From time to time we speak to a client or prospective client who is looking to make a post redundant and when we look the contract of employment hasn’t been updated in a very long time.
Keeping contracts of employment up to date with changes to names, job titles, hours of work, salary etc can be a real pain, but it’s one of those actions, like many jobs we have to do, where your ‘future self’ will thank you for the effort you went to.
What can happen when a contract isn’t up to date?
In the scenario above where an employer believes that an individual does one job, and yet their contract shows another, a dispute can occur in a potential redundancy situation. One of the common reasons for an organisation to consider redundancies is because they believe they no longer have a need for a role to be performed. That can be difficult to argue if the employee is able to demonstrate that they are not ’employed’ to do that role, and the employer can’t argue any different.
Similarly, if a employer believes that an individual belongs in a ‘pool’ at risk of redundancy due to decline in the number of posts needed, someone who hasn’t had their contract updated may be able to argue that they don’t hold that role.
In these situations we might look for other evidence to support the employer’s arguement that a role has changed and the contract not reissued. This could be in the form of a salary change letter, email signature, business card, Linkedin profile, job description being issued and signed for or similar. None of these are as good as an up to date contract of employment.
An Employment Spring Clean
Therefore a really good job for an Employment Spring Clean will be:
- Check your personnel files. Have leavers been removed and securely archived?
- Can you remove an old information, that you do not have a good reason under DPA’18 to retain?
- Do you have an up to date signed contract of employment on file for every employee?
- Have you updated contracts for those who may have had term time only contracts?
- Have you updated the contracts of your casuals to remove reference to 12.07%?
- Have you checked whether you have up to date employee contact information, particularly important in an emergency, sadly we have found that employee’s don’t maintain this info.
If we can be of any assistance, with updating your template contracts of employment, please call us on 01527 909436.