Employee Relations

There's a specific moment I've seen play out dozens of times. A manager mentions, almost as an aside, that someone on their team "isn't really pulling their weight." I ask how long that's been going on. The answer is almost never "since last week." It's usually months. Sometimes longer. And when I ask what's actually been said to the person directly, the answer is often nothing or something so softened it barely registered as feedback at all. I don't think managers avoid this

I don't think the employers who get employee relations wrong are careless or badly intentioned. Almost none of the messes I get called in to help untangle started with someone being deliberately unfair. They started with someone being busy, or uncomfortable, or genuinely unsure what the right move was, and making a small decision under pressure that quietly became a bigger problem three months later. Here are the ones I see over and over. Letting things slide because the mome

There's been a lot of noise about the Employment Rights Act 2025, and if you've skimmed a few headlines you could be forgiven for thinking the government has invented some brand new "statutory probation period" that you now need a manual for. It hasn't. That proposal was on the table during the bill's passage through Parliament and it got dropped before Royal Assent on 18th December 2025. So if you've been dreading a new set of rules specifically governing how probation has t

I've lost count of the number of times a client has called me in a mild panic because someone's turned up late for the fourth time that month, or missed a deadline that mattered, and their instinct is to march the person into an office and sack them on the spot. I get it. When something's frustrating you, the temptation is to deal with it fast and be done with it. But fast and fair rarely live in the same sentence, and skipping the process is how a straightforward performance

Most managers over-prepare the wrong part of a difficult conversation. They spend all their time working out exactly what they're going to say, word for word, and almost none preparing for what happens after they say it; the reaction, the pushback, the silence, the tears, the anger. That imbalance is exactly why so many of these conversations go sideways. The opening line was fine. Nobody had thought about the next five minutes. Get clear on the actual point before you get cl