As we slowly inch our way towards a brave new world post COVID-19 we set out below the employment law issues likely to face employers and employees in the coming months.
Working patterns and remote working
Post lockdown many employers and employees perhaps reluctant to embrace remote working will have proved that the model works. Having established new working patterns both will have realised that working from home is as productive as it was whilst spending time in the office. This genie is now out of the bottle.
Whilst there has been a loss of close working relationships with colleagues, clients and customers may not have seen any difference in service levels. Certainly IT teams have seen their remote working processes severely tested and weaknesses will have been identified which will require correcting.
What Employees have lost in comradeship they have gained in time saved in not having to commute to the office.
The lockdown restrictions will only be lifted slowly and carefully and not all employees will be asked to work in their places of work at the same time as social distancing measures are implemented across all business sectors.
All employers will be well advised to review their contracts of employment to allow for far more flexibility both in patterns and place of work.
The measure of employee performance is going to shift much more to objective measures output rather than managerial observation of day-to-day employee performance.
Soft skills so vital to helping create a team feeling and keeping organisations working smoothly will inevitably have to be re-engineered so as to work more effectively when holding web meetings via Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype etc. Thought will have to be given as to how and when to bring employees physically together to reform bonds of comradeship as well as how to ensure employee engagement through regular, timely and informative employee communications.
Employers should expect to receive and welcome more flexible working requests and the far sighted ones will invite these rather than waiting for the inevitable requests to flood in.
Contracts of employment will also be re-drafted to include those clauses many employment lawyers considered somewhat old fashioned and outmoded permitting employers to impose lay-offs or short-time working.
Health and Safety
This issue will inevitably continue to be uppermost in the minds of employers concerned to ensure that no employee will accuse them of having needlessly exposed them to the possibility of catching COVID-19.
The questions to be asked will be:
Does the employee have to travel to work at all and face the dangers of infection on a tube, train or bus journey?
What safety measures are to be taken when employees are in the office? Can the 2 metre social distancing measures be implemented? If not what is going to be considered reasonable? Regular hand washing will clearly be required but what about the wearing of masks? The science and the government can’t agree on what is right so what is an employer to do?
What other working pattens might employees be asked to work? Perhaps rotating employees’ presence in the place of work might be the answer or differing working hours?
If employees are to be asked to regularly work at home it is important that employers’ liability insurers are made aware of this and employers need to remember to carry out specific home working risk assessments.
Mental health risk assessments will also become far more common as employers learn the lockdown lessons and seek to apply home working patterns on employees.
Furlough ends, re-structuring begins…
Businesses have already started adjusting to the new world. The travel and retail sectors (not those supplying food of course) have already had to face the realities that their businesses will not recover for many years to come. The two greatest costs to businesses are people and premises and both will be under careful scrutiny. Redundancy programmes have already started where more than 100 employees are to be made redundant since consultations need to start at least 45 days before the termination date. Redundancy programmes are already being planned and implemented in businesses who are only too acutely aware that post lockdown their business needs will be radically different.
For other businesses the process is more likely to be a gradual one as they adopt a wait and see attitude. All businesses will have accumulated considerable levels of debt and will have no choice but to cut jobs or look to re-structure via Company Voluntary Arrangements or as a very last resort go into liquidation.
Landlords will be faced with the acceleration of a move away from bricks and mortar retailing and the prospect of even more empty shops; difficult choices will have to be made between writing off rent and service charges to help tenants or seeing tenants cease trading leaving empty shops for years to come. Gradually the demand for office space will also reduce as employees are encouraged to work from home.
All the scenarios and variants of them will play out in the next months and years to come and advisors will have to strain every sinew to help clients through difficult and challenging times. Inevitably there will be winners and losers. The winners will learn the lessons of lockdown and seek to enter into constructive dialogue with all stakeholders, show flexibility, courage, new thinking and lots of imagination. The losers will be those who seek to ignore the lessons of the lockdown and try to pretend it never happened.
We are well placed to assist all our clients to help them navigate this brave new world.
