At the best of times, dealing with corporate monstrosities is pretty challenging.

Since Covid, it’s become an utter nightmare, with more barriers and irrelevant questions in every single interaction.

Take Thames Water as an example – they called me yesterday to book a date to install a water meter.

The guy on the other end of the phone sounded bored out of his brain, and clearly reading from a script, launched straight into the all too familiar Covid questions:

• Is anyone self-isolating?
• Is anyone in the vulnerable categories?
• Has anyone in your household tested positive for Covid recently?
• Does anyone have Covid symptoms?

So far, so standard.

I replied “no” to all of them, and then he explained that the earliest date that an engineer could come would be May 21.

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What is the current default retirement age?

I ask this during my presentations quite a bit, and get A LOT of different answers, with “65” being the most common

The real answer?  There isn’t one. It was abolished in October 2011, with a short transition period where you were allowed to give your employees six months’ notice of retirement.

That concluded in 2012.

What does that mean for you as an employer?

Quite a bit as it happens.

Most obviously, it means there is no “retirement” anymore.  The only way people leave is to resign.

You can’t wait for that awkward member of staff to retire, because there’s no guarantee they will.

You can’t put off managing a poor performer because they haven’t got long left, because you’ve got no idea whether they will.

However old your staff member is, if they’re not performing, they need managing.

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We’ve had a few clients failing at the “dismissal stage” recently.

Each one for exactly the same thing – not telling us that they KNEW the employee had long term mental health issues.

As the saying goes – the truth will out, and it always does, just as soon as the employee contacts ACAS Early Conciliation.

Then it comes to us, we see what’s being claimed by the employee, and end up having an uncomfortable conversation with the client, who’s clearly conveniently ignored what they KNEW about the employee’s mental health.

Why?

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I was talking to a friend the other day, and she was probing me about human resources-related stuff (occupational hazard!).

One of the things she was keen to know was whether there was a legal requirement for an employer to have a handbook that they gave to their staff.

I asked her why she was so interested, and I was pretty surprised by her answer:

“Because I was given my contract, which refers to the handbook a lot. So I asked the Office Manager for a copy of this handbook. He said I should think of it like a magical handbook.”

As you can imagine, I was a little bit confused by this, so she elaborated…

Apparently the Office Manager had told her that the handbook was like a unicorn: everyone knows what it is, but no one has ever seen it in real life!

Now there are a couple of problems with this:

1. Businesses are legally required to issue their staff with employee handbooks;
2. This business had flat out lied to their employee.

It is just not-on for businesses to try and pull a fast one, or in this case, a magical one, over their employees, and a bit pointless, as the handbook protects the employer, not the employee.

Have you got a ‘magical handbook’? Best magic one into reality if you have…

Last month, my daughter saw a rat.

She was in our (very messy) garage with our miniature schnauzer Comet, and it scuttled right in front of them.

Comet successfully ignored generations of breeding and let the rat go, choosing to focus on a manky tennis ball instead.

Luckily, one of our clients specialises in pest extermination, so – after witnessing Comet’s failure – we called out Vermatech and they arrived the next day.

Three weeks later the rats were gone, and we were under no illusions about how they’d got into the garage – the old wooden door frame, which clearly needed replacing without delay.

I contacted three companies – two from Checkatrade, and one via recommendation.

All three came round.  All were likeable, knowledgeable, could provide what I wanted – a grey anthracite roller door – and could do it for about the same price and in the same time frame.

I was dreading getting the quotes and having to make a choice because they were all so similar – how was I going to make the choice?!

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I was speaking to a prospect the other day, and while he was interested in our support, it quickly became clear that he didn’t feel he would need it going forward.

Not because he wouldn’t experience issues in his organisation, but because – in his words –  “Now we’ve had Brexit, the government is going to scrap a lot of employment law, so I probably won’t need much help”.

Whichever side of the referendum you sat on, I’m afraid to confirm that he is wrong.

Brexiters always claimed there was a thicket of EU red tape that could be removed: Priti Patel said in 2016 that scrapping EU rules could create 60,000 new jobs.

But the reality is rather different.

In 2018, a CBI survey found that 18 out of 23 sectors favoured complete alignment with EU rules, many of which are now a firmly established part of the British legal framework.

So although the government has been saying they will review employment law in this country, the truth is that precious little is likely to change, and the vision of being “free from the shackles of European snowflake law” is more mirage than reality.

This is not really a surprise, given all the other things that the government has to deal with right now!

So, if you’re thinking Brexit is the fork in the road that means HR doesn’t matter, I regret to inform you that – on the contrary – you can expect European type law to remain in this county for years to come.

And if that means you need some help, you know where we are!