Carolyne Wahlen - GAP HR

How To Dismiss An Employee Fairly: A Guide for UK Business Owners

Introduction Let’s face it – dismissing an employee fairly is never a walk in the park. But as a business owner, it’s crucial to handle the situation fairly and within the bounds of UK employment law. While the process may seem daunting, breaking it down into manageable steps can make it a bit less overwhelming. … Read more

Blacksmith meet cute

I met a blacksmith at a Christmas party the other day.

Not the usual meet cute, I grant you.

His name was Tom, and he’s not just any old blacksmith – he makes customised armour for battle re-enactments.

I’d assumed the armour used for such purposes was plastic, but no, it’s actual armour, manufactured from steel, and making it and selling it is quite the endeavour.

It takes 2-3 months to prepare most orders (with their biggest order taking 18 months to complete).

There’s more demand than supply in the UK, so they get plenty of work, but I wondered whether there might be competition from overseas.

1 Month Notice Period UK

Does a 1 month notice period still apply after 8 years? No, is the quick answer to that. In the first month of employment, notice can be immediate on both sides. Their notice period After the first month, it has to increase to one week on both sides. You can keep the notice period at … Read more

Easter bank holidays 2024 – action required

Some of you need to start thinking about the Easter bank holidays! Keep reading if your holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March AND you only give the statutory minimum annual leave entitlement (20 days + bank holidays). In 2024, the Easter bank holidays fall on 29 March and 1 April 2024. So, … Read more

The magical 2-year line

Unsurprisingly, we’re still SUPER busy here at Gap HR.

It’s usually when we’re in the middle of discussing staff member issues and that “they need to go”, that the manager pipes up with something along the lines of:

“I don’t need this person anymore. They aren’t performing, their attitude is bad, and frankly, they have been trouble since their first day of employment. Let’s get rid of them now!”.

“How long have they worked for you?”

“2 years and 2 months”

Laying aside the fact that part of a manager’s job is to “manage” poor performance, the most irritating part of this statement is the fact that despite believing that their employee “needs to go”, they’ve allowed them to drag their employment on over the magical 2-year line.

Must be true

Must be true

A haulage company owner got in touch this week.

I’d say he was calling for advice, but actually, he just wanted the green light on his plans!

He had an employee with three years of service, and he wanted to get rid.

And because “it says it on the internet”, he believed that as he’d never given him an employment contract, he could just give him his marching orders.

I must admit to being a little taken aback by this, which may explain my blunt response:

“No, it does not say that on the internet”.

Braving the bauble

Sure, ‘it’s the most wonderful time of the year’, but in 2024, the festive season now seems beset with danger, with plenty of employers concerned about the repercussions of celebrating Christmas in any way, shape or form.

So if you’re wondering whether you can brave the bauble, here’s the common-sense guide to decking the halls without ending up in tribunal.

Burning business health

Burning business health

I look forward to Christmas every year.

For all the normal reasons, but also because of a massive indulgence I allow myself.

Before the children graced me with their presence (!), I could go out and buy pretty stuff, for me, for the house, and occasionally for others.

And it was in that period that I discovered Crabtree & Evelyn’s Noël range.

Which smells exactly like Christmas. It’s perfection.

Since that moment several years ago, I’ve been as loyal as possible, buying products from the range when I could, and in recent years, I’ve taken to splashing out on candles to burn throughout the entire month of December.

And this year’s been another good one for the business, so I was looking forward to my usual ‘splashing out’ celebration.

Sadly, I was disappointed.

Flabbergasted by Formula 1

Flabbergasted by Formula 1

I’m no Formula 1 super fan – I was dragged to the Dutch Grand Prix a couple of times as a child, and my only abiding memories?

The cars – too loud
Free cigarettes being handed out in the pit lane; those were the days!

Despite my lack of fandom, I sat down to watch some GP highlights earlier this week.

Why?

