What Do You Look For in Your Recruits?

08 / 06 / 2018

What manager doesn’t dream of finding great employees, building a great team, having minimal employment issues and increasing productivity and generally having a wonderfully smooth work life? Pie in the sky? No, not entirely. Employees are humans, not robots so it’s likely that you will have problems from time to time. Even the most diligent and hard-working people have the...

Chronic Mondayitis

06 / 06 / 2018

Monday morning, 8.30am, a beautiful fine day and bang on cue, one of your employees, John, calls in (using that curious hoarse voice he always has when he is reporting sickness) to let you know he’s unwell (painful boils this time). There’s no underlying medical reason causing his absence. He’s just simply away rather frequently with a wide variety of...

Helping Your Employees to Engage

30 / 05 / 2018

Yesterday I had two good train experiences. En route to London by train the guard / train manager (don’t know what they’re called) not only added a few facts to his official announcements which made the journey more interesting, but also having found out I was headed for Euston he offered me some helpful and accurate advice as regards changing...

Reference Requests

23 / 05 / 2018

Yesterday I looked up from the last minute GDPR preparations that many of us are finishing off this week to find I had received a reference request from a large retail organisation for one of my former employees. The email came from a Do Not Reply address. All it said was that X had indicated I would be willing to...

The Investigatory Rant

08 / 05 / 2018

Before any formal disciplinary hearing can take place, you first have to carry out an investigation to determine whether or not there is a case to answer. An investigation is a fact find. The investigating officer is not there to try and establish guilt but to examine all the relevant facts to get a full picture of what has happened....