Employment law changes - The onboarding impact
One day you’re sipping a nice cold beer down by the river, the next it’s January 1st and you’re thinking about what this next year means for you and what you want to focus on. If your life is anything like mine then you’ll know what it’s like to blink and be another year on.
Now what’s sipping beer and planning next year got anything to do with onboarding? Well, I’m glad you asked. There’s some big changes coming to how businesses need to manage new colleagues. The UK Labour Government had their late bill (introduced 2024) receive royal assent in December 2025.
The final version of the act now states that unfair dismissal protection starts from 6 months, as well as completely removing the compensation cap. Although the official changes come into effect from January 1st 2027, this isn’t when colleagues will be protected from. It turns out that anyone recruited in the 6 months leading up to January are also protected. So if you’ve recruited anyone from July 1st 2026 up until now, they are protected by these changes.
Now if you’re still unsure how these changes could impact colleague onboarding, I’ll break this down for you now.
Onboarding is one of the most overlooked and under-delivered processes in 88% of UK businesses. One of the main reasons for this is that there's never been any real pressure to get it right. Pre the changes, if a new colleague started and they took too long to get up to speed or you decide for various reasons to let them go, you had 2 years to make this decision with zero risk to the business from a compliance point of view.
Going from 2 years down to 6 months before they are protected means that great onboarding can no longer be optional. Not just to protect your business, but the new colleague deserves the best possible start. Otherwise what reason do they have to hang around?
If for some reason you find yourself going to a tribunal that could have been avoided with better onboarding, I hope you’ve got some spare time. As of the time of writing this, there were over 70,000 open single claim cases with 14,000 of these coming in the last quarter. If that wasn’t enough, you’d be looking at a 3 year wait before you’d even be in the room. This is even before the expected influx of cases when January arrives.
Onboarding doesn’t have to be complicated and you definitely don’t need to spend £10,000 on a fancy software. You just need structure, the right people handling it and ways to track progress so that if you ever do find yourself in the court room, you’ve got everything you need to show how the colleague was onboarded, supported and trained.