My daughter is doing ‘Formula Student’ this year at university, where she’s tasked with designing and building a single-seat racing car, and she wanted to get some tips, so I tagged along on the sofa.

I was immediately blown away.

Not by the cars. Or the graphics. Or the colours, noise, cheers from the crowd, or anything like that.

The thing that bowled me over?

Sky Man, Will

Sky Man Will

A year ago, I finally got the dining room sorted.

It had been in my sights for a while, but there were all sorts of other things that needed time and attention first.

Eventually, though, it was the dining room’s turn, and the decorator came over to transform it.

One thing that was definitely on the list was getting rid of as many ugly cables as possible – Sky box, TV, sound system, they all add up.

During the process, a white TV cable with a connector at the end came apart.

Bizarrely, the TV still worked without it – BBC, ITV, and C4 were all there, meaning the white cable was superfluous, a hangover from the original installation.

Carry them for 3 months?

Carry them for 3 months?

We started working with a new client this week – a private sector company with nine employees.

They had an employee that’d been there a year who just wasn’t performing despite being spoken to, offered training and so on and so forth.

We asked the critical questions, checked that the employee had no protected characteristics, and then let them know they could dismiss them.

Turns out we weren’t the only HR provider they’d spoken to about this issue.

They were in contract with Bright HR (a budget online HR service with an advice line attached), and they’d given them very different advice:

3-month performance review, and then make a decision.

Feeling strangely fine

Feeling strangely fine Don’t worry, I’m not going to launch into a song from the 90s band Semisonic (remember them?!). Instead, I’ve got something far less exciting (but no less excruciating) to share with you: What you can and can’t do regarding Covid. We’ve had a lot of questions on the topic again, so I … Read more

Mosquito mistake

Mosquito mistake

I went to Venice last week.

I’d been once before, so I had great expectations.

The City of Water didn’t let me down: sun, wonderful streets, great architecture, boat rides, Italian gelato (three times a day) and wine without compare.

There was one drawback of having been there before, though – I went into the whole affair with an air of complacency and completely forgot something critical:

Canals = mosquitos.

Rabid mosquitos.

The silent business killer threatening us all

The silent business killer threatening us all I was in Northern Ireland a few weeks ago, giving a presentation. Now, given that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, you might assume that employment law is the same as it is in Great Britain. You’d be dead wrong. Employment law is different in Northern … Read more

Pool car perk

Pool car perk

Got a “pool vehicle”?

Well, it depends on how it’s being used.

I was chatting to a club last week about one of their new employees – a course manager.

He’d decided that the pool vehicle should live at his house during evenings and weekends but charitably agreed that when he was on holiday, he’d leave it at work.

Here’s the problem – through HMRC’s eyes, that transforms the “pool vehicle” into a company car, which the course manager will have to pay tax on, just as if he were the only one using it.

If pool vehicles are taken home and used for anything other than specific work travel, they immediately become a taxable benefit.

Sucks for the course manager, but rules are rules.

My exorbitant date with Taylor

My exorbitant date with Taylor

Everyone knows that a key part of sales and marketing is making the sales process as easy and frictionless as possible.

Look at Amazon – three buttons, and you can buy anything you want. No friction, no hoops to jump through equals lots of sales and lots of profits.

But with all that said, there’s something to be said for a sales strategy at precisely the other end of the spectrum.

I experienced exactly this when my daughter asked me to join her at a Taylor Swift concert next year.

(If you’re a parent of a late-stage teenager, you’ll understand why I grabbed this opportunity with both hands!)

Getting the tickets was no mean feat.

ED (&I)?!

You’ve likely had plenty of emails about “ED” over the years.

Most of them probably ending up in your spam box, thanks to their spurious claims to improve virility.

But what about ED&I?

Thanks to my fascinating career, I’ve no choice but to keep up to date with what’s going on in the world of HR, and recently this “new” acronym has popped up.

