Category Archives: HR Tips for Business and Charities

What it says on the tin – some useful guidance for smaller organisations on HR and employment law topics

Caveat Recruiter

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Aspiring Conservative leader (and potential Prime Minister) Andrea Leadsom hit the headlines last week when she was accused of exaggerating her CV, suggesting that she had undertaken more senior roles than she in fact had.

It’s a problem that many businesses – large and small – face in recruitment. How reliable is the information contained in a candidate’s CV?

Most small businesses are unlikely to have the time, or resources, to undertake full background checks on potential candidates. And indeed it hardly creates trust between you and your potential employee if you feel you have to verify every aspect of a candidate’s career history. Having said that, a quick comparison with their LinkedIn profile might be useful!

Clearly, if you discover that a candidate has lied outright (claiming they have a qualification they don’t, or worked in a role or for a company they didn’t) you can withdraw a job offer or even dismiss after they have started.

But in most cases, it will be that a candidate has perhaps oversold their experience. What to do then?

It’s worth remembering that a CV is a marketing document. It is the person’s attempt to impress you as their potential new employer, so it’s understandable that they will want to put a positive spin on their achievements. After all, you don’t put in your brochure or website things like “our products are pretty good but battery life is better in our competitors” And it’s also a fact that individuals and their employers will often collude to make job titles sound more important and prestigious. “Senior HR Executive” implies there are more junior ones when in fact there may not be!

It’s a further reminder that recruitment should be a rigorous process Use interviews to test out the claims in detail. Everyone will accentuate the positive, but good questioning techniques (not this sort of nonsense) and effective listening will allow you to get a better picture of the candidate in front of you and what they actually have done. And you can then decide whether they have broadly the right skills and experience for the role or if you’ve been seduced by their marketing skill!

After all, we don’t complain about advertising unless it’s deliberately misleading; treat your candidates’ CVs in the same way.

 

What would you do if you found you employed a porn star?

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The heady combination of sex and employment law much beloved by the press came to the forefront in a recent case involving an NHS worker who claimed unfair dismissal after her bosses found out she appeared in pornographic movies. Although the judgment in the case is still awaited*, it does raise a lot of questions about how far an employer can go in regulating the behaviour outside work of employees.

The simple facts of the case are fairly straightforward. Ms Molloy was employed as a medical secretary to an NHS consultant. Although she would have access to a lot of patient information, she would rarely deal with or be seen by patients – it was purely an administrative role. There appears from the press reports to have been no issues with her work.

However, outside of work, she appeared in a number of pornographic films and apparently also advertised what are referred to variously as “kinky adult services”.

No-one in the Trust was apparently aware of this until it was brought to their attention by another employee (whom a number of press reports refer to as a “whistleblower” although it’s doubtful whether reporting on a colleague’s legal out of work activities would necessarily be covered by the whistleblowing protections).

Following this information, Ms Molloy was allegedly given a “resign or be dismissed” ultimatum.

So – were Ms Molloy’s activities outside work any business of her employer?

The Trust appears to have relied on two aspects – that she had breached their policy on second jobs, and that her behaviour had brought them into disrepute.  I wrote about how to deal with employees who have more than one job here, and it’s difficult to see how having a non-health service job in her own time would cause a problem (especially since in the NHS many senior professionals have second jobs) . At worst, it might be a warning for failing to notify them.

So did her behaviour bring the NHS into disrepute? She wasn’t patient facing, and it appears that her activities had been going on for some time without attracting any notice (which given that online porn is easily available is quite surprising).  Was the trust’s reputation damaged by being seen to employ her? Would the press have made anything more of the issue than they have done anyway, had they somehow got hold of the information sooner?  Or would public confidence be damaged? It’s interesting that in an admittedly unscientific newspaper poll, an overwhelming majority felt she should not have been dismissed (a suspiciously convenient 69%!)

Of course, many people find pornography distasteful, immoral or demeaning to women. But is a personal moral opinion grounds to sack someone doing something that isn’t illegal? In employment terms, you’d really need to show that continuing to employ the person was causing significant damage to your business to justify dismissal – was it within the range of reasonable responses to the issue? It might well be a case of “Some other substantial reason” if this were the case.

*Update Sept 2016 – Ms Molloy’s claim was successful, primarily on the grounds that the Trust had failed to follow any real procedure, although the judge felt that the disrepute issue would have potentially been a fair reason had they dealt with matters correctly.

The World’s most expensive training course?

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Like many football fans, I watched events at Old Trafford yesterday – where the match was abandoned before kick-off after a “suspect device” was found in the stadium – with initial concern, followed by relief that the incident appeared to be a false alarm, and finally a degree of amusement when it was revealed that the mysterious package was in fact a dummy bomb left over from an exercise to train sniffer dogs in the ground several days previously. Several comments on social media at the end of the day expressed the view that they hoped the individual(s) responsible to be fired this morning.

