Employer’s pension contributions count towards a week’s pay

It has been long standing practice that when calculating a week's pay for redundancy payments and certain employment tribunal awards, that employer pension contributions are not included. However, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has recently held, in the case of University of Sunderland v Drossou that the calculation of a "week's pay" under s.221(2) Employment Rights Act 1996 should include employer pension contributions, and not just be the basic pay.

A week's pay for calculating redundancy pay is currently capped at £489 and this decision does not alter the level of the cap. Depending on the amount that the employee earns and if it is less than £489 per week they may receive more now due to the employer’s pension contributions being taken into account. 

Contact us if you would like assistance on calculating redundancy payments on 01245 261883

Biggest workplace distraction is social media

Fleximize carried out a study into workers procrastination habits and identified that the instant messaging app WhatsApp is the most distracting platform. 72% of employees regularly use it to chat to friends and family when they should be working.  Other common workplace distractions named in the study affected the following percentage of employees:

Facebook (70%), Instagram (49%), Twitter (41%) and Snapchat (30%)

Some companies encourage employees to use WhatsApp as a communication tool amongst their teams. Whilst this may assist with communication in the workplace, employer should be aware that it can also provide employees with a platform to air grievances and complain about their work colleagues or how they are being treated by their manager.

There is a risk that an employee could accidentally whilst using WhatsApp send confidential information and attachments relating to their organisation, to a third party or to an individual who is outside their organisation.  As WhatsApp picks up all contacts on a user's smartphone.

If social media is approved for work, employers need to ensure that they have clear policy and procedures around how employees conduct themselves to ensure that they do not break any defamation, data protection or privacy laws.

If the use of social networking sites during working hours for personal use is not acceptable then employers need to ensure that this is clearly communicated to employees and that they understand the implications of what may happen if they are found to be using social media.  The policy should state how the issues will be dealt with and if it is through the disciplinary procedure.

If you need any guidance on how to communicate a social media policy to your employees please contact us on 01245 261883

New leave for grieving parents

There is no legal requirement for employers to provide paid time off for grieving parents and employers are expected to be understanding and flexible.  The Employment Rights Act allows employees to take a ‘reasonable' amount of unpaid time off to deal with an emergency involving a dependent. This is likely to change. 

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has now published a Bill, which will entitle working parents who lose a child under the age of 18 to two weeks' leave, regardless of their length of service.

Employees with a minimum of 26 weeks' continuous service will also be eligible for statutory parental bereavement pay, the cost of which employers will be able to recover from the Government.

It is hoped the bill will formally become law in 2020.