For candidates
The Residence Code
How the staff we place conduct themselves in the households where they work. Every member of staff reads and signs it before a first placement.
This Code describes how the staff Larchcombe places conduct themselves in the private residences where they work, and what the households we act for may expect of them. It was first written in 2011 because we found ourselves explaining the same things to every new member of staff, and would rather explain them once, carefully, in writing.
The Code is not a contract. Your employment agreement, your confidentiality agreement and the law govern your employment, and nothing in this Code takes away anything they give you. Where a household has rules of its own, the house manager will tell you, and they apply alongside the Code.
1. Discretion
1.1 What you see, hear and learn in a household stays in the household. You do not discuss the family, their guests, their affairs or their house with anyone outside it, including your own family and friends, other staff in other households, and other staff we have placed.
1.2 Within the household, you discuss the family only as your work requires, and only with the people your work requires you to discuss it with.
1.3 You do not mention the household, its address or its members on social media, in any form, at any time, including after your placement ends. You do not say on social media or anywhere else that you work in private service in a way that would allow a reader to identify the household.
2. The confidentiality agreement
2.1 You will sign a confidentiality agreement with the household before your placement begins. Its term is twenty years from the end of the placement. Please read it, ask us about anything you do not understand, and keep your copy.
2.2 Nothing in the agreement or in this Code prevents you from speaking to a lawyer, a doctor, the police or a court, or from making any report or complaint the law allows, about the household, about us or about anything else.
3. Presentation
3.1 You dress as the household asks: a uniform where one is provided, and otherwise plain, clean and well-kept clothes in dark colors. Hair is neat and tied back where your work requires it. Perfume and cologne are not worn on duty.
3.2 Jewelry is kept to a wedding ring, small earrings and a wristwatch. If you wear anything else for a reason that matters to you, tell the house manager, who will usually agree.
4. Punctuality and the household’s day
4.1 You arrive before your hours begin, ready to work when they do. If you will be late, you tell the house manager before you are.
4.2 The household’s day sets the pace of yours. You are never seen to hurry, and you are never seen to have nothing to do.
5. Hours, living in, and calls at night
5.1 Your hours of work, your hours of rest and your days off are set out in your employment agreement. Outside your hours of work you are free.
5.2 If you live in, you may be called on outside your hours of work in an emergency: a child who is ill, an alarm, a guest arriving at an hour nobody expected. Such calls should be rare. When they happen you record them in the Register, with the time they began and ended and the reason, and you are paid for them as your agreement provides. If they are not rare, tell us.
5.3 Your days off are your own. If you live in, you may spend them in the residence or away from it, as you choose, and you tell the house manager which.
6. Telephones and personal devices
6.1 Personal telephones are not used in the family’s presence or in the family’s rooms.
6.2 Where the household requires it, you hand your personal telephone and any other personal device to the house manager at the start of your hours of work, and collect it at the end. The house manager keeps them securely and does not open them.
6.3 Where telephones are held, the house manager gives your family a number at which you can always be reached while you are on duty, and brings you any call on it at once.
7. The Register
7.1 You will be given a Register number and a first passphrase with your placement letter. Please change the passphrase the first time you sign in.
7.2 The house manager holds a sealed copy of the first passphrase of each member of staff in the household, so that a member of staff who has forgotten theirs out of office hours may sign in. Once you have changed your passphrase, the sealed copy no longer works.
7.3 You record in the Register any hours worked outside your agreed hours, and acknowledge each edition of this Code there.
8. Photographs, recordings and assistants
8.1 You do not take photographs, video or sound recordings in the residence or its grounds, of anything, for any purpose, unless the household asks you to as part of your work.
8.2 You do not use voice assistants, recording or transcription apps, or note-taking software of any kind in the course of your work in a residence. Notes you need for your work are kept in the household’s day book or on the household’s own systems.
9. Visitors and staff quarters
9.1 Your own visitors come to the residence only by arrangement with the house manager, and are received in your own quarters or wherever the house manager suggests. They do not stay overnight unless the household agrees.
9.2 Staff quarters are yours. Nobody enters them without your agreement except in an emergency, and the house manager tells you afterwards if anyone has.
10. Keys, codes and the house’s systems
10.1 Keys, alarm codes, gate codes and passwords to the household’s systems are given to you by the house manager, or the head of security where there is one, and are not shared, written down outside the household’s own records, or taken from the property.
10.2 If you lose a key or think a code is known to someone who should not know it, you tell the house manager at once, whatever the hour.
11. Leaving the property; leaving a placement
11.1 During your hours of work you do not leave the property without the house manager’s knowledge.
11.2 If you wish to leave your placement, you give the notice your agreement provides, and you tell us before you tell the household, so that we can help both of you. Please do not leave without notice. If you ever feel you must, call us first, at any hour, and tell us where you are.
12. Gifts, guests and the family’s friends
12.1 You may accept the ordinary gifts a household gives its staff at the holidays and on occasions. You do not accept gifts of money from guests, or gifts of any value from anyone without telling the house manager.
12.2 You do not seek employment, favors or introductions from the household’s guests or friends. If one of them offers you a position, you tell us.
13. Concerns
13.1 If anything in your placement worries you, about your own treatment, about someone else’s, or about anything you have been asked to do, tell your consultant or call the duty line. We would always rather be told than find out.
13.2 Nothing in this Code prevents you from raising a concern with anyone else, including the authorities.
Acknowledgement
I have read the fifth edition of the Residence Code, and I understand that it describes how staff placed by Larchcombe conduct themselves in a private residence.
Staff acknowledge each edition in the Register, or on paper at their first Residence Code session.