Services

Outsourced operational HR / Employee Relations

For organisations that cannot justify the costs of a permanent HR function, we offer ongoing expert advice and support, based on an annual service contract. This service includes:

·       A two-hour visit to the organisation’s premises to setup the service and discuss the best approach to HR management in line with business requirements and culture.

·       Unlimited email and telephone contact for one named person in the organisation.

·       Access to day-to-day HR information and documentation to inform the necessary policies and procedures, etc.

·       Additional nominated staff can also be included in the annual service contract.

We can provide a mix of annual fees, tailored support, or one-off projects to suit your business need and budget. We are able to provide hands-on, specific support during the year as needed, for example to provide face-to-face support to help you deal effectively with employee relations issues. We are also able to extend support to any or all the areas below:

Employee relations:

•       Policy Audit and Review

•       Policy development and implementation

•       Advice, witness disciplinary / grievance processes.

Development / training

•       Team Building

•       Line manager development - coaching and / or skills training

Business development

•       Helping to align teams, skills and people to changes in business direction

Despite our best efforts as advisers and your best efforts as managers, there is still a small chance that an employee could be successful in bringing a claim of unfair dismissal, discrimination or the like. To cover this we recommend that firms insure themselves with a ‘directors and officers’ policy. Often firms already have suitable insurance and we recommend that you check your cover.

 Policy and Procedures

Employment law can be difficult to navigate and is constantly changing. Employers either find themselves spending a lot of money with lawyers trying to resolve claims from disgruntled employees, or waste time trawling websites for off-the-shelf employment policies and procedures that might or might not fit their business requirements or ways of working.

We will help you find the right approach and sets of words for you to set the right expectations throughout your organisation and within required legal parameters.

We can also provide updates as legal requirements change.Click to edit text. Focus on how you can benefit your customers.

Re-structuring, mergers, acquisitions and Staff Transfers

We have significant experience of system and organisational reform, including basic restructuring, organisation closures, new start-ups, mergers and acquisitions both within the public and private sector and we can advise on due diligence, legal mechanisms for transferring staff such as TUPE, delivery / change planning and implementation.Click to edit text. Focus on how you can benefit your customers.

Leadership development and executive coaching

Our leadership development and coaching equips managers with the skills they need to get the most from their teams and to change their ways of working to implement change.

We work with leaders and aspiring leaders across private and public sectors. Our bespoke programmes enhance leaders’ impact and improve their relationships with colleagues and partners to help improve individual and business performance.

We help leaders to learn how to deal with leadership challenges, including how to:

·       advocate the corporate vision and long-term goals

·       engage with stakeholders

·       make sense of ever-changing and complex systems

·       lead organisations through change and difficult times

·       engage with service users to gather useful feedback to improve service delivery.

We provide specialist, one-to-one or team coaching for executives to enable them to focus on their impact in role and to examine difficult questions about service / organisational effectiveness, budget constraints and forward planning in a confidential setting. Leaders who have worked with us report increased confidence in their own performance and ability to influence the performance of colleagues in their own teams as well as in partner organisations.

People Strategy and Organisation Development

We focus on 5 critical areas to help top teams develop and articulate their people strategy, including:

1. Aligning HR strategy with the business strategy – taking steps to understand your business and where it has competitive advantage is an essential first step towards determining the key HR interventions that should form the basis of an HR strategy. It is often weaknesses relating to the quality of your workforce, its motivation and ability to deliver organisation performance that need addressing first.
2. Clarifying roles and functions – when designing an HR strategy, it is vital that there is a clear and agreed understanding of where specific HR tasks will be handled and who is accountable for associated decisions, for example hiring/firing decisions; developing a pool of potential candidates that will then be interviewed by company executives; managing payroll and benefits concerns.
3. Developing the HR strategy / workforce plan - giving a picture of where the company currently is and providing expert HR thinking and working with your top team to identify the requisite HR interventions and how they fit together to leverage organisation performance.
4. Evaluating the effectiveness of the HR strategy - as the HR strategy is put into place, there needs to be an agreed approach for evaluating the HR interventions used, including, for example HR policies and processes, resourcing and performance management, learning and development.
5. Implementing the HR strategy – external advisers are often accused of delivering a useful report or PowerPoint presentation of what needs to be delivered, but failing to enable organisations to deliver anything in practice. We develop and sustain excellent working relationships with top leaders to drive the appropriate ownership for action required to deliver sustainable outcomes.

We then help the top team to develop Organisation Development (OD) plans that outline specific business improvement requirements to deliver the agreed strategic aims,, who will be affected by the change and how it can be rolled out efficiently across the organisation.

OD is the use of organisational resources to improve efficiency and productivity. It can be used to solve problems within the organisation or to analyse a process and find a more efficient and effective way of doing it. OD requires an investment of time and money, but by demonstrating its impact it is easy to justify the costs.

Talent Management

Talent management is a set of integrated organisational workforce processes designed to attract, develop, motivate and retain productive, engaged employees. The goal of talent management is to create a high-performance, sustainable organisation that meets its strategic and operational goals and objectives.

The employees of an organisation are often its most valuable asset; managing, nurturing and keeping them engaged and motivated is key to an organisation’s ability to provide high-quality business outcomes / profit. Talent management strategies are a great way of making this happen as long as they properly relate to the organisation’s vision and strategic objectives, are implemented in daily processes throughout the organisation as a whole and – most importantly – are explicit about how ‘human capital’ is valued. In short, successful talent management is an ethos – part of ‘how we do things around here’ – and is core to developing a safe, compassionate culture.

We have a track record of working with top teams to develop effective talent management strategies and embedding talent management thinking and capability across the organisation as a whole. We are also experienced in developing collaborative talent management schemes that enable organisations to create effective partnerships with other organisations to share the identification, development and deployment of talent to mutual best effect.