Employing Good Sense
Maintaining comprehensive and up-to-date employee records is not only good business practice but can also be vital should a dispute end up in court.
Lawyers
In the past year, most organisations in Dubai have seen a significant amount of restructuring. The economic climate has meant that many employers have reviewed their existing organisational structure and sought to reduce and, wherever possible, limit their outgoings. As a result, some employees may have modified employment contracts (where the hours of work per week are reduced and so is the remuneration). Other employers have made redundancies and looked at phasing out certain positions.
The endeavour of every human resource professional is to try to ensure that the terms and conditions in employment contracts are consistent and uniform in respect of all the employees in an organisation, at least for employees of each grade. However, as the UAE is a melting pot of expatriate employees from various jurisdictions, this may result in multiple contracts with different terms. More often than not there are exceptions to the norms adopted, and once the cast is broken, things start to spin out of control.
This article was first published in The Brief, January 2010.
