Do your staff experience discrimination and diversity issues? How do you know?

Did you know that over the past year, the Acas helpline has dealt with nearly 50,000 calls on discrimination and diversity issues in the workplace? Do you know where discrimination is most likely to arise in the workplace? Are your staff confident in dealing with allegations of discrimination? Are you aware of new free guides from Acas to help employers and managers get to grips with these issues?

In August 2015, Acas published three new free guides that offer a wide range of practical advice in the workplace:

• Equality and discrimination: understand the basics;
• Prevent discrimination: support equality; and
• Discrimination: what to do if it happens.

The ‘understanding basics’ guide covers the fundamentals of what employers, and employees and their representatives need to know to comply with equality law. The guide does what it says on the tin – it is quite basic - it does not, for example, explain the public sector equality duty or the two specific duties. But anyone new to the field of E&D would find it useful

The ‘prevent discrimination support equality’ guide explains where discrimination is most likely to arise in the workplace and how to stop it happening. It covers areas such as Advertising jobs, recruitment, Promoting existing employees, Pay and other terms and conditions, Equal pay, Training, Dismissal, Religious practice, Dress code, Unacceptable behaviour, Redundancy, Different types of leave for parents and Flexible working.

It also has a useful short briefing on equality impact assessments

‘Discrimination, what to do if it happens’ guide explains how an employee should raise a complaint of discrimination and how an employer should handle it.

You can download the guides here