Adding some basic clauses to already existing workplace contracts and policies can be more effective and less time consuming than drafting dedicated documents to help manage risks presented by workers out of hours conduct.
As far as employment contracts go, some broad clauses about workers duties and obligations may be all that is needed to sufficiently cover out of hours conduct.
Some clauses that might be useful to add include:
- Any behaviour that may negatively affect the company’s reputation, business, employer’s interests
- Breaching of the laws or policies using company property
- Taking on secondary employment without the consent of the company.
When it comes to work place policies it does not make sense to write a policy that is only related to out of hours conduct as it would have to be too generalised and would be hard to define exactly what employees are not supposed to do. The best approach is to examine your existing policies and determine how they might apply to out of hours conduct. Where it is appropriate you can add any relevant stipulations into those policies that make it clear what is suitable to extend to out of hours conduct.
Depending on what industry you are employed in there is a variety of policies that may be relevant to out of hours conduct.
Some amendments that could be made to existing policies to cover out of hours conduct include those relating to drug and alcohol use and private use of company property for example, vehicles and IT communications.
A lot of policies regarding company vehicles do not actually go into how people should be driving the vehicle, complying with the law and generally using them in their personal time.
Regarding computer use, policies should be simply updated to say that they apply to both work and private use.
Some other policy areas that may need to be considered include behaviour at work functions, travelling for work related business, social media and wearing work uniforms off duty.
Employees wearing their uniforms when they are not at work can pose a problem because they are easily identifiable as working within your business. There behaviour can easily fall back on you.
Discrimination and harassment policies should be updated to make it clear that they can apply to any out of hour’s interactions between employees.
These simple clauses can be extremely effective and they can also come in useful if you have to enforce policies for out of hours conduct breaches.