers are collected on our Question and Answer page.
  5. A complete Appraisal Training Workshop to help you implement appraisal
  6. A Job Description Compiler to guide you through writing a job description
  7. A Competency Dictionary which allows you to consistently describe the mix of skills, expertise and experience needed to fulfil a job role.
  8. A model Workforce Planning framework to ensure your business always has the optimum number of workers, with the right up-to-date knowledge and skills in place at the right time.

The Sharks Nearest the Boat..

Please note some recent issues below which might affect your employees and which you should be aware of:

  1. From 1st October 2011 the new Agency Workers Regulations (2010) give agency workers, once they have 12 weeks service, rights to largely the same terms and conditions as your permanent staff. Such things as working time, holiday entitlement and pay all fall within the scope of these Regulations. If you are a small business employing agency temps then this blog entry will tell you what you need to know. NOTE - The first tranche of agency workers completing 12 weeks in an assignment became entitled to the same pay and conditions as permanent employees doing the same work on 24th December 2011.

  2. The default retirement age provisions came to an end on 30 September 2011, and employers can now no longer use this to compulsorily retire employees. As 6 months notice is required by the current legal provisions, if you intended to compulsorily retire someone then the last day to have provided this notice was 5th April 2011. There is more information from ACAS here.

  3. From 3rd April 2011 employees became entitled to request 'additional paternity leave' of up to 26 weeks (previous entitlement was 2 weeks). See our sparksheet on Paternity Leave. There is more information on these changes on Alex. Brogan's blog here.

  4. The Bribery Act (2010) came into effect on 1st July 2011. If one of your employees bribes another person to gain advantage for your company, both the company and the Directors can be prosecuted and may be subject to serious criminal sanctions. However you can defend against this with some simple policy changes -we have updated several of our free policies to take account of this. See the blog entry for more details.

Updated 27/12/2011

Alex Brogan's Blog For information and comment on current HR issues, and how we are attempting to keep this site as a free resource, visit Alex Brogan's blog. Alex is our Lead Consultant and manages this website.
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Some Help With Your Staffing Issues..

5 Key Tips for Dealing with Staff who Keep Taking Days Off Sick..

All organisations have them - staff who take lots of intermittent sick time which puts their colleagues under pressure and can ultimately threaten the success of a small organisation where there are limited staffing resources. You can do something about this - see our article 5 Key Tips for Dealing with Staff who Keep Taking Days Off Sick..

10 Reasons NOT to Employ an HR Consultant..

Human Resource Solutions is a consultancy and advisory service that provides a range of HR services to both private and public sector organisations throughout the UK. However we firmly believe that small and medium sized businesses should be empowered to take control of their own people issues and that they do not need to employ expensive HR Consultants or subscribe to premium HR web sites.

Have a look at our article on 10 Reasons NOT to Employ an HR Consultant...

How to dismiss staff when necessary..

If you are in a position where you have a member of staff who is not working out for whatever reason, do you know it can be perfectly fair to dismiss them? Have a look at our article on Fair Reasons for Dismissal..

How do you recruit the best staff?

Often small businesses don't have the expertise or time to recruit effectively. Decisions are taken based on gut feeling rather than objective assessment. Here is a simple process to help you Recruit the Best Possible Staff.

How can you make your workforce more flexible?

One of the biggest challenges for small and medium sized businesses is ensuring your workforce is utilised in as cost effective a way as possible. Our article outlines a number of steps you can take to ensure your workforce is always utilised flexibly according to the current business requirements..13 Suggestions to make your workforce more flexible.

Please make use of any of the free resources you find on these pages as you think fit. If you have any queries, or would like to leave a comment you can do so on our Guestbook page.