Gloucestershire Enterprise Business Services (GEBS) is a small friendly team of business support professionals based in the heart of Gloucestershire. We provide a wide range of services to help both fledgling companies and existing small businesses achieve their full potential. Our services range from general business advice to business skills training and more specialist programmes of support such as the countywide mentors programme and rural enterprise initiatives.
If you are already on the road to starting your own business or have been running your company for a number of years, you may occasionally need external expertise to help guide and improve your business performance. Many businesses experience barriers and challenges and we are expert in identifying issues and providing cost effective solutions, thereby helping to grow and sustain a healthy local economy.
GEBS is a not for profit company, effectively being a social enterprise driven by our objective, to work for the development of a more prosperous Gloucestershire, rather than the profit motive.
The business is modelled on the lines of an Enterprise Agency. We are members of the National Federation of Enterprise Agencies that has 128 members around the country. As a result we have access to a vast array of contacts and information to draw on to help support our clients.
A number of clients have asked us to provide some clarification about their obligations to pay staff when their businesses were disrupted during the recent adverse weather conditions.
The answer, as I’m sure you are all aware, is not clear cut.
Firstly, the question is dependent on who made the decision. Where a business opted to close due to the weather conditions, the decision is clearly out of the employees’ control. In this case, they should receive their usual pay. Where there is a specific clause in individual employment contracts which states that this is not required, you do obviously have a let-out. However, you will see below that a decision not to pay may still not be in your business’ best interests.
If a business is open but the staff member was unable to get in, (they made the decision not to turn up to work), their employer is not obliged to pay, and the day would, in normal cases, be taken either as holiday or unpaid leave. However, where an employee was willing to turn up to work but was prevented because their journey to work was affected by poor weather or driving conditions, the employee still effectively had no choice. In which case, requiring them to take holiday or unpaid leave is likely to cause considerable ill feeling, which may be counter-productive in the long run. As an employer, you are also responsible for the safety of your staff, and by penalising their decisions not to come into work you could be pushing them to try to come into work in the future in similar conditions, and put themselves at considerable unnecessary risk.
In summary, you need to consider the cost/benefit of the potential impact of staff morale, goodwill and personal safety compared to the short-term salary savings. The fact that this is something they could neither prevent nor prepare for means that any subsequent penalisation would be seen as unfair, even by the most understanding of employees.
The advice to pay covers the core contractual hours. If the employee is on flexible hours or has regular overtime, an employer should take a fair and reasonable approach. In many cases it is normally acceptable to negotiate with the employee that they cover those hours another time but obviously this would vary on a case by case basis.
In the longer term, disruption due to snow and ice could be something you build into disaster plans. This will enable employees to be prepared in advance, it can help you to communicate decisions quickly and may help you to ensure that employees who have an enforced day at home can still be productive. As they are normally very low priority, disaster plans tend to be overlooked until it is suddenly too late (as many business discovered during the 2007 floods). But a bit of strategic thinking in advance can make it easier to cope when a crisis does arise, and hence minimise disruption to customers, employees, the business and the bottom line. The Business Link website is a good source of further information: Business Link
Gloucestershire Enterprise Business Services
is a trading name of Chargrove Business Services Limited.
Registered in the UK: 2551923 | Vat: 575 9875 64
