All posts by Adrian Berwick

Every SME business wants to grow, ideally organically and the key is to find good sales people. Judging by some of the claims being made on Salesperson’s CVs, this country is awash with good sales people but it’s the excellent sales person that will make a difference and the ones that can “walk the walk” rather than “talk the talk.”
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Over the last few years we have seen rafts of employment legislation around discrimination, diversity as well as disability and increasing moves to encourage fathers to take paternity leave. Last year we saw significant developments in case law around the subject of obesity and the notion that this could now fall under the Equality Act and the need for employers to make reasonable adjustments.

However, there is a taboo subject that many believe could be a major topic in the next few years – namely the menopause and the way in which its symptoms impact on women in the workplace and employers, specifically those in the private sector need to wake up to the issue and recognise that burying their heads in the sand in not going to make the problem disappear. Read More

In a recent CIPD survey, over 70% of our eligible working population are now covered by some form of workplace pension arrangement. In part, this is due to the introduction of the Workplace Pension, affectionately known as auto enrolment and the recent TV advertising campaign to broaden awareness.

But with any analysis or statistics, the devil is in the detail and whatever pensions survey you look at, you are masking the great divide between private and public sector pensions. You can talk of the great divides – North and South, rich and poor, City and United in Manchester but then you have those whose working life has been based around a private sector business and those who have worked in the public sector. Read More

“Make sure we’re ready for the National Living Wage” – this needs to be pretty high on the HR team’s task list.

It hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that in April, we see the introduction of the National Living Wage (NLW) replacing the National Minimum Wage (NMW) and requiring employers to pay £7.20 an hour for employees aged 25 and over and for those full time employees currently on the NMW of £6.70, this effectively represents an increase in basic pay of about £1,000.

Working on the basis that you’ll never please everyone all the time, there will be many employees for whom this is great news but there will also be groups who will say it doesn’t go far enough and that there is a difference in the cost of living in and out of London but, to be fair, the NMW made no distinction. Not only does the NLW prescribe that we need to pay £7.20 from April, we know that the target is £9 by 2020. Read More