“Incredibly complicated” tax changes to salary sacrifice schemes due next year
Employers who offer workers childcare vouchers and the like will face some complicated tax calculations from the start of next year when new VAT rules on salary sacrifice schemes come into force. From January 1 2012, companies will have to pay VAT on non-cash goods and services provided to employees in exchange for some of […]
Employers failing to make staff contingency plans due to Olympics antipathy
As youth unemployment passed the one million mark for the first time, just over a quarter of UK employers said the money being funnelled into the London Olympics would be better spent on training to help young people get jobs. A total three in five UK also wished that the money had been invested in […]
New investment for 10,000 more volunteer business mentors
The Coalition Government is investing £1.2 million in order to recruit and train 10,000 new mentors in a bid to boost support for entrepreneurs and stimulate the economy. The money will be used to support the Small Firms Enterprise Development Initiative‘s new ‘Get Mentoring’ scheme for volunteers from small-to-medium businesses who may not otherwise be […]
Legal Insight: Qantas of solace – Would Oz’s dispute resolution model work in the UK?
Qantas’ unprecedented decision to ground its entire fleet of aeroplanes during a recent industrial dispute has provoked huge debate across both the country and the world. The clash, the response of the Australian national airline’s management to it and the subsequent decision of national workplace relations tribunal, Fair Work Australia, to order an end to […]
Update: UK worker loses race discrimination claim against Chinese telco
A UK worker has lost his case against a Chinese telecoms company that he sued for race discrimination after claiming that 49 workers in Basingstoke were axed and replaced with Chinese nationals. Judeson Peter, a customer support engineer who was paid £48,000 per annum by Huawei Technologies, accused the firm of making him redundant because […]
Blog: A new role for HR?
Every year we bring together key thinkers in the HR Profession for the Ochre House HR Directors Annual Symposium and this year, they certainly didn’t fail to impress. The subject for the day was Redefining Business Value Through a Talent Centric Approach and it wasn’t long before the room was buzzing with conversation. One […]
Employers asked to bid for chunk of £250m apprenticeship pot
In a bid to try and tackle soaring youth unemployment, the Coalition Government is asking employers to bid for a chunk of a £250 million pot next year to take on new apprentices. The news came only weeks after the leak of a document from Business Secretary Vince Cable’s department revealing that official apprenticeship figures […]
Communication: the secret to recruitment success
Does your hiring process actually lose you candidates? How do you manage something that is effectively intangible and immeasurable? From an executive recruitment consultant’s perspective, how organisations deal with those quiet times while waiting for an internal decision or response about a prospective hire can be just as important to the relationship as how the […]
ADT awarded for ‘inspirational’ staff engagement initiatives
ADT Fire & Security has been received an ‘Inspiration in HR’ award for its attempts to boost staff engagement over the last 18 months. The firm, which is owned by US multinational Tyco and sells burglar alarms, security systems and fire detection systems, employs 3,843 personnel across the UK, who were experiencing morale issues. This […]
CEO Video Insight: NetApp UK’s Dave Allen on staff engagement
At the end of October, data storage firm NetApp was named number three in Fortune magazine’s list of top 25 multinational companies to work at. The firm, which employs 500 people in the UK and Ireland, is headed by managing director Dave Allen. He speaks to us here about how the organisation has tried to […]
Attrition rates for contact centre staff leap
Attrition rates for contact centre agents are on the up again after three years of decline, but are forecast to keep on rising into the foreseeable future. According to contact centre industry analysts, ContactBabel, the mean annual turnover rate for UK call centre staff increased to 21% in 2011 from a six-year low of 16% […]
Blog: How to turn volunteering into team-building
My daughter decided to volunteer through a program at her job. Each employee has the opportunity to volunteer their services and receive a day off in return. She was up early on a Saturday morning and headed into New York City to work at a soup kitchen in the Bowery. To her surprise, basically […]
Unemployment at 17-year high – and worsening
The UK is suffering a “major jobs and pay crunch” after unemployment hit 2.6 million, a figure not matched in 17 years and higher than consensus forecasts for 2011 as a whole. According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of people out of work in the three months to September rose by 129,000, […]
Talent Spot: Gemma Aird, head of HR at Anesco
When Gemma Aird took on the top HR role at Anesco six months ago, she didn’t just have to revamp the energy efficiency services firm’s HR processes. She had to create them from scratch. This is because, although Anesco is a new company that was set up only a year ago, it is already expanding […]
Redknapp to stand trial in January for tax evasion
Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp will stand trial in January for allegedly evading tax on £180,000 of his earnings. Redknapp is accused of two counts of cheating the public purse between 2002 and 2007 when he was at Portsmouth Football Club. He will stand trial alongside former Portsmouth chairman Milan Mandaric, both of whom […]
Will the ‘gig economy’ be the death of HR?
As freelancing, interim management and the ‘gig economy’ continue to grow, the question becomes, are we looking at the impending death of the traditional HR function? In a recent CBI report entitled ‘Mapping the Route to Growth’, the employer’s lobby group noted a recent increase in the number of temporary and self-employed workers making up […]
Blog: Five truths about millennials in the workplace
Recognise This! – All people, of every generation, are individuals. Stereotyping behaviours based on birth date only serves to ignore true issues in the workplace. The generational divide, in one form or another, kept hitting my screen time and again in the last week or two. A few that struck me the most: […]
Legal Insight: Key learnings from AWR, six weeks on
It was with great anticipation that everyone waited for 1 October 2011 and the new era of Agency Worker Regulations to dawn. But in the event, the world of temp working did not stop spinning. So what have we learned six weeks or so on from living with the legislation? Firstly, the same questions […]
Book Review: Purple your People by Jane Sunley
‘Purple your People’ was written with the aim of helping businesses to attract, engage, retain and develop their talent, while at the same time “seriously enhancing” their reputation and growing their profits. But it isn’t your typical business book because it incorporates lots of purple imagery, white space and bullet points, ensuring that it stands […]
Home Office may have breached employee “trust and confidence”, warn lawyers
The blame game taking place between the Home Office and the head of the UK Border Force serves as a reminder to employers of their duty to maintain “trust and confidence” with workers, lawyers have warned. After being publicly accused by Home Secretary, Theresa May, of acting “improperly” by relaxing border checks for people arriving […]