It is always good to have an adverse weather policy. In the event of adverse weather, you have to close your business early or because your staff can’t get into work, what should you do?
Preparing and circulating a Adverse Weather Policy before adverse weather arrives is a sensible way to support your business continuity and planning process. As well as communicating your expectations to your employees.
Your Adverse Weather Policy should state how you will communicate to your employees that the business is not going to open. And it is closing for the day because of adverse weather that has occurred during the working day or overnight.
Include in your Adverse Weather Policy
- How you expect employees to communicate their absence due to adverse weather
- What effort you expect employees to make to attend work
- Any flexible working options that you have available to enable people to work from home. Or flexibility in working hours. For Example, arriving later in the morning to enable road conditions to improve.
- Your position on employees using annual leave entitlement for the days that they cannot attend work
A couple of words of warning
- if adverse weather means that your staff can’t get into work, you may be within your rights to deduct pay. However, you must have a clause in your contracts of employment that permits you to take this action for not attending work. This can avoid a potentially successful claim for “unlawful deduction from wages”.
- if you employ staff to drive on Company business, you have a duty of care towards those individuals in adverse weather. Take care to consider carefully the action that you take. You may be accused of forcing an employee to drive in dangerous conditions.
Employers are expected to be reasonable when dealing with the disruption. Employers and employees share the frustration of adverse weather and acting sensibly is often the most effective course of action.
Do you need a Adverse Weather Policy? Contact us now using the Contact Form and we’ll send you a free no obligation copy.
Metis HR is a professional HR Consultancy based in the North West of England supporting clients across the country. We specialise in providing outsourced HR services to small and medium sized businesses. Call us now on 01706 565332 to discuss how we may help you.
