Our new column, the HR Radar reports on how HR professionals are handling new and impending legislation and HR issues; this week three HR Directors reveal just how they are preparing for Age Discrimination Regulations due to come into force this October.
Age Discrimination legislation comes into force on 1 October 2006. Following the introduction of the legislation it will be unlawful to discriminate against employees on the grounds of their age (unless this can be justified). This will impact on all aspects of the employment relationship from recruitment to retirement and damages for successful claims will be uncapped.
Linda Parrott is the HR Director for Interdean Ltd
“Interdean has always promoted a diverse workforce in terms of age. Our current range is 15 to 68. The latter is an ex-bank manager working in our finance admin team, with an exceptional attendance record and customer service approach. I’d love to find another 10 like him!
“I’m running some workshops to re-brief all staff on their responsibilities relative to the implications of the new law. It’s important to remember that youngsters have equal protection, and we’re revising the legal compliance of all our policies and paperwork accordingly. I’d also recommend companies contractually make age discrimination a disciplinary offence, to support the eradication of any old habits e.g: asking someone their age at interview, or insisting on three years experience when it’s not really necessary.”
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Janet Gray, HR and IT Director at Ramada Jarvis
“Clearly this is a massive piece of legislation that will impact every area of HR whether that is recruitment, benefits, pensions, contracts or training. At Ramada Jarvis we have placed particular emphasis on re-engineering our recruitment schemes to ensure that no imbedded practices are missed. Thankfully the nature of our industry means that we have always had employees spanning a range of ages in most positions, but I do believe that we can be proud of how everyone has pulled together to meet the requirements.”
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Mary Canavan, Director of Human Resources, The British Library
“The new Age Discrimination in employment legislation is regarded as one of the most complex, sensitive and far reaching changes in employment law since the 1970’s.
“The British Library began work in preparation sometime ago with an audit of all its employment polices, procedures and practices followed by the development of an age policy for the British Library. This policy focuses on the strategic and operational levels of the organisation and identifies the priority areas for action. Our aim is to have the final policy and implementation stages of the policy and practices in place by March 2006.”
We’d like to hear how you are preparing for the impending legislation. Simply post your comments in the box below to share your tips.
3 Responses
An approach to preparing for the age discrimination law
It’s good to hear from three HR directors who are clearly well on the way to dealing with the new laws. But for those who still have a long way to go, here is an approach which some may find interesting.
This is a blended programme which includes consultancy, interactive theatre, workshops and e-learning. It can operate at 4 levels, depending on an organisation’s size and structure:
Level 1 Top Management
Task – developing age diversity policy and strategy
Services – consultancy and presentations, possibly using interactive theatre
Level 2 HR Department
Task – HR policy, strategy and plan for training and dissemination
Services – age-proofing HR procedures and designing a programme for training and communications
Level 3 Department heads and team leaders
Task – Briefing and training team leaders
Services – Producing learning materials and running workshops
Level 4 All employees
Task – Compliance training and challenging stereotype views about age
Services – delivering an e-learning programme supported by team meetings
Although the longer term goal should be to implement an effective age diversity strategy, the short term priority for employers in 2006 is:
* to ensure that the orgnisation and all ts employees comply with the new age laws, and
* to be able to provide evidence that the organisation has taken all reasonable steps through training to eliminate age discrimination in their employment practices.
I’ll be interested to know what ideas others have, pleased to talked to anyone who wants to know more about this programme.
Age discrimination
I am in total agreement with Mary Canavan and also have just started to see the benefits of reviewing all our procedures and policies. We have been using a review toolkit looking at all aspect of our business for the last couple of months, hoping to be ahead of the legislation, and the audits showed us where we had ‘age’ issues that needed addressing. We then compiled an action plan and have been working our way through it. The benefits to the business as a whole have been very surprising (not always very positive unfortunately), and we hope we are well on the way to making ourselves ‘age compliant’. For information, our toolkit was supplied by Prettys in Ipswich.
Age Discrimination.
Totally agree with Janet Gray in that the hospitality industry has historically welcomed persons of all ages – and more so now with the huge skills gap. The more mature workers tend to be far more customer service focussed and possess many of the lost skills and experience we so desperately need.
Coupled with this, we value in general their high attendance records,commitment, flexibility and desire to learn new skills.
Our own graduate programme has engaged persons from the ages of 17 through to a de-frocked vicar aged 48