Tag Archives: competence framework
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.
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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 →
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 →
On Business Restructuring
Business restructuring is the catch-all phrase used to describe the series of actions that a firm might take to re-organise its affairs following some management decision to change the course of the business. There are three views often discussed: from the legal perspective, from the finance perspective and from the human resources perspective. Taken alone, they all tend to adopt a hard approach. The lawyers talk of new legal arrangements for the firm and like the accountants they assume the firm is in difficulty. Both assume that if drastic restructuring action is not taken urgently then third perspective action will be inevitable – redundancy following liquidation, merger or buy-out. In every case it’s a boom time for the professional services firms.
But business restructuring is not about the stuff of films. It’s about the normal adjustment that a firm makes to optimise its approach to the market. Continue reading →
On Remuneration: a pay model for SMEs
Pay is a complex business. Often we only get a measure of how well a firm pays relative to the employment market when people leave. Then of course it’s too late. Pay is not the only reason why folk leave one firm and move to anotherbut often it is high in prominence in the overall decision. This blog sets out the primary criteria in deciding how much to pay an employee for doing a job and then describes a pay model that allows these criteria to be met. If followed, this model enables the SME principal to set fair and appropriate wages for all staff. Continue reading →
Frankfurt Airport, Fish-hooks and Job Design
Imagine the scene. Frankfurt airport was snowbound and closed all Thursday evening. It was Friday afternoon. Runways had just been cleared of snow. Flights had resumed at 2:00pm. The queues were huge. Two hundred people queued for the security check. One German security guy hurled bags and coats on the belt. Two security operatives patted down when everyone invariably failed the magnetic screen. And one lone guy manned the X-Ray machine. He progressively failed the bags and selected well over half for further analysis. He left his post by the X-Ray machine and opened each bag. He selected shoes, PCs and handbags and marched the owners to the swab analyser 15 metres away to spend three minutes with each passenger to clear them. That done, he wandered back his X-Ray machine to resume scanning. And all while his colleagues and two hundred passengers waited.
So HOW did this mess happen? How was it that two hundred passengers swore and gnashed teeth? It happened because the manager watching this fiasco did not understand the basics of job design. This short blog shows how an SME manager can analyse his or her organisation. It shows how the manager can optimise the various jobs so that competences are balanced across teams. That done the horrendous Frankfurt inefficiency can be avoided.
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Moving Mountains: re-skilling the firm Part II
A previous post on the subject of staff development discussed how to establish through gap analysis the competences that need improvement in the firm. This post disuses how the SME principal might go about bridging these gaps with planned development activity. It also discusses the levels of success that one might hope for in making large-scale staff development change – just how big a mountain can one move?
Moving mountains: re-skilling the firm Part I
What does a firm do when the principal realises that the market has changed and his firm is not now best placed to meet the customer’s needs? What does a firm do to sustain competitive advantage through its people when those people as a whole are not up to par?
These are issues that face many firms today. Many were oriented and organised to meet the needs of an old paradigm, an old market state that was more tolerant of shortcomings and less fast-moving. In many segments, customers demand more service, higher reliability and more immediate response. It prompts some principals to lament that their people are no longer up there with the best. But what does a principal do?
