Following interest from last week’s article, the following are expansions of the points regarding changes to the Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP)

Starting SMP The earliest date legally that an employee's statutory maternity pay and maternity leave can start is from the 11th week before the baby is due and the latest is from the day following the birth.

Babies due on or before 31st March 2007 Employees can continue to work after the 11th week before the week their baby is due. SMP will usually start from the Sunday following the day your employee stopped work to have her baby. The entitlement is a maximum paid leave of 26 weeks.

Babies due on or after 1st April 2007

If your employee continues to work after the 11th week before her baby is due she can choose when she wants her SMP to start. SMP will start from any day your employee chooses, once she has stopped work to have her baby. This means that her SMP should start from the first day of her maternity leave.

The entitlement is a maximum of 39 weeks of paid leave.

SMP will be affected if: The start of SMP for your employee will change if her baby is born before the start of the 11th week or before the start of her SMP period. If this is the case then she will start to receive her pay the day after the birth of her baby.

SMP may also be bought forward in the case that your employee is off sick with a pregnancy related illness at the start of her pregnancy or in the first 4 weeks before her due date. SMP will start following the first complete day that she takes off sick with a pregnancy related illness.

Employers can maintain reasonable contact with their employees during their period of leave.

This is not a new right, but it just reinforces that each party is allowed to contact each other with no effect on leave or SMP.

Keep in touch days.

Employees can take part in ‘keep in touch’ days; this is a maximum entitlement of 10-days of work within the 9 months leave in which employees will be paid.

Under the new changes for employees who have a baby due after 1st April 2007 If you your employee works for more than the 10 day entitlement they will lose one weeks pay for each week or part week that they work.

For any further information on the new changes and how they affect you as an employer please email Cheryl@stephen-hill.co.uk or alternatively speak to your client manager.

Office banter

Over 18 million working hours per day are lost as a result of employees gossiping at work about non work related matters, this results in losses of £43 billion a year.

However despite the huge losses a report from insurance firm ‘More Than Business’ the office banter is actually beneficial for firms as it boosts morale in the office and allows workers to talk through any difficult problems with their colleagues.

As an employer you have a responsibity for the welfare of your staff as they are your most valuable assets. With a happy team you can get the best performance from them, which is key to a happy expanding business.              

‘Getting the best from your team’ is a session designed to help you to identify some of the issues that will motivate your employees to perform to the best of their ability without incurring huge losses. For more information on this session please speak to your client manager or alternatively email Cheryl@stephen-hill.co.uk

SPAM filter 

Last week we decided to take some much-needed action to get rid of our SPAM mail problem. On a normal week between all members of staff here we receive over 10,000 SPAM emails, we have found this to cause huge problems and there have been unfortunate incidents when we have deleted important emails from clients due to the vast amount of emails we receive.

Over the next couple of weeks we would be grateful for your feedback to help us sort out the filter on our SPAM, as this needs to be finely tuned. If you send us an email and find that it gets returned back to you could please ring Cheryl Taylor on 01474 853856 so we can help combat the problem.

Quote of the week

"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything"

Theodore Roosevelt