Agency Bulletin
The people issues that matter to UK business owners, cut through. No noise. No jargon.
A quieter week following the advent of the ERA and the FWA . SO, we have a chance to explore some other, at least, equally important stuff.
This week Gallup published its annual State of the Global Workplace report and the numbers are striking and point to just what a state the workplace is in. Nearly half of employees reported as stressed. Only one in ten engaged. And the people feeling it the hardest? The managers.
Elsewhere, the hiring market is showing signs of life but only in the right places, and only for businesses that are hiring well rather than just hiring fast.
Two stories this week. Both connected by the same underlying question: do you know how your people are actually doing?
Nearly Half of UK Employees Are Stressed. Most of Their Managers Are Unaware.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, published this week and based on surveys across 160 countries, found that 46% of UK employees experienced stress "a lot" the previous day. That's higher than the European average of 39% and the global average of 40%, and the highest level recorded since Gallup started measuring UK workplace stress in 2010.
Those first two numbers together tell a story. Nearly half your workforce is stressed. Only ten percent are genuinely engaged. The gap in between (the people who are present but disconnected) is where productivity drops, retention risk builds, and early burnout takes hold.
Gallup's deeper analysis found that the decline in engagement since 2022 is primarily driven by a steeper fall among managers specifically. Manager engagement has dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. And because managers account for around 70% of team engagement variance, their disengagement cascades downward through their teams.
Leaders and managers also reported higher levels of stress, anger, sadness and loneliness than individual contributors. Gallup found that leadership roles now offer little upside in terms of positive emotions. These are not people who are thriving in their roles. They are people absorbing pressure from above and below, with less support than the job now requires.
Clearly this is a phenomenon taking place inside many organisations. Whilst all employees are struggling, it's the managers who are dealing with this in their teams, whilst they themselves struggle, often less demonstrably. The people in the middle, carrying increasing operational load, fielding more HR complexity, managing more difficult conversations, with less time, less support and less clarity about what's expected of them.
Nearly one in three UK employers admits their managers lack the time, training or resources to meaningfully support staff mental health. Over one in three workers does not feel comfortable discussing stress with their manager — up three percentage points from last year.
If managers aren't equipped to spot early signs of stress in their teams — and aren't being supported themselves — the problem compounds. The cost shows up later in sickness absence, attrition and performance. By then it's expensive to fix.
The Hiring Market Is Thawing — But Only for the Right Roles
REC chief executive Neil Carberry noted this week that with the cost shocks of the 2024 Budget having worked through the system, firms began to thaw out long-frozen growth plans. The recovery, where it exists, is uneven.
CIPD senior labour market economist James Cockett has been consistent in his view that demand for tech, digital and high-skilled roles will remain highly selective, while demand for lower-skilled and entry-level roles faces a longer recovery. Unemployment is still forecast to peak toward the middle of the year before a gradual improvement in the second half.
What that means practically: the market is bifurcated. If you're hiring for specialist, technical or senior roles, you're still competing hard for a small pool — and you need to move decisively when you find the right person. If you're hiring for operational, admin or generalist roles, you're in a stronger position than you've been for years, with more candidates and more time to be selective.
The risk in both cases is hiring quickly at the expense of hiring well. Two in five employers now expect to hire fewer permanent workers as a result of the Employment Rights Act reforms, which means the hires you do make carry more weight, not less. A bad hire in a tighter headcount is proportionally more damaging. And from July, a bad hire also comes with faster unfair dismissal exposure.
The businesses managing this well are treating hiring as a process that starts before the job goes live — with a clear brief, a structured interview approach, a realistic probation plan, and a manager who knows what good looks like in the role before they meet the first candidate. That's not complicated. It's just deliberate.
Employer brand matters more in this market than many SMEs realise. When candidate volume is high but quality is uneven, the businesses that attract the right people, rather than just the most people, are the ones with a clear story about who they are and why someone would want to work there. That story doesn't need a big budget. It needs to be honest and consistent.
The Gallup data this week is the most important thing we've covered in a while — not because the numbers are surprising, but because they confirm what most business owners sense but rarely measure. Their people are stressed. Their managers are under pressure. Engagement is low. And the cost of all three is real, even when it doesn't show up as a line on the P&L.
The good news is that Gallup's own research is equally clear on what moves the dial: manager capability. Organisations where managers are equipped, supported and genuinely engaged see team engagement nearly four times higher than the average. That's causation, not coincidence.
Practical sessions covering difficult conversations, absence, performance, family leave and redundancy process. Plain English, built around your business.
Access to the latest AI-powered wellbeing tools to help you and your managers spot the early signs before they become a problem.
Not sure where to start? A fast, practical picture of where you stand following the ERA changes — what needs attention and what can wait.
Get in touch. We'll tell you honestly what you need.
Agency Bulletin
The people issues that matter to UK business owners, cut through. No noise. No jargon.
Last week the law changed. This week, things got complicated.
