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Log

Key Legislation Underpinning Employment Contracts

The Employment Rights Act 1996 underpins contracts of employment in the United Kingdom.

The terminolgy to use is a written statement of particulars of employment. This summarises the main particulars of the employment relationship and must according to the legislation be given within two months of the person's first day of service.

Whilst the law states two months it would actually be poor form to encourage a person to give up an existing job or prior state of affairs without actually presenting them with the contractual terms of their new role until two months after it has started. The law is quite flexible but if we are truly focused on the quality of the engagement with the prospective member of staff the written statement of particulars really should be issued as soon as possible after the decision to appoint has been made.

Issuing the written statement of particulars at the earliest point means the person is aware of what they being contracted to and can clarify any uncertainties before accepting. Starting a relationship in this manner where possible helps ensure a more harmonious contract.

The key aspects of a written statement of particulars are as follows:

  1. The names of the employer and employee.
  2. The title of the job which the employee is employed to do or a brief description of the work for which they are employed.
  3. Where the employment is not intended to be permanent, the period for which it is expected to continue.
  4. Either the place of work or, where the employee is required or permitted to work at various places, an indication of that and of the address of the employer.
  5. The date when the employment began.
  6. The date on which the employee’s period of continuous employment began (taking into account any employment with a previous employer which counts towards that period). The continuous employment date is often the same as the start date. Where it is earlier this may give the new starter certain employment rights that come with longer service.
  7. The scale or rate of remuneration/pay or the method of calculating this.
  8. The intervals at which remuneration is paid (that is, weekly, monthly or other specified intervals).
  9. Any terms and conditions relating to hours of work.
  10. Entitlement to holidays, including public holidays, and holiday pay.
  11. How incapacity for work due to sickness or injury will be handled, including any provision for sick pay.
  12. Pensions and pension schemes.
  13. The length of notice which the employee is obliged to give and entitled to receive to terminate his contract of employment.
  14. Any collective agreements which directly affect the terms and conditions of the employment. In large organisations trade unions negotiate with the employer on behalf of staff, the agreements they reach with the employer are called collective agreements.

Key to the Organisation Chart

An explanation of the symbols used

collapsed icon This icon represents a unit that has child units. Click it to see the child units.
expanded icon This icon means that a unit has its child units visible. Click to close the child units.
Unit name Click on a unit to get more information on it. If the unit has child units it will open a page showing them too.

Organisation structure details Clicking this icon takes you to some basic theory on organisation charts and structure.
collapse all button This button is Collapse All and when clicked closes all units that have been opened up.
expand all button This button is Expand All and when clicked opens all units so you will see every aspect of the tree.

Welcome to Learning in Small Bites

YouTube page

Welcome to the free website for people who want to learn about the technology used for keeping staffing details in offices. Using this site you can learn as much from the comfort of your arm chair as you could in two years at work. Here is your chance to practice with systems that you may only have heard about. Get a behind the scenes view of what happens with your information and how it is stored.

This site is aimed at people from school leaving age and above who may be interested in working with what are known as Human Resources (HR) information systems.

If we can help even one person to secure a job in HR or specialise in HR systems as a result of using our free development site then the creators of HRMISolutions and Learning in Small Bites will have achieved what we set out to do.

Prerequisites

You will get the best out of this site if you have:

  • A little experience of using a computer, a tablet or a smart phone.
  • A desire to help people to use less effort to achieve more.
  • An interest in office systems (don't worry if you are not sure at the start).

About

Credits

As you can guess anything that any of us do is actually a product of what we have seen, learned, experienced or contributed to. Below I will do my best to set out credits to those who were fundamental to sparking ideas that were subsequently built into the online systems on this site.

Other than authors of books, I have chosen not to actually name individuals but they know who they are and their contribution was that tipping point that helped the solutions either come into being or be improved. I remain grateful to each and every person who lent a sympathetic ear or expressed constructive opinions. Thank you.


Acas

Every so often in HR it is necessary to quickly check the current state of play in relation to best practice guidance. The ACAS website is possibly one of the most comprehensive and freely available resources in the UK. This will be abundantly clear when I get round to writing this site's case monitoring simulation.

Administration Log

Derived from work done in 2010 with the law faculty administration manager of a world class university.

This really was one of those ideas that just seemed to form into an information system solution as we talked. We were responding to results of a staff survey and trying to think through how to understand the breadth of administration work across the organisation and also importantly how to help administrators form networks.

