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What is Positive Discrimination in the Workplace?
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HR management outsourcing is when a team of experts manage your HR by looking after your contracts, policies, and procedures.
These are the HR essentials every business needs. Without them, your staff could bring successful claims against you, you could lose thousands in legal fines, and even face prosecution. Never underestimate the benefits of HR support for a small business.
We have years of experience in providing HR for SMEs and HR management outsourcing. Contact us to see how we can support you, including HR advice for small businesses - as well as medium and large companies.
Good human resource management is having round the clock support when you need it the most.
Whenever there’s a staff challenge or an important legal update, you just pick up the phone and get the help you need – no matter the time or place.
The main benefits of HR outsourcing are:
- Cost saving: Reduces the expenses for such things are hiring, training and employing an in-house HR team.
- Time saving: Saves time for staff members away from HR tasks.
- Improves expertise and compliance: Provides ongoing advice and support to ensure complete and total compliance.
- Reduces risk: Reduces the risk of any payroll and compliance failures.
Outsourcing HR is cheaper than hiring internal staff and saves you money overall when it comes to your HR service. Plus, you avoid making mistakes that could cost you heavily in claims and legal fines down the line. Every business should consider HR support as a way to avoid claims.
Peninsula is one of the leading HR outsourcing services in the UK, and by working with us you get access to our HR advisory service. Contact us for your outsourced SME HR today.
The key functions of HR outsourcing services are:
- Payroll and benefits: Helps a business to manage employee wages, tax processing, and employee enrolment.
- Recruitment and onboarding: Helps with job descriptions, sourcing new candidates, interviewing, and ensuring a smooth onboarding process.
- Compliance with employment law: Helps to ensure compliance with ever-changing employment legislation.
- Employee relations: Helps to manage grievance and disciplinary procedures, and any ongoing support that's required.
- HR admin: Helps to handle and manage daily tasks, such as employee records, sorting employment contracts, and processing any leave requests.
- Training and development: Helps to create and deliver staff training programs to improve employees' skills.
It doesn’t matter what a person’s employment status is or how long they’ve worked for you… All employees are protected from unlawful, unfavourable treatment during work. This is known as ‘discrimination’.
Research by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) found that 52% of people faced at least one form of workplace bullying, harassment, or discrimination connected to their sexual orientation
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In today’s business and social climate, it’s important to embrace diversity to ensure your business can benefit from a wide range of global talent.
Improving diversity in your organisation has many benefits. However, you need to be wary as you could accidentally fall into the realm of positive discrimination.
It can be a serious issue, so if you need immediate help you can refer to our 24/7 employment law services. The rest of our guide explains what it is and how your business can avoid it.
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It’s the practice of recruiting a person because he or she has a relevant protected characteristic rather than because they are the best candidate.
Whilst this phrase is typically reserved for the recruitment phase, it can also apply during employment when making promotion decisions.
Positive discrimination UK laws
Is positive discrimination legal? No. Though there are occasions where it’s lawful to require a job applicant or worker to have a particular protected characteristic. But it’s rare and is likely to fall into the category of an occupational requirement.
However, positive action is legal—it’s common for businesses to become confused between the two. The Equality Act 2010 allows you to treat an applicant or employee with a protected characteristic more favourably in connection with recruitment or promotion than someone without that characteristic, providing they’re equally qualified for the role.
If you still need a little help, below are some positive discrimination examples so you can see how this applies in practice:
Hiring a female candidate in favour of a more suitable male candidate simply because you worry there is a distinct lack of females in your organisation. That’s positive gender discrimination.
Promoting an underqualified employee to a managerial position as they’re considerably younger than the rest of the managerial team. That’s positive age discrimination.
The effects of positive discrimination in the workplace
These can be significant and may have a detrimental impact on morale. For example, existing employees could become dissatisfied if they feel hiring and promotion decisions are unfairly based on protected characteristics rather than skills and experience.
There’s also the risk that unsuccessful job applicants could lodge a claim for discrimination at an employment tribunal. This is if they feel they’re unfairly overlooked in favour of another individual due to a protected characteristic.
To avoid this outcome, you should understand that while there’s a difference between positive and negative discrimination, they are unlawful for different reasons.
To prevent positive discrimination from occurring, it’s important that you based decisions on recruitment and promotion on pre-determined criteria rather than protected characteristics.
If you find it hard to differentiate between applicants during the recruitment phase, a scoring system may prove a useful way to compare individuals’ suitability.
Need our help?
Peninsula offers expert advice on positive discrimination. Our teams provide 24/7 HR advice which is available 365 days a year. We take care of everything when you work with our HR experts.
Want to find out more? Contact us on 0800 028 2420 and book a free consultation with an HR consultant today.
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