Media-Insert Communications

Built to Last? A blueprint for developing future-proof in-house legal teams

This Obelisk Support paper reviews current reports, #surveys and various off-line and on-line literature on in-house #legal #teams and best practice. As well as looking at the legal industry specifically, we draw on thinking from #leaders and #academics across many industries in order to synthesise and present a comprehensive set of #insights. We have also analysed the websites, #press coverage and recruitment advertising of the UK #FTSE100 companies, looking at their leadership, advertised #benefits and working practices and promotion of careers
within the legal team. This #analysis was carried out using internet search engines and job boards in October 2019. This report was researched and written with Graham Jarvis of Media-Insert Communications: https://bit.ly/3d0lJSb

Bridgeworks and PeaSoup target the growing BUaaS and DraaS market

Bridgeworks CEO David Trossell speaks to Digitalisation World Magazine about joining forces with PeaSoup to bring award-winning solutions to disaster recovery (DRaaS), backup (BUaaS), replication and business continuity planning.

Engage Remote Employees With Microsoft 365

Silicon Reef is all about connecting and creating employee engagement with remote and flexible teams. We find they bring distinct advantages: the creation of cost and time efficiencies, increased employee happiness, reduced staff churn and recruitment costs.

With the right tools and organisational culture, remote and flexible strategies in place, team productivity and performance can shoot up. A 2017 YouGov survey of British business and employees found 89% considered flexible working to be a key motivator to their productivity – particularly when a sense of being part of a team is created, as most of us yearn for person-to-person interactions.

Click to understand how to engage remote employees with Microsoft 365. 

Smart tech: Making Employees Safer and More Productive

Mobile apps and wearable technologies such as Apple Watch motivate employees, encouraging them to take responsibility for their own health and wellbeing.

Employee health and wellbeing is firmly on the agenda of many organisations today. A healthy employee is a happy and potentially a highly productive member of staff who’s less likely to either seek employment elsewhere, go off sick or be absent for other reasons.

According to research from the University of Salford: “More than 130 million days are lost to sickness absence every year in the UK, and working age ill health has an annual cost to the economy of more than £100bn.” So health and wellbeing isn’t an issue companies of all kinds can take lightly.

Find out more, read the complete articles here. 

Publication: Director of Finance, written by Graham Jarvis and published on 31st May 2016.

How to use the cloud to increase employee collaboration

Using the cloud to improve collaboration among your workforce is the way to go, just follow some simple rules

Email has for a long time been the main tool for collaborating on various business projects, but the cloud provides an opportunity to do more than just send someone a document and then wait for a response. Read more in CloudPro.

Published on 12th October 2011.

Mycustomer.com - 'Thrive in a downturn with effective targeting'

An economic downturn is an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. Some companies will certainly have to close their doors; but with more focused targeting, meaningful employee performance and customer-related targets, and the will to innovate, it’s possible to thrive in such a climate as this. How? Companies need to ramp up their marketing, and invest in key resources like their staff and their customers. Marketing isn’t just about huge CRM systems and data – it’s about people, and in a downturn they behave differently...

Read the complete article by Graham Jarvis at http://www.mycustomer.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=133977. Published on 20th October 2008.

ConFIRM your thought-leadership: A whitepaper on the Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations, Online Surveying and Reporting

The legislative burden upon organisations, both public and private, seems to get heavier and heavier as time goes on. However, some have emerged for very good reasons. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States emerged from the Enron and Worldcom scandals, and enforced a greater need for corporate transparency and accountability.

There’s also the Freedom of Information Act, The Working Time Regulations, the Disability Discrimination Act (e.g. website and physical accessibility), the Data Protection Act, an increasing number of laws and regulations that enforce equal opportunities, and now – since it came into force in the United Kingdom in April 2005, regarding organisations of more than 150 employees – there’s the Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations. If your organisation fails to comply, it could face a hefty fine of up to £75,000.

What a nightmare? No, not really! With Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in mind, these shouldn’t be seen as resource-draining interferences into an organisation’s everyday life. If you are able to become a thought-leader, and turn these into opportunities rather than consider them as potential threats, then you will be able to create both financial and economic value for all of your stakeholders.

Therefore the UK’s Direct Marketing Association (DMA) welcomes the new legislation, and it believes that most large companies already have had some sort of information and consultation process in place anyway. However, were these regulations to apply to companies and organisations with one or more employees in the future, the DMA fears that the legislative burden could become disproportionate and unnecessary. Even so, an 11th annual survey by DLA – a law firm – showed that 64% of public sector and 56% of private organisations believe that this legislation is more beneficial than interfering.

