THE TASK
We were engaged by our client to help them to resolve a number of legacy issues that they were struggling to manage, and that were potentially exposing them to significant legal risk.
Contractual Worries
A complex business model and a mis-understanding of employment law had created a situation where employees were being hired on fixed term contracts as a caution due to the temporary nature of the project funding.
The thought process was that if the funding for the project were to end, then fixed term contracts would provide a simple and legally compliant way to terminate employees who’s jobs no longer had funding.
In practice, funding for the projects renewed every few years for over a decade, resulting in fixed term contracts regularly being renewed and extended for many years continuously. This created a situation where a significant number of employees had accrued many years of service (and therefore full employment rights), but were still being treated as if they were temporary. Indirectly, this meant that some employees weren’t being given access to job opportunities and promotions in the same way as permanent employees.
Process Headaches
Additionally, due to the structure of the client’s business, they didn’t have their own dedicated recruitment team, which meant that staff were each responsible for the full end-to-end process of recruiting to their teams, including all the admin!
This had a significant impact on their core work, as it was a full day job in itself. This caused delays to the project, and just wasn’t an efficient way of working.
OUR SOLUTIONS
After a period of fact-finding and diagnosis, we designed a number of solutions that were adopted by the client to great effect.
Developing Good Employment Practices
Many of the issues present were borne out of a confused understanding of contract types, when they should be used, what the implications are for employers and employees, and what rights and entitlements employees have and when they gain them.
To help iron out these understandings, we developed a suite of factsheets and policies that clearly explained the details, and provided context and clarity to Senior Leaders and Managers. These documents also formed the basis for training seminars and new revised procedures relating to recruitment and secondments.
Fixing the Fixed Term Contracts
After reviewing the employee files and assessing the risk, we recommended converting 40+ members of staff to Permanent (open-ended) contracts. The worries about project funding are fair, but not enough to justify the use of Fixed Term Contracts in this case. If the funding were to significantly change, employees would be subject to the redeployment and/or redundancy processes that were already in place, and using fixed term contracts as the default only created confusion amongst staff and added unnecessary complexity to procedures.
Recruiting Recruiters
Using project staff’s valuable time to do recruitment just didn’t make sense. It made their working days long and admin heavy, and caused delays in the project work. They also aren’t recruitment experts and consistency between teams varied.
So we worked with the central functions to create a new dedicated recruitment team for the client. We redesigned the recruitment process to build in a values-based approach, and created 2 new positions dedicated to the full end-to-end recruitment process. This took the heavy admin burden away from the project staff, enabling them to focus more on their core work and focus on the project.