Irish HR and Employment Law Developments

In this month's podcast, HR and employment law expert Caroline Reidy, Managing Director of The HR Suite, discusses the new right to request remote working.

Caroline provides guidance for employers in considering requests from employees to work on a remote basis.

In this episode, Caroline Reidy, Managing Director of The HR Suite, discusses dealing with performance issues.

Caroline outlines the best practice for dealing with:

• Poor performance in new staff
• Poor performance in long-term staff
• Poor performance and difficult situations in a remote/hybrid backdrop

David McCarroll, Partner at Ronan Daly Jermyn discusses:

• The current status of Sectoral Employment Orders
• Current and proposed employment protections for employees who blow the whistle under current Protected Disclosures law and the EU Directive set to be transposed in to Irish law this year
• Proof of Covid-19 Vaccination - to what extent, if any, can employers demand Covid vaccination proof to allow an employee to undertake a role

In this episode, Caroline Reidy, Managing Director at The HR Suite outlines the importance of having the proper foundations in place for discipline and grievance management including;

• Appropriate polices
• Correct procedures and training to effectively management disciplinary and  grievance matters
• Adherence to relevant Codes of Practice
• Consideration of when suspension is appropriate

During this episode, Scott Alexander of Legal Island and Michelle Ryan, Senior Associate at RDJ, discuss the data protection implications of seeking information on an employee’s covid-19 vaccination status in light of the proposed directive from the HSE that frontline health staff will have to indicate their vaccination status.  They also discuss the further extension to the suspension of Section 12a of the Redundancy Payments Act preventing employees who are laid off making a request for a redundancy payment. 

The government has committed to bringing statutory sick pay into legislation by the end of 2021. This will be a major change for Irish employers in terms of costs and absence management. 

The governments statutory sick pay scheme is due to be phased in over a 4-year period. It is hoped to begin with 3 paid sick days per year for each employee starting in 2022, rising to 5 days in 2023 and 7 days in 2024. It is hoped that employers will cover the cost of 10 sick days per year by 2025. The government intend to introduce a phased approach to allow employers to prepare and adjust for the scheme and its associated costs.

In this podcast (extracted from a live webinar), Caroline Reidy discusses this new introduction and answers listeners questions live.

Q2 has marked a new chapter in life and work, with several steps forward. Coronavirus restrictions began easing, and the vaccination programme speeded up, just after a new official code of practice came into place on the right to disconnect from work.

Around the same time, the Tánaiste also invited submissions on putting the right to seek remote working into law.

In this context, Legal Island discuss what the next phase holds for employers, with a focus on work-life balance, particularly in relation to working families.

Over the previous year, the pandemic had fundamentally transformed our work-life dynamic, further blurring the lines between work and family. The Department of Enterprise and Employment described both new public policy initiatives as part of Leo Varadkar’s plan “to create more flexible family-friendly working arrangements, including working from home and working more flexible hours”.

• Learn what Ireland’s leading employers are doing now, and next, to engage their workforces and enable work-life balance in a new hybrid working world
• Focus in on how to help working parents and carers meet the novel challenges ahead as we move towards the summer, and then the Autumn.
• Identify the lessons worth keeping from how working parents and carers coped with periodic lockdowns, and the school-free world. What can employers continue to do to provide practical support with care.

In this podcast, Legal Island is joined by Oliver Daniels, Client Services Manager and Oliver Black, Commercial Director, Bright Horizons to consider what it means to be a family-friendly employer in Ireland in – and after - the ‘Time of Covid’ and in a new world of work-life balance.

In this podcast, Caroline Reidy, Managing Director of The HR Suite and HR and Employment Law Expert, outlines some tips for managing both short and long-term absence. This includes:

• Absence Policy
• Dealing with Long Term absence
• Dealing with sporadic Short-Term Absence
• Reasonable Accommodation

In this podcast, Antoinette Vahey, Partner with RDJ discusses the following with Scott Alexander:

• WRC Adjudication Service – following the recent Supreme Court case of Zalewski -v- Adjudication Office & ors [2021] IESC 24 the WRC has made a number of changes to the operation of its Adjudication Service.  The impact of these changes for cases in the system and those going forward and how the WRC are likely to approach them will be reviewed.
• Redundancy/Collective redundancy – the inevitable removal of Government supports is likely to lead to an increase in the number of job losses as a result of redundancy.  This webinar will address issues such as consultation; redundancy while on lay-off; impact of closure of premises and relocations; impact of remote working, etc.
• Employees refusing to wearing face masks – giving rise to issues in the workplace and also under the Equal Status Act due to refused entry to services.

In this podcast, Caroline McEnery, Managing Director of The HR Suite and HR and Employment Law Expert, discusses the HR implications of the new code of practice on the right to disconnect. In particular, Caroline focuses on:

• The Organisation of Working Time Act and the right to disconnect
• Do policies need updated in light of this.
• Do HR staff need to coach managers to ensure compliance with the code.
• What about remote/agile workers and the right to disconnect.
• What about peaks and troughs in workload – are there exceptions for this.
• What if someone is happy to work extra hours or respond to emails outside normal hours.