When everything is going well at the beginning of the employment relationship it’s great, but when the relationship turns sour that’s when you wish you’d paid more attention to the really boring stuff, like the employment contract.

So here are some points for a bullet proof legal employment contract.

The Legal Bits

The legal bits that do need to be included are common sense – or so you would think!

Name & address of employee and employer

This needs to be the employers registered office.

Start date and continuous service date which if it’s a new employee will be the same.

Hours & days of work this may sound obvious but it needs to be clear when you need them to work.  Too often I have seen business owners employ people on the hours and days that the new employee dictates.

Job title and brief job description.  Give a job description to the employee with the contract that way they know exactly what they are signing up to do.

Place of work. You may want to add another clause here that will allow you to move employees around to different settings. It’s not always easy to move someone, even if it’s just to another setting down the road.

Pay date & rate of pay. Everyone needs to know when that important pay day is going to be and how much you are going to pay them.

Sick entitlement – there is no legal requirement to pay company sick pay. If the employee meets the qualifying conditions you will need to pay statutory sick pay (SSP). An employee needs to be off work for 4 days before SSP kicks in.  (Remember you can’t claim SSP back now so make sure you deal with any absence issues otherwise it’s costing you money!)

Holiday entitlement – Yes I’m afraid if you employee people you must let them have holiday and yes you have to pay them for it even if they only work part time. Holiday entitlement can be difficult to work out, especially for part timers. I will try and make it simple. If an employee works five days a week they are entitled to 28 days holiday per year, even if they only work 2 hours a day. They would of course only receive 2 hours pay for each day they were on holiday.  The 28 day entitlement can include bank holidays. There is no legal entitlement to bank holidays.

To get more points to include in your employment contract download my guide ‘How To Ensure You Have A Bullet Proof Employment Contract’.