Frequently Asked Questions
Recruitment
The recruitment process can be a minefield.
It needs careful planning and considerable effort if it is to be successful. How much time do managers have to get it right? We can help you through this.
Providing professional recruitment support from the time a vacancy is identified, right through to the point your new employee joins you.
Many people are influenced by what kind of employer they are joining. This is about more than terms and conditions. Increasingly individuals know their rights and are looking for more than just a decent salary. People are now looking for employers who can offer more. We can help you put policies in place that will allow you to stay within the law and enable you to attract and retain employees, by sending positive messages about what you do and what it’s like to work for you. The approach that Blue Star Human Resources uses, is to work with you to develop a role profile covering each job in the organisation. Combining the job description, skills, knowledge, experience and personal qualities in a simple easy to use format. This profile will then form the basis of recruitment, individual performance management, career and personal development.
Onboarding
Having found the right person, it is important that they become fully aware of the nature of your organisation and know all there is to know about their new job.
We can help by working with you to put together an appropriate induction programme when you need it.
So you have your employment contract and supporting employment policies and procedures in place, but how do staff find out what they need to know about working for you on a day to day basis? We always recommend putting in place a short, highly readable Staff/Employee Handbook, covering areas such as what your organisation does, pay and benefits, absence/leave, health and safety, company property, learning/development. We believe the handbook to be an important means of you communicating the look and feel of your organisation to your staff. We can put this document together for you with the minimum of effort on your part. We will ask you the relevant questions and then we do the rest.
Development
Releasing their potential
Can you rely upon your people simply to deliver day in day out, without some form of personal development? It’s unlikely.
Most will either require development in their current role or development in order to undertake other, perhaps more senior roles in the future. We encourage you to use personal development planning as part of generally managing your staff. We can help you to put this in place. We can work with you to create personal development opportunities. Using a number of techniques including psychometrics, we can help teams and individuals to develop and release their potential. We have a proven track record in delivering successful outcomes.
Performance
Blue Star Human Resources can work with you to put in place a process for managing your people on a day to day basis. We will help your managers learn the skills to manage performance effectively.
Your people will need to know what is expected of them. They will also need to acquire new skills and experience as your business evolves. We can work with you to establish a performance management process starting with agreeing performance objectives. We usually recommend they be SMART (Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bounded). We can help you establish where skill gaps exist and how these may be filled through personal development. We can train your managers how to appraise performance at the end of the performance period. This need not be an arduous process. It needs to be seen as benefiting the team as a whole.
Dealing with poor performance is one of the most difficult things a manager has to do. It’s so easy to be at one of the extremes – to want to immediately sack people who are not performing properly or to simply ignore it and hope it might go away. Neither approach is acceptable to any successful business. At one extreme a lengthy and costly tribunal proceeding may be the result (to say nothing of the impact on morale of those left behind) and at the other the business suffers as a result of someone staying who is clearly not performing as they should be.
Difficult people issues arise even in the best managed companies. We recommend dealing with every issue early on, face to face (if possible), and in an open way. Sometimes you may have to resort to your disciplinary procedure but most times you’ll be able to address a problem before it gets unmanageable. If however, you find yourself in need of additional support to manage a particularly difficult situation, Blue Star Human Resources can act as an independent facilitator or mediator to work with you to minimise the risk to your business.
Reward
Making the managers life easier.
Whilst most managers will recognise that reward is important, few have a reward strategy in place.
The strategy is important in determining not only how base pay is to be established and reviewed but also how any bonus system will work and how other forms of reward are to be used as part of the overall strategy.
The dreaded appraisal. Managers generally hate doing them. They say it’s mainly because they take up so much time. They get in the way of doing the day job. The key thing they miss of course is that a successful appraisal can mean a more motivated and productive employee that may make the manager’s life a little easier.
Employment relations
Your employment contract is more than a legal document.
It makes the first statement about your organisation and the relationship you have with your people. It should reflect both the needs of your business and your market sector. If you’re worried about getting the balance right, we can help you with a pragmatic approach, simple language and make sure that all legal aspects are covered.
Retention
Staff surveys are a good way of asking people what they think and focus attention on key issues.
A series of such surveys can track views over time to see whether improvements are being made. We can help by putting in place a simple and effective succession planning approach in your business that also links in with your personal development planning process.
Exit
Understanding why your staff leave… is there a pattern? Do we have a problem?
Creating an exit interview or survey is a great way of understanding if there is an underlying issue that needs to be resolved, in order to alleviate such issues in future.
Dismissing employees is something all businesses hope to avoid but few manage to. We can help you to put in place the necessary arrangements for you to dismiss employees with the minimum of fuss and with minimum risk of action being taken against you.
Redundancies can be difficult for all involved, but not only can we help you to put in place an appropriate policy, we can work with you when they occur, to ensure that you do not fall into any traps and ultimately find yourself in an employment tribunal or paying out many thousands of pounds in legal costs or compensation. Sometimes you need to make an exit watertight, in order to avoid the risk of further action being taken against you by an ex-employee. This might occur in a redundancy situation or simply because someone in your organisation is no longer performing as you wish.