Wedding season is well and truly upon us.  You may think that the Royal Wedding has caused enough disruption but spare a thought for those employers who are unlucky enough to have a member of staff getting married some time in the near future.

Of course, this is a subject dear to my heart.  As our wedding day approaches and I juggle my ever-expanding wedding to do list with making sure that the actual work is getting done, I have even more sympathy for those employers with soon-to-be-married employees!

Worst case scenario

 Company policies that is!

a)      As a legal “tick in the box”

I always loved playing “let’s pretend”.  Work with me here.  Let’s pretend that I’m an employer who’s recruiting.  I have a pile of CVs on my desk and I’ve read through them.  I’ve even shortlisted the ones I want to interview based on how well they match the specified criteria for the job.  So far, so good.

Seriously, why keep a dog and bark yourself? Would you pay someone to give their advice and then completely ignore it?

That’s exactly what the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce did. They employed someone, weren’t happy with his performance and made him redundant. Against all advice from their HR department, they created more than one draft of the person specification for this person’s replacement using the word “younger”. As in we are seeking a “younger entrepreneurial profile”.

Honestly, there’s just no helping some people. I’m sure they wondered why they were taken to Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) for age discrimination. In fact, they tried to cover it up saying that actually, they didn’t mean younger. Of course they didn’t. What they really meant to say was less senior and therefore less expensive. Yeah right.

New research from Which? Legal Service indicates that only 3 in 10 employees received an employment contract before starting the job. 9% of people didn’t get a contract until they’d been in the post for six months or more. A large number of those who did receive their contracts either skimmed through them or didn’t bother reading them at all.

Just last week I was explaining to a customer how to deal with a complicated disciplinary situation with one of his staff. “That’s not easy” he commented. “I thought your business was all about making HR easy?”. Actually, it’s not. Our business is all about keeping HR simple which is not the same thing. We don’t claim to make HR easy because that’s not a promise we would always be able to keep. We promise to keep it simple and straightforward, but that doesn’t mean it’s always going to be easy. In fact, we’ve found that some of the simplest things are the most difficult to implement.

I’m often asked (with disturbing regularity, in fact) why I bother. By that my conversational companion usually means why do I bother with the mission of keeping HR simple.

So, why do I bother? Because of employment contract clauses like this, that’s why:

“In this Agreement the singular shall include the plural and vice versa the masculine gender shall include both the feminine gender and the neuter gender and the feminine gender shall include both the masculine gender and the neuter gender.”

They probably wouldn’t be the best alcohol policies in the world. At least not according to Carlsberg staff who went on strike last week after the company decided to cut off their limitless beer access. Staff at the Danish brewery are now only allowed to drink beer in the canteen during their lunch break.

Those poor, poor Carlsberg employees. What a traumatic experience for them to have their beer coolers removed from their workplace. It’s no wonder they went out on strike! The company had been considering the move for some time, they said, but were unprepared for the backlash of the strike.