Taking Your Punishment

23 / 04 / 2013

Recently an email came into the office raising a question about an employee, Ken, who – yet again – had failed to call in sick (or make arrangements for someone else to make the notification on his behalf),despite having a fairly minor condition. He’s already on a final warning for this very thing following a series of failures to...

How To Train Dragons

22 / 04 / 2013

I was reminded if the name of this fantasy film when I dealt with our latest case of an employee who is not meeting her employer’s expectations, but the employer is showing great nervousness about dealing with it. It’s a very typical scenario. A manager, Jeanette, has worked with a small manufacturing company for four or five years. Initially, the...

Educating Rita (and Ron): Reward Your Workers and Grow Your Business

19 / 04 / 2013

On the whole employees are human beings, not robots, so they have complex and varied needs. It’s well-established that while the absence of money does make people unhappy, the presence of money doesn’t necessarily make them happy (or at least not for long). Pay rises are nice, but we also have to find ways of rewarding and motivating your employees...

What’s Your Twitter Trail?

18 / 04 / 2013

Entering the world of work for the first time is a daunting prospect, and parents of seventeen year-olds who are currently looking for work, may sympathise with Paris Brown, Britain’s first Youth Police Commissioner (YPC),who fell at the first hurdle after her online Twitter account was scrutinised by the media. Ms Brown came under fire after a series of...

Should We Set Up Granny-Into-Work Clubs

17 / 04 / 2013

These days unless you’re a venerable Cheddar cheese, mature is a very unhip thing to be. Youth is apparently where it’s all at, for no discernible reason that I can see. (I rather think that I might have become a grumpy old woman, though some would say I’ve always been a grumpy old woman and I’ve just grown into the...