Category: Culture and change

Culture and change
Emma Browning

Summer staff shortages – might flexible working policies for your staff be the solution?

The sun is shining and it’s July. Which means that the whole country is poised for their summer holidays, family day outs, festival trips, the World Cup and Wimbledon on the TV ….….lots of marvellous reasons not to be in the office!! Great news for your staff, but probably less than great news for you if you are facing staff shortages in the office or are trying to plan holiday cover over the Summer. I’ve recently blogged about how to tactically plan staffing cover over the Summer, so hopefully you…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Shared Parental Leave

The Government has just finished its £1.5m advertising campaign to promote shared parental leave (SPL) after just a 2% take-up of the policy since its introduction. So did you and your employees get the memo? Probably not! Despite being 3 years down the line since launch, many companies still know little about it and don’t have the right systems and infrastructures in place to manage SPL well, and research shows that around half the population aren’t even aware that SPL even exists. The introduction of Shared Parental Leave in April…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Donut disturb……

With National Doughnut Week (yes, really, it’s a thing!) looming, expect a glut of doughnuts, cakes and other delicious patisserie in the office. A host of businesses take part every year, including bakers, coffee shops, offices and educational establishments, baking delicious confection to raise funds for The Children’s Trust – which is undoubtedly a great cause. Cakes and sweet treats in general are an office tradition that plenty of us enjoy, but have you stopped to think about the potential health implications? Most of us are pretty familiar with so-called…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Holiday year

Tax year end is on the horizon and every year I marvel at why it is that despite 365 long days ahead of me, it seems that there is always a last minute rush when a deadline looms large?! It’s a basic fact of life, if we are given a deadline, we work to it, and it will always cause a glut or a backlog, often when we are at our busiest! Unfortunately, none of us can change the date of tax year-end, unless your name is Phillip Hammond of…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Are you showing some self-restraint this Lent?

The year is charging ahead and already Lent is fast approaching us; a time traditionally for taking stock and giving up a luxury or two. Granted those luxuries are often alcohol or chocolate based – although the really savvy amongst us will give up things they never really liked anyway (so that’s no celery for me for a month!). We all know that bad habits in our personal lives can lead to serious problems. From trying to adopt a healthier diet through to kicking caffeine or nicotine, most of us…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Show your employees some love this Valentines

While Valentine’s Day is traditionally the time to show your sweetheart how much you care, it has always seemed like an ideal opportunity to me, to take a moment to reflect on my employee relationships and ask myself whether I show their employees just how much I value them. How about you? We all want our employees to reach their full potential and go above and beyond every day don’t we? So consider the findings of the latest research conducted by employee services provider Personal Group, which has revealed that…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Lend a hand – why workplace volunteering is a win-win

If I told you that approximately 70% of FTSE 100 companies have a volunteering programme, would you be surprised? Corporate volunteer activity days, giving employees time off to volunteer in their local communities, and sponsorship matching are just three examples of popular schemes adopted by the FTSEs. Waitrose, for example, donate some 75,000 paid employee hours a year to volunteering. So there must be a really compelling reason why our biggest and most successful corporates do this. After all, they have budgets and performance targets like the rest of us.…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Six Ways To Raise Your Leadership Game This Year

1.Think that becoming a better leader involves attending intensive courses, gaining years and years of experience, or getting your head stuck into a textbook? Well, not necessarily. These things can all have their place, but it’s very possible to raise your game in this first week of 2018, by making just a few manageable changes. If you’re ready to step up to the challenge, then read on. We’re going to look at six practical game-changers that you can get to work with right away. 1. Leave some unplanned time in…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Spotting the bullies

A couple of weeks ago it was national Anti-bullying week and children around the country are wearing odd socks and celebrating what makes them, and others, unique and why it’s important to be able to be themselves without fear of bullying. The tagline is ‘All Different, All Equal’ and it’s heartening to see such a progressive attitude towards the prevention of bullying amongst our younger people. So why then do over 91% of employees report that that their employer did not deal with the consequences of social bullying at work?*…
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Culture and change
Emma Browning

Be more millennial

A 9-5 working week, 4 weeks holiday a year, and a corner desk were once considered perks to a job, creating satisfaction and loyalty. Not anymore. Todays businesses need to be much more savvy if they want to attract and retain key talent. The so called ‘millenials’ have a different set of expectations; these days potential employees are searching for more of a work/life balance, and a greater sense of fulfilment from their jobs. They are more discerning. The structure of work has broken down and shifted, and small business…
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