Harassment at work: do we need a crackdown on NDAs?

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are increasingly being used to silence the victims of workplace bullying and sexual harassment, but will a government crackdown do more harm than good? Last month business minister Kelly Tolhurst announced that the government will tackle business misuse of NDAs after a number of cases where businesses were found to be using […]

Workplace productivity: enabling our brains to be more productive at work

There are a number of factors that influence productivity and how effective our brains are during the working day. Unfortunately, the set-up in most organisations is the opposite of what it needs to perform at its best. Centuries ago, most workers would have been involved in manual labour and that work would have been limited […]

How can HR create a company culture ‘to go’ in an age of remote working?

Remote working is perhaps one of the defining characteristics of the modern workplace. It has evolved from a perk to table stakes for many employers. In fact, there’s a good chance you will be reading this while working remotely – indeed, 70% of the world does so at least once a week, according to Gallup. […]

Why senior leaders don’t listen to activist employees

Over the lifetime of most current senior leaders of big organisations, a series of assumptions will have taken root about how the world works, assumptions that will have been reinforced by years of experience and will have turned into a well tried and tested worldview.  When faced with a new generation of employees, who see […]

Learning analytics: how to be more strategic in your use of data

In part four of a six-part series Trish Uhl argues that learning and development professionals today are awash with data – the challenge, however, is how to access and use it effectively.   We talk a lot about the discipline of workplace learning analytics – but what about the data that fuels it? Collecting the right […]

Changing perspective: from employee engagement to employee experience

Employee engagement surveys only tell part of the story when it comes to understanding the needs and motivations of your staff. In order to get the full picture, employee experience is where organisations need to focus their attention.  Over the past 50 plus years, organisations have conducted surveys of their employees to gauge employee satisfaction, […]

Gender equality: why we need to talk about unpaid care

Globally, women on average do more than three times the amount of unpaid care work done by men, rising to more than five times in poor rural areas. There is not a single country where men and women do equal amounts of unpaid care work and in some regions women do as much as 80–90%. […]

Mental health at work: the rise of work separation anxiety

For many of us, work is an important part of our lives. One of the first questions we ask someone we meet is ‘what do you do?’ and we even expect children to know their career aspirations when they are just a few years old. This isn’t a bad thing – after all, our work […]

Diversity and inclusion: why data doesn’t always tell the full story

HR is placing increasing emphasis on monitoring diversity and inclusion but in the race to gather data, many people are missing the point entirely.   Developing a diverse and inclusive workplace is a vital aspect of people management. Organisations need to value everyone as an individual to be able to gain the many benefits that […]

Why human skills remain essential in an AI workplace

We can automate certain jobs, but soft skills are still needed. As new technology is created, different opportunities that rely more on ‘the human factor’ will open up for employees. When thinking of the future of work, there are two things that need to be kept in focus: firstly, the advancement of new technology, and […]

Online security: how HR can help prevent cybercrime

HR teams have access to more critical data than ever before, but an alarming number of employees show a distinct lack of awareness when it comes to protecting that information. Digital transformation is affecting every area of business today, enabling more modern ways of working, with more employees than ever working flexibly or remotely, and […]

How to empower managers to truly engage their teams through data

Maintaining an engaged workforce is an effective way to improve talent retention levels and increase productivity. Discover how data can empower managers and bring teams together. If you want to survive and thrive in today’s ultra-competitive talent market, you have to be thinking in a more structured way about what your team feels. There is plenty of […]

Employee onboarding: a game changer for talent development and retention?

Organisations that have robust employee onboarding and talent management structures, which support continuous learning, will secure the committment of their employees. According to research published earlier this year, approximately a quarter of new employees, reported that they received no clear onboarding when starting a new job. Some even stated they had a truly bad experience; one in […]

Employee wellbeing: how to support people with neurodiverse conditions

Employee wellbeing has never been so high up the corporate agenda. Here are some practical tips to help guide you through the challenges of supporting neurodiverse employees’ with their physical and mental health, both inside and outside of the workplace. Supporting employees in the workplace can sometimes feel like an overwhelming and difficult task, with […]

Heatwave: how can HR take care of their employees in hot weather?

The sizzling summer has arrived, leaving many workers clammy, stifled and tired – none of which are conducive to productivity. Here’s how HR can better handle the heat for their people… You’ll be well aware that the UK is in the midst of a heatwave this week, with temperatures getting up to a stifling 37 […]

From ‘fika’ to offline time: three lessons from European countries about stress management

Stress is rife in the UK – and it’s affecting our health, engagement and performance at work. Are there lessons to be learned from other countries on better managing this epidemic? Every year in the UK, 70 million work days are lost due to mental ill health such as anxiety and depression, making it the […]

Unconventional interview tricks – helping or hindering recruitment?

Companies are increasingly starting to use unconventional tricks in interviews to help them decipher the best person for the job. But could these quirky recruitment approaches be doing more harm than good? The rise in unconventional hiring tactics has created considerable debate around how effective, if at all, such approaches are for finding the best […]

Ethics in the workplace: what does an ethical business look like?

In the second article of a nine-part series on ethics in the workplace, Luke Andreski considers the key characteristics of ethical organisations and asks, ‘Is ethics a success factor in modern business?’  It’s worth beginning our discussion with a preliminary question: ‘Are organisations ethical by default?’  The answer to this question is that organisations have […]

Reaching for the stars: skills advice from a NASA astronaut

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which took place on 20 July 1969, astronaut Dr Story Musgrave explores how his thirst for learning has led to an extraordinary career. Even in our current world of uncertainty anyone can go the distance, he argues, but it requires embracing a new set […]

What gets measured, gets done: why inclusive workplaces thrive

Becoming a genuinely inclusive workplace means measuring what you do.