Useful information/FAQs

Oh, you totally could!!

Here at E-J HR Consulting it is important that we understand the context of what you are trying to achieve. What is your strategic plan and how does the work fit in with or support it? We would also be thinking about how the work supports what you are trying to achieve in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB)….and, if you have not thought about the work through that lens, to encourage you to do so. How you think about these things will shape and influence the detail of any work we do with you. Policies, systems and processes absolutely need to reflect legal, and other regulatory, requirements. They are also an important opportunity to reflect your organisational goals, culture and values. They can be used to re-emphasise your DEIB intentions.

So when you download information from any website, like a policy template, it is not going to be tailored to the specific needs of your organisation. Whilst it will be legally compliant, assuming you’re downloading from a reputable organisation like ACAS (and that’s really important), it may or may not be suitable for your needs and it is not likely to reflect your organisational goals, culture and values. Partnering with E-J HR Consulting you can be confident that you are getting a tailored service with deliverables designed specifically for your business needs.

So whilst you could, we would suggest that you might not want to. Just putting that out there.

The smaller the business in terms of headcount the more significant the impact of any people management issues, particularly relating to performance and conduct. So a more helpful question to think about is can you afford not to HR support in place? We all know that trying to fix or correct a something that has gone wrong or is not working is much harder and more expensive then putting the necessary systems & processes in place to protect your business and mitigate your risk in the first place. If you invest and enable now (in your people managers, ensuring that you have robust systems and processes in place and managers who know how to use them), you save later (less stress, better able to manage when things do go wrong, small issues have less of a chance to become much bigger issues, time, energy, costs and business disruption)!

Think about it this way you work with accounts & other financial experts to help you manage your finances, and you have IT support to help you manage your tech. Ensuring that your business has access to professional and highly experienced HR expertise, allows you, as a business owner/ leader, to focus on what you do best whilst also reducing your stress levels!

Typically, before any work commences you will receive a proposal document from us. This will outline our understanding of the work you want us to do and detail the costs. So you know up front what your costs are going to be. If any elements of a piece of work are either unknown or require subsequent clarification, as the project progresses, for example, this will be noted clearly in the proposal.

In most circumstances the costs contained in the proposal will be what you pay, unless there are any material changes either to the project brief or scope of the project. However, this would always be identified and agreed with you, as the client, as early as possible once identified, giving you the opportunity to decide if you wanted to insure the additional costs.

In order for any organisations to perform, however you are defining that, you need to have leaders who are clear about what is trying to be achieved and why at all levels. If your people managers, who are leading and managing teams on a day to day basis, are not able to operationalise your strategy then the chances of achieving your strategic goals is, at best, significantly hampered.

In addition to delivering on strategic plans, your people managers are the conduit through which most people experience the organisation, its values and culture. You may have heard the phrase ‘people join and organisation, but leave a manager’? Well, that should give you a sense of the impact that a people manager can have on what it feels like to work in your organisation.

So if you have not invested in upskilling your people managers how can you expect them to lead and manage themselves and others effectively? When you recruit for an accountant, for example, you would expect them to have the necessary experience and qualifications in accounting. And if they did not that would soon become apparent in their work. Well, when employees step into roles that require them to manage and lead others but do not have the necessary skills, experience or capability it also becomes very apparent, and impacts on the individual, their team and what it feels like to work in that team and also on the perfjoamcne of that team collectively and individually. The stakes for the organisation could not be higher.