The importance of employment law compliance
By Leslie Faughnan
Intelligo Software is an established Irish software house with solutions for SMEs and larger companies in payroll and HR administration. It also provides outsourced services in these fields.
“Every business, large or small, has a HR function and a set of legal obligations as an employer,” said Padraig Gill, managing director of Intelligo. “The first management problem is where the responsibility falls.
“SMEs will seldom have a HR person, certainly not a trained one, and the responsibilities will be spread or not defined at all. The laws and regulations place the responsibility squarely on proprietors and directors. Unfortunately, it is probably fair to say that in those smaller companies, awareness in any detail only dawns when a problem arises.”
Broadly speaking, Gill said, employment regulations were Revenue-driven until the late 1990s. “Since then, we have seen major extension of the statutory obligations of employers. Maternity leave rules, for example, have been revised four or five times.”
Gill said he believed there was still a huge amount of ignorance and misunderstanding in smaller businesses. “This is where they leave themselves wide open to penalties and employee litigation. It is a complex area with a very broad range of regulation.
Yet the preventative actions are more often than not quite simple, like keeping all of the proper records and following the correct procedures. Accepting that you need to know what is applicable in order to do that, the job of HR systems is to prompt and lead you along so that you comply.”
In general, employment law compliance is about doing all of the right things correctly. In that respect, good record keeping is crucial and perhaps the only thing that counts in a dispute.
When an employee has a complaint or management has a disciplinary issue, a great deal can depend on following the correct procedure or at least gong through a recognisably fair process. Claims of bullying and sexual harassment, for example, call for systematic as well as sympathetic handling.
“HR is actually one of the functions in business that is utterly controlled by process, over and above standard record keeping,” Gill said.
“Think of performance reviews, training and certification, health and safety compliance and checks, and, of course, interviewing and recruitment back at the beginning of the cycle.”
HR software cannot make decisions but it can assist and inform, as well as guarding the integrity of processes to satisfy any subsequent query or inspection. Gill pointed to the inspection powers of the National Employment Rights Authority. “The employer offences are all related to being non-compliant in record keeping, before any complaint that might be made by an employee.”
The salient point overall, Gill said, was that from largely simple tasks like time and attendance to complex employee relations issues, today’s managements needed good systems to support them.
“The scale and complexity of the company or its activities will govern what you invest in. The really expensive options are to rely on ad hoc solutions or to do nothing much at all.”
