We spend a lot of time doing policy work for our clients. A little while ago the question arose…. Should we have a policy on the menopause at work?   My immediate response, fuelled by a general dislike of having a policy for absolutely everything, was…. no. Why would we need one?   And then […]

Conflict happens in all organisations, to some degree or another. Wherever there are people, there are diverging views, approaches and thoughts and the workplace is no different. Whilst steps can be taken to prevent or minimise it, the chances are that it is something that every organisation will need to deal with at some point. This

I’m a social media evangelist. You’ll usually find me advocating its use to and for everyone from business leaders to small business to HR professionals. But for all its benefits, social media is not completely without risk for the organisation. We’ve all heard the horror stories – in fact when I speak about it, I often

Tim writes… Last week I attended a great event called ‘Our Digital Future’ run by the Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP). The aim of the day was to bring together people working in the Digital and Creative sectors to discuss the skills and business support that are needed to enable those businesses to grow and

Tim writes… Last week, I attended the inaugural Facilitation Shindig, run by the fabulous Julie Drybrough (in the group pic above, you can spot her at the right end of the front row). It was a get-together of a whole range of folks who get involved in facilitation in the workplace, in some form or another.  As we went

Wait: great HR policies? Yes, there really are such things. You are probably more used to long, boring, bureaucratic and legally-worded ones with lots of ‘for the avoidance of doubt’s and ‘up to and including’. You may have even had to sign something to say you’ve read and understood a document which makes the 90-odd pages of

On 1 December 2016, Tim participated in a CIPD Liverpool Group event at which we discussed the future of work, in particular: Robotics, Automation, Artificial Intelligence: How will human beings interact with the new technology? Slightly ironically, given we were talking about technology, we couldn’t live blog or tweet the event as we were in an underground

For many of us, social media is part of our everyday life. It is what we do and how we do it – whether for work or personal or a little bit of both. It will come as no surprise to regular readers of my stuff that I am one of these people. After all, I’m a

One of the big “future direction of HR” topics for me at the moment is the increasingly close relationship between HR and Marketing/Comms. Nowhere is this clearer than in the  growing area of employee advocacy. Simply put, employee advocacy is the promotion of an organisation by its own employees: the people who work for you

I’m now two weeks into life as part of the so-called “gig economy“. So far, it has been fun with lots of variation, some hard work and quite a lot of coffee drinking. I’m speaking to lots of different organisations about lots of different issues, which is a really big change from me after almost