The Employment Rights Act changes bedded in on Monday. The Fair Work Agency opened its doors on Tuesday. And on the same day, tens of thousands of resident doctors walked out across NHS England — in the longest strike of a three-year pay dispute, timed to hit hardest over the Easter holidays.
The week has a theme: what happens when the people doing critical work feel their pay doesn't reflect it. That's a question that runs well beyond the NHS. It's one every business owner should be reflecting on.
Here's what you need to know.
The NHS Doctors' Strike: What It Means for Your Business
Resident doctors across England began a six-day walkout on 7 April, rejecting a 3.5% government pay offer after talks collapsed over what the BMA said was a failure to address years of real-terms pay erosion. The BMA argues that doctors' pay remains 20% below 2008 levels in real terms and has called for a 26% increase to restore it.
NHS England set a target of maintaining 95% of scheduled services during the strike, redeploying senior doctors and non-striking staff to cover the gaps. The timing — across Easter, when staffing was already stretched — compounded the pressure. NHS chief Jim Mackey described it as deliberately calculated to cause maximum disruption.
Why does this matter if your business has nothing to do with healthcare? Two reasons.
First, practical: if any of your employees or their families need non-urgent NHS treatment this week, expect delays. That feeds into sickness absence, planned leave disruption and background stress levels that are easy to underestimate.
Second, and more importantly: this dispute is a vivid illustration of what happens when pay drift goes unaddressed for long enough. The running cost of NHS strike action since 2023 has now exceeded £3 billion. Four years. A workforce that felt consistently undervalued. No credible plan for resolution on either side. None of that is inevitable — it's the compounded cost of a people problem that was never treated as a commercial priority.
Pay transparency, clear progression frameworks, and honest conversations about what a business can offer — these aren't soft extras. They're what stops a quiet grievance becoming a structural problem.
The ERA Is Live. Now the Manager Conversations Begin.
The compliance work is done — or it should be. Contracts updated, payroll adjusted, policies rewritten. But the Employment Rights Act 2025 doesn't live in your documents. It lives in the conversations your managers are having every day.
A new starter requests paternity leave on their third day. An employee calls in sick for the first time and asks about SSP. A manager waves it away with "you don't qualify yet." That last response is now legally wrong — and the liability rests with you, not the manager.
The gap between what your documents say and what your managers do is where most employment tribunal claims are born. Not from deliberate wrongdoing. From an uninformed line manager making a call that felt reasonable in the moment, in a situation the law has just changed.
The areas to cover are straightforward: day-one SSP and how to record it properly. Paternity and parental leave requests from new starters — what employees are entitled to and what you can and can't ask. Absence management in a world where every absence from day one is a potential SSP trigger. And redundancy — because the doubling of the protective award means any restructuring conversation now carries significantly higher stakes if the process isn't followed correctly.
The July Hiring Cliff. Thirteen Weeks and Counting.
We've mentioned this before, but the window is closing and most businesses still haven't acted. Anyone employed from 1 July 2026 onwards will have the right to claim unfair dismissal after just six months of service, when the qualifying period reduces from two years to six months on 1 January 2027.
That's thirteen weeks away.
The businesses that are prepared are redesigning their probation processes now — not as a legal exercise, but as a practical management tool. Clear expectations set on day one. Regular documented check-ins. Written feedback that evidences the conversation, not just the conclusion. A six-month process that gives you a defensible record if things don't work out.
The businesses that aren't will find themselves in January 2027 with new hires who have full unfair dismissal protection, a probation process that exists on paper but not in practice, and managers who have no idea the clock has changed.
The jobs market is softer right now. Candidate supply is high, particularly for operational and generalist roles. The temptation to hire quickly and figure it out later is understandable. But the cost of a bad hire — now compounded by the January change — is higher than it's ever been. Getting the hire right and managing the first six months well are the same problem.
The Employment Rights Act has landed. The Fair Work Agency is open. And the NHS dispute is a reminder — expensive and ongoing — of what happens when the relationship between an employer and its people quietly deteriorates over years without anyone addressing it directly.
The businesses in the strongest position right now aren't the ones who spent last month in a compliance panic. They're the ones who've always treated their people function as a commercial priority — clear pay structures, honest conversations, and managers who are equipped to handle difficult situations before they become costly ones.
That posture doesn't require a large HR team. It requires intention — and sometimes a little outside support.
A fast, practical picture of where you stand — what's in order, what needs attention, and what can wait. No alarm, no jargon. Just a clear view.
Practical sessions covering the ERA changes and the situations your line managers are most likely to face — absence, family leave, performance, redundancy. Built around your business.
If either is useful, get in touch. We'll tell you honestly what you need.
Agency Bulletin
The people issues that matter to UK business owners, cut through. No noise. No jargon.
UK employment law changed this week. Not in a distant, theoretical way — in a practical, affects-your-payroll-and-your-contracts way.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 has moved from legislation to reality, and the enforcement body that backs it up is now open. The good news is that most of what's changed is straightforward to get right. The Fair Work Agency isn't going to be at your door this week. Enforcement builds over time, and it focuses first on the most obvious failures — unpaid minimum wage, miscalculated holiday pay, absent records. Businesses that act methodically over the coming weeks will be fine.
