Get in touch 0117 325 0526
Get in touch 0117 325 0526
You want your employment contracts, policies and procedures to be robust and comprehensive, protecting you in all the likely situations that could come up. But you also don’t want to get tied up in over-complex obligations and processes that prevent you from being agile when you need to be.
With us, you benefit from our decades of experience in dealing with every single aspect of contracts, policies and procedures. We have anecdotes about every single clause and rule, every twist and turn and how best to work them.
We create robust directors service agreements for the most senior employees and simple, concise ones for junior staff – and everything in between. We create simple handbooks for start-ups and much more detailed ones for established companies. The important thing is that we create what suits your business, not someone else’s.
Whenever we review your existing staff documents or create new ones for you, our approach is twofold. We ensure you have in place robust, clear terms that mean your workforce can’t mess you about. Sometimes that’s giving more clarity to what needs to be contractual and what you could leave as discretionary. Other times, it’s ensuring your restrictive covenants are fit for purpose.
Yet at the same time we also ensure that you have the necessary built-in flexibility to adapt to changing situations – and the occasional highly unusual one. You don’t want to be unable to progress a redundancy or disciplinary where an employee has unconvincingly decided to go ‘off sick’. Nor do you want the burden, as we’ve occasionally come across, of staff having the right to be accompanied by a trade union rep at every single meeting with their line manager.
With us, you will always get sensible, practical approaches that are both reasonable to your staff and also allow you to manage them effectively.
Our experience and expertise covers the whole range of employment contracts. Our specialist employment lawyers can draw on their experience in City of London law firms of complex and sophisticated terms for your senior executives. And when it comes to shop floor operatives’ terms and conditions in a factory environment, we draw on our team’s expertise in manufacturing and engineering sectors to draw up suitable documentation. Conversely, if we’re dealing with lecturers’ contracts or an Absence Management policy in a college then our deep knowledge of the further education sector ensures the document properly suits its purpose.
Our approach to how to word contracts, policies & procedures is to unashamedly use plain English throughout. We want people to understand them and the ways in which they apply to their working lives. We like relatively short, clear succinct wording that is fit for purpose and avoids arguments about what it means.
Importantly, your contracts should reflect your culture. If you are a small, informal business, your contracts should not look and feel like those of a corporate. Equally, a professional business should have contractual documentation which reflects this. Employers need to think of the impression contractual documents need to make on a new hire. Do they adequately represent the company they’ve interviewed with? First impressions count and are especially important in the competitive hiring landscape our clients are experiencing.
As well as working on the areas you know you have concerns over, we’ll also take a step back. We are always ready to suggest any other terms or policies we think you’d benefit from. Offering suggestions for improvement and adaptation to your particular business is all part of the service.
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