CIPD

Every so often in HR it is necessary to quickly check the current state of play in relation to best practice guidance. The CIPD website is probably the most comprehensive resource for UK practitioners. Much of its material is members only and some requires even further subscription. The public facing pages are an excellent way to keep abreast of issues whether one is in HR or thinking of joining. I feel it is a particularly useful resource for HR systems developers who want to keep up to speed with the needs of their operational and strategic HR colleagues.

Images

The majority of the images used on this site and sibling sites were bought under license from Shutterstock.com. We highly recommend Shutterstock for their library of diverse, vibrant high resolution stock images.

JavaScript & jQuery: The Missing Manual

JavaScript & jQuery: The Missing Manual, by McFarland, proved a very useful introduction to JavaScript and jQuery. My preference was to hand code each site page from a text editor (If you have watched the original Karate Kid it was a sort of 'wax on wax off' approach) so I used jQuery very sparingly. However, I sensed that if anyone wants to go the full JavaScript and jQuery root this is the book to use.

jQuery UI

The pop up calendar that is used with some of the date fields on the site is from the jqueryui.com website. This has a selection of useful jQuery user interfaces. After spending a couple of days building my own pop calendar in PHP the jQuery UI offering reduced development time considerably.

Their site is well worth a visit.

Organisation Chart

The collapsable hierarchy was in place early in the project but I was using database calls. Initially each click would go off to the database and call back all of the rows to be displayed. Continuously querying the database seemed a heavy overload. Mentioning this to an information management colleague over dinner she suggested JavaScript's expand and collapse functionality. That was all that it needed.

Logo

Our current logo evolved from an early 2000s animated logo designed by NIVAG Design. It remains our representation of cyberspace. The current term to use is the Cloud. At HRMISolutions Ltd we still want to think just that little bit further into space.

Perfect Phrases for Writing Job Descriptions

When writing the new staff module it suddenly occurred to me that while we in HR take job specification writing for granted, it is actually not very easy to do on demand when faced with a blank sheet of paper and no one to interview. Perfect Phrases for Writing Job Descriptions by Martin proved very helpful in getting past attacks of writer's block.

PHP and MySQL Web Development

This incredible book by Welling and Thomson proved an awesome well written easy to understand font of knowledge. The learning in this book is the equivalent of several thousand pounds of instructor led courses.

I worked with the 3rd edition but I do believe a 5th edition will soon be published.

php.net

php.net is invaluable and seems to be controlled by gurus of the PHP language. Can be a bit hard going sometimes but that is probably the case whenever one learns the technical background to a language.

Reporting Library

The majority of our reporting section is built using the excellent reporting library developed by pChart

. This is a freely available for users whose work is not for profit.

CyberMick is credited for the reminder that, whilst being pleasing to look at, 3D pie charts can distort the perceived size of each slice of the pie. More detail on this in the charting section.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is billed as a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. I found it to be probably somewhere between W3Schools.com and the book PHP andMySQL Web Development.

Virtually ever enquiry I put in a search engine at some point came back with a Stack Overflow answer to a similar question. Accessing Stack Overflow is like being able to sit in a virtual group and listen to people's informed opinions on solving problems.

The beauty of coding is there are so many different ways to reach the same end. Sometime just looking at someone else's approach or issue stimulates branches in thought and ideas for ones own code.

TinyMCE - Open source WYSIWYG HTML editor

This open source HTML editor is embedded in the application form on this site. It has proven useful in helping add formatted rich text content to the supporting statement page.

w3schools.com

I found w3schools.com to be one of the best resources around for reminders on up to date language structures and rules when writing code. If the book PHP and Web Development is a physical font of knowledge then this site is the virtual equivalent. Best of all one can try out the code on line which is really helpful for anyone who learns as much by doing as theorising.

As languages evolve some coding syntax changes. For me, the best resource for keeping reasonably current was w3schools.com.



You may have noticed that the sum total of all of the compulsory resources above probably costs less than £500. The thing that probably costs the most is the intellectual capacity of HR analysts, process specialists, systems developers and information managers. Hopefully when you have worked through this development site you will be able to turn to an HR information specialist and say with a smile "Well done, you deserve credit for helping make HR technology accessible".

Niyi Founding Director and Systems Developer HRMISolutions Ltd September 2015

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