I haven’t paid too much attention to it as we’ve been rather busy solving client issues, but a couple of weeks back, I quickly found the time when our competitors started pinging emails at our clients, saying that they all needed an ED&I policy.

The greenkeeper shot the apprentice…

The greenkeeper shot the apprentice

If one of your greenkeepers decided to shoot an apprentice with an air rifle, you’d assume it’d be okay to give them their marching orders, right?

Not so fast…

One of our clients decided to sign up with us having lost a big tribunal case based on exactly this transgression.

At first glance, it was difficult to see why they’d lost, but when we delved a little deeper, it all became clear.

The greenkeeper in question was out in the woods, with two colleagues and an apprentice, when they stumbled upon an air rifle.

Instead of leaving it where it was and calling the police, they decided to pick it up and use the age old, failsafe method to work out if it was loaded.

Yes, that’s right, by pulling the trigger.

While aiming at the apprentice’s buttocks.

This ad changed my life

This ad changed my life

We’ve all tried them – the fad diets.

5:2, 2:2, Atkins, Keto, the list goes on and on – if you’re anything like me, you get bombarded with ads and content promising to help you drop a dress size, lose a stone or climb a mountain on a daily basis.

I’m as sceptical as they come, but one of those ads has changed my life.

Granted, it wasn’t one from a snake oil salesman but the well-known Zoe nutrition, partly invented by Professor Tim Spector.

And rather than just trying to sell you some shakes or supplements, Zoe actually tests your body to understand how it responds to food, using a blood glucose monitor to see what happens as each food or drink is consumed.

As well as that, you send them a couple of samples (one being a stool, so don’t say you weren’t warned!) and eat a couple of their standardised muffins to help them understand your metabolism.

A week later, the results were in:

Blown away by Travelodge

Blown away by Travelodge

I was at Eddie Izzard’s “Great Expectations” show last week (absolutely brilliant, highly recommended).

In days gone by, I’d likely have rushed out of the theatre to catch the last train home, but I’ve got to the age where that feels much more like trial than adventure, so I booked a hotel room close by and decided to make a “mini break” of it.

Having had some pretty lacklustre hotel experiences recently, I decided to go back to basics and plump for a Travelodge.

They’re not glitzy, they’re not glamorous, but you know what you’re getting, the beds are comfortable, and – obviously – they’re at the more affordable end of the spectrum.

Anyway, I got to the reception, gave them my name, and they tapped one key on the computer, pulled up my booking, and handed over the key.

Job done – the process probably took 20 seconds.

Holiday – wise old soul

With better weather and the holidays hurtling towards us, I was reminded of a saying I read a while ago:

“Take time for quietness, and you will free yourself from being influenced by the wrong things”.

They had a point. Especially when it comes to the workplace.

You see, it’s that time of year again when the employees pour out, slap on their suntan lotion and head off on holiday, leaving a skeleton staff to run the office.

Your self-employed shop assistant

Last week I was giving a talk to trainee golf club managers.

And being the fun trainer I am, I decided to put together a quiz to see how employment law proficient they are.

Don’t worry – they’re not meant to be experts; that’s why we exist, after all!

Usually, they manage to get a few questions right, but this time, EVERY single person got one particular question wrong:

Can the shop assistant in the pro shop be self-employed?

They’re going to die anyway!

They’re going to die anyway!

I saw the other day that Royal Dornoch Golf Club has installed defibrillators and first aid kits on six of its buggies.

Five of them are hired out to golfers with pre-existing conditions; the other is for their “roving ranger”, who can help if someone has a problem.

It seems highly sensible to me, and I was delighted to learn they want to go further and get them into all buggies going forward.

But it did remind me of a regional GCMA meeting a few years back when the British Red Cross came in to demo some defibrillators, offer some training and provide advice on where to station the defibrillators.

Buggies weren’t suggested, which maybe reflects how tech has moved forward in the last few years, but what I found remarkable was the number of managers poo-pooing having them at all.

