Glass Ceilings®
Glass Ceilings® provides Business and HR consultancy services, specialising in inclusion and culture throughout the employee lifecycle to prepare businesses for The Future of Work.
How and where people work is changing. Businesses are facing a combination of unprecedented crises as they adjust to the Future of Work whilst emerging from the Coronavirus pandemic and in a post-Brexit era. Business that aren’t alert or adaptable to trends will lose people who find their needs met elsewhere. Glass Ceilings® is therefore more than a Business and HR consultancy. We believe work should be a place in which people can grow and thrive so that businesses grow and thrive.
In times of change, often the same people are left behind. We will point out barriers to growth and support businesses to remove them, without judgement, ensuring that nobody is left behind. We do this by working with senior leaders to develop inclusive people strategies aligned to organisational culture and values.
Our key strategic priorities for 2022-23 are:
• Socio-economic Issues in the Workplace
• Agile and Hybrid working
• Reproductive System Health in the Workplace
• Covid recovery
And we look forward to sharing our thought leadership through publications, public speaking, and the launch of our website in May 2022.
Covid Recovery
One of our key areas of focus right now is supporting businesses with Covid recovery. As we all learn to live with Covid and legal restrictions are lifted, many businesses face labour shortages from rising infections amongst the workforce, and the effects of Long Covid. Many employees are taking time off, or require flexible working arrangements, to manage increased caring responsibilities.
Businesses can mitigate risks and reduce the impact of labour shortages, in turn improving attendance, productivity, and profits in the medium to longer term, by rethinking organisational strategy and policy in the following areas:
Preventing Discrimination
There may be adverse impacts on certain groups of employees who all share a characteristic that makes them more likely to live with long term effects of Covid when compared to employees who do not share the same characteristic. Reviewing people policies to reduce the risks of discriminating on any grounds, is important to reduce potential discrimination and to support employee wellbeing.
Attendance and Leave
Reviewing Attendance and Leave policies to ensure they are fit for purpose in the Covid world we now operate in, and update them to reflect new requirements.
Proactive measures could include:
• Paid time off to undergo tests or treatment, or accompany dependents
• Disability Leave entitlements extended to Long Covid
• Occupational Health Assessments, on a case by case basis
Reasonable Adjustments
Employers may need to agree reasonable adjustments or temporary adjustments to role, working pattern, or work environment to support and manage employees living with Long Covid.
This could include:
• flexing the amount of time spent on higher risk activities, for example driving, operating machinery, supervising activities, etc.
• adjusting start and finish times or increasing number of breaks
• implementing an agile / hybrid working model (where a role enables it)
Strategic Workforce Planning
Assessing workforce data on Covid could help HR and Senior Leadership Teams to do strategic workforce and contingency planning. It may also highlight policy areas that need to be updated. Assessing how many positive Covid cases, Covid-related sickness absences, and isolations within their employee population offers a useful indication of the potential number of employees who may go on to develop longer term effects. Employers should also consider risk assessing roles and functions across the organisation to consider if any may be at higher risk from the symptoms or effects of Long Covid, for example driving, operating machinery, or supervising vulnerable people.
Risk Assessment
Although the legal requirement to risk assess Covid has been removed in many sectors, the general health and safety duty to reduce workplace risks as far as reasonably practicable applies. Employees who are older, disabled or living with long term health conditions, or carrying out duties that expose them to the general public, all fall into higher risk categories. Increasing numbers of employees are falling into these categories as a result of previous Covid infections. Employers should consider risk assessments for higher risk groups, to protect them as far as reasonably practicable from catching Covid in the workplace or through work activity.
enquiries@glassceilings.co.uk