| HR & EMPLOYMENT LAW
Jackie Le Poidevin, Editor-in-Chief, HR Adviser |
Accelerating the Return to the Office: 5 Tips to Avoid Legal and Practical Problems
Jacob Rees-Mogg – the man photographed apparently napping on the front bench of the House of Commons during a Brexit debate – thinks civil servants who are still working from home aren’t pulling their weight and should be ordered back to the office. He has been going round government departments leaving a note in empty offices reading ‘sorry you were out when I visited’ and has drawn up a league table showing the worst-performing departments. If, like the government, you’re still trying to persuade reluctant staff to return to the office, these are 5 tips for how to go about this without creating as much of a stir as Mr Rees-Mogg has done.
1. Check if Staff Have the Right to Work Flexibly
If members of staff have submitted a formal request to work from home on certain days and you’ve agreed to this, this is a permanent change to their employment contract. Both you and the employee will need to agree to any further change.
2. Make Use of Your Normal Performance Management Procedure
If someone who works from home part time or full time isn’t pulling their weight, you can take them through your performance management procedure. You would need evidence they were getting less done on their homeworking days or compared to office-based staff. Their manager feeling they weren’t visible enough wouldn’t suffice.
To try and improve performance, you could require the person to come back to the office. A good homeworking agreement will explicitly state that if the employee’s performance is unsatisfactory, you may end the arrangement.
3. Lead by Example
A recent international survey of 10,000 knowledge workers has shown that more junior employees are nearly twice as likely as leaders to be working from the office 5 days a week. This double standard is, the study by Future Forum claims, resulting in work-life balance scores that are 40% lower among employees than managers. Employees are also reporting more than twice the level of stress and anxiety than their bosses. Some 79% of knowledge workers would like location flexibility and 94% want schedule flexibility – the ability to adjust their hours of work.
If you want high-performing employees, you should implement your rules fairly. Insisting junior staff return to the office while managers retain a high degree of flexibility and autonomy will breed resentment and increase employee turnover.
4. Draw Up a Policy in Consultation with Staff
Allowing working from home to trundle on without a clear plan in place creates uncertainty for everyone. In the Future Forum survey, employees who believed their employer wasn’t being ‘transparent about their future of work plans’ were nearly four times as likely as other respondents to say they would ‘definitely’ seek a new job in the next year. Also, employees may eventually gain an implied right through custom and practice to keep working from home.
Mr Rees-Mogg is therefore right that a decision should be made about the future of home working in the civil service. However, imposing edicts from the top isn’t the best way to go about this. If you want more employees to attend the office more often, you should be having a two-way conversation with them about this. Explain the benefits of being present in the office, such as collaboration and knowledge sharing, and seek employees’ views. You can’t please everyone but employees will feel more engaged if you’ve listened to them and there’s been some give and take.
Once you’ve consulted, you can put together a written policy. Trying to turn the clock back completely to before the pandemic (or to Dickensian times as Rees-Mogg has been accused of trying to do) is likely to be difficult and unnecessary. However, it’s sensible to have clear ground rules in place about how much time you expect employees to spend in the office and how you’ll ensure there are enough people physically present each day.
5. Tread Carefully on Pay
The civil service is reportedly looking at stripping staff who work from home full time of their London weighting – a salary boost intended to offset higher living costs in the capital, such as commuting costs. Cutting pay unilaterally would be a breach of contract, so you would need to consult employees and obtain their agreement before taking a similar step.
| HEALTH & SAFETY
Michael Ellerby, Editorial Board Member, Health & Safety Adviser and Risk Assessment & Compliance |
How You Can Meet Your Basic Legal Duties on Electrical Safety
It is well known that electricity can kill and can cause serious injuries and fires. The main causes of harm from electricity and electrical equipment are: electrocution (death), electric shock, electrical fire and slips, trips and falls from cables. For most businesses, electrical safety can be fairly straightforward and involves some simple areas: fixed electrical installation, portable electrical appliances and cable management.
In regards to electrical safety, the obligations placed on employers include:
- Providing a safe workplace with safe electrical installations.
- Providing safe electrical equipment (portable/fixed) that can be plugged into the fixed system.
- Provide training/instruction in the safe use of the electrical installations and equipment to worker.
- Implement some simple condition checks.
Fixed Electrical Installation
The Health and Safety Executive recommend that fixed electrical installations are tested and inspected by a competent person (such as an ECA [Electrical Contractors’ Association] or NICEIC [National Inspection Council for Electrical Installation Contracting] accredited electrician) and determined to be satisfactory.
The certification lasts for differing periods depending on the nature of the premises (and can be reduced by poor installations). The general recommended inspection schedules are:
- Domestic: every 10 years.
- Commercial: every 5 years.
- Industrial: every 3 years.
- Places of entertainment (such as theatres): every year.
Often, the documentation indicates remedial works on the fixed installation that should be completed. There are different categories for this remedial works:
- C1: Danger present. Risk of injury. Immediate remedial action required.