Benefit from informing and consulting your employees

“In the DMA’s opinion, happy employees will provide better customer-focused service. If the system becomes cumbersome or too stringent, then this places additional burden upon management, which is not in the general interest of the company.” Source: Michelle Wicker, Solicitor, Employment, Legal and Public Affairs Adviser of the Direct Marketing Association.

According to the European Union, The Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations, should help to make the EU more competitive (Source: 3i – ‘Managing Growth, Management strategies – Cutting through the red tape’, by Emma Davis). Companies should therefore focus more on the benefits of the legislation, which should make them more competitive for the reasons cited below. Little value will be derived from failing to comply and concentrating on its negative aspects.

The key benefits include better staff motivation, retention, less absenteeism, better customer service and acquisition (if staff feel respected, they are more likely to empathise with customers), and this will present – tied together with compliance to other laws – an image of greater corporate social responsibility. The end result could be an increase in a company’s share price, which would please shareholders and even staff if the right incentives were also in place. It will also create a more collaborative and harmonious environment for improving industrial relations, helping employees to better understand the day-to-day issues.

The three steps to implementation

This law will, in the first instance, affect 3% of the UK’s organisations. Due to the potential disproportionate burdens that could be placed upon smaller organisations, the legislation comes into force in three stages:

• 2005 for the aforementioned firms;
• Those with at least 100 staff have until 2006 to complete the full implementation process;
• SMEs, those with less than 50 employees, are being given until 2008.

The regulations establish Works Councils, which are elected representatives of an organisation’s employees. It is their responsibility to work with mangers to facilitate and ensure that the process is followed, and that pre-existing agreements are considered, re-negotiated if and when necessary, and abided by.

The regulations aren’t activated automatically though. At least 10% of an organisation’s employees, as shown by the DTI’s flowchart below, must sign and present a petition before they can be enacted. Part of the employee consultation process would include a ballot, and if less than 40% of the organisation’s employees participate, managers have no legal obligation to consult further or negotiate, where an agreement is required, with their representatives. If there is a pre-existing agreement in place, and less than 40% of the employees respond to any consultation, then that agreement continues...

To read the full report, download it here:

Download ConFIRM your thoughtleadership.doc

Happy employees, better customer service

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) welcomes the new Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations, which came into force in April 2005. In a whitepaper entitled, ‘Confirm your thought-leadership’, Michelle Wicker, who works as an employment solicitor at the DMA, says:

“In the DMA’s opinion, happy employees will provide better customer-focused service. If the system becomes cumbersome or too stringent, then this places additional burden upon management, which is not in the general interest of the company. Most large companies already have a policy in place to advise employees of any organisational changes.  The advantage to the company having an agreement in place is that the arrangements and structures will be tailored to their individual circumstances.”

The report was commissioned by online survey and reporting software vendor, FIRM. The whitepaper will be published and released in the next few weeks. The following therefore provides an insight into the paper’s analysis.

Compliance is a good thing

So the word is out there! Compliance to the increases in new legislation, which is all too often perceived as an extra and sometimes as an unnecessary burden upon business, needn’t be a seen as costly or resource draining. New legislation offers many opportunities to present your company as one that practices and preaches Corporate Social Responsibility, one that includes staff in much of the decision-making processes that help to drive a business forward.

Without a motivated workforce, the engine of any company, what do you have? Nothing. Money can be the fuel for many projects, but you need people to add value to the business, so as to drive up company revenues, while also pleasing shareholders and customers alike. So you companies and organisations need to look beyond the burden of the ‘red tape’ and start to realise the benefits that CSR and good corporate governance, including good industrial relations, can give you.

Research by a number of organisations has revealed that if you want to have happy customers, particularly in a customer-facing business environment, then you should be doing your utmost to make sure that your employees feel happy too, that their opinions are valued and respected; so that they become integral to the company, and more loyal as a result. The benefits of employee involvement are wide-ranging, and this includes a significant reduction in absenteeism. It can also increase the productivity of your employees.

The difference: failure or success?

The Involvement and Participation Association, also welcomes the new regulations, and provides an insight into how they can either work well or fail in its whitepaper, ‘High Performance Workplaces; Informing and Consulting Employees, The IPA’s response to the DTI’s consultation document’ (2003). The pros and cons are revealed in the following table from the report.

