Staff Regulations

Lately I have been approached by employers who ask me to draft Staff Regulations. I am glad that more employers see the importance of such regulations, because the employment contract can never cover all important matters concerning the employer – employee relation.

What has to be arranged by an employer?

Employers expect that employees act in a certain way in the workplace and would like to prescribe certain situations and the actions to be taken in those situations (e.g. sickness, conflicts with colleagues, etc.) Staff Regulations are eminently suitable for this desire and allow employers to draft very concrete rules. When the rules are breached, an employer can prove more quickly that a dismissal (sometimes with immediate effect) could be justified.

Importance of Staff Regulations

In order to stress the importance of Staff Regulations I would like to quote two judgments.

Data transferral from the workplace

The first judgment dealt with a case of the district court of Gelderland in which an employer discovered that one of his employees had sent a database with records of candidates to his private email address. (The employer was in the labour brokerage business). The employer deemed this unacceptable, started a procedure and asked the judge to acknowledge that the employee was guilty of unlawful conduct. The defense of the employee was that he partially worked at home and therefore needed the database. This was still unacceptable for the employer. She was afraid that the list could be used by third parties or that this was already done and she felt robbed by her own employee.

No evidence of wrongful use

In this case the judge refused to grant the claim of the employer, because he deemed it not proven that the database was used outside of the daily activities of his company. If the employer has the opinion that such a database should not be send to private email addresses, he should draft rules on that. (e.g. in Staff Regulations) Because the employer did not draft such regulations, it could not be proven that the employee was guilty of unlawful conduct.

Staff Regulations present? – Claim awarded

A case before the district court of Amsterdam dealt with the situation in which the employer did draft clear Staff Regulations. This ultimately led to him winning the case.

Strict code of conduct

The case dealt with an employee of a hospital who was obligated to sign a code of conduct, in which it was stated that employees cannot use their job to arrange things for family or friends. There was a very strict regime in place, because the hospital deals with medical data of people. The employer could check who dealt with certain data as well, apart from a pop-up question which asked the employee whether there existed a legit reason (treatment or administrative purposes) to open a certain file. Only when that question was answered with yes it became possible to open the file.

Examine family file

The employee violated these rules when she opened the medical file of her drug addicted half-brother. He complained about this, which led to this case.

Clear rules

Especially because the employer drafted such elaborate rules and the pop-up was installed to raise extra awareness for the rules this case was won. The employee still violated those elaborate rules, which was enough reason to justify dismissal with immediate effect.

More information

These cases show the importance of drafting clear Staff Regulations. If you would like to know whether such Staff Regulations, a kind of protocol or code of conduct would be necessary for your company, please contact our attorney mr. Suzanne van Dijsseldonk.