What this week's bulletin covers: what's actually changed, what it means in practice, and where to focus first.
Every Employee Now Qualifies for Sick Pay From Day One
Statutory Sick Pay is now payable from the first day of illness. The three-day waiting period has gone. The lower earnings limit — which previously excluded lower-paid and part-time workers — has been removed entirely.
SSP is now calculated at 80% of average weekly earnings or the flat rate of £123.25 per week, whichever is lower. Every employee on your payroll, regardless of their hours or pay, qualifies from day one of any absence.
If you have lean teams in sectors with higher absence rates — hospitality, retail, care, logistics — the financial impact is worth modelling now. Short absences that previously cost you nothing in SSP will now trigger a payment from the first day.
Paternity Leave Is Now a Right From the First Day of Employment
The 26-week qualifying period for paternity leave is gone. So is the one-year qualifying period for unpaid parental leave. Both are now day-one rights — meaning a new starter can request them immediately.
It's worth being clear on what has and hasn't changed: paternity leave is now a day-one right, but statutory paternity pay still requires 26 weeks' continuous service. The leave entitlement and the pay entitlement operate differently.
Most employment contracts still reference the old qualifying periods. If yours do, they are now non-compliant. This applies to contracts, staff handbooks, onboarding documentation and any family leave policy you operate.
The Cost of Getting Redundancy Consultation Wrong Has Doubled
The maximum protective award for failing to properly consult on collective redundancies has increased from 90 days' gross pay to 180 days' gross pay per affected employee. This applies to dismissals taking effect from 6 April 2026.
To be clear: the consultation process itself hasn't changed. What's changed is the financial consequence of not following it. Collective redundancy rules are triggered when you propose 20 or more redundancies at one establishment within 90 days — and the obligation to consult is substantial.
Employees don't need two years' service to claim a protective award. That makes this a risk even for relatively new workforce changes. If restructuring is anywhere on your 2026 agenda, the doubling of this penalty is material.
Keeping Holiday Pay Records Is Now a Legal Requirement
This is the change that's had the least coverage — and it matters. From 6 April 2026, all employers must keep adequate records of statutory annual leave and holiday pay. The duty applies to every employer, every worker type, and every sector.
Records must cover ordinary and additional annual leave, any leave carried forward, holiday pay calculations, and payments made in lieu of leave. They must be kept for six years. There's no prescribed format — but they must be clear, accurate and retrievable.
Non-compliance is a criminal offence, carrying potentially unlimited fines. And there's a practical risk beyond the legal one: holiday pay has been a growing source of tribunal claims for years. Without adequate records, you have no defence.
The Fair Work Agency Is Open. It Doesn't Need a Complaint to Investigate You.
The Fair Work Agency launched on 7 April 2026. It brings together enforcement of National Minimum Wage, Statutory Sick Pay, holiday pay and agency worker protections under a single body with significantly enhanced powers.
The critical difference from what came before: the Fair Work Agency can investigate proactively, without an employee complaint. It can enter premises, inspect records, investigate breaches going back up to six years, and issue penalties of up to 200% of underpayments — capped at £20,000 per worker. It can also bring tribunal claims on behalf of workers and name non-compliant employers publicly.
That said, enforcement builds gradually. The Agency's early focus will be on clear-cut failures: NMW underpayments, missing holiday records, miscalculated holiday pay. Businesses making good-faith progress on compliance are not its primary target. But businesses with obvious gaps should not assume they're invisible.
Anyone You Hire From July Gets Unfair Dismissal Rights After 6 Months
This one isn't live yet — but the clock is already running. The reduction in the unfair dismissal qualifying period from two years to six months takes effect on 1 January 2027. Anyone employed from 1 July 2026 onwards will reach that threshold on New Year's Day.
This changes how you hire, how you onboard, and how you run probation. The informal "we'll see how it goes" approach to the first year of employment stops working in July. From then, every new hire needs a documented probation process — clear expectations, regular check-ins, evidenced feedback — completed within six months.
The businesses quietly preparing for this now are redesigning their probation frameworks, updating offer letters and onboarding, and training line managers to have early, constructive conversations.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 is now law. That's not a reason to panic — it's a reason to get organised.
The businesses that will handle this well aren't the ones who scrambled before a deadline. They're the ones who treat it calmly and methodically: updated documents, briefed managers, payroll that reflects the new reality. Most of what needs doing is genuinely straightforward once you know what you're looking at.
The Fair Work Agency is proactive, but it's also new. Its early focus will be on the most clear-cut failures — NMW underpayments, missing holiday records, uncorrected SSP calculations. If you're broadly compliant and making good-faith progress on the rest, you're in a reasonable position.
If you're not sure where you stand, that's exactly the conversation we're built for. A fast, honest audit — what needs doing, what doesn't, what can wait. No alarm, no jargon. Just a clear picture.