Professional Services

Engaged employees stay with companies for a long time. They are part of the company team, company culture, and company value. Creating company engagement drives employee retention. Retaining great employees keeps hiring and training costs low. Retaining employees can only be achieved with consistent and effective employee communication.

No matter how well senior executives are performing at work, they all tend to dread their annual performance review. Whilst many are trained in the art of giving feedback to their teams, how do they cope when the tables are turned on them?

Receiving feedback and acting upon it is a vital ingredient in the development of leaders in business today.

The increasing occurrence of cybersecurity breaches – such as the recent case at eBay when it is believed more than 145 million user accounts were infiltrated – is causing executives around the globe to seek ever more sophisticated  solutions to prevent future violations . As they review their procedures, tighten their operational environment and add additional levels of security, finding the optimum formula is still proving elusive.

Hiring the right people is immensely complex – it is no surprise that so many mistakes are made. Getting recruitment right will pay huge dividends, but is enough rigor applied to the process? Though luck will play its part, businesses need the right people to be available and attracted to your organisation. If there are two things that are critical it is to assess people’s values and leadership.

Every businessman and woman knows the importance of meetings. A necessary evil they may be, meetings are vital for providing and receiving updates, communicating, planning, brainstorming and making decisions.

All too often, however, meetings take up an inordinate amount of time. But by focusing on meeting productivity, individuals and businesses can greatly reduce time wastage. In a business climate where time is precious, that’s an advantage many of us can’t afford not to take.

The evidence is hard to refute: swapping spreadsheets for specialist commodity management solutions helps create a winning business that makes better decisions, faster, and with more confidence.

Eight reasons to unhitch and make the switch:

In my experience the NED is still seen as an outsider and NED’s also view themselves as outsiders. Whilst their degree of detachment from the day to day life of a business can be a healthy thing, the detachment caused by episodic intervention can be very unhealthy and greatly restricts the ability of the NED to deliver value and exercise their governance duties.

With up to a hundred people applying for each job he advertises, entrepreneur Daniel Thomas sees the same CV and cover letter mistakes repeated over and over again.

For Daniel, who set up his hot tub business DanzSpas eight years ago, it’s all about the cover letter.

He never looks at a CV until he has shortlisted ten applicants and believes you can convey more in this one letter than you can in a two page CV.

He wants to see that an applicant cares about the business they’re applying to and the job they’re applying for.

A recent survey of 1,200 conducted by Depression Alliance found that a third of people in the UK struggle to cope at work because of depression, stress or burn out, with 83 percent of those affected experiencing isolation or loneliness as a result. It is not necessarily a big workload that causes depression at work but an unfair boss and an unfair work environment are what can really have an effect on employees and really bring them down. Below are a few tips on how to combat stress and depression at work:

Meetings may be an essential part of the business world, however there are those among us who have no idea how to behave in these situations.

We’ve all been in meetings where someone has made us see red either by texting on their phone, not contributing or even not shutting up.

1) Time-wasting
Time is an extremely valuable commodity, so meetings that go on much longer than they need to are not only costing you money, but also disrespecting everyone’s time.