Improving fair work in your business

How to improve Security at work

• Everyone involved in work has a responsibility to ensure and support widespread awareness and understanding of employment rights. Employers should give clear information on pay and contractual matters and signpost workers to advice and support, for example through trade unions, ACAS or other relevant organisations.
• A template job offer letter including a statement of particulars is provided by ACAS. This could be useful for smaller hospitality employers and would ensure workers have basic information about their rights at work.
• Contractual stability should be a core employer objective. Offering a contract or ways of working where the burden of risk falls disproportionately on workers (including most zero hours contracts) is not fair work. Employers should offer contracts that provide security to workers, while also working with employees to design approaches to the allocation of hours and shifts that meet the needs of the business, while ensuring that pay for the worker that is regular and predictable.
• All workers should be paid at least the Real Living Wage. Information on the Scottish Living Wage can be found on the Living Wage Scotland website.
• Pay transparency and clear pay structures which facilitate pay progression, should be a core organisational objective. Pay levels and pay structures that are openly shared with workers along with clear policies on things like tips, maternity leave, annual leave and sick pay provide the basis for a more equal, transparent and inclusive workplace. Template policies, advice and support are available on the ACAS website.

How to improve Respect at work

• Respecting others is everybody’s business. A culture of respect requires that behaviours, attitudes, policies and practices that support health, safety and wellbeing are consistently understood and applied.
• Be explicit about respect as an organisational value and start a dialogue around respect as it is experienced in your own organisation. Agree clear expectations of behaviour, conduct and treatment and encourage the involvement of everyone to improve respectful behaviours.
• Respect for workers’ personal and family lives requires access to policies and working practices that allow the balancing of work and family life. Hospitality work often involves working ‘anti- social hours’ which can impact the wellbeing of workers. This is part of the nature of work in hospitality but wellbeing can still be enhanced in this context. Work with your staff to understand their current views of their working hours and focus on providing consistency and transparency around the provision of hours and how work is organised. Providing a clear schedule for rest days that supports broader work life balance is also important.
• Ensure that interpersonal relationships and internal procedures exist to manage issues or conflict in a constructive way. Clear procedures are necessary to ensure workers feel confident to raise concerns. It is important to include clear steps to take if the issue is with their direct manager or a senior manager in the organisation.
• Ensure you are providing adequate health and safety training and supervision, including providing translated material for workers who need support with their English. The Health and Safety Executive has a range of translated materials that could be useful in this regard.
• Take responsibility for the safety of night workers, including those that you are asking to travel to or from work late at night. Providing free transport to ensure workers get home safely at night or considering overall wage structures to include night work allowances are both approaches that would support safe outcomes for workers working past 11pm.
• Ensure you are consulting your workers on health and safety issues and consider setting up a health and safety committee. Draw on good practice when preparing risk assessments. Union expertise and networks on health and safety are a valuable resource, the use of which should be developed, supported and maximised.

How to improve Opportunity at work

• Investigate and interrogate the workforce profile in your organisation and sector, identifying where any barriers to opportunity arise and address these creatively.
• Engage with diverse and local communities.
• Use buddying and mentoring to support new workers and those with distinctive needs.
• Train your managers on supporting a diverse workforce (Inclusion Scotland, for example, has information for employers) and support them to make reasonable adjustments for people with disabilities and additional support needs.
• Undertake equalities monitoring, particularly in the provision and uptake of training and development activities and in career progression outcomes.
• Draw on skills, knowledge and experience of others, including from unions (who train and provide support for specialist equality, learning and health and safety representatives), or contact organisations such as Scottish Union Learning or the fair work co-ordinator posts recommended as part of this Inquiry (Recommendation 1).

How to Improve Fulfilment at Work

• Build fulfilment at work explicitly into job design.
• Create an authorising culture where people can make appropriate decisions and make a difference.
• Consider the treatment of managers, ensuring that they have access to fair work, and support them to develop clear and consistent management practice in line with fair work.
• Invest in training, learning and skills development for current and future jobs. Where available, utilise the skills and expertise of the Skills Development Scotland Employer Hub, the Scottish Tourism Alliance Toolkit, as well as union-led learning and the resources available through Scottish Union Learning.
• Set expectations of performance that are realistic and achievable without negative impact on wellbeing.
• Provide clear and transparent criteria and opportunities for career progression, as well as opportunities for personal development, as a feature of all work.

How to improve Effective Voice at work

• Adopt behaviours, practices and a culture that supports effective voice and embed this at all levels – this requires openness, transparency, dialogue and tolerance of different viewpoints.
• Effective voice requires structures – formal and informal – through which real dialogue – individual and collective – can take place. One-to-ones, team meetings, and staff surveys are all important tools and employers should ensure workers are clear about management structures and points of contact.
• More extensive union recognition and collective bargaining at a workplace level would help to address the absence of effective voice in hospitality and support the delivery of all other dimensions of fair work. It is important to recognise that working positively with unions results in improved fair work outcomes for businesses and workers.
• The ability to exercise voice effectively should be supported as a key competence of managers and union representatives.
• Ensure workers have confidence that their views and concerns will be respected and acted upon.
• As recommended by this Inquiry (Recommendation 2), appoint a senior manager to be a Fair Work Champion and support your workforce to elect an Effective Voice Champion (in unionised workplaces this will be the shop steward or union representative).

Further Information

Find out more about the Inquiry into Fair Work in the Hospitality Industry:

• Full report.
• How businesses already deliver dimensions of fair work – good practice case studies. Tips for further action:
• A Fair Work Toolkit designed by Highlands and Islands Enterprise for Hospitality Businesses.
• The Fair Work Employer Support Tool designed by Scottish Enterprise with the Fair Work Convention to help employers assess fair work in their own business.
• The Fair Work Self-Assessment Tool for Workers designed by the Fair Work Convention to allow groups of workers and employers to understand workers collective experiences of fair work in their workplace (to be launched early 2025).
• My World of Work has some useful information for both employers and workers.