Did you know that January is named after the Roman god ‘Janus’, the god of beginnings and endings? He is also the god of doors, depicted with two faces, one looking backwards and the other looking forwards. As we step into 2025, the start of the new year is the perfect time to reflect on the lessons of 2024 and set goals for the year ahead.
What did you learn from last year? How can those insights shape your approach to supporting your teams this year? By taking stock of successes and challenges, you will identify what you need to achieve to foster a thriving, resilient workforce in 2025.
Let’s start by looking at some of the key legal updates from 2024.
The Worker Protection Act
This new duty became law in October 2024 and is an amendment to The Equality Act 2010. The Act places an ongoing duty for employers to take reasonable preventative steps to stop their teams from experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace. This extends to protecting them from third parties such as clients, customers, contractors and visitors. If sexual harassment has taken place, the employer has a preventative duty to stop it happening again. We’ve written a blog on how to make the changes required to satisfy this new duty and keep your team safe, but below are the essentials you need to know.
Businesses are now liable to pay a 25% uplift towards any compensation for sexual harassment, if a tribunal finds that they failed to take steps to protect the worker. This applies even if the employer has not had a report of sexual harassment. The act requires employers to anticipate scenarios and take pre-emptive action.
What is ‘reasonable’ varies, depending on factors such as business size, sector and resources. There is no simple one-size-fits-all list of steps that all employers must take to keep their teams safe.
Reasonable steps include:
- Risk assessments
- Governance frameworks
- Rewriting policies to include preventative measures
- Appropriate anti-harassment training
All these steps aim to mitigate risk. Risk assessments are essential because it’s easy to assume that something won’t happen. Perhaps you don’t want to think that your staff would be capable of such things, or you may not be viewing the potential scenario from their perspective. This is dangerous as risks could be overlooked.
Aside from policy changes, behavioural shifts are essential. The right culture is created through action. Spend time training staff on appropriate behaviour and follow through on your changes to policy to show that you will take any kind of sexual harassment very seriously.
Employment Rights Bill 2024
In early October 2024 the Employment Rights Bill was read in the House of Commons, with the intention that it will become the Employment Rights Act in 2025. So, as we head into the new year, it’s important to keep these potential changes in mind.
- Zero Hours Contracts won’t be entirely eradicated. However there are suggestions if someone works for 12 weeks they will have the right to be offered a guaranteed hours contract based on the hours they have been working. (This would replace the Workers Predictable Terms and Conditions Act 2023 which never came into force.) This right will apply to minimum hours contracts as well as zero hours contracts.
- Rights to pay if shifts are cancelled, curtailed or changed at short notice.
- Enhanced flexible working rights. The key difference from what is already in effect is a requirement for refusal by the employer to be reasonable, with the employer having to state why their refusal is deemed reasonable.
- Statutory Sick Pay will be payable from the first (currently the fourth) day of absence. The lower earnings limit to be eligible for SSP is being removed – however there will be a lower level of SSP for lower earners.
- Parental Bereavement Leave is being changed to ‘Bereavement Leave’ so it seems it will apply to all. Some wording refers to “relevant relationships” although those are not yet defined. The leave for bereavement will be one week, two if the deceased is a child.
- Unpaid Parental Leave and Paternity Leave will be day one rights; no qualifying period will be required for eligibility.
- Sexual Harassment Bill Changes. It is proposed to re-add the word “all” when defining what reasonable steps an employer must take to prevent sexual harassment. (This was previously removed when the new duty around sexual harassment was passed.) Also, a disclosure of sexual harassment will be treated as a protected disclosure (often referred to as “whistleblowing”).
- Unfair Dismissal isto become a day one right (once employment has started) – removing the two-year qualifying period. However, it is proposed that there will be a 9-month ‘initial period of employment’ or probation period.
- It will become automatically unfair to dismiss an employee for refusing a contract variation – what has been largely referred to as ‘Fire & Rehire’.
- Changes will apply to Collective Redundancy Consultations, with the numbers affected to be a sum across the whole business rather than at just one establishment.
- There will be requirements for larger businesses to produce Equality Action Plans for gender equality.
- Statements of Employment Particulars will need to include a statement that employees have the right to join a union.
Currently we are informed that over 100 amendments have been suggested to the initial Bill whilst consultation and consideration is ongoing so we expect to see changes and / or clarification on some of the above. Current wisdom suggests some of the above (in whatever its final form looks like) will be in effect this year, some in 2026 and some may not make it past the starting post before a next general election!
What’s coming up in 2025?
Although the actual dates and details for all of the following are yet to be confirmed, these are some of the employment law changes we expect to see coming up in 2025:
- Bullying and Respect at Work Bill, gets its second reading in parliament in June 2025
- Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, as yet the bill has not been published though
- Skills England Bill
- Paternity Leave (Bereavement) Bill, this has already gained Royal Assent and is the Paternity Leave (Bereavement) Act 2024 but the amendments have not yet been made in the Employment Rights Act 1996
And here are a few important dates for your HR calendar in the first half of 2025 – times when you can easily show (extra!) appreciation for your people.
20 Jan – Brew Monday (Samaritans)
3-9 Feb – Race Equality Week
6 Feb – Time to Talk Day
17 Feb – Random Acts of Kindness Day
20 Feb – National Leadership Day
7 March – National Employee Appreciation Day
8 March – International Women’s Day
17-23 March – Neurodiversity Celebration Week
7 April – World Health Day
28 April – World Day for Health and Safety at Work
12-18 May – Mental Health Awareness Week
12-18 May – Learning at Work Week
20 May – International Human Resources Day
June – Pride Month
1-7 June – Volunteers’ Week
9-15 June – International Men’s Health Week
9-15 June – Loneliness Awareness Week
14 June – Global Wellness Day
How to Lead your Team into a Better 2025
At vivoHR we are really passionate about creating long-lasting change within the companies we support. Working on a positive company culture is hugely beneficial for staff retention, creativity, productivity and overall business performance. In 2024, our blog series focused on creating a strong workforce by encouraging a happy team, supporting staff’s mental health, addressing a toxic workplace culture and dealing with workplace bullying and harassment.
Something that is universally important to all of these topics is effective performance management and leadership. Effective performance management is NOT a once-a-year meeting, it is a continual process of support, feedback, teaching and investing in your team.
As we head into 2025, we believe that there are 6 key areas of performance management that employers should focus on to have a more successful 2025:
- Training
- Communication
- Recognition
- Addressing poor performance
- Performance reviews
- Setting goals
We know that embracing all of the above as well as managing the important legal changes we highlighted is a LOT! It’s important to remember that building a happier – and therefore more effective team – through good performance management is not a sudden success but an ongoing and ever-changing goal.
As you head into 2025 take some time to look back at how far you came in 2024 and set some new goals to help support your team more efficiently this year.
Grab 2025 by the horns and start building a happier and more productive team today. vivoHR are here to help! Contact us on 01252 757359 or drop us an email at [email protected].