People Matter - January 2026
HR Dept
New Year HR housekeeping
Perhaps you’ve already set yourself (and given up on!) some personal New Year’s resolutions. But what about your business.
You may work with a coach on some long-term goals, but for short-term impact in January and February, getting your HR house in order is a useful place to devote some energy – especially with a busy year of employment law changes ahead. So where could you begin?
Policies and contracts – It is always a good time of year in January to review your policies and contracts. This year, major changes to things like auto-enrolment and the EU Platform Workers Directive mean that it’s more important than ever to be on top of it now.
Get the balance right between being prepared for known changes and flexible for others that may be released in the coming weeks and months, to ensure you do not have to revise your policies again unnecessarily later on.
Employee engagement – Working on your company culture and employee engagement can be crucial for productivity, recruitment and retention. There are many ways you can do this and some will be more appropriate for your business than others.
Don’t have a good handle on what staff think of working for you? Why not set up an employee survey to ask them their opinion, or probe in staff appraisals? Sensing things are a little flat? How about a social event, charity drive or a staff competition to encourage high performance?
Staff training – Partly linked to employee engagement, but also an important part of your performance management, think carefully about staff training goals for 2026. Where do you need them to upskill and what are they interested in improving on?
Think also about compliance with new rules such as the (delayed) EU AI Act, and more generally about training in your business. For example, could you make it a project for this year to improve your induction training for all future new recruits?
Check out our article further on in this newsletter on eLearning courses.
HR compliance calendar – With so many things happening in 2026 (and 2027 for that matter) your future self will thank you later, if you take the time to map out the key dates of what you need to do and when. On an online calendar or project management tool, or a simple desk diary – whatever works best for you.
Budgeting for auto-enrolment
If you did not previously offer pension provision for your staff, the introduction of auto-enrolment this January, may require a major budgeting project from you.
There has been plenty of lead up to this major change, so hopefully you have already done this. But if not, it would be wise to fully understand how it works, and the costings for your business.
One thing to keep an eye on is that although employer contributions (and additionally employee contributions) start at 1.5% of salary, there is a timeline for these to increase to 6% of salary over the next ten years.
As a reminder, your staff earning over €20,000 and aged between 23 and 60 must be automatically enrolled into the My Future Fund pension (unless they are already in a qualifying pension scheme).
So you can see, this represents a significant and growing payroll cost as the years unfold. If you are struggling with the rules, or how you are going to make it all work for your business, please get in touch as soon as possible. There are penalties for non-compliance so getting on top of it as soon as possible is essential.
The Night Manager
Are you a night manager? Not a character in a John le Carre novel/TV series, but someone in charge of people working night shifts.
Recently, attention has been drawn to the lot of such workers, even suggesting they may suffer certain forms of pay inequality based on the difficulty associated with being at work at night.
There is nothing formal in the pipeline for this specific issue, but you could review your business’s attitude towards these important workers. Areas highlighted include difficulty commuting when transport networks close down, stress and anxiety from the isolation that some roles come with and a lack of access to affordable food.
You may find that understanding any issues and engaging with staff on them helps you drive performance and makes recruitment and retention easier. Then everyone’s a winner.
Papering over the cracks
Many a phrase is coined in HR. Following the pandemic we had The Great Resignation and quiet quitting; now we have “quiet cracking”.
Unlike quiet quitting, which is an intentional resolve in employees to do the bare minimum in their role, quiet cracking is an unintentional degradation of their commitment to you.
As the name suggests it happens with little attention drawn to it, and builds up over time from factors like a lack of influence, disappointment, and worry about things out of their control. In real terms these could be not having a voice in meetings, not having a pathway to career progression and experiencing anxiety about change – say the impact of AI.
Good management skills and communication are key mitigations for you. Look out for a lack of energy in team members, address big issues that may affect them openly, and offer genuinely supportive conversations.
You cannot control how people feel, but you can create an environment which gives them the best chance to shine – and a lot of the time feel-good factor and engagement will follow.
eLearning = elation
As we begin 2026, now is a great time to choose how you are going to develop your staff this year. Many businesses will already be discussing this with employees in their appraisals.
We are strong advocates for eLearning as part of the solution. It is affordable, convenient and highly targeted. What’s more, eLearning leaves an easy audit trail to be followed (for proof-of-compliance purposes).
This can be particularly useful in relation to areas where you may need to prove that someone has undergone training, for example with one of your obligations under the Employment Equality Acts 1998–2015 which require you to have taken reasonable steps to prevent harassment.
We offer a huge range of eLearning courses covering everything from sexual harassment awareness training to problem solving. Sometimes a more in-depth, in-person workshop may be more appropriate. Don’t worry, we offer those too. Just ask if you want to find out more.
54 strikes and you’re out?
In a story from the UK, various judges have called a tribunal claimant out for “targeting legal representatives”, pursuing claims in a “personal and vexatious manner” and viewing the tribunal system as a means to “get rich fast”. One judge had just thrown out what he believed to be the 54th claim in these courts.
There has been one successful claim for unlawful deduction of wages which yielded £5,000. But it is believed the others, for things like racial and sexual discrimination, have all been unsuccessful. Nevertheless, employers will have had to fork out hefty sums to defend themselves.
While this is not typical, the cost of defending dubious claims remains a nagging worry for SME business owners in the UK and Ireland. Getting HR right remains essential to running a business.
