ERA 2025 exposes manager capability gaps. Do you have the data to find yours?
- Sonia Moore
- May 15
- 2 min read
The Employment Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent in December 2025. The first wave of changes landed in April 2026. And almost every provision shares the same characteristic: the moment it becomes a live risk for your organisation is a manager-employee conversation.
That makes manager capability a compliance question, not just a development one.
The provisions that matter most
The changes which carry the most immediate financial and reputational weight are:
• From 6 April 2026, day-one Statutory Sick Pay removes the qualifying period entirely. Managers are handling return-to-work conversations from an employee's first shift, with no margin for inconsistency.
• Sexual harassment now triggers whistleblowing protection, also from April. A manager who mishandles a harassment report doesn't just face the underlying claim. They create automatic unfair dismissal exposure, with uncapped compensation.
• The collective redundancy protective award has doubled, from 90 to 180 days' uncapped pay per employee. And from January 2027, the unfair dismissal cap disappears entirely: tribunals will assess compensation based on actual financial loss, with no ceiling.
None of this requires a legal update. It requires managers who know what to do when the moment arrives.
The case HR can now make
Your decision makers are already receiving legal briefings. What they don't have is a measured view of whether their own managers will handle these situations correctly.
CMI and YouGov found that 82% of managers enter management with no formal training (Better Management Report, 2023). That capability gap has always existed. ERA 2025 has just attached a price tag to it.
One organisation using Sytuate discovered this firsthand. Data across their management cohort revealed consistently low first-try success rates in three areas: setting individuals up for success, dealing with conflict, and adapting communication styles. Not one struggling manager, all considered good performers, yet there was a cohort-level pattern, invisible until the data surfaced it. Their VP described it as actionable data they could take to the Board.
That's the shift. Not arguing for training in principle, as boards have heard that before. But presenting a baseline of manager capability against the specific situations ERA 2025 creates, with your own organisation's gaps identified and risk quantified.
Development then follows in priority order, starting where exposure is highest: Preventing Harassment, Managing Absence, Managing Performance. Situational-based, mobile-first, five minutes a day, reinforced in the moments that actually matter, not delivered once and forgotten.
What to do this quarter
Map the manager-facing situations ERA 2025 has changed in your organisation. Baseline capability across your cohort. Present the gap, the risk, and the remediation plan using your own data.
That's where HR influence shifts. And the data to make it happen is already within reach. For fractional and consultant HR practitioners, these tools are equally available to bring into client engagements.
About the author
Sonia Moore is the founder of Sytuate, a situational manager development platform that gives HR the data and tools to build the case for manager investment, and then deliver it at scale. Sytuate's 45-day diagnostic baselines manager capability, surfaces the highest-risk gaps first, and deploys structured development pathways to close them.
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