All our Services

Whatever the problem, if there is a difficult conversation to be had, we’ll guide you through it. Perhaps it’s about sickness absence, or poor working relationships, poor performance or the need to restructure a team.

Whatever your difficult situation we’ll have the employment law knowledge, the real life working knowledge and the practical, pragmatic solutions to help you to have that conversation.

You can talk to us for guidance before you deal with a potential disciplinary, grievance or appeal. We’ll make sure that we understand the full context before advising so that we can guide you through all the possible implications of the case you have to deal with. We’ll check that you understood any employment law that you must take into account and work with you so that you feel confident that you can approach the problem professionally and correctly.

We can rehearse conversations with you, help you to draft letters, explain how the format of the meetings must run and who needs to be present at which stage. If you need us to attend, we can. We can act as note taker and HR support or we can manage investigations and meetings on your behalf if it is appropriate to do so.

We run some great, fun, interactive workshops on how to manage such situations.

The world of work has changed since covid. So many more people expect to be able to work from home or work more flexibly.

The law on flexible working will be changing this year, to give everyone the right to make a ‘Flexible Working Request’ from the day that they start working with you, and to make two requests in one year. You’ll also need to deal with requests within a tighter timescale than before, and consult with an employee before turning down a request.

You can turn a request down if it really wouldn’t work for the business, but you do have to give it proper thought and a proper response in line with the specified 8 business reasons that are legitimate reasons for refusing a request, and making sure that you avoid any risk of discrimination.

If you want to create a more flexible working environment, tighten up on your current one or deal with a flexible working request, we can guide you.

We can help whether the problem is employees with persistent short absences, or a longer-term absence with no prognosis of when the employee may be able to return to work.

We’ll provide you with policies and procedures that really work, and coach your managers and supervisors in how to deal with absence management problems and we partner with an excellent Occupational Health provider who supports us when we need expert advice on physical or mental ill health.

Ask us about our half day workshops on how to manage absence, where you’ll get the chance to ask all your questions and practice different scenarios.

The right to unpaid time off deal with a dependent related emergency has existed for a long time, but did you know that this year a new right to Carer’s Leave is being introduced?

The calculation of holiday entitlement and pay can cause such a headache and employers still don’t always realise that they may have to factor in overtime pay or commission into the calculation of holiday pay. Holiday pay legislation was updated at the start of this year and includes changes in the way you can pay holiday to irregular hours workers. Talk to us if you are not whether you are doing things correctly.

Find it difficult to keep track of holidays? The Breathe HR software that we use will do this for you. Employees request holidays using the app, you can check who else has holiday booked around the same time before authorising it or not. Both you and your employees will clearly see how much holiday they have remaining.

You need to get the best from your people. From helping you to manage a difficult capability or poor performance problem, to embedding a whole new appraisal or performance review system, we have the tools, the experience and the ideas to help you to do what’s best for your business.

There are so many reasons your employees might need to take time off. Short or long term sickness, a family emergency, maternity, paternity, parental or shared parental leave, compassionate leave, bereavement leave, time off for voluntary work or sabbaticals. All of this is manageable but can be intensely time consuming. It’s easier if you have good documented processes and a helpful person to talk it through with when the situation arises.

We use Breathe HR to provide HR software for our smaller clients. This gives you a secure database to store all your employee information, manage documents, share company information and see organisation charts. You can let employees request for you to check and authorise, record and monitor absence and keep training and performance records.

Because we are Breathe partners we provide the administrative support for your system, troubleshooting your queries and helping you to keep on top of your administration.

For larger organisations looking to implement or upgrade their HR or Time and Attendance software, we have extensive knowledge in specifying, identifying and implementing systems.

Please do ask for our help if you don’t have the resources or the time to do this properly in house.

For smaller businesses without a full HR team, HR administration is easily neglected and can become a burden. You can hand over the administration to us.

We’ll deal with your offer letters and contracts, right to work checks, help with onboarding and induction, probation and performance review documentation, absence management, updates and changes to terms, everything right through to managing the leaving process.

