Blogs

In the first of this two-part blog, Professor Katie Bailey considers how jobs can be meaningful and what employers can do to raise levels of meaningfulness in their organisations.

In the landscape of uncertainty following the Brexit vote, Stephen Bevan considers the need for HR and employers to focus on employee engagement.

Professor Stephen Bevan on the need for HR to be prepared to provide guidance around pension funds and employees' financial concerns in the context of uncertainty surrounding the implications of Brexit for the UK economy.

Penny Tamkin suggests five HR tendencies that can shift what appears to be a popular people management practice to one that is unpopular.

Can laughter at work really make us more productive? Amanda Callen considers new evidence of the link between laughing and performance at work.

Duncan Brown comments on the forthcoming election manifestos with regard to pay, concluding that, with such all-party support for higher and 'fairer' pay, it is interesting to see that employers and their HR functions appear to be much less keen.

Dilys Robinson introduces us to another unsung hero, Mary Parker Follett. First outlining Parker Follett's ideas, Dilys argues how her thinking applies to modern day people management and what we could learn from this great thinker from the past.

It seems that every week brings another bad news story to damage the reputation of many of our best-loved institutions. The NHS is still reeling from the body-blow of the shocking findings of the Francis Report on the failings in Mid-Staffordshire. The Co-operative Bank has been found lacking, and its chair is in disgrace. There have been high-profile care home scandals, our MPs are still not forgiven for dodgy expenses claims - and we even have horsemeat in our beef-burgers.

Right now, compassion is trending. Google hits for 'compassion' in the UK show a steady rise over the last eight or so years. The dictionary describes compassion as 'a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for someone struck by misfortune, accompanied by a desire to alleviate the suffering'. It is embedded in our humanity and helps us affiliate, care and nurture our friends, family, neighbours and community. It is as much a part of our human make up as our ability to read body language or offer a smile to a friend. But then, casual cruelty is human too, the desire to laugh at others, to treat 'us' and 'them' differently, to turn away from pain, to be worn out by others complaints... We can swing either way it seems and evidence suggests that affiliative, caring, trusting, cultures with well-managed workloads are more likely to incubate compassion than harsh, coercive, disengaged, disempowered environments where work overload is the norm.

‘Knocking the employee survey seems to be the current flavour of the month. In the past few weeks, I've heard it described in a lot of ways, rarely positively. But is there really a good and practical alternative to the employee survey?'