Why would any business create a workplace policy?

1. To stop repetitive conversations where time is consistently wasted for no-to-little positive return.
   • Think all the conversations your people have around annual leave requests, sick days, and medical certificates, where a policy can provide all the rules and info instead of managers being pulled into countless conversations.
2. To standardise a procedure or decision-making protocol, which avoids waste in process and returns greater efficiency.
   • Think purchasing approvals, setting departmental budget-levels, and delegation of authority policies.
3. To comply with a legal obligation and avoid future penalties when a certain policy doesn’t exist.
   • Think whistle blower and modern slavery policies.

Ultimately, the outcome of any policy you create should be the creation of protection mechanisms from commercial and legal risk.

When shouldn’t a policy exist?

The answer to this question varies depending on which HR pro you talk to.

The HR Cartel’s perspective is to never create a policy that doesn’t provide you with protection from commercial and legal risk.

For example: Flexible Working Policies.

This is a great example to dive deep on. It’s the “in-thing” right now – creating flexibility for your people is on everyone’s lips. Having a flexibility policy must be a good thing, right?

Not exactly.

Flexibility, by its very nature, requires variability, autonomy, and freedom. So wherever an employer rolls out a detailed and structured flexible working policy, I’m simply perplexed.

How flexible is your offer of flexibility, when it comes with so many rules, it requires a stand-alone policy to tell everyone how it works?  This isn’t flexibility, at all – this is nothing more than the setting of minimum required part time hours.

In fact, a by-product of this type of policy is the creation of a legal and/or commercial risk for your business – totally against the theory of relevant policy creation in the first case.

Let’s explain this scenario a little further:

If an employer decides their workplace can benefit from and utilise flexibility, it must be careful not to focus on working hours. Rather, it should concern itself with the outcome required of a person’s position. This should take pole position in any discussion about flexibility.

Let’s consider it in practice.

An organisation with 30 employees is a group of people with 30 different lives. The idea of flexibility is to create the ability for people to effectively blend their careers with their lives.

So, taking the approach of formally setting up working hours for fulltime employees, in a manner that doesn’t reflect fulltime hours, is creating nothing more than the same rigorous working model, just establishing it with less in-office, or face-to-face time.

We often see this approach resulting in people having less time to get their work done, being jammed up in meetings during the face-to-face time, while struggling to get outcomes completed during their “flexible” hours away from the workplace.

Let’s not forget the new “right to disconnect”.

If we have an employer that creates a flexible working policy, focused on the days of the week and hours of the day that are available to flexible working, this inadvertently establishes a rule of “working hours”.

The government’s latest abomination (the right to disconnect) will now provide employees with the protected right to ignore any request for contact the employer makes, outside of “working hours”.

A policy developed on the belief that it was a “good idea” to try to improve productivity by allowing flexibility has now created an enormous commercial and legal risk.

Rules are made to be broken.

Now let’s consider the inevitable moment one or many employees request flexible arrangements outside of the policy provisions. Sooner or later, a leader is going to give in, and offer flexibility to one or more people, outside of the provisions of a rigorous policy.

Why? Because people don’t work with the reliability of a mechanically programmed production line.

This means employers with this type of policy will inevitably open themselves up to claims of favouritism and unequal flexible arrangements being offered to some, but not others.

The risk of exuberant policy making.

Another issue to be across is the development of policies that over-commit your team’s obligations.

We see time and time again, where HR consultants or internal staff have inserted a USB stick full of policies from previous workplaces, thinking these are totally fine to implement in their new workplace.

This is problematic.

A policy that determines how, when, and why something may occur in your business must always reflect what your teams, people, and structures can execute.

If you find yourself in front of a Fair Work Commissioner defending a decision to discipline or terminate an employee, you better be sure that you followed your own policy to the letter.

When your workplace has a policy that provides procedural guidelines that relate to any reason any person may be subjected to an adverse outcome (i.e. termination), and your actions differ, it is highly likely your process will be the weak point of your defence, and a loss will ensue.

That isn’t a policy that creates protection from commercial and/or legal risk.

Audit your policies, now.

Every employer must regularly audit their handbooks and policies, especially in our current day where regulators and governments are very active in changing the rules of engagement.

Check every policy. Create two (2) lists:

1. Policies that should create protection from commercial and legal risk; and
2. Policies that were created without protective purposes, that are nice-to-have.

What does your list look like? Are there policies covering things better left as workplace level discussions? Are there policies that create rigour and onerous processes your team simply can’t comply with?

Remove or update any policy that stands out as a dud.

 

Need some help with HR policies? Call our team on 1300 138 211, or contact us here for a confidential chat.