But if your staff were responsible for such an incident, would you be considering dismissing them today? After all, we all like someone to blame, and there’s no doubt that the incident caused massive inconvenience to a lot of people. Indeed, local politicians seem to have jumped on the scapegoating bandwagon

But consider it this way. That error gave the emergency services the best way of testing their disaster plans in the event of a suspected bomb. They successfully evacuated 75000 people from the ground, put in place public transport plans to get them away from the area, and ensured that everything was done without panic or problem. But I’m also sure that they will be reviewing today what worked less well and making changes to resolve problems.

No matter how well planned your training, people will always behave differently when they think the event is actually happening (compare what happens during a planned fire drill and how people behave when they think there is real fire). So rather than blame, we should consider yesterday as a very high profile learning experience. The individuals concerned with leaving the dummy bomb behind will never again forget to carry out basic checks, while the emergency services will probably never have a better opportunity to safely test their procedures in a real life situation.

So blame, or thanks? Which would your company go for?

 

You need heels if you wanna make deals (apparently)

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Top accountancy firm PwC hit the headlines yesterday when a temporary receptionist was sent home for not wearing high heels. While it may not appear related, the situation has many parallels with the famous case of whether a Christian can wear a cross in work – something which went all the way to the European Court to decide.

So can an employer have a dress code? And can it include a requirement to wear high heels?

The answer to the first question is yes – but you need to have a reason why you want one.

If the reason is health and safety, things are relatively simple. If employees must wear hi-vis jackets, safety shoes or tie long hair back to avoid it being caught in machinery, then you are fine with enforcing rules – and indeed the vast majority of employees would understand and accept this.

Equally, if it is a condition of employment to wear a uniform, you’re also on safe ground. Lots of people wear uniforms to identify themselves either to customers or to show the company they are representing. While it’s perfectly possible to be a courier, security guard or airline pilot without wearing a uniform, it’s a requirement of most employers in those sectors that their staff do so.

Where things can become a bit more nebulous is when you want to enforce a dress standard to promote a “corporate image”. You need to ensure that any dress code is non-discriminatory (particularly on gender and religious grounds) and proportionate to what you are trying to achieve. So if you want to say that employees must wear smart business dress this is fine (and you can define this as a suit and tie for men, and a business suit for women). But the reason for this needs to be clear – for example because it would be expected by business contacts, customers etc. What you need to consider is the culture and the expectations of your company and the industry it operates in.  Does it really affect the performance of your call centre if staff wear jeans, t-shirts and trainers?

So the answer to question 2 – can a dress code require a female employee to wear high heels? – is a “no” on sex discrimination grounds and a “why would it be necessary?” on the grounds of being reasonable.

Like many things related to HR, the key question for business owners is whether the dress code rules actually serve a business purpose or are they just petty restrictions?

Newcastle United go down…

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Newcastle United hit the headlines for non-footballing reasons last week when they were found to have discriminated on the grounds of disability against one of their former players, Jonas Gutierrez. Apart from its high profile nature, the case has several interesting points for small business which often worry (unnecessarily) about disability issues.

The first thing to remember is that anyone diagnosed with cancer is classed as disabled under the Equality Act – no matter how early in the disease or how “healthy” the individual may appear. It seems that Newcastle either failed to accept this or chose to ignore it.

Secondly – an employer has a duty to make reasonable adjustments to allow a disabled employee to undertake their work. Reasonable is the key word here – it needs to take account of the size of business, nature of the work being done and how practical it is to make the adjustment. An “adjustment” need not be some physical change – it could be that you accept that someone with a disability has their targets or outputs adjusted, or even something as simple as allowing home working if the job can still be done that way. In Newcastle’s case, it was not adjusting the appearance target required to trigger a contract extension, given Gutierrez’ need to attend treatment. (They then compounded this by an act of direct discrimination, by not picking him when he was fit to ensure he couldn’t achieve the appearance target).

Thirdly, the case shows that if you are taken to tribunal – for any reason – it is important to have a clear and convincing argument that would sound reasonable to anyone not involved in the case. The tribunal concluded that senior figures at the football club were “evasive”, “vague” and “lacking in credibility”. Contrary to the view of some employers, tribunal judges aren’t biased in favour of employees but they are generally adept at spotting bulls*t – whether this comes from the individual making the claim or the employer’s witnesses.

As always, the advice is to consider what you can do to help an employee diagnosed with cancer or with any other form of disability; but that can be balanced against what you can realistically do as a business. And if you have made an error, don’t try to defend the indefensible!