Endeavour Partnership’s employment law team have developed a comprehensive support service focused on meeting the HR needs of small to medium sized businesses.
Introducing Navigate HR…
Endeavour’s Navigate HR packages are fully customisable and flexible. If what’s initially set out doesn’t meet the needs of the business, we can add and remove elements to create a bespoke service. The employment team are equipped to work alongside a preexisting HR function within the company or to fill the role of managing any HR issues that may arise.
What sets Navigate HR apart from other packages of a similar nature is the fact it has been uniquely designed by experienced legal minds. Navigate not only gives a business advice on good HR practice but protects and considers matters from an employment law perspective.
Navigate HR is composed of three main elements: Helpline, Review, and Update.
Navigate Helpline
Navigate HR Helpline covers unlimited email and telephone access to Endeavour’s specialist employment lawyers who will give prompt guidance on any day-to-day employment and HR-related issues. The key aim of the helpline to provide effective and efficient solutions to your HR queries rather than advising on more complex projects which may need more in-depth analysis.
Navigate Review
Under the Navigate HR Review feature, businesses will receive a free health check of their employment contracts, policies, and procedures. The team will then work with the current documents you have in place or provide new ones which are tailored to your business, depending on the specific demand.
Navigate Update
Once the audit of documentation has been undertaken, organisations can take advantage of the update component of Navigate HR. This involves a regular review of your employment contracts, staff handbooks, and other HR policies which takes place on an annual basis. Endeavour’s team will update them to reflect any changes in the law ensuring the business is fully compliant and up to speed.
Endeavour’s employment law experts are advising businesses to be aware of new changes that come into force in April.
National Minimum Wage
Those aged 25 and over will see an increase in the minimum wage they are entitled to from £7.83 per hour to £8.21 per hour, with increases across all the different NMW age banding.
Tribunal awards
Maximum compensation awards in a successful unfair dismissal claim will increase to £86,444, up from £83,682, whilst the maximum amount of week’s pay used for calculating the basic award increases from £508 to £525. The maximum level of penalty that an Employment Tribunal can impose on an employer who repeatedly breaches their employment law obligations will increase from £5,000 to £20,000.
Gender Pay Gap
For the second year, organisations with 250 or more employees have been required to publish their annual gender pay gap report to the Government Equalities Office and these figures must be published electronically on their own website.
It is expected that these figures will come under increased scrutiny to see what improvements have been made by employers towards increased equality. Even where men and women are paid equal for equal jobs, if an organisation has more men in the higher-paid jobs there will still be a gender pay gap, as the figures will also show the distribution of men and women across different levels of the organisation.
Statutory payment rates
The qualifying criteria for Statutory Sick Pay changed on April 6, 2019, which means that individuals will need to earn at least £118 per week in order to qualify for weekly payments of £94.25.
Similarly, the earnings threshold for Statutory Adoption Pay, Statutory Maternity Pay and Statutory Shared Parental Pay will be £118 per week, in order to qualify for weekly payments of £148.68.
Pension Contributions
The minimum contributions into the automatic enrolment workplace pension scheme has also increased. The new minimum employer contribution will be 3%, with minimum eligible staff contribution of 5%, making the total minimum contribution 8%.
If you’d like to speak to a member of Endeavour’s employment team Navigate HR or for general employment law advice, call 01642 610300 or email [email protected].