Just as last year the leading topic in most of these articles is the pandemic and its impact on the labour market, including on how work is performed, employees’ health, their expectations and the challenges employers face.

One of these challenges is related to persuading as many employees as possible to be vaccinated and for everyone to feel safe as a result. In the first article you will find a number of ideas on how to encourage employees to be vaccinated in compliance with the law and without any risk of discrimination. 

In the next article we draw your attention to the threat posed by remote work to employees’ mental health and how employers can counter or mitigate its effects. Another leading topic of an article on compliance is occupational safety and health. In this article we explain why  implementing effective occupational safety and health procedures can substantially increase value of goodwill. 
Another challenge precipitated by the pandemic is controlling and monitoring remote work. We scrutinize the monitoring of business mail and the systems used by employees from the vantage point of personal data protection. 

The pandemic has led to multiple amendments in regulations pertaining to foreigners’ residence and work permits which our immigration experts describe.

In the “Paperless HR” article we share our experience in the digitization of HR processes (the need for which was triggered by the pandemic). We argue that it is doable and not as difficult as it may seem and that the more quickly we eradicate paper in HR processes, the more we will gain from going paperless. 

In the following article we share our observations concerning the functioning of labour courts during the pandemic, including the advantages and disadvantages of written witness testimonies, remote and hybrid court sessions and e-service. 
In our final text we describe the latest changes to remuneration in the financial sector and advise on how best to incorporate them in practice.

We invite you to read the second edition!
 

Katarzyna Dobkowska
Partner and Editor