Carolyne Wahlen

I had a fantastic time at a recent conference, in no small part down to the emphasis on building the right team and looking after the staff that make our organisations great.

(Long overdue, in my opinion!)

If you were there, you’d know “Employee Assistance Programmes” (EAP) were mentioned quite a lot.

What is an Employee Assistance Programme?

A confidential helpline dedicated to helping your employees smooth out personal and work-related problems.

Yes, it might seem a bit touchy-feely, but the reality is that it really does make a difference and can help you keep your team together, turning up and functioning as you need them to.

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I’ve always loved buying things, from when I was a little girl, counting out the pennies for a paper bag of cola bottles, right through to now, when everything is available with the click of a button, or swipe of an iPhone.

The internet really has reduced purchasing friction, and I’m regularly finding myself drawn to products advertised to me on Instagram and buying them before I’ve even thought twice about it.

And – philanthropist that I am – in the last couple of years, most of those products aren’t even for me, but for our beloved miniature schnauzer.

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I’ve been trying to sell my son’s moped for 18 months now.

Why the delay?

A combination of my lack of motivation, paired with a significant lack of understanding of the second-hand moped market.

I started off by putting ads out at a sales price I considered eminently reasonable.

The prospective buyers did not agree.  Zero enquiries.

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It’s rapidly approaching that time of year again – the skeleton crew is in operation, staff disappear to make merry, and you lose half of December to run your business!

Before we get into the silly season, let’s answer some of the key questions we get around holiday:

How much holiday entitlement do my employees get?

“It depends” is the short answer.

Normally, this would be specified in their contract of employment.

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I’ve stayed in a lot of different hotels this year, from humble hostels to five-star specials.

But regardless of the brand or quality, they’ve ALL had one thing in common: a woefully inaccurate thermostat in the bedroom.

The one that really took the biscuit was the Hotel Adlon in Berlin – a beautiful hotel, but with a thermostat that swore blind that it was 18 degrees in the room.

And having set my home thermostat at that temperature to keep costs down, I can tell you one thing: I KNOW what 18 degrees feels like.

As I’ve experienced over many months now, 18 degrees means warm socks, a woolly jumper, and a blanket if I’m watching TV.

“18 degrees” at the Adlon?  A different temperature entirely – the kind you could sit in wearing a summer dress and still feel pleasantly warm.

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As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours, and in the last month, we’ve had a particularly dense deluge of “employee incidents” to deal with:

• The employee who took clients out for a meal and then decided to head to a nightclub, only to be turned away at the door because there was cocaine in his bag
• The head chef who pinned a 21-year-old waitress into a corner and told her, “If you give me a kiss, I’ll let you go”
• The house manager who got into a waitress’s car without permission and then proceeded to assault her

Yep, as I mentioned, it’s been busy.

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If you’ve dealt with committees before, then this won’t be news to you, but I just felt the need to write this after dealing with several incidents recently made a whole lot worse by committees…

• A club manager we were helping being told not only NOT to pay for HR advice (standard) but also being told off for getting free advice from ACAS “because the government will log what problems we have and use it against us”!
• A chairman deciding to cancel ALL HR support because they hadn’t had enough issues to justify the cost (Note – not NO issues).
• A committee member refusing to ask for a sick note from an employee who was off because “we are a caring organisation”, ignoring the actual process, although that would imply that they even knew there was a process.
• A committee failing to manage a head greenkeeper for 15 years, giving very limited feedback, and then deciding that he “had to go” because the course “isn’t as good as it could be” and because they are a “caring organisation” paying him a year’s salary to go without a fuss, rather than managing him properly over the years and having a better course!

So I am sure that you can see how committees are like teenagers now:

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We’re recruiting again – there seem to be no end to staff issues at the moment, so we’re pretty much at capacity.

And when it comes recruitment, I’m pretty ruthless – after all, I’ve got to be happy with the successful candidate giving out critical HR advice in our name, so they’ve got to know what they’re doing.

Step one of The Wahlen Gauntlet is designed to quickly and painlessly weed out the people who aren’t HR experts – a straightforward 10-question employment law quiz, which requires a minimum of 70% to proceed to the next stage.

You’d think everyone applying for an HR job would ace it, but you’d be wrong – only 20% applicants actually make the grade.

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Stephen King coined the phrase, “Books are a uniquely portable magic”.

I’m in total agreement – books are pretty much my joint favourite thing.

The trouble is, the other thing at the top of the list is travelling, so I really do need my books to be extremely portable.

Enter my Kindle, allowing me to take 300 books on the go.

It’s had more than its fair share of use over the last year or so though and is slowing down as a result, and though I could just go on less holidays, I decided a new Kindle was a better bet – it’d been to five of the seven continents, so a pretty good innings.

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There’s a golf club that’s keen to use us for their HR support, but there’s just one snag:

They’re with Citation.

Having been with them for three years, they’ve decided they’re not getting the bespoke, personalised support they need, and see the value in working with someone that specialises in golf clubs.

Anyway, they’d fulfilled their original three-year contract, and while they didn’t imagine they could leave straight away, they assumed it’d be a case of giving six months’ notice and they’d be free to go.

No dice.

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There have been thousands of column inches devoted to what Labour is going to do when it comes to employment law – some of it true, some of it less so.

But one thing that seems pretty certain (albeit without a specific time frame) is that they’ll make Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) a day-one right that applies to ALL staff.

What is Statutory Sick Pay?

Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) was introduced in 1983. The amount increases every April and is currently £116.75/week.

All workers are entitled to it as long as:

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Greenkeeper Bob went off sick at a club we work with the other day.

The story goes that he was working alone on the course on a Sunday, picked up a divot box, and put his back out.

