ACAS guidance and advice update

Please see the latest guidance and advice from ACAS below.

Supporting remote employees Employers and employees should be practical, flexible and sensitive to each other's situation when working from home because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Employers should:

• talk to their employees and workers about how they might improve working from home arrangements
• consider individual employees' needs, for example anyone with childcare responsibilities, a long-term health condition or a disability, or someone in their household is shielding
• continue to consider which roles and tasks can be done from home – this might involve doing things differently and not assuming a role cannot be based at home
• support employees to adjust to remote working
• write down the arrangements that have been agreed so everyone's clear.

For Acas training on how to manage homeworkers click here 

*NEW* Acas Training - now available digitally in 2- and 3-hour sessions
Changing terms and conditions of employment  find out more
Employment law update find out more
How to manage homeworkers find out more
Managing discipline and grievance find out more
Managing employee mental health find out more
Redundancy - getting it right find out more
Transition from lock-down: key employment considerations find out more

HR and Employment News
UK equal pay case reaches the Supreme Court in virtual hearing.  Read more (The Guardian article)

Thousands of equal pay claims are received by Employment Tribunals every year according to this article (via Personnel Today)

How can HR teams leverage remote working to support D&I objectives? According to Glassdoor, more than 50% of employees demand a diverse & inclusive employer, and 70% want to join a diverse team. With many of us continuing to work from home post lockdown this HR Grapevine article explores this very question.

Reduced working week, anyone? New polling shows public support for a four-day working week to be explored as a way to recover from the coronavirus crisis. (via Autonomy website)

FREE On-line Learning
e-learning module - Handling Redundancy
The threat of redundancy can be stressful for everyone, and employers should follow a clear and transparent process for managing each step fairly and consistently.
Visit https://www.acas.org.uk/online-training to register and get started.

And finally...Don’t Let Micro-Stresses Burn You Out (Harvard Business Review online article).
Working from home with builders next door?  Trying to sleep at night in a busy city? This video is quite simply 3 hours of rain sounds to block out everything else - warning - the first few seconds are ads!)