The Red Cross team were suggesting one in the clubhouse and perhaps one in the halfway hut, but according to plenty of the room, there would be no point:
“If they have a heart attack, they’ll be so far from the clubhouse that we wouldn’t be able to get there in time”.

No harm, no foul?

No harm, no foul?

We’ve experienced a significant increase in sexual assault and harassment cases recently:

• The member of a golf club committee that asked a waitress who was offering him a lift home if she was offering to give him a “little sex”

• The bar manager that complained about female bra straps always falling down employees’ arms and then pushed them up an 18-year-old’s arm and under her t-shirt for her.

• The 18-year-old trainee who was being shown the beer barrels down in the cellar when the bar manager said, “You know, no one would hear you if you screamed in here”.

• The bar manager, who, when asked what time he finished his shift by the new trainee, said, “Are you asking how I get off?”

The defence of all of these?

Zero hours = zero rights?

One of my friends got a new job the other day.

She’s been unemployed since being made redundant last summer and jumped at the chance to do some casual work that used her admin skills.

As you’d expect, I had my HR hat on, asking about her contract, sick pay and holiday and all that jazz.

Her response?

“Oh no, I don’t get any of that stuff because I’m a zero hours worker”.

I pointed out that however wonderful her new employer was, they were also operating illegally and not paying her what she was owed.

I offered to read the contract to check what else they had got wrong.

The employer had correctly worded the contact to make it a “zero hours” one: they did not have to offer work and the worker did not have to accept it.

Zero hours = zero rights?

Zero hours zero rights

One of my friends got a new job the other day.

She’s been unemployed since being made redundant last summer and jumped at the chance to do some casual work that used her admin skills.

As you’d expect, I had my HR hat on, asking about her contract, sick pay and holiday and all that jazz.

Her response?

“Oh no, I don’t get any of that stuff because I’m a zero-hours worker”.

I pointed out that however wonderful her new employer was, they were also operating illegally and not paying her what she was owed.

I offered to read the contract to check what else they had got wrong.

The employer had correctly worded the contract to make it a “zero-hours” one: they did not have to offer work, and the worker did not have to accept it.

But pretty much everything else was rubbish:

Rounds are up, but people are down

Rounds are up, but people are down

Last week’s BRS Golf figures made interesting reading.

The number of rounds of golf so far this year is up 100% from the number played in the same period in 2019.

But the number of members of golf clubs? Down 6,000

If you’re still a member somewhere, this is all good news – more space, more tee times and so on and so forth.

For the golf clubs dependent on the subscriptions every year for your budget? Not so good.

It wasn’t all bad news – visitors were up by 21%, which goes some way towards plugging the gap, but the point is that not all revenue is created equal.

Whether you’re a private business or a golf club, recurring income makes life so much easier.

You can’t rely on “one-offs” to pay the increased electricity bill, but you can try to convert them to members so that you can rely on their payments.

Anyway, all this talk of the decreasing members reminded me of an article I wrote a while back, which is pretty pertinent to this subject – here it is below:

Honesty is not the best policy…

Honesty is not the best policy…

A client of ours had decided to terminate the employment of one their greenkeepers last week, but very nearly bungled the whole thing at the 11^th hour.

The greenkeeper in question had been there less than two years, had performed poorly for a long time, and had been called in for numerous performance meetings, and had continually failed to improve.

Open goal, right?

They spoke to us, and we explained exactly what they need to do: explain that they were letting him go, have a witness present just in case (they chose the Chair of Greens) and pay him a month’s notice. Job done.

It all went well at first.

AWOL

Awol

One of our clients called us at 10:30am on Monday – an employee was 90 minutes late and counting.

There’d heard nothing from him, no excuses or explanations, despite trying to call him.

What they wanted to know was whether they could just fire him on the spot.

The employee in question was a rather troublesome character, and they were already speaking to us about how they could part company with him.

