In today’s competitive employment market, attracting the best candidates and ensuring the retention and motivation of your employees is key to the ongoing success of your business. Having spent time and money to obtain the best talent, the last thing you want is to lose your staff because they don’t feel valued.
Continue reading “Implementing a reward and recognition scheme”
Lee Ridley has cerebral palsy, which affects his ability to speak. The comedian uses a voice synthesiser to deliver his act and gained £250,000 in prize money and the opportunity to perform at the Royal Variety Performance by winning Britain’s Got Talent.
When Lost Voice Guy won I jumped for joy!
Well, I have a personal interest in seeing people with health challenges succeed. This stems from my own experiences from being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the age of 17 and in particular the way I was treated when suffering a relapse aged 25.
Continue reading “When Lost Voice Guy won Britain’s Got Talent I jumped for joy!”
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that comes into force on 25th May 2018 has been keeping us really busy writing and updating data protection policies.
Companies have been reviewing their employee handbook to ensure that their data protection policy is up to date, or in some cases plugging the gap where there wasn’t an existing policy.
A data protection policy needs to be tailored to each business’s circumstance, but broadly speaking the policy should cover:
Employment laws in the UK are complex in nature, but reviews of the modern day working practices, have been put in place to protect both employer and employee alike.
The Government commissioned Matthew Taylor to conduct an independent review of modern working practices. The Taylor Review was published in June 2017. Speaking at an HR conference he stated, “Small businesses don’t end up at tribunal because they’re evil people. They end up there because they don’t have any HR to guide them through complex employment law”.
Following the highs of Christmas and New Year and the exhaustion brought on from the aftermath of partying and overindulging with too many chocolates, it’s understandable that returning to work in January can be a struggle for many.
So, it’s no surprise that the most depressing day of the year, known as Blue Monday, falls in January.
Holiday companies see a peak in enquiries and bookings, with people wanting to have a break firmly in the diary to look forward.
The knock-on effect is that business owners find themselves inundated with holiday requests, especially as employees jockey to get their days off booked to avoid clashing with their colleagues.
January is a good time to review and that includes your company policies. And since we’re talking about holidays, let’s review your annual policy (assuming that you have one!).
We like this humorous (with a touch of reality) Christmas survival guide and would like to thank the Brighton School of Business Management for encouraging us to share this.
Dealing with poor performance needn’t be a situation for managers to shy away from. The trick is to deal with the issues as soon as there’s a deviance from accepted performance.
If poor performance is allowed to continue it can become much more difficult to resolve.
So, our advice is to nip poor performance in the bud.
I’ve just done the maths and realise why we’re getting so many clients asking us for support on all things maternity. The babies are arriving; Valentine’s Day was clearly a very romantic one! 
This means we’ve been drafting rather a lot of Maternity Policies recently.
Here is a summary of elements that should be included in your Maternity Policy.
Ryanair has a lot of angry customers to placate, due to a series of cancelled flights that are reported to affect 400,000 passengers. We’re not PR specialists so we won’t comment on how this has been handled, but we are HR experts so we do have an opinion on the crux of the matter.
The problem as Ryanair admits “we messed up in the planning of pilot holidays”.¹
Ryanair’s business is seasonal. As we understand it, pilots are encouraged to take a block of 4 weeks annual leave between September and March, out of peak season, with the remainder on an ad-hoc basis. We assume this should leave enough pilots available through the busy periods from Easter and through the summer.
However, there are a couple of further complications: 1) the number of hours pilots can work in a given period and 2) a new regulation that they have to comply with (Irish Aviation Authority told the airline that, by the end of 2017, they must adopt the rules set by European regulators and use a calendar year).
Whilst we’re certainly not providing an excuse for the mess Ryanair find themselves in, the point is, annual leave needs to be managed properly.
The law has changed. All employers must provide a workplace pension – and contribute to it.
Mandatory Auto Enrolment commenced in 2012 for companies with over 250 employees and finally, in April 2017, this applied to companies with less than 30 employees or those without PAYE schemes. Now all employers have to have a qualifying pension scheme in place, whether their employees are eligible or not.
As a business owner and depending on your view Auto Enrolment is either a pain that you can do without or an opportunity to be embraced.
From an HR perspective, we see this as a great employee engagement opportunity.
Whilst the State Pension age set out by the government has been increased, (see https://www.gov.uk/state-pension-age for the latest information) so too has life expectancy, with many people now expecting to have over 20+ years enjoying their hard-earned retirement, or will they?
Continue reading “Workplace Pensions – Headache or Opportunity?”
