As ever, the Employment Team have been busy travelling around the region offering Consultancy and Training to help councils with investigations into tricky workplace issues where it is helpful, or indeed advisable, to have an independent view.
Disciplinary, grievance and whistleblowing investigations continues to be a significant growth area for SEE. In the last few months investigations have been undertaken in respect of allegations of bullying and harassment at various levels of your organisations, including at senior management level; disciplinary investigations, including in the education and social services sectors; grievances raised against local authority officers from a number of maintained schools in the region; and gross misconduct/gross negligence investigations. We have also been assisting a number of councils to provide an independent view both at hearings and appeals.
The Covid-19 outbreak has, of course, required us to consider how to undertake this work differently, therefore ongoing and new investigation work is being done remotely using Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype, etc. This has been working extremely well, and our Employment Director for one, cannot understand why we did not try this before as it saves hours and hours of travelling time!
On the training front, alongside our usual courses delivered to HR professionals and others, the Employment Team has seen a significant surge in recent months regarding requests for training for elected members and have delivered sessions on, for example, Equality and Diversity; the Public Sector Equality Duty; Code of Conduct Training; and Handling Disciplinary Matters Against Statutory Officers – all from the specific perspective of elected members.
We are here to help you with Consultancy and Training for your HR questions, support you to manage those challenging people related issues and provide your HR team with resilience. Whether it’s the latest legislative or case law changes, helping your employees to work through conflict or managing a tricky sickness capability exit, we are able to help. Our advice line is available to all members of SEE, and initial advice on any topic is included in your subscription. And if you need further support our consultants will be able to provide you with a competitive quote. Click here to see just a few areas that we can help with but if you’re looking for something different please get in touch and we’d be happy to discuss.