Over the last couple of years, HR professionals have reported a seismic shift in employee relations expectations, and with more to come later this year with the Employment Rights Bill (ERB) – front line mangers are sitting in the driving seat of a positive employee relations culture. It’s not difficult to predict that we’ll see an increase in employee relations training in 2025, so let’s get down to the practicalities: what should you be including within your employee relations training this year? We’ve picked some of the crucial topics:

1. Dignity at Work and Sexual Harassment

Following the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act, which came into force in October 2024, employers now have a proactive duty to prevent sexual harassment. That means this topic moves from ‘nice to have’ to non-negotiable and so it’s top of the list. Often met with rolling eyes or echo’s of ‘PC gone mad’ – it’s more important than ever to ensure your workforce are championing a respectful culture.

We believe that by focussing your employee relations training to this area, HR professionals can spearhead a genuine empowerment and ownership on your whole workforce to call out harassment.

The essentials? Make sure employees know they will be listened to, and issues will be dealt with quickly. It’s a dangerous game if they feel the opposite.

Our dignity and respect collection of videos is jam packed with techniques that your managers can use to do things like:

  • Still have fun at work
  • How to effectively call out harassment
  • What to do when something makes them feel uncomfortable at work
  • How to ask if someone is okay (without backing them into a corner)

Lots of our clients use this suite of videos to bring to life their dignity and respect training programmes, giving managers the support they need following on from a face-to-face workshop.

2. Conflict Resolution

With the ERB reshaping the way employers need to handle employee relations effective conflict resolution skills are essential for maintaining a positive and proactive employee relations culture. Left to bubble, conflict lowers morale and damages long term relationships.

We’re a big believer in effective, informal conflict resolution as well as the importance of techniques such as active listening, empathy, and emotional intelligence.  An effective strategy in this area of your employee relations training strategy will go a long way to promote constructive communication and teamwork throughout your organisation.

3. Mental Health & Wellbeing

Another huge topic for 2025 training programmes: training on stress management techniques, resilience-building strategies, and promoting overall employee wellbeing can help employees cope with stress more effectively and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Our friends at Vista are doing some great work in this area, and we are working on building a mental health and wellbeing collection of videos soon, so watch this space.

4. Performance Management & Feedback

Conducting effective performance evaluations (at the right time) is a challenge our clients are always asking for support with. We’ve developed loads of customised performance videos recently to align to clients’ policies and performance management procedures, and the one thing we always find? Objectives can be a bit like vegetables, pushed to one side until review time of year. We help employers and managers to embrace their greens and shift their thinking to performance management being a year-round priority.

The benefits they see from this shift in thinking almost always boasts:

  • Clear performance expectations for everyone
  • Constructive feedback that employees can actually use (and won’t be offended by)
  • Improved productivity and morale, and employees reaching their full potential

5. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Training

This one won’t come as any surprise to, well, anyone. Nevertheless, it needs to be included in your employee relations training portfolio now, and for many years to come.

This training should cover topics such a Neurodiversity, unconscious bias and microaggressions and their impact. And don’t be afraid to be risky, this is a topic that needs to be dealt with head-on.

6. Legal Compliance & Employment Law

Last but definitely not least, training on employment law helps managers to understand their rights and responsibilities as a manager and mitigate legal risks for your organisation. Each of our collections of videos cover the employment law framework and the ACAS code of practice to achieve just that.

These topics are likely to remain forefront of HR professionals’ priorities when it comes to employee relations training for a few years to come yet. By investing in your workforce, we hope you’ll be able to reap the benefits of enhanced employee satisfaction, engagement, productivity and the pride of creating and influencing a respectful, inclusive and thriving people culture.

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