Tag Archives: just management
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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On Keeping HR Records in an SME
No-one likes keeping records on staff. It’s a burden on the SME principal and yet it is one of the foundations of HR management. Indeed it’s one of the foundations of excellence in HR. Without records, there’s no data on which to manage staff in the firm. So what data do we need? And how much of it do we need to keep?
This blog answers some of these issues, giving a framework for setting up an HR records system and then preparing it for evolution into a larger records management system as the firm grows.
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Just Culture, Just Management
On the Home Page of our web site at www.timelesstime.co.uk we mention two concepts desirable in a firm: ‘just management’ and a ‘just culture’. What on earth are they? Are they simply esoteric states that it’s fun to talk about but never achieve? Or are they something tangible that every principal of every SME should strive for?
This brief blog discusses these two concepts.
First some definitions. Management’s role is to manage. Successful managers manage with the blessing of their staff. They gain legitimacy thought the culture they create and their appointment to a senior position by the board. That’s not to say that there’s a sort of democracy, just to acknowledge that to give direction and demand that stuff happens needs legitimacy. In an environment where folk chose to work in a firm, legitimacy is essential or folk walk or worse, they simply ignore the instruction. Managers are facilitators. They orchestrate and lead change. But they have to have their staff with them or they are pushing water up hill.
Culture is the climate that needs to be in place for management to gain that right to manage. It’s also the group’s skills, knowledge, attitudes, values and motives. If all the aforementioned are positive, legitimacy comes easy. If not, the manager must adopt a different approach, departing the ideal of facilitator and orchestrator and taking on a directive and authoritarian approach This leads to a breakdown of the culture and a weakening in the manager’s ability to effect change. Whilst it might be OK in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen, such aggressive methods become wearing after a short time.
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