What works well and why?	Why does Information and consultation fail?
Working together to build a shared view of the business and its competitive environment.	A lack of commitment from senior managers.
Sharing information widely to enable all participants to have a shared grasp of the context within which decisions are being made.	A failure to consult at an early enough stage and before the key decisions are made.
Consultative processes which enable the workforce both individually and as a whole to contribute effectively to the debate on issues and to influence the outcomes.	No dynamism – keep going around the same issues.
A range of joint problem-solving techniques to address issues.	Poor agenda
Feedback systems enabling employee ‘voice’ to be heard effectively and get messages back to the workforce.	Little or no evaluation, which means that the participants lack clarity about what they are doing.
Information Source: ‘High Performance Workplaces; Informing and Consulting Employees, The IPA’s response to the DTI’s consultation document’ (2003).	Little or no training in information and consultation for participants (both managers and employee representatives)
	Too much pressure on time and resources for participants.
	A failure to follow up on promises or actions and
	A lack of a supportive infrastructure.

The auditing role of technology

Technologies like online surveying and reporting software can help your company to take advantage of the opportunities presented by such legislation, while also reducing the hurdles and saving your company time and money. The British Council even uses FIRM’s Confirmit to develop its staff training and education programmes. The British Council has to comply not only to the new legislation, but also with the Freedom of Information Act and the Data Protection Act. Confirmit is used to assess an employee’s knowledge of the Acts, and how they need to put them into practice.

Not only has online surveying and reporting helped the British Council to reduce the survey-creation to report-creation and analysis cycle from around 3 months (for example) to a matter of days or weeks, but it has also facilitated the creation of a number of centres of excellence around the world, no matter where it operates and in 50-60 languages, employees can either be consulted, informed and trained to ensure that best practice, however determined, is followed. Ian Barnes, global web operations manager, elaborates:

We are using Confirmit to deliver a training and evaluation suite for the organisation. The objective is first to test every single member of staff, every year to see if they understand the rules of Data Protection and Freedom of Information. Now we’ve got quite a small department, so we need automated techniques to achieve this, and because we have 7,500 employees in 110 countries and 230 offices. It’s just impossible for any size of UK-based department to individually inspect people’s knowledge in this area. So we’ve used Confirmit in a very novel way; we’ve blended a question and answer session with a CD-ROM, which is sent out to everybody.”

In the same way that online surveying and reporting has been used to create best practice and to assess knowledge of the DPA and FOI, it can also be used to inform and consult with employees on a wide range of potential issues. It could even be used to facilitate voting on particular issues when the regulations are activated following the delivery of a petition by 10% of a company’s employees. Following that 40% of all employees must endorse any agreement for it to become valid, otherwise managers have the right not to enact any proposals that may have been agreed with a Works Council.

Wicker adds: “Online surveying and reporting can benefit companies in that a survey can be sent directly to the employee rather than being passed through the management hierarchy of the company.  Employees would have a direct voice in the process and this would facilitate genuine communication. However, employees may feel they are unable to offer their true opinions if the survey is not anonymous, as it can be linked back to them. Therefore, any survey should remain transparent throughout the process. “

In fact that’s the beauty of online surveying and reporting software like Confirmit, because they offer the means for employment processes to be transparent, while allowing those matters that need to be kept secure and confidential to be kept so. In addition to annual climate surveys, the software is suitable for global HR organisations to understand “moments of truth” across the entire employee lifecycle, from studies regarding the quality of the recruitment process all the way to exit interviews – most of which are not shared beyond the departmental HR and line management. The software also has the ability to provide a 360-degree assessment of the organisation and its employees. Reporting from such a system is available in real-time, so you act quickly on insight generated by the studies, as well as discover and monitor trends.  This can all be integrated with Human Resources’ databases.

Collaboration for profit

With better informed, assessed, trained and consulted staff, managers will soon realise that the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s published fears, whereby managers may no longer be able to manage, doesn’t necessarily have to become true. If managers are working more collaboratively with staff, they could even develop better marketing strategies, and improved customer service while increasing shareholder and overall stakeholder value. So keep your staff happy by informing and consulting with them on a regular basis, and particularly if you seek to please shareholders and maintain a database of happy and loyal customers.

By Graham Jarvis

Editor and Media Services Consultant

Email: [email protected]

Blog: http://www.media-insert.co.uk

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