Storms communication 'about keeping people safe'

Communication between employers and employees during extreme weather is a key factor to ensuring safety, according to a human resources (HR) expert.

Last week, Guernsey's government asked people to stay home while the worst of Storm Austen passed over the Channel Islands, but some people claimed they were told to come to work despite warnings.

Lorna Pestana, from Law at Work, said employers had a duty of care for their workers' health and safety.

Channel Islands emergency planning officer Kevin Murphy said the islands' individual States worked with businesses when planning responses to storms.

Pestana said an employers' duty of care would including taking government advice and "it's all about keeping your employees safe".

She said: "Generally, you would expect your employees to make the call themselves, so, depending where they live - if they were within walking distance of their office - you'd probably be able to get them to come into the office and as long as it was safe to do so.

"But, of course, if they're having to drive from the other side of the island and there's trees down and the wind is still quite bad... employers really do have to take account of those types of conditions."

However, she said that there was no legal requirement for companies to pay workers who did not work during stay-at-home advice.

She said: "Employers would normally have their own policies and procedures to deal with these situations.

"Under legislation, there is no obligation to be paid if you would have a policy that states that employees can either take it as holiday or they could take it as time owed.

"They could make the time up in the future or they would have to take it unpaid because there's certainly no legal obligation to be paid."

Murphy said the emergency planning team tailored advice to each storm.

He said: "We look at each storm as an individual storm and we tailor the communications message we put out on that storm that we've got on that specific forecast, and on the impact it's going to have, so each storm is very different.

"There is generic advice on what to do in a storm; we're really grateful that it's out there. But we try to make sure that when these things happen people are aware of the specific risks of that particular storm."

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