So when he didn’t turn up, it seemed like all their Christmases had come at once.

Except they hadn’t – you can’t just “fire” someone if they don’t turn up for work.

Instead, here’s what you need to do:

10 outrageous excuses for not paying National Minimum Wage

10 outrageous excuses for not paying National Minimum Wage

WH Smith, Marks & Spencer and Argos are among more than 200 firms that have failed to pay workers legal national minimum wage (NMW). The employers were found to have failed to pay their workers almost £5 million in a clear breach of NMW law, leaving around 63,000 workers out of pocket.

The employers named previously underpaid workers in the following ways:

39% of employers deducted pay from workers’ wages.
39% of employers failed to pay workers correctly for their working time.
21% of employers paid the incorrect apprenticeship rate.

Whilst not all minimum wage underpayments are intentional, there is no excuse for underpaying workers. However, some employers have tried the most outrageous excuses to justify their failure to pay their workers NMW.

And before you read these, I want to clarify that these are genuine excuses that employers have given to HMRC enforcement officers – not a single one is made up:

Bad news for this employer!

Bad news for this employer! Usually I spend my time helping employers to stay the right side of employment law. But this week I found myself helping an employee. Her employer had given her a contract last year, which is impressive in itself – many employers don’t even bother with that! Sadly, the contract was … Read more

Dull as dishwater

I’m afraid it’s a slightly less whimsical note from me today, as I need to share something with you on whether employees should work their notice period. Yes, I agree, it’s dull as dishwater, but failure to do the right thing around notice periods can spell serious trouble. There are three options when notice has … Read more

Written warning from ChatGPT

Chances are you might have heard of ChatGPT. It’s been the talk of the town recently, with thousands of words written about how it’s going to take all the white-collar jobs away. I’m a big fan of tech (anything that’ll do the same job better or faster is worth exploring), so I thought I’d have … Read more

“How many bank holidays do I actually have to pay my staff for?”

We have another extra bank holiday this year for the coronation of King Charles. (It’s Monday 8 May, if you didn’t know). So I thought it would be a good time to brush up on what we do and don’t know about bank holidays. “How many bank holidays do I actually have to pay my staff … Read more

Terrible holiday pictures

I’m in Miami this week. Yes, it is amazing, thanks for asking. Florida is my kind of holiday to a tee – sun, sea, sand and a good book. But everyone’s different – some are sun worshippers like me, some prefer snow and apres ski, others like a safari or a city break. There is … Read more

The question on everyone’s lips

Now that everyone has stopped talking about the snow (it was lovely, but then, I didn’t need to go anywhere!), the next talking point at work is whether people are going to get paid for their “snow day”. The first place to look is your handbook, in your severe weather policy (you do have one, … Read more

10 minutes with the house manager was all it took

We recently took on a client who’d been accused of discrimination in the past, long before our involvement. They’d gone through a redundancy process in which everyone in the F&B department was put “at risk”. They went through the consultation period, did it by the book, and made one person redundant. So far, so good, … Read more

Settlement agreements and redundancy

A settlement agreement is where an employee gives up their right to bring legal action against their employer at the end of their employment, usually in exchange for payment.

Once an agreement has been reached, the employee has officially given up their right to bring a case against you in an employment tribunal.

It’s a useful option for many employers who are considering redundancy, for two reasons:

1. It protects the business
2. It also settles the end of the employee’s time in your employment, while still giving them something.

Bob punched me

One of our clients told me that their house manager was a confirmed liar the other day.

It seemed a trifle strange that they were saying it in such a matter-of-fact way, without having taken action on it, so I delved a little deeper.

Their most recent lie went a little like this…

There’d been a party at work, and then the team had decamped to the pub, leaving two staff members to follow behind:

The house manager and an apprentice.

Female and male. Older and younger. Both quite drunk.

A match made in heaven, right?

Zero hours = zero rights?

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