Getting to grips with the new Maternity Provisions

The Statutory Maternity scheme has changed and those changes apply to any maternity situation where the baby is due on or after 1 st April 2007.

Employees are now able to take up to a year of maternity leave, even if they tell you they are pregnant on their first day of employment. In addition, the period of paid maternity leave has been extended from 26 weeks to 39 weeks for those employees with at least 26 weeks service.

There were some positive changes in the new rules - you can now agree with your employee up to 10 ‘keeping in touch’ days, where you can offer them the opportunity to come into work for training days or just to keep up to date with things before their return.

As schemes like this get more and more complicated, it is easy for both employers and employees to become confused over what the new rules actually mean for them. So how do you communicate with your employees to ensure that they are clear about their entitlements?

Barry Rees, our Director of Human Resources Services, has produced a two-page templated chart that employers can use to more easily illustrate the statutory maternity scheme to employees. An accompanying management guide takes you through the various provisions, shows you how to input data onto the chart and how to use it with your staff.

Both are completely free and downloadable from here ... CHART | MANAGEMENT GUIDE.

Give them a read and then use them to help you make sure that your employees are fully informed.

In addition to its standard packages, EBS also offers a range of specific Human Resources services:

• Dispute Resolution Programme - Managing grievances fairly
• Exit Management - Dismissing employees fairly
• Getting Age Right - Avoiding age discrimination
• Performance Management - Taking action on employee poor performance
• Recruitment Audit - Helping management recruit more effectively
• Recruitment Plus - A fully managed service to recruit more effectively