TV Review: The Apprentice Week 2 – The art of listening
After the initial excitement of getting to know the candidates in week 1, I was looking forward to seeing how they all shaped up and settled in this week. Would the boys continue to be the perfect dream team working in peace and harmony? Would the girls continue to scare unsuspecting children and shop […]
Blog: Are you an inspirational leader?
Inspiration is the best way to engage people! Or does it make you squirm? You may be an HR Professional, leader or manager relying on HR to help move your business forward. When discussing strategy with people of different roles at many levels, I have often been met with a perplexed look when I have […]
European eSkills Week: Europe to be 700,000 ICT professionals short by 2015
Convinced ICT is a strong part of our national economy and a great destination for young people? Brussels agrees – hence its European e-Skills Week campaign, which is trying to accentuate the positive in terms of the sector. Kicking off in Brussels yesterday, the closing event will take place on 30 March in Copenhagen. […]
Salesforce.com to make HR “a weapon for transformation”
Salesforce.com has proclaimed that it wants to make HR “a weapon for transformation” by enabling practitioners to interact with workers in a more social way. The Software-as-a-Service vendor made the statement as it launched the first fruit of its Rypple acquisition in the shape of a performance management application. The offering dubbed ‘Salesforce Rypple’ […]
Case Study: Herts Council’s ‘Transformation’ programme slashes sickness absence
Hertfordshire County Council provides local services to more than a million people in the area and employs around 34,000 staff, of whom about 24,000 work in schools. Last year, it introduced a ‘Transformation’ programme – a new and radically different wellbeing strategy, aimed at reducing sickness absence and improving organisational performance. And, while it […]
National Science and Engineering Week: UK to be 2m engineers short by 2015
Guess how many engineers and scientists we’ll need to remain competitive in the next five years? Some 2.2 million. How many kids are going into engineering at the moment as a career? More like 125,000. That sobering statistic is one of the prompts behind ‘The Big Bang Fair,’ a jobs fair that hopes to […]
Blog: Appraisals – The menace of ‘soft marker’ managers
There are plenty of aims of appraisal or performance review programmes, but the key one is usually for managers to assess the performance of their staff, often giving them performance assessment ratings. Sounds like a straightforward enough concept – yet like so many HR initiatives, it is so often a good idea badly executed! […]
Blog: Does HR have the right skills to be in the boardroom?
In a pan European study undertaken by Mercer among over 300 HR Professionals across 25 countries it is revealed that 70 percent of organisations have or are planning to transform their HR functions. A big shift in the way businesses perceives HR seems to be the catalyst for this activity. HR is now seen as […]
Talking Point: How to eat an elephant – Moving to a strengths-based culture
The case for using a strengths-based methodology was most recently supported by David MacLeod’s excellent review entitled ‘Engaging for Success’. But moving from a deeply-ingrained competency culture to a strengths-based approach to recruitment and performance management brings to mind the question, ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ In 2003, I joined a new organisational […]
Inclusion: Reaping what you sow
From the rallying cry of the Lord Davies report calling for more women to join British boardrooms to the abolition of the official retirement age, diversity has been in the full glare of the media spotlight over the last year. Yet the story at ground level is rather different and the key theme in […]
Is interim HR management for you?
Leaving behind the stable world of PAYE won’t appeal to everyone in the current economic climate. But even with predictions of a second recession ahead, many HR professionals still crave a new career challenge and some are even brave enough to make big changes. One career option that commonly appeals to senior HR practitioners […]
Blog: Spotting hidden talent
Recognise This! – Every organisation has critical, but hidden, talent. Finding and utilizing them creates significant competitive advantage. The U.S. sports world has been abuzz with “Linsanity” – hype about the excellent performance of Jeremy Lin, an NBA-league basketball player who came off the bench and immediately displayed stunning numbers. Regular readers of my […]
The HR Headmistress: How to deliver compliance training with aplomb
Compliance training is like visiting a difficult family member. You may not really like spending time with them, but your mother insists. Topics such as health and safety, data protection, food hygiene and employment law evoke a similar rather less-than-thrilled response in a ‘we do it because we have to, but don’t expect us to […]
Blog: Why is coaching still an elitist sport?
Nearly every respondent to a recent survey of 250 UK companies said coaching in the workplace has helped individuals and their organizations. As I wrote in my previous blog post on coaching culture, they cited improved personal skills, better communication, higher confidence levels and greater motivation. With so many benefits, one might expect all […]
National Apprenticeship Week: How to get started
As we enter another year of economic uncertainty, recruiting fresh faces may not be at the top of the corporate agenda for all companies in 2012. Organisations ranging from large firms through to small and medium-sized enterprises are increasingly being asked to balance up diminishing budgets with a need to boost productivity and continue providing […]
Steve Boorman, Royal Mail’s ex-chief medical adviser, on health and well-being
In these difficult economic times, businesses are becoming more aware of the huge impact that the well-being of their workforce can have on the bottom line. Staff absence alone now accounts for the loss of an estimated 175 million working days a year in the UK. But too many companies regard occupational health services as […]
London 2012: Planning for travel disruption
London is less than six months away from hosting the biggest sporting event in the world. During the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the country expects to play host to 90,000 athletes, media representatives and officials, along with hundreds of thousands of spectators who will attend venues across the capital from 27 July to 14 […]
Tax workers strike over privatisation fears
In something of a reprieve for those workers struggling to file their income tax self assessments online, HM Revenue & Customs offices were closed today due to strikes over fears that its call centres are in the process of being privatised. The Public and Commercial Services Union dislikes plans to trial the use of private […]
Blog: Employee stress equals financial risk
Recognise This! –If employee retention is important enough to list as a substantial risk factor to meeting financial expectations, then it should be important enough to find ways to reduce employee stress. I just read an interesting story in Forbes, which noted that a common phrase included in the risk factors on 10-Q forms for […]
Short on rewards – an HR skills crisis
It would be hard to miss the steady growth in demand for reward professionals. Interest in their skills began with a handful of FTSE 100 businesses back in the 1990s, but the job title of ‘compensation and benefits director’ was a rarity at that time. Today, however, there are a lot more reward roles […]