Managing Out of Hours Risks by Adjusting Existing Policies

Adding some basic clauses to already existing workplace contracts and policies can be more effective and less time consuming than drafting dedicated documents to help manage risks presented by workers out of hours conduct.

As far as employment contracts go, some broad clauses about workers duties and obligations may be all that is needed to sufficiently cover out of hours conduct.

Some clauses that might be useful to add include:

• Any behaviour that may negatively affect the company's reputation, business, employer's interests
• Breaching of the laws or policies using company property
• Taking on secondary employment without the consent of the company.

When it comes to work place policies it does not make sense to write a policy that is only related to out of hours conduct as it would have to be too generalised and would be hard to define exactly what employees are not supposed to do. The best approach is to examine your existing policies and determine how they might apply to out of hours conduct. Where it is appropriate you can add any relevant stipulations into those policies that make it clear what is suitable to extend to out of hours conduct.

Depending on what industry you are employed in there is a variety of policies that may be relevant to out of hours conduct.

Some amendments that could be made to existing policies to cover out of hours conduct include those relating to drug and alcohol use and private use of company property for example, vehicles and IT communications.

A lot of policies regarding company vehicles do not actually go into how people should be driving the vehicle, complying with the law and generally using them in their personal time.

Regarding computer use, policies should be simply updated to say that they apply to both work and private use.

Some other policy areas that may need to be considered include behaviour at work functions, travelling for work related business, social media and wearing work uniforms off duty.

Employees wearing their uniforms when they are not at work can pose a problem because they are easily identifiable as working within your business. There behaviour can easily fall back on you.

Discrimination and harassment policies should be updated to make it clear that they can apply to any out of hour’s interactions between employees.

These simple clauses can be extremely effective and they can also come in useful if you have to enforce policies for out of hours conduct breaches.

Age Discrimination in the Workplace

Age discrimination is when a person is treated less positively than another person in a comparable situation, because of their age.

It could be ‘direct age discrimination’ if an older applicant is not considered for a job because it is assumed that they are not as up to date with technology as a younger person.

It is also considered age discrimination when there is a policy that is the same for everyone but has an unfair effect on people of a particular age. This is called ‘indirect discrimination’.

It may be considered direct age discrimination if an employer obliges an older person to meet a physical fitness test –which younger people are more likely to succeed in – if the fitness standard is not an essential necessity of the job.

The Age Discrimination Act covers situations where you feel that, because of your age, you may have been:

• denied a promotion, transfer or other employment-related benefits
• given less favourable terms or conditions of employment
• refused employment
• harassed
• dismissed
• denied equal access to training opportunities
• selected for redundancy

The law includes all types of employers, including the Commonwealth and state governments and the private sector.

The recent Age Discrimination Survey conducted by the Australian Human Rights Commission has found that over one quarter of Australians aged over 50 years have experienced some form of age discrimination within the last 2 years.

This report should serve to encourage employers to begin taking the issue of age discrimination more seriously.

Most people understand that it is more difficult to get a job if you are older but this report highlights the fact that this is a form of discrimination and should be treated as such.

The publicity that has accompanied the results of this survey may give older workers the confidence to take action if they believe they have been discriminated against due to their age.

One of the major findings of this report was that you are most likely to be discriminated against because of your age when you are looking for paid employment.

The telephone survey of 2109 people aged over 50 years found that almost three in five or 58% of people looking for paid employment were discriminated against because of their age.

Of those who were not employed in the last two years but would have liked to have been, one in five (18%) stated that it was because their skills were not current.