You’d assume that that’d be the end of his working day, but apparently he continued to lift another 7 or 8 divot boxes before heading home, freshening up and out to a crowded pub where he stood in the throngs watching England lose the Euros final.

Next morning, he turned up for work at 6am, and by 8:30am his back was hurting too much to continue and he headed off home.

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I’ve lived without a coat rack for the last six months.

I know, it’s been quite the hardship.

I had my hallway repainted at the turn of the year – a lovely, dark blue, and once it was done, I decided not to bother putting the coat rack back up; it was worn, old and time for a change.

Fully intending to research and invest immediately, life quickly got in the way, and my coats quickly found alternative places to hang.

Six months flew by, as they tend to.

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I’m no forensic accountant, but I’m currently embroiled in a financial fraud case.

A general manager started a new position at a club and was given the “good news” that he didn’t need to worry about it – “John” had taken care of it for years, so he’d keep doing that.

General managers have got plenty to do, the accounts all seemed to be up to date, so he was happy to leave it to John.

Then the power bill came in, which was a bit of a shock, seeing as it had gone up from £1,500 a quarter to £77,000. It was quite the jump.

Then another demand came in – apparently, the club owed an additional £120,000 and hadn’t paid the energy bill for a long time.

“We need to talk”, says John.

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The predictions were right, and the polls were fairly accurate – we’ve woken up to a Labour government.

Understandably, you might be wondering what this means for your organisation—whether there will be any big changes in the world of employment law and whether you’ll need to do anything differently.

First thing to say here is don’t panic about any changes you read or hear about – they will not happen overnight.  Laws take time to be changed, and you’ll have enough notice to change your staff strategy if that’s required.

(And as we all know, just because something was in a manifesto, it does not mean that it will be implemented in the form promised, or at all.)

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“Hide and seek the general manager” – can’t see it usurping the traditional form of the game, but nevertheless, we have plenty of fun playing it in the Gap HR office.

Here’s how it works:

1. We hear from a client that they are moving. So far, so straightforward.
2. Obviously, we hope to continue the relationship with that client, but it also presents an opportunity – who has just left, and where are they going?
3. The search begins. We look on the new website. LinkedIn. The out-of-office messages from our weekly emails.

Sounds easy, and it should be.

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We’ve had two new clients sign up on retainer this week, both with really meaty staff issues; the kind we really like to get our teeth into.

There’s something else they have in common – both were already paying retainers to other HR companies when they approached us and asked us to help them with their HR.

And as it turned out, it would have been just as effective for them to set the money on fire as it was to send it to the HR companies in question.

Because when tricky staff issues come along, the pretenders get found out.

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We’re recruiting at the moment – a steady stream of new clients over the last few months means we need to grow our team.

Our recruitment process is pretty hardcore: after all, the person we hire will be giving advice to our clients, which means it’s got to be spot on.

As part of the process, we ask a lot of HR questions, and there’s one question that candidates keep failing – when they do, it’s a pretty big red flag.

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I’ll be blunt: we have seen a large increase in sexual harassment in golf clubs in recent months.

Not between employees.  For the most part, they abide by the rules, and when there is an incident, it’s dealt with quickly, effectively and by the book.

So, what’s the problem?

In a word: the members.

I won’t teach you to suck eggs, but we both know that – for the most part – golf club membership is dominated by white males, from a previous generation.

Chances are you’ve had to deal with your fair share of challenges from this demographic – I’ve had plenty of managers tell me about members who felt they owned the club and had the right to be involved in all decisions, despite not stepping up to take any responsibility.

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How about this one.

The scammers targeted a new employee, let’s call her Sarah, less than two weeks in the company.

They sent them an email, allegedly from the managing director, asking Sarah to buy some John Lewis and Apple gift cards to be used as gifts for valued employees. The email asked her to keep it confidential so as not to spoil the surprise for those employees.

As the employee was so new, she somehow did not question why the MD was speaking to her, rather than literally ANYONE else in the office to do this important task. Despite the email address and language of the emails not being at all what the MD would use, because Sarah was so new, she didn’t realise.

They asked her to buy £2000 of gift cards at £500 each. She, and this is so sad, said that she only had £200 in her account, and apologised to the MD/scammers that she could only buy this much.

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A client emailed this week, wanting to issue a final written warning for the chef at his club.

He’d been drunk at work twice now, and they’d had enough.

On the face of it, that all seems sensible – it’s clearly a disciplinary offence; potentially a dismissal.

There was one teeny little snag, though: this was the first time we’d heard about any sort of disciplinary process for this member of staff.

And generally, this means one thing: it hasn’t been carried out correctly.

So it proved, when I started asking general questions – how long had the chef been there for, could they send over the investigation notes, what did the previous warnings say, and so on.

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We learnt plenty about osmosis during “O” level biology; trouble was that by the time it came to the exams, I’d forgotten it all.

Perhaps I thought the process of osmosis would bail me out – just sleep with the textbook under the pillow, and my brain would be magically instilled with everything I needed to know.

Fanciful and bizarre, maybe, but I’ve noticed a similar approach being adopted by plenty of employers, with one recent story springing to mind.

A client got in touch about an employee being off sick.

They’d not followed the absence reporting procedure, so there was a chance they could be dismissed, which was the employer’s preferred outcome.

I just needed to check one tiny little thing – that the handbook containing the absence reporting procedure HAD been given out to all staff.

The answer wasn’t reassuring:

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Words are important. Any serious Scrabble player reaching for the dictionary will tell you that.

And when it comes to employment law, your choice of words couldn’t be more important.

I experienced this recently when a golf club committee member got in touch.

A member of staff at the club had submitted a grievance against the manager, and we’d worked on the response, which was a robust rejection of the grievance claims.

He’d agreed that we should (and must) reject the grievance, but he didn’t like the way the response was worded – too formal, too unemotional.

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