Articles in ‘Employment & Immigration’ Category

Our Employment & HR team brings its monthly review of new legislation, guidance and case law.

Step one of the planned route out of lockdown in place. And it’s not just shops and restaurants; the obligation to work from home where possible has been lifted.

With many employers starting to plan their staff’s return to the workplace, our Employment & HR team examine where we are now and the next steps to take.

Banking and financial services businesses have for many years monitored the work patterns and behaviours their staff. Since the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent seismic shift in working patterns, we are now seeing an increasing number of employers monitoring their staff in their own homes.

Our Employment & HR team brings its monthly review of new legislation, guidance and case law.

For the most part, a company’s procedures and protocols will ensure that employees receive the sums they are owed, and are not under or over paid. However, it is more common than you may think for a company to inadvertently overpay an employee.

In a recent case, the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court decided that the ownership of copyright in works relating to software developed by an employee largely from his home, in his own time, and using his own computer, belonged to the employer.

Sometimes making changes to the structure of a business is necessary, particularly in financially testing times such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Employment costs, as the single biggest overhead for the majority of businesses, are taking the brunt of this financial strain.

Mergers and acquisitions are often described as a marriage, bringing two companies together. However, the post-merger integration process is often an afterthought, which can cause a derailment in the integration process leading to a failure to deliver the true deal.

A senior employee was awarded more than £2.5m after the Employment Tribunal decided that his employer conducted a ‘sham” investigation and “dressed up” issues as a breakdown of trust and confidence to dismiss the employee, who had been behaving erratically due to cancer.

According to ACAS, around two million women over the age of 50 have difficulties at work as a result of their menopause symptoms. Menopause can affect all of us indirectly at work, as colleagues or line managers, but it still remains a taboo subject, rarely discussed or even acknowledged in the workplace. There is also very little obvious support or protection available for women experiencing the sometimes debilitating symptoms of the menopause at work.

Our Employment & HR team brings its monthly review of new legislation, guidance and case law.

A recent report published by ACAS has estimated that employers across the UK are paying as much as £28.5 billion per year in order to deal with and resolve employee conflicts.