We use Breathe HR to keep all your employee records, but if you have another HR software in place you simply need to allow us access.

The law now requires you to provide the main statement of terms and conditions of employment on or before the day that someone starts working for you. This applies to casual workers as well as to fixed term or permanent staff, even if they join you on a probationary period.

You can easily find templates free of charge online, but tailoring them to be just right for your business is harder.

We’ll work with you to provide templates suited to all the different employment situations you may need to cover. This could range from straightforward permanent appointments to those needing restrictive covenants, fixed term appointments, apprenticeship agreements, flexible hours, annualised hours, casual work and using self-employed workers.

We won’t offer you a suite of ‘off the shelf’ policies because we know how important it is for everything to be tailored to your business, your culture, your needs. We will provide a comprehensive set of policies and procedures which work for you, having thoroughly discussed what you need.

Alternatively, we’ll help you to review and update your existing documentation.

If you use one, your staff handbook should be an easily readable summary of all the main points employees must understand about working for your business, such as where to park, what time keeping rules apply, standards of dress, how to book holidays or report absence, what your expectations are for acceptable use of IT and where to find the detailed policies when they need them.

Working with you, we can provide a properly thought through and tailored Staff Handbook/Employee Handbook/HR Handbook for your business.

Jane is a trained and accredited mediator. Mediation takes the problem out of the formal company disciplinary or grievance procedures and tries to assist all the parties involved in coming to an agreement and in finding a better way of working together.

It can be quite surprising to find that people who have been so wrapped in conflict can, with the support of the mediator, begin to talk to each other, understand each other’s point of view and find their own way to resolve the problem.

Let us help you to create a working environment where dignity and respect for others is the norm. It’s not always easy, maybe you have an employee on the neuro-diverse spectrum who is finding it difficult to conform to what you think you need, or someone struggling with the menopause or a difficult pregnancy, perhaps an employee with a permanent or temporary disability or physical or mental health problem.

We will guide you through the best approaches, adjustments and changes to help overcome the difficulties and, if that’s really not possible, to bring the employment to an end in the fairest way possible.

Employers have a duty to make sure that there are equal opportunities for all in the workplace, and that no form of discrimination, including harassment and victimisation, takes place at work.

There will be new legislation in 2024 placing even more responsibility on employers to ensure that sexual harassment does not occur in the workplace.

Our Dignity at Work workshops are a good start, helping you to think about the standards you want to set in your own workplace, how to identify and deal with unwanted banter, bullying, discrimination or harassment and how to put in place meaningful policies and training so that your employees understand and can be confident about challenging unwanted behaviour.

We partner with HSF UK to provide an employee health and wellbeing benefit package for our smaller clients at a level which would normally only be available to larger organisations. This gives access to an Employee Assistance Programme, Health Care Cashback, Personal Accident Cover and Perkbox.

Camino HR specialises in HR support, and very often occupational health or health and safety matters are key to the work that we need to do. Some clients already have their own experts, but we partner with the outstanding people at Harmony Health and Wellbeing and at Libertas Health and Safety to provide you with these services if you need them.

The health and safety support is practical and pragmatic, keeping you compliant and minimising the burden of paperwork.  The Occupational Health advice is invaluable in assessing and supporting employees with health or wellbeing problems spilling over into the workplace.

Ask us about the options for medical health screening questionnaires for new starters and health surveillance for employees working in areas of possible risk.

We’ve been supporting businesses to understand and manage workplace stress and mental health difficulties in the workplace since the time when such topics were still hardly talked about. We’re still working to break the taboo in some businesses, and to help managers, supervisors and colleagues to understand that anyone can experience such problems at some time in their life.

Our workshops on managing workplace stress help you to understand what it is and how it can be caused, and we run a simple and effective activity to help you and your employees identify the main stressors in your workplace, so that you can think about how to eliminate them.

If you do have an employee struggling with workplace stress, anxiety or any other mental health difficulty, we can guide you in the best way to support the employee and manage the situation. Our Occupational Health specialist is skilled in supporting people with mental health problems.