In my experience of providing HR support to small charities and social enterprises, the following activities are worth considering to improve your HR practice in 2019:
Review your HR policies and procedures that have not been looked at for over two years to make sure they still reflect best practice and current legislation.
Employment status – it might be a good idea to review all your working arrangements and make sure that you do not have self-employed freelancers who should be employees, casual workers who are treated like employees, and volunteers that could be considered employees.
Managing sickness absence – it is really important to keep good records of sick leave and pay taken by employees so that you can determine when you may have an issue and be in a better position to manage it sooner rather than later. (The cloud based system, breathe HR maybe able to help. It is free to registered charities until April 2019! Use this link: https://app.breathehr.com/signup?hrp=POPU01 for a 14 day free trial to have a look at the system.
Managing redundancy – if you find yourself in a situation where funding is coming to an end and/or you need to restructure and change roles, you will need to be clear about the process you will follow if redundancies are a possibility. Contact me and I can clearly outline your responsibilities as an employer.
Review probation and managing performance – many individual cases I deal with are directly related to the lack of performance review of new employees in their probationary period. This can lead to bigger issues with employee performance later after probation has passed. Performance management of employees should be on your radar from day one!
GDPR – have you compiled a privacy notices for your employees which outlines:
o what data you will process,
o what you process the data for,
o what your lawful basis is for data processing,
o how long you will retain the information,
o who you will share the data with and if it is shared internationally, what safeguards have been adopted,
o what rights employees have e.g. the right to access their data or have it erased,
o the employee’s right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority if the employee thinks their rights have been breached.
