Employee Relations

The 2017 Deloitte report on Human Capital Trends illustrates the rapidly changing landscape for many organisations in relation to their leadership structures. The current reality of most companies with traditional organisational structures is that People Leadership comes through a combination of tenure, experience, and business performance. In fact, the acquisition of a team is often considered a rite of passage, because of promotion through the business. However, what is becoming increasingly apparent is that People Leadership requires, as Liam Neeson…

Being a recruiter is great. We get to make lofty assumptions and judgements on a person’s whole career based on their lovingly crafted 2-page summary. Those with a standard career trajectory and long tenure in organisations generally fare well during this corporate equivalent of The Hunger Games, but anybody with a slightly unorthodox career path risks being discarded in favour of a safer option. We’ve come a long way towards accepting our differences, but we need to be more grown…

Nicola Thorp can’t have imagined her first day working as a receptionist at PwC would have been so eventful. Having arrived in a pair of flat shoes, she was told by Portico, the outsourcing agency that she needed to wear 2-4 inch heels, as outlined in the company’s ‘appearance guidelines’. Clearly unimpressed with her employer’s demands, she gathered over 150,000 signatures calling on the British government to ban employers enforcing a high heel dress code on their female staff. Thorp’s…

A reality of most companies with traditional organisational structures is that the more senior an employee becomes in the organisation, the more people they manage. In fact, the acquisition of a team is often considered a rite of passage, as a result of promotion through the business. However, we don’t always appreciate that People Management requires, as Liam Neeson would say, a particular set of skills that are not universal, in the same way we are not all good with…