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Monday 2nd March 2020

THE HOT STORY

FTSE 350 companies fail on gender diversity The Hampton-Alexander review and the Investment Association have written to 63 FTSE 350 companies in regard to gender diversity among their senior leadership and how they intend to improve the gender balance. Of the 63 firms, 24 had only a single woman on their board, 35 had all-male executive committees, and four had both only one woman on their board and an all-male executive committee. Although a target of seeing a third of all board seats filled by women by the end of 2020 has been met, the review has called on firms to go further. Sir Philip Hampton, chairman of the review, said: "Leaders of FTSE 350 companies that are still adrift of the 33% minimum target need to rise to today's challenge from the investment community and take swift action to address the lack of women on the board and in their leadership teams." The Times Financial Times

WORKFORCE

Law firm shuts office in coronavirus scare Baker McKenzie ordered its entire London office to work from home on Friday amid fears a member of staff may have contracted the coronavirus. The law firm told all of its 1,100 employees to work remotely after the staff member came back from northern Italy, which has seen a spike of hundreds of coronavirus cases, and later felt unwell. “Our priority is the health and wellbeing of our people and our clients and we have asked our London office employees to work from home for the time being while we are taking precautionary measures in response to a potential case of the Covid-19,” a Baker McKenzie spokesperson said. Meanwhile, the FT looks at how the coronavirus outbreak may bring about lasting changes in how companies manage their workers, with flexibility viewed as a way of protecting staff and supply chains. City AM The Daily Telegraph Financial Times

Freelancers given a year to get used to tax shake-up The UK Treasury will not punish freelancers facing tough new tax avoidance measures for any mistakes on their returns for 12 months. With IR35 rules due to come into force on April 6th set to make medium and large businesses responsible for setting the tax status of contractors they hire, Chancellor Rishi Sunak has said that businesses and contractors would not have to pay penalties for errors in compliance in the first 12 months "except in cases of deliberate non-compliance." Julia Kermode, the chief executive of the Freelancer & Contractor Services Association, says that with the general election delaying HMRC's education programme, “a number of businesses are only finding out about the reforms and their new liabilities now, weeks before they take effect." An inniAccounts study looking at the potential impact of the new rules, which are designed to tackle disguised employment, shows that 70% of 350 organisations polled were no longer willing to use contractors. The Times

University is not worth it for a fifth of graduates Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis for the Department for Education shows that a university education increases lifetime earnings by at least £100,000 on average. However, the study found that a fifth of people who go to university would be financially better off if they had not. Each year, an estimated 70,000 graduates end up losing money over their lifetime because they did an undergraduate degree. Men studying creative arts subjects are most likely to be financially worse off for having gone to university, with 97% getting a negative return on their investment over their lifetime, while women studying physics, pharmacology or economics are the most likely to gain financially from doing a degree, with all graduates getting a positive return. The Daily Telegraph Financial Times The Guardian BBC News

More employers offer mental health support A study by jobs site indeed.co.uk shows an increase in the number of jobs offering mental health support. Nearly one in 200 jobs advertised in January provided support, compared to nearly one in every 5,000 jobs five years ago. A recent report from Deloitte suggested that poor mental health costs employers up to £45bn a year, up 16% since 2016. Deloitte also said that for every £1 spent on mental health support, firms make £5 by cutting absenteeism, presenteeism and employee turnover. The Times The Daily Telegraph Financial Times

ORGANISATIONAL TRUST

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LEGAL

Solicitor awarded compensation over age discrimination A solicitor who was refused a job at a law firm after making a joke about his Russian- speaking interviewer poisoning him with Novichok has won a £13,000 payout. Raymond Levy told senior lawyer Maria Udalova-Surkova: “I hope you are not going to poison me,” before she interviewed him for a position at Cheshire-based law firm McHale Legal Ltd, in the wake of the Salisbury poisoning in 2018. The firm, which had “a lot of Russian clients,” turned him down for the job. However, the lawyer accused McHale of age discrimination, pointing out that he had been the only applicant for the job, but had not got it. Employment judge Sharon Langridge found that, although Mr Levy's “remark about poisoning may not have endeared him to Ms Udalova-Surkova,” his age was 'the principle reason' he was turned down. She went on to order the firm to pay him £13,187.83 compensation, including £4,000 for 'injury to feelings.' Daily Mail The Times The Daily Telegraph

