News & Press

Dilys Robinson outlines why this unsung hero deserves more recognition for his influence on modern-day health and safety.

At IES we study organisational effectiveness. We wade through literature, talk to senior managers and lots of focus groups, consult academics and examine metrics. We ruminate on the alignment between business and individual performance, culture, engagement - all that stuff. And yet… I've spent a lot of my working life visiting organisations and am amused, intrigued and sometimes appalled at what a visitor experiences.

Now that it's September, coming back to work after summer distractions and in particular visiting the Edinburgh book festival, I started thinking about what have I (re)learned? One thing I've been thinking over is how do you understand the past?

Conflict in the workplace is a fact of working life at some point for most people. Dealing with conflict and in particular stopping it from escalating, ultimately to an employment tribunal, is a difficult task and yet an essential one, as conflict can cause a significant amount of disruption and upheaval for both those involved and their colleagues.

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.

‘...but if you try some time, you just might find, that if you're a woman in work then you probably still won't get the pay or the grade you deserve.'

As trailed in my blog post in September 2013, here is an update on employment law and other statutory changes that are coming into force with the beginning of the tax year on 6 April, as well as a couple of other interesting changes due over the summer and into the autumn.

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.