Managing the Workplace – Policy and Procedure
Useful for: Business, Non Govt Organisations
In Brief
- The issues surrounding employment (and engaging independent contractors), are many and varied.
- From the interview or procurement, all through the relationship and even after it ends, hiring organisations should put in place effective legal agreements, scrupulously manage the legal (and practical) relationships, and consider the desirability of up front restraint and non-competition clauses carefully to reduce the risks when people leave the business.
- Non-solicitation clauses prevent an employee or contractor engaging or soliciting your employees/contractors/suppliers or clients when they leave your organisation.
- As the gig economy ramps up, there is ever increasing awareness of the effects of discrimination, hostility and bullying in the workplace. Organisations should put in place detailed workplace policies to deal with the behaviour of both employees/contractors and the employer to avoid disputes and give all employees and some contractors a clear pathway to make and resolve complaints.
- It will be discriminatory and therefore illegal to take “adverse action” against someone because of the person’s race, colour, sex (including intersex status), sexual preference, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, family or carer’s responsibilities, pregnancy, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin so frame interview questions carefully and limit them to enquiries that go directly to the ability of the person to do the job.
- Know your rights when the relationship is at an end. Restraints of Trade are contractual promises that an employee will not work/carry on business in competition with their employer for a period of time after expiry or termination of the employment contract.
- As a starting point, Restraints of Trade are unenforceable, but may be enforceable if the employer can show that the restraint is reasonable in the circumstances and goes no further than to protect the employer’s legitimate interests – this is due to the overriding public interest in ensuring people are not unduly restrained from making a living.
- Adverse action includes refusing to hire or dismissing a person, offering employment on different grounds than the employer is prepared to offer others and treating a person differently to other persons within the organisation.
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