Practical HR insights

Unfair dismissal rights drop to six months' service from 1st January 2027. Here's what I'd review now: probation, feedback, PIPs, manager confidence and where AI fits in.

Review onboarding and probation before January 2027, including union rights statements, six-month unfair dismissal rights, HRIS automation and new-starter feedback.

Managers are using AI to write redundancy business cases. Here's where AI genuinely helps in a redundancy process, where it adds risk, and the questions I'd ask first.

Love them or loathe them? Why so many businesses are wary of trade unions, what unions actually do, and how to build a better relationship before 30th October.

Most line managers didn't set out to manage people. Here's what actually helps them in a small business without an HR team, from someone who has spent years supporting them.

From 1st October, right to work checks no longer stop at employees. Here's what's changing, who it affects and what I'd be doing now if I ran HR in a small business.

It's one of the questions I get asked most. Can HR put employee information into ChatGPT or Copilot? The honest answer is "it depends", so here's what it depends on.

A grievance can feel daunting when you don't have an HR team. Here's a step-by-step guide to handling one fairly, based on the Acas Code, plus what to do when it's been written by AI.

Lots of HR teams are using AI, but few have stepped back to look at how. Here's what an HR AI readiness review involves, what you get from one, and how to tell if you need it.

Most HR consultancies hit the same problem sooner or later. Too much work, or work outside their core skills. Here's how associate arrangements work, and where I think AI fits in.

Most HR teams have at least one project that keeps getting pushed back because the day job takes over. Here's what HR project management is, and when it's worth getting help.

A staff handbook isn't a legal requirement, but some of what goes in it is. Here's my plain-English checklist for small businesses, and the mistakes I see most often.

I'm based in Farnborough and work with businesses across Hampshire, Surrey and Berkshire. Here's what outsourced HR support looks like, and what to expect if you get in touch.

HR teams can get real value from AI, but we hold some of the most sensitive data in any organisation. Here's the practical starting point I'd suggest, based on rolling out AI to an HR team myself.

Most small businesses don't need a full-time HR person. But there comes a point where doing it yourself starts costing more than it saves. Here are the signs I look for.

The Employment Rights Act 2025 is arriving in stages. Here's what small businesses need to know, what changes when, and what I'd be doing now.

This week, AI was apparently going to make humans extinct. That was the headline, anyway. The coverage followed warnings from a former Anthropic researcher, who said he believed there was a 10% chance that AI could cause human extinction within the next decade. Other researchers have raised concerns about companies racing to build increasingly powerful models without knowing whether they will always remain under human control. That is clearly not something we should dismiss.

This week I joined a webinar run by Hireful on using ChatGPT in recruitment. I use AI most days, so I went into it wondering how much I'd actually learn. Would I pick up anything new, or would I already know most of it? Turns out, I learnt quite a bit. A few new tips, some features I hadn't really explored properly and, probably most usefully, a different way of thinking about how I interact with the tool. It was a good reminder of how ridiculously quickly all of this is movi

I've been thinking about a question that feels slightly uncomfortable for someone whose business is helping organisations use AI. What about its environmental impact? I spend a lot of time thinking about responsible adoption. Whether people understand the tools they are using, what happens to their data, how they check the answers and where human judgement needs to remain involved. But if we are encouraging organisations to use more AI, I think we also need to be willing to a

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a LinkedIn poll asking who should own AI within an organisation. The options were HR, IT, Legal and Compliance, or shared ownership across the business. Shared ownership won with 79% of the vote. IT received the remaining 21%. Nobody chose HR or Legal and Compliance. My first reaction was that the result made complete sense. AI touches too many parts of an organisation to belong neatly to one function. There are questions about technology and data