Prepare for Wintry Weather

 

Winter is upon us and following the coldest winter in three decades last year, which caused
widespread disruption to businesses, forecasters are predicting another harsh, snow-filled
winter.
Normally, a bit of snow is great fun. But adverse weather can give employers concerns
about employee absence levels.

According to a YouGov poll, 74% of employees nationally were affected by the snow last
year, with more than a quarter failing to get to work at all.

Employees are obliged to attend work in terms of their contract of employment. This
applies even in extreme weather conditions. Therefore, you would be within your rights to
refuse to pay an employee who cannot make it into work because they are snowed in or
because public transport has been cancelled.

However, you should assess whether this would be in the interests of your business. It may
be that the financial implications to the business of paying your staff in these
circumstances are outweighed by the benefits that such a gesture would have on staff
morale and productivity in the long run.

It is also worth thinking about alternative ways to manage the situation. For example, you
could give employees the option to work from home when there are extreme weather
conditions. For many businesses, this is becoming increasingly practical given that more and
more employees have access to a laptop or home computer that allows them to fulfil their
duties from home.

Other options are to allow employees to take the days off as part of their annual leave, or
pay them but expect them to make up the time at a later date, or introduce a staff rota
with staggered start and finish times dependant on where employees live.

Perhaps employees could draw on their experiences from last year and share ideas on how
to plan ahead for any possible disruptions. For example, were there alternative routes and
ways of getting to work that helped them?

It would be sensible to introduce a policy on adverse weather conditions or amending your
absence management policy to provide for such instances.

Here are some tips on what to include in a policy:

• State what the procedure is for employees to notify an appropriate person by a
certain time.

• Where an employee arrives late, leaves early or is unable to attend work on the
first day of bad weather, state whether the employee will be given paid leave (in
most cases, employers grant paid leave).

• On subsequent days of bad weather, if an employee is still unable to report for
work, at the discretion of the manager, consideration could be given to treating
lost time as:

  • Lieu time
  • Flexi leave
  • Annual leave
  • Unpaid leave of absence
  • Absent without pay (if there was no notification or explanation received)

• Set out what parents should do if their local schools close and they have no
alternative means of childcare. For example, working from home may be an option
or in accordance with statutory provisions emergency unpaid time off for
dependants could apply.

• You may also want to make it clear that employees are expected to make
reasonable efforts to get into work (for example, using alternative travel
arrangements).

• However, employees should not feel pressured to risk their safety to get into the
office. Therefore any policy should be as fair as possible and take into
consideration the health and safety of employees.
With occurrences of severe weather on the rise, putting in place a clear adverse weather
policy could be a worthwhile investment.

If you would like help putting a policy together, please email us at
julie.ware@peoplebusiness.co.uk or call us on 01932 874944