The TimelessTime Blog

Deterministic Recruitment: getting recruitment right first time

Recruitment starts with the MD or manager of a firm stating what qualities they want in a new recruit.  A recruitment consultant then perhaps instigates a search to find suitable candidates.  There’s an issue though – how does one specify what’s needed?

How does that manager express the traits and abilities of candidates such that the search turns up truly viable candidates?  If the search turns up less-than-ideal folk and the interview process selects the ‘best of a bad bunch’, that wastes everyone’s time and reduces the firm’s turnover and profits. How then does one avoid time wasting and get a viable pool of candidates right from the start?   Continue reading →

What the heck is TUPE?

TUPE, the transfer of undertakings regulations, is a minefield.  But how did such legislation come about and how does the generalist manager understand its meaning?

Buying a Firm

First, there are three reasons why someone might buy a firm: for the intellectual property (IP) in its products, for access to its markets or for its people and their knowledge and skills.  There are firms who make it their business to buy others and strip the assets.  A good example is where a firm is bought for its customers and the purchaser uses the newly acquired brand and distribution chain to market its products  and increase its turnover.  Continue reading →

Making Staff Redundant: top tips for achieving fairness and reducing risk to the firm

Our White Paper Redundancy – get it right! is very popular – 600 visitors have read it this year alone.  We’ve also worked with several business over the last few months to implement restructure, which has in many cases resulted in redundancies.  And we’ve taken phone calls from employees across the UK who’ve been placed at risk or are being made redundant asking for help and clarification.

Whilst we can’t really help individuals  - we only work with employers –  it got me thinking.  Why are employees phoning us?  Does it mean that firms are not running redundancy processes correctly?  They’re clearly not TimelessTime clients!  Perhaps guidelines are needed to ease the process.    Based on that, here are six top tips on handling staff in a redundancy situation.
Continue reading →

Demystifying Mixed Contract Redundancies

Many small firms employ workers on temporary or short term contracts to cover maternity absence or to cope with seasonal demand.  And many employ part timers to cope with peaks in the business day or week.  Both are ideal ways of managing costs and supporting full-time permanent staff.  Both are ideal ways of staffing the firm to match the local market for goods and services.  In addition, some also make use of agency workers for quick fix to sudden absence.  But what happens when a downturn suggests that some staff need to be made redundant?  Who goes and how does the employer decide? Continue reading →

Training Evaluation: it’s just too much effort

Firms lament the poor learning that actually takes place in training courses and the poor transfer of learned skills to the workplace.  They often in part blame absence of course evaluation.  But evaluation involves everyone and it’s not as easy or as cost effective as one might think.

Training for most is a fragmented activity – SMEs don’t have departments looking after staff development.  The interested parties – manager, trainee, trainer and shareholder – are likely to be separate entities or well separated departments.  So how does a manager proceed and how far can he or she go to evaluate training and decide whether a particular training intervention is worthwhile? Continue reading →

Should UK have a two-tier professional training?

There’s strong argument to suggest that Britain’s approach to foundation and vocational training is in no way sufficient to equip the UK economy with the necessary skills to compete in global markets in years to come. We once had a two-tier structure with a small proportion of academically qualified engineers and a majority of apprenticeship-qualified technicians. The Blair government changed this dramatically, encouraging 50% of all young people to go to university.  The result is that Britain has a similar structure to that of the US – graduates and low skill workers.

But who’s right and how should UK approach its skills training? Continue reading →

Learning by trial and error: how bizarre is that?

In a recent paper, Kieth & Frese^[1] describe error management training (EMT) in which trainees learn through a process of making errors and correcting them.  The theoretical foundation of EMT is action theory. The idea behind action theory is that the learner already has an action-oriented mental model or part formed mental model of some sort that is useful to the task to be learned. Keith & Frese note that the more adequate the mental model the more successful the result will be. Continue reading →

360-degree appraisals or simple, old-fashioned one-to-ones?

There are five possible rating ‘directions’ that can be used during performance appraisal – self appraisal, downward (boss) appraisal, upward (subordinate) appraisal, peer appraisal and 360 degree (multi-source, multi-rater (MSMR)) appraisal.  All have benefit but all have their problems and in reaching a conclusion about which to use one needs to understand the dynamics of each ‘direction’.  There is also a danger in receiving negative feedback. Continue reading →

What does the future hold for training and development?

The first point to note is that unlike most other areas of science and technology, research in training methods and approaches does not drive practice. Why not? Research in training has built a substantial body of theory but training practitioners are not reading what academics publish. Practitioners are focused on lightweight ‘how to’ material. Given that research leads to progress this seems to pose a real threat to the future of training and development. Continue reading →

The Benefits of Systematising Operations and Developing People

Management of a small firm is a multi-faceted thing.  On the one hand managers must lead by example in operations and delivery and on the other they must set strategy, develop the people and manage finances.  And all that in a changing economic and market environment.

There are two essentials to success: systematising operations and having competent staff and managers.  Both drive competitive advantage. Continue reading →