HR policy support
Access fast, expert HR policy and document services, from compliant, best-practice templates to bespoke solutions aligned with your values and HR strategy.
When was your last HR policy review?
Your HR policies play a key role in defining your organisation’s culture, ensuring your people are supported and protecting your business against risk. But if they’re out-of-date, your people policies could be doing your organisation more harm than good.
This simple assessment will help you decide if it’s time to review your HR policies:
- Are your policies accessible by your employees and well understood?
- Do you have effective processes in place to support them?
- Is everything aligned with your company values?
- Are your policies compliant with employment law – including any proposed updates?
- Do your policies align with your overall business strategy?
- Can you measure the impact of your policies?
If your answer is ‘no’ to any of these, our approach to HR policy review follows a three-step process, which we’ll tailor to match your organisation’s unique requirements.
Just some of the organisations we support
How outsourced HR can modernise your people policies
Your employment contracts and handbook need to go beyond words on a page. They should actively protect your organisation, support your ways of working, and be understood and lived by the people they’re written for. Our policy review service focuses on three key areas:
Ensure legal compliance
We verify that your contracts and people policies are lawful and up-to-date with recent employment law changes. This includes preparing for the Employment Rights Bill, which introduces significant changes to employment law, flexible working, SSP and redundancy protections for pregnant employees and new parents by autumn 2026.
Improve workplace culture
We help you get the most from your contracts and handbooks, ensuring they provide the flexibility your organisation needs and save you money in potentially expensive employment tribunal claims. We also review and streamline clauses, clearly communicating expectations to empower your workforce.
Create modern policies
It’s no secret employees often skim through contracts and handbooks. These vital first documents should be engaging and reflect your organisation’s personality. We guide you in making yours user-friendly, straight-talking, free from complex legal jargon, and always up-to-date with evolving employment law and modern workforce expectations.
“It was such a comprehensive process; the benchmarking service was invaluable in ensuring we could offer the most competitive packages and attract the very best talent for this exciting new venture; and having all HR policies written up in two weeks was an incredible help.”
University of Warwick
HR policy review
In the first stage of the process, we’ll work closely with your organisation to review your HR policies. This involves carrying out a legal compliance assessment and gap analysis to check their suitability for your employees and ensure you’re effectively managing risk. Our consultants will deliver this through a collaborative approach, including a one-day discovery session with your HR team to pinpoint your specific challenges and determine how we can best support you.
For some organisations, we’ll then create an entirely new suite of people policies, while for others, we’ll update or harmonise existing ones. We’ll also review and benchmark your policies against industry peers to highlight areas for improvement.
Writing your HR policies
In the second stage of the process, if your consultant identifies your HR policies are no longer compliant, don’t align with your values, or lack clarity, they’ll focus on understanding your HR strategy to ensure everything we create is in line with your organisation’s values and objectives. Your dedicated AdviserPlus team will then leverage our design services to build a comprehensive suite of clear, contemporary, succinct, and engaging policy documents from scratch that align with your company culture.
If your organisation is aiming to harmonise a varied suite of policies, we’ll help you produce comprehensive, streamlined policy documents that apply to all your employees.
HR policy implementation
In the final stage, our team can help you roll out your new people policies across your organisation. We offer training sessions (remotely or onsite), organisation-wide communications, and supporting documents like letters and checklists.
We’ll also provide practical guidance for managers and employees, develop a bespoke knowledge portal website to host all policies and templates and offer ongoing support, maintenance, and analytics.
Digital training session | The Employment Rights Bill unpacked and tribunal trends
Sign up for our on-demand digital training session on the Employment Rights Bill, new legislation and employment tribunal trends. In this essential session, our experts from the Empowering People Group provide organisations with insights and actionable strategies to navigate significant changes in UK employment law.
Frequently asked questions
The scope of our policy services is flexible and tailored to your unique organisational needs, whether you require assistance with some or all of your HR policies. This can include the harmonisation of varied policy suites, a gap analysis of your existing policies, the design and creation of supporting documentation like letter templates, and the development or review of your staff handbook.
As part of our policy support services, the outputs we create can include a best practice and legally compliant policy set, along with supporting documents, and manager and employee guides. We also provide training sessions and support for briefing any changes back into your people. We’ll also provide ongoing support, maintenance and analytics.
The objectives of our policy support services are all about making sure your policies minimise your organisation’s exposure to risk and align with your values, culture, and strategic objectives.
We ensure they’re legally compliant with UK legislation and regulation and aligned with best practice. We also aim to plug any gaps you have in your policy set or supporting documents to give you the best set of policies and get the most out of your people.
The answer truly depends on your organisation. However, if you’re primarily focused on managing employment law risk, we’d suggest having policies for Disciplinary, Grievance, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Preventing Sexual Harassment, Absence and Sickness, Whistleblowing, Health and Safety, and GDPR. These policies will best position you to manage the most frequently occurring employee issues.
You may also want to have more forward-thinking policies which demonstrate your people-first commitments. This can include fertility, menopause, pregnancy loss, gender transition support.
There are a few HR policies which are mandatory under UK law. This includes health and safety, disciplinary procedures and equal opportunities.
It’s advised to have additional, well-documented policies in place to help protect your organisation from potential disputes.
Regular policy reviews are essential to ensure they remain legally compliant, reflect your organisation’s current practices and support a consistent approach across teams.
In addition to scheduled reviews, it’s vital to revisit your policies whenever there are significant changes in employment legislation. The Employment Rights Bill, which is expected to come into effect autumn 2026, is set to introduce a range of new employee protections and procedural requirements.
This will mean that many HR policies will need to be updated. This includes areas like flexible working, predictable working hours, changes to statutory sick pay, and redundancy protections for pregnant employees and new parents.
Updating your policies promptly ensures they continue to reflect the law and can be implemented with confidence.
HR policies must be applied consistently to all employees to avoid claims of unfair treatment or discrimination. However, they can and often do vary for different employees, especially based on factors like job classification, seniority, or contractual agreements.
Organisations might have different policies for full-time versus part-time staff, and individual contracts can also lead to variations in compensation or benefits. While these variations are legitimate, they must always be applied fairly and consistently, ensuring no discrimination occurs based on protected characteristics like race, age or gender, and that they remain compliant with all employment laws and regulations. It’s crucial that employees are clearly informed about the policies that apply to them, and that these policies are regularly reviewed and updated to remain relevant and effective.
You’ll want to make sure your HR policies are easily accessible to all of your employees. This means making them accessible through channels like your company intranet or a cloud-based HR system.
What’s key is ensuring they’re always simple to access and up-to-date. It’s also essential to incorporate the most important policies into your new hire onboarding process too.
Employee relations policies aim to create a positive and productive work environment. A key example, like a workplace bullying and harassment policy, would thoroughly outline the organisation’s commitment to a safe and respectful workplace. This specific policy would define what constitutes bullying and harassment, and detail responsibilities, clear reporting and investigating procedures.
Other employee relations policies might cover grievance procedures, disciplinary processes, codes of conduct, or conflict resolution, all with the goal of providing clear guidelines for managing workplace interactions effectively.
Get in touch
Or speak to an HR expert on: 0844 327 2293