- C2: Potentially dangerous defect. They may not pose an immediate threat but are likely to become a danger in the future, so still require urgent remedial action.
- C3: Improvement recommended. Something has been identified which does not comply with the latest regulations but isn’t immediately dangerous.
Unsatisfactory Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR)
C1 and C2 issues attract an unsatisfactory report rating. You must rectify these defects in order to demonstrate compliance.
Other Testing for Fixed Installations
There are additional checks and inspections you may need to be consider, especially for industrial installations, such as thermal imaging (or thermography). This is a method of inspecting electrical (and mechanical) equipment by obtaining heat distribution pictures. It is based on the fact that most components in a system show an increase in temperature when malfunctioning. Again, the reports will contain recommendations and remedial actions that should be addressed. Some insurers also require thermography to be carried out annually for certain installations.
Having confirmed that the fixed electrical installation is safe, you can look at what you may wish to plug into it.
Portable Appliance Testing (PAT)
PAT describes the examination of electrical appliances and equipment (by a competent person – internal or external) to ensure they are safe to use.
As many faults can readily be discovered by visual examination, PAT should be accompanied by regular visual checks by the users or by an appointed person (supported by training and instruction). This demonstrates that the equipment is safe (at that time), while the visual inspections show that there is no reason to consider that the equipment has deteriorated.
The frequency of PAT is based on you risk assessment: items such as PCs (which are not moved) can be inspected less frequently that items that are moved (or pulled by cables), such as vacuum cleaners.
Portable Appliance Inventory
In order to manage portable appliances, it may be useful to have a simple inventory of equipment that is accurate, up to date, and which shows the compliance status of equipment. Remove an unsafe equipment from service and identify it on the inventory.
| PAYROLL
Sarah Bradford, Editor-in-Chief, Pay & Benefits Adviser |
Prepare for End of Working from Home Easements
During the Covid-19 pandemic, employees were instructed to ‘work from home where they can’. To support home working during this period, HMRC introduced a number of easements to end the tax reliefs available for homeworkers. The easements applied for the 2020/21 and 2021/22 tax years. However, as the work from home guidance no longer applies, and the Government are keen to encourage workers to return to the office, the easements have come to an end and from the 2022/23 tax year there is a return to the stricter statutory rules. What does this mean for you and for your employees?
Homeworking Equipment
Where an employer provides an employee with equipment to enable them to work from home, a statutory exemption means that no tax liability arises in respect of its provision, as long as any private use of the equipment is insignificant and the sole purpose in providing the employee with the equipment is to enable them to work at home. The exemption applies, for example, to the provision of a laptop and a printer to enable employees who are home-based or work from home some of the time under hybrid arrangements to work from home.
The statutory exemption does not apply if the employee initially buys the equipment and is later reimbursed by the employer. In this situation, the exemption for paid and reimbursed expenses does not apply either as if the employee meets the cost of the equipment, they are not entitled to a tax deduction as the expenditure does not qualify because it is capital in nature.
HMRC Easements
During the Covid-19 pandemic when employees were required to work from home, often at short notice, and needed to be able to kit themselves out to enable them to do so, HMRC introduced easements relaxing the strict statutory rules. This meant that no tax liability arose if the employee purchased the equipment and was later reimbursed by the employee. The easement also allowed the employee to claim tax relief where they met the cost of the equipment.
The easements applied for the 2020/21 and 2021/22 tax years only and have now come to an end. As a result, the rules have reverted to the strict statutory provision for 2022/23. While this means that no tax liability will arise if you provide your employees with equipment to enable them to work from home, if they initially buy the equipment and are reimbursed by you, the reimbursement is taxable and is treated like extra pay. In addition, employees will no longer be able to claim tax relief for any homeworking equipment they buy themselves.
Allowance for Additional Household Expenses
Where employees are required to work from home under homeworking arrangements, the employer can pay them a tax-free allowance of £6 per week/£26 per month. Homeworking arrangements are arrangements between the employer and the employee under which the employee regularly performs some or all of the duties of the employment from home.
Where the employee is required to work from home, they can claim a deduction for additional household expenses if these are not met by the employer. This, too, is £6 per week/£26 per month.
During the pandemic, the conditions were relaxed and employees who worked at home, whether in request to do so from the Government or otherwise, were allowed to claim the deduction for the full tax year. The claim can be made online on the Gov.uk website.
Changes to Household Expenses Allowances
However, from 2022/23 the relief can only be claimed where the employee works at home for one of the following reasons:
- There are no appropriate facilities for the employee to perform their job at the employer’s premises;
- The nature of the job requires the employee to live so far from the employer’s premises that it is unreasonable for the employee to travel to those premises on a daily basis; or
- The employee is required, under Government restrictions, to work from home.
This means that employees are unable to claim the relief if they simply choose to work from home or opt to do so under flexible working arrangements.
Homeworking Policies
Check that any homeworking policies have been updated to reflect a return to the pre-pandemic rules.