The 2020 Good Work Plan legislation changes the way that HR teams are legally required to process new hires.
This includes the removal of the two months that employers currently have to supply their new starters with all the required ‘written particulars’.
When the legislation goes live, on April 6th, 2020, all of the contractual paperwork needs to have been completed on or before the person’s starting date.
It’s a major change and one which heightens the importance of having an efficient employee onboarding process. It’s something that all UK hiring departments need to be preparing for.
Here are five tips to make sure you’re ready for Good Work Plan 2020:
1. Understand what’s changing for employee onboarding
The Good Work Plan covers some complex areas of employment law and the exact legislation has been constantly evolving and changing over time. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that some HR managers are still unsure about what it involves.
Webonboarding has put together an expert report providing a clear guide to the legislative changes and how they affect employee onboarding. You can find the full guide here
The main change for onboarding is the stripping away of the two month period that employers are given to supply a new starter with ‘written particulars’ – typically covered by a contract or offer letter.
You also need to know about how the Good Work Plan requires agency workers to be handled. These must be provided with a ‘Key Facts Page’ which must include information such as pay, contract type and employment structure.
2. Identify issues with the current approach
Does your current onboarding approach tick all of the boxes required by the Good Work Plan 2020? Are you able to complete onboarding admin prior to a candidate starting in the role?
You also need to look at how your onboarding operation will cope as an organisation grows. Is your approach scalable – can it cope with an increasingly turbulent recruitment environment?
The 2019 ‘Welcome Aboard’ survey found that 71% of UK employees do not have paperwork completed before they start. For over a quarter (27%), they had to wait up to a month for admin to be completed.
3. Review your onboarding tools
The 2020 employment law changes demand that hiring teams have a fast and efficient onboarding process. This is hard to achieve when hiring teams rely on a traditional paper-based approach.
This means that contracts and offer letters are posted or emailed with physical copies having to be signed and returned by recipients. It creates a slow and error-prone administration process.
This is why HR managers are increasingly moving their teams over to a paperless approach. A system such as Webonboarding provides everything a new hire needs via an online portal with documents able to be digitally signed.
The switch to a paperless process transforms the way that onboarding can be handled, reducing administration times from days to minutes.
4. Monitor your performance
The best time to identify any areas where your HR process is failing is right now – before the Good Law Plan laws come into effect. If the legislation was currently active, would your hiring approach be consistently compliant?
To monitor this, you need to have an effective way to keep track of the time it’s taking to complete onboarding administration. This can be difficult to achieve with a paper-based approach as it requires the information to be manually collated. A cloud-based system can automatically track and store this data.
By looking at the performance of your current setup, you can identify the potential compliance risks posed by the Good Work Plan changes. Effective monitoring should highlight any bottlenecks in your admin process that need to be tackled.
5. Create a Good Work Plan roadmap
With knowledge of what’s required and the right tools, you can create a schedule of all the tasks required to be fully prepared for Good Work Plan 2020. Contracts and offer letters need to be reviewed to ensure they meet all the ‘written particulars’ requirements.
Preparations should also include making sure that everyone within your team is fully up to speed on the changes and know what individual tasks or action points are required of them. Designating a Good Work Plan champion within a team can be an effective way to provide workplace help and support.
Webonboarding, employee onboarding software also allows automated checks, notifications and reminders to be created which help to ensure that all administrative tasks are completed on or before a person’s start date. Find out more about Webonboarding.
