All articles by Duncan Brown
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ArticleDuncan Brown: Should employers pay for skills and qualifications?
When both my girls were in full-on exam-stress mode recently, one to get into university, the other to stay there, I lay low at home. But underneath the headlines of mounting student debt and graduates being forced into low-skilled jobs, what’s the evidence that all the effort of getting a ...
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ArticleDuncan Brown: The best benefit is training and development
Last month I wrote about Professor Jules Goddard’s award-winning research calling for “bolder investments and higher costs” to provide a sustainable basis for our economic recovery. But, particularly in low-paying and labour-intensive industries, how can you possibly increase your pay and benefits costs and stay in business?Two reports out last ...
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ArticleDuncan Brown: Rebuilding and rehumanising performance management
They are not alone. E-reward will soon release its latest research on the subject. Its previous study found that most organisations, like this large one, had changed their process in the past three years. But most had further reforms planned, a hamster-wheel pattern of change that seems to leave most ...
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ArticleDuncan Brown: Economic sense and social sensibility
At the end of December 2013, the GMB released research pointing to a 14% national decline in real wages since the start of the recession in 2008, and an average 20% fall in London. General secretary Paul Kenny argued: ”People deserve a decent pay rise after years of attacks on ...
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Duncan Brown: Pulling the HR lever
Rather than welcoming the significant upward revision to national economic growth forecasts for 2013 (1.4%) and 2014 (2.4%), much of the post-statement debate focused on the cost-of-living issue and who shares in that growth, with the Institute of Fiscal Studies showing that the average employee earns £1,600 less in real ...
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Duncan Brown: Linking reward with engagement
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s (CIPD) latest Employee Outlook survey, published in autumn 2013, found just 36% of employees were positively engaged at work and one in four of them are looking for a new job. With 38% of them reporting that their employer still has a pay ...
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Duncan Brown: Low pay, no way
These include free childcare funded by a banking levy (Labour); taking those on the minimum wage out of income tax altogether (Liberal Democrats); and tax breaks for married couples (Conservatives).I was at two events in September exploring some of the ways in which the HR community might contribute on the ...
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Duncan Brown: Executive pay in overseas aid charities
The TUC has a clear point of view on ‘excessive’ executive remuneration. In keeping with many working in HR, I agree with much of the press criticism and support the measures now being taken: the compulsory shareholder vote, clearer communications of the total value of packages, and so on.But the ...
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Duncan Brown: Good economic growth via staff management
But in a thought-provoking article published on 25 July, City AM’s editor, Allister Heath, questions the nature and sustainability of this recovery and says: “We must urgently improve the quality of our economic growth.”After the last four years, any growth might seem ‘good’.But Heath perceptively distinguishes between ‘good’, sustainable, long-term ...
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Duncan Brown: Engagement through reward: impossible or essential?
In the last couple of weeks, I have been talking about the links between performance, reward and values with the NHS Pay Review Body; moves towards more market-driven reward with the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association (UCEA); and the links between reward and engagement at an Aon Hewitt seminar.Whatever the ...
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Duncan Brown: Fear not the key for motivation
Aon Hewitt has contributed, with its annual HR barometer of director priorities in organisations with more than two million staff in Europe, and the Global engagement trends study drawn from its database of five million employees.Although the economic indicators are, at last, suggesting the UK is spluttering into recovery, the ...
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Duncan Brown: Do executive bonuses really work?
That was the maximum available to WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell last year. However, 60% of shareholders voted against his £6.8 million package at the annual general meeting. under his new scheme, that maximum will fall to a mere 217.5%.That seems strange to me. if you believe bonuses work, ...
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Duncan Brown: Are status perks still relevant?
Yerdaw understands status. He’s only eight and has no money. But my self-appointed, homeless guide to beautiful Lalibela, Ethiopia, insisted on showing me to the best restaurant in the best hotel in town. ‘How do you know it’s the best?’ I asked. ‘The manager has a big, big car’ he ...
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Duncan Brown: Issue avoidance puts us in peril
Even without the threat of imprisonment, avoidance is a well-known psychological phenomenon, affecting individuals and organisations, according to Ralph Kilmann, chief executive and senior consultant at e-learning conflict resolution firm Kilmann Diagnostics, who co-developed a technique to measure it. A short-term focus and superficial actions are common symptoms.I think there ...
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Duncan Brown: Reward must re?ect the right behaviour
First, last month Robert Francis QC published the report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust public inquiry on the suffering of patients at Mid-Staffordshire hospital, with 290 recommendations to improve care and the ‘self-serving’ NHS. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt promised a tough new inspection regime, while prime minister David ...
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Duncan Brown: A chilling tale of shifting fortunes
The eurozone’s third quarter of double-dip recession and disappointing UK industrial output figures were accompanied by news of 13% growth at luxury brand Burberry and record sales at Rolls-Royce.Who stole the American Dream? by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, published last year, charts US economic history since the Second World ...
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Duncan Brown: Reward and the road to recovery
With ministers such as business secretary Vince Cable openly discussing the possibility of a ‘triple-dip’ recession, the search is now on for measures to stimulate recovery, in the economy and in employee engagement.Employee share ownership and less legislative red tape are two of them.Despite little evident support, Osborne confirmed legislation ...
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Duncan Brown: How will you treat employees in 2013?
Analysing the four largest public sector pension plans, the Pensions Policy Institute’s October report The implications of the coalition government’s reforms for members of the public service pension schemes found the proposed reforms will reduce the average value of the benefit across all scheme members by one-third. No wonder they ...
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Duncan Brown: Reward policy: back to the centre?
This year’s party conferences highlighted the problems of policy co-ordination in a coalition government. The Conservatives in Manchester reinforced the drive to local pay management in the NHS, while Liberal Democrats voted against the proposals for regional pay.You can be forgiven for being as confused as the coalition’s pay policy. ...
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Duncan Brown: The soul of benefits management
Nelson Mandela said you can judge the soul of a society by how it treats its children. Halifax’s annual Pocket money survey last month left my teenage girls disappointed. Rather than upping the financial ante on dad, it revealed an annual 8% decline to £5.98 per week, a 6% increase ...