Ask the expert: Maternity returner
What should you do if an employee, who is due to return to work after maternity leave, calls at the last minute to say she is not returning for a while due to a sick child? Esther Smith, partner at Thomas Eggar, and Martin Brewer, partner and employment law specialist at Mills & Reeve, advise. […]
Home Working: A recipe for sloth and suspicion? By Annie Hayes
Forming a major relationship with your slippers and This Morning’s competition time are just some of the indulgent delights enjoyed by that strange breed of salary suckers, the home worker; but is the reality as shiny and how do managers conquer that pesky trust issue? Annie Hayes reports. In May the UK celebrated its second […]
Consolidation looms over HR software industry. By John Stokdyk
If you are a regular visitor to the CIPD’s HR Software Show (taking place on 21-22 June at Olympia,London) one of the games you can play to fill idle moments is to guess which of the exhibitors is likely to get swallowed up before next year’s event. A couple of years ago, the likes of […]
HR Awards
Awards… love them or hate them? Undoubtedly a bit of a ‘Marmite’ subject.Do you think entering HR awards is all about vanity? Maybe you dismiss them as magazines/institutes making a bit of cash/publicity, or do you see them as a driver of excellence?Maybe you see the writing of award submissions as an unwanted distraction, or […]
HR Tip: Confidential information on employees over the phone
These questions are being answered by Learn HR, a market leader in the provision of HR and payroll training and nationally-recognised professional qualifications. Question: "Someone telephoned us to ask if a certain named person – one of our employees – worked here. I did not know what to do so asked them to ring back. What […]
EAPs: The deeper you dive
Employee Assistance Programmes have been highly commoditised and packaged in recent years but Paul Avis, corporate development manager at Ceridian, explores what services are on offer and confirms that you still get what you pay for. Employer benefit, rather than the employee benefit, is the future! As you step into the clear waters of the […]
Juggling not struggling
UK bosses are missing out on the huge benefits that flexible working can bring to their businesses, explains Kate Milner, WebEx Communications. From October 1 this year, the right to request flexible working hours is extended to carers of adults in the UK, reflecting the dramatic shift in working patterns that UK employees have […]
Watch what you say – Or your boss will. By Louise Druce
Would you expect the boss to let you nip off to the supermarket every five minutes during work? Probably not. Yet some staff still happily spend hours trawling the net looking for bargains during company hours, or emailing their mates about plans for the weekend. It may seem harmless but, as Louise Druce finds out, […]
A guide to the smoking ban
Consultant Sandra Beale explains what the smoking ban in public places in England from July 1 will mean for business. From 1 July 2007 in England all smoking in enclosed public places will be banned. It is already banned in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (from 30 April 2007). The ban covers pubs, bars, private […]
Make the most of temps’ skills
Investors in People (IiP) is urging employers to make more of an effort to integrate temporary workers so they can benefit from the skills and experience temps bring with them.It’s estimated that 1.2 million temps keep businesses in the UK moving each week – but IiP says many do not know what’s expected of them, […]
Mental health problems on the increase
Research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) reveals there has been a sharp increase in the number of employees taking time off sick for mental health problems.The examination of 30,000 absence records across 40 organisations reveals that musculoskeletal conditions are still the number one cause of time lost due to sickness with […]
Take control of your e-learning
Patrick Fitzpatrick, director of e-learning strategy at Xperience, the IT solutions provider that recently won an e-learning contract with Deloitte, reveals how to manage your programme to produce optimum results. The e-learning industry has taken many different twists and turns over the last 10 years. We have witnessed great successes one day – followed by […]
Jobsharing: Double the trouble or twice as nice? By Rob Lewis
It’s still a rare sight, but anecdotally the amount of jobsharing going on in UK workplaces appears to be on the rise, even in the boardroom. Is it ever that responsible to agree to share responsibility? Rob Lewis looks at the legal and management aspects from a HR perspective and tries to find out if […]
Trust your intuition
Jan Hills of HR consultancy HR With Guts explains why intuition is a key skill in people management. As HR people we’re on a continual search for high performance, whether we’re examining our own performance, or helping businesses achieve their goals. But there’s increasing evidence we’re ignoring a skill that could radically propel ourselves and […]
Climate change creates specialist job boom
The growing issue of climate change has created a whole new job market that looks set for staggering further growth over the next five years.Research by sustainability recruitment consultancy Acre Resources shows that in the past year there was a 130 per cent increase in specialist jobs relating to climate change.And the explosion in climate […]
They went off to sunny Spain
It was viva Espana for all 15 employees of Portfolio Payroll whose boss took them off to Barcelona for a five-star luxury weekend – complete with spending money.The £50,000 trip was the reward for a successful year which saw the payroll recruitment business being recognised as one of the fastest growing companies in the country […]
Holidaymakers take work worries with them
The idea of a holiday to get away from it all appears to be thing of the past for UK workers – a new survey reveals that a whopping 86 per cent take their work worries with them.Even worse, according to Peninsula BusinessWise which carried out the survey, 67 per cent fear for their job […]
Changing face of skills at work
The past 20 years has seen a fall in the number of jobs requiring no qualifications for entry and a rise in the number of jobs requiring computer skills.But according to research published by the Economic and Social Research Council on skills, knowledge and organisational performance, the pace of change has slowed during the past […]
Pin money belief undervalues women’s work
It’s more than 30 years since the Equal Pay Act came into force and the cost of living has soared, yet research funded by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) has revealed that many people still think that women only work for ‘pin money’.Written by Damian Grimshaw and Jill Rubery, from the University of Manchester’s European […]
HR Tip: The right to privacy for sick employees
These questions are being answered by Learn HR, a market leader in the provision of HR and payroll training and nationally-recognised professional qualifications. Question: "If we visit a sick employee in his home are we in breach of his right to privacy provided by the Human Rights Act?" HR Tip: You would be in breach of good […]
