Opinion – Page 4
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OpinionJames Davies and Amy Cooper: How are employers continuing to deal with Covid-19?
The Covid-19 (Coronavirus) crisis presents businesses with multiple challenges, including how to continue to get the best out of their workforce while keeping them safe.Many employees have had to juggle childcare and schooling responsibilities with working in makeshift home offices. The government’s furlough scheme has, meanwhile, helped preserve jobs where ...
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OpinionJennifer Hill: Employers have responsibilities when helping staff return to the workplace
As lockdown is relaxed during the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, employers need to plan carefully for employees’ return to the workplace.Crucially, employees should continue to work from home if they can, and employers should take all reasonable steps to help employees to do so.Employers should also consider the guidance issued by ...
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OpinionHelen Watson: Business decisions during Covid-19
With little time to prepare or plan, businesses have needed to make critical decisions while having to navigate ever-changing legislation and guidance set out by the government. This has, in turn, left many employers potentially vulnerable, with lots of business owners and managers confused about what the correct duties and ...
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OpinionLisa Harris: We must adapt our digital literacies and embrace workplace technologies
Workplace technologies have been evolving over many years and their particular usefulness at the moment is evident in every news bulletin. Both the communication tools that we rely on and the network infrastructure that supports them have, so far, proved remarkably resilient in a global crisis.It is becoming clear that ...
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OpinionEmma Swan: Five finer details of the furlough scheme
One of the biggest economic impacts of Covid-19 is the high risk of widespread job losses. Organisations are experiencing significant drops in revenue and, unfortunately, for many businesses, making redundancies is a logical first step to protect cashflow and help secure company survival.The Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) is ...
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OpinionApril Horsman and Anne Sammon: Employers are key in supporting mental wellbeing
With a significant proportion of the UK economy now working from home due to the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, both organisations and the people within them are facing an unprecedented challenge in adapting to a new way of working. During these uncertain times, employers have a responsibility to ensure their workforce ...
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OpinionCharles Cotton: Supporting employees through times of uncertainty
The Coronavirus has plunged businesses into uncertainty and there are reports that millions of jobs could be lost globally as a result of the pandemic. As well as suddenly dealing with financial worries, individuals are concerned about their loved ones getting the virus or contracting it themselves.Many businesses will not ...
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OpinionCharles Pitt: Protecting wellbeing and mental health during Coronavirus
Since the start of the Coronavirus crisis, the British Safety Council has put in place a plan to protect its people and its customers. Supporting our employees' wellbeing and mental health is just as important to us as limiting the spread of the virus. Much of what we have done ...
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OpinionMalcolm Hurlston: Share schemes must present attractive returns to engage younger employees
If early assessments of Generation Z are on the money, they will be like chalk to the Millennial cheese, leaving employers with the most interesting communications challenge they have ever faced with young people.Gen Z appear to be old before their time, the first generation ever to be thinking about ...
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OpinionZoe Denny-Thomas: Engaging younger staff with share plans should be a key goal
Engaging the different generations in the workplace is always a hot topic, and there is increasing evidence that take-up of share plans among younger employees is disproportionately lower than their older colleagues. However, this is not necessarily a sign of disengagement with their employer. In 2017, Proshare produced a report, ...
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OpinionHelen Smith: Improving engagement when launching a health and wellbeing strategy
When launching a new health and wellbeing strategy, employers need to be proactive in the way they publicise it. After all, staff will not access benefits if they do not know they exist.Invite employees to helpHow do you encourage employees to feel part of the strategy from the outset?A good ...
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OpinionAlice Honeywill: The value of additional contributions in closing the gender pension gap
While we await government reforms on pension policy and wider industry change to tackle the gender pension gap, I find myself asking one question: what action can be taken right now?More specifically, what steps can employers be taking to make small, yet potentially effective, changes?The most widely discussed initiative is ...
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OpinionStephen Perkins: Benefits management involves knowing employees' needs
A single cash award may seem the simplest method of reward, and one which allows employees to control what they do to benefit from their earnings, but benefits have become part of an expected package.How does an employer offer benefits that employees want and value, compared with cash? How can ...
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OpinionSimon Richardson: Employers must convey the value of benefits to staff
In these days of internet and telephone banking, most of us check our balance each day, perhaps even more just before payday. However, we do not check the value of our pension statement, which is especially important if we are in a defined contribution (DC) plan subject to the vagaries ...
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OpinionPip Hulbert: Mental health support needs a year-long focus
Mental health is rightly becoming a priority for every kind of business, yet conversations around the topic are still too often shrouded in stigma.That has got to stop. Talented people are the beating heart of business, and we want everyone to feel that it is okay to raise their hand ...
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OpinionMark Brill: Artificial intelligence and the Wizard of Oz effect
In the last 18 months, a painting created by artificial intelligence (AI) was sold at Christie's for €400,000, a writing bot at tech magazine TNW out-performed its journalist colleagues, and Google announced that it had achieved quantum supremacy in a computation that would have taken a binary computer 10,000 years. ...
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OpinionRachel Clift: How to support employees with money worries
We are currently living in uncertain times, with austerity and the constant pressure of cost saving taking its toll.UK household debt has hit a record high at £428 billion, according to figures published in January 2019 by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). With an average total debt per household of ...
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OpinionMarc Long: Are there hidden dangers when staff tip each other?
Peer-to-peer reward technology provides employees with a budget to tip each other small amounts of money each month, to reflect what they consider to be good work.On the face of it, a scheme that allows co-workers to ‘tip’ colleagues they think are doing a good job is a positive one. ...
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OpinionDavid Mendel: Clear guidelines are needed for wearable technology in the workplace
In an increasingly digital environment, more and more employers are exploring the use of wearable devices in the workplace to enhance employees’ health and wellbeing. However, if data is not used in a transparent way, it can raise a number of legal and practical issues such as data protection and ...
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OpinionMichael Kind: Tech platforms help engage employees with their pensions
Could technology be the answer to pensions engagement? To some extent, yes. PensionBee and Smart Pension being integrated into Yolt and Alexa, respectively, increases the points at which they are visible, and makes employees’ user journey smoother. Simpler touches, such as using educational videos rather than long reams of text, ...