Woman wins landmark divorce case A woman has won a landmark divorce case after “sacrificing” a promising career as a solicitor so she could look after her children. The Cambridge graduate won compensation on top of an equal share of the family’s wealth after her divorce. The ruling could have implications for other divorce cases in which one partner has stepped back from their career for the good of the family, a lawyer said. A judge has decided the woman and her former husband, who were married for about a decade and have two children, should split assets of nearly £10m equally but that the woman should get another £400,000 in compensation for curtailing her legal career. The Guardian Daily Mirror The Daily Telegraph The Sun

Woman claims she was dismissed for avoiding lad culture Adrienne Liebenberg claims she was sacked from her £200,000 a year job at international packaging group DS Smith in December 2018 because she did not want to talk about football and go out drinking with "the lads." Ms Liebenberg - who was told her "leadership style" was "not working” - took the firm to an employment tribunal, arguing that she was sacked because of her gender. In a witness statement read out at the Central London Employment Tribunal, Ms Liebenberg said key business decisions were often taken over "boozy dinners" with a "gang" of senior male employees where the practice was "bonding, drink and football." Daily Express

Employers worry about what their staff say The Economist reports that organisations are increasingly worried about what their employees say online as the boundaries between people’s work and private lives become blurred. Some companies, like General Motors, have introduced conduct codes which police workers’ speech even when they are not at work. Noting that "jittery" employers respond to indiscretions by sacking the offender, The Economist makes the case for free speech in the workplace and says companies should be stopped from trying to silence their employees. The Economist The Economist

Barclays executives cleared of fraud charges Three former top Barclays executives have been cleared of fraud charges in a case that saw the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) allege that the bank gave Qatar secret fees that helped it to survive without a UK government bailout in 2008. Roger Jenkins, Tom Kalaris, and Richard Boath were found not guilty on all charges. Former Barclays chief executive John Varley was acquitted in June 2019. The ruling marks the end of a seven- and-a-half-year SFO investigation that led to the first criminal charges in Britain against senior financiers at a major bank over their conduct in the credit crisis-era. BBC News

STRATEGY

Bank slammed for pay hike amid staff cuts The Danish bankers’ union has criticised Danske Bank after the Copenhagen- headquartered lender's supervisory board sought to raise its own pay ahead of announcing hundreds of job cuts. Danske said it is laying off 230 employees as part of efforts to reduce costs. It’s “a paradox” that Danske is cutting jobs “almost at the same time as the board wants to grant itself significant pay increases,” Kent Petersen, chairman of the financial services union in Denmark, said. Karsten Breum, Danske’s head of human resources, said the bank is “taking a number of initiatives to adjust and simplify parts of our organisation,” adding that cutting jobs is “not easy,” but “a necessary part of our efforts to reduce costs in order to ensure that we remain competitive.” The bank initiated a hiring freeze last year and offered voluntary redundancies to 2,000 Danish employees in January. Bloomberg Reuters

CULTURE

Senior civil servants want bullying probe Top Whitehall civil servants have urged an independent investigation into bullying claims against Priti Patel, the home secretary, as it emerged that there had been at least one earlier formal complaint before the resignation on Saturday of Sir Philip Rutnam, permanent secretary at the Home Office. The head of the FDA union has now written to Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, about the lack of any available independent complaints process. In the letter, David Penman said that civil servants needed to be confident that complaints against “some of the most powerful individuals in the country” would be treated fairly and transparently. The Times

KPMG partner at centre of bullying row leaves firm Sanjay Thakkar, former head of deal advisory at KPMG, has left the firm by “mutual consent” over bullying allegations that prompted a review of conduct and culture. Financial Times

TECHNOLOGY

Randstad hopes blockchain can better match talent to needs Randstad, the world's largest human resources firm, is looking at how blockchain technology can be used to better match talent with organisations that are seeking the immediate fulfilment of roles. Research by the Netherlands headquartered company has found that distributed ledger technology (DLT) can securely preserve the personal data of talent while enabling the verification of academic and professional qualifications. Randstad global collaboration manager Frank van der Bijl said a proposed combination of the Cypherium blockchain and Google Cloud would offer a quicker and more efficient way to verify and match talent. “Google Cloud and G Suite already free us from some manual verification tasks, and we plan to use Cypherium’s blockchain to hand off even more,” he said. CoinDesk

OTHER

Gender-neutral toilets could be scrapped in public buildings At a time when increasing numbers of publicly accessible lavatories are being converted into gender-neutral facilities, UK government ministers have told officials to see whether changes should be made to building regulations so that they make it explicitly clear women must be allowed access to female-only toilets in public buildings. Peers complained last week that gender-neutral lavatories made women feel uncomfortable. The Department for Communities and Local Government will now write to the British Standards Committee to ask whether technical guidance on building regulations needs to be clarified. The Daily Telegraph

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