HR Coffee Time

Managers are expected to handle everything from one-to-ones and development conversations to absence, performance issues and disciplinaries. Yet many step into management without having been properly taught how to deal with these responsibilities. For HR and People professionals, finding a way to build managers’ knowledge and confidence without overwhelming them can be a real challenge. In this special bonus episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay Wallis is joined by Amy Critchley, Head of People at Indigo Networks. Amy explains how she created a management development programme from scratch after joining an organisation that had not previously had a dedicated HR or People team. Amy shares practical ideas for combining essential HR knowledge with wider management development, making potentially dry subjects more engaging and helping learning stick. She also explains how the programme strengthened relationships between managers and changed the way they worked with the People team. What You’ll Learn How to decide which topics to prioritise when creating a management development programme Why combining practical HR knowledge with wider management skills can make training more effective Ideas for making subjects such as absence, investigations, disciplinaries and employment law more engaging How to accommodate different learning preferences without relying on lengthy presentations or uncomfortable role play Ways to support learning beyond the workshop through e-learning, workbooks, drop-in clinics and People Partnering sessions How real-life scenarios, discussion and peer learning can build managers’ confidence Signs that manager training is working, including stronger peer relationships and a more positive relationship with the People team Chapters [00:00] Introduction: Why managers matter [01:14] The challenge of developing managers [02:02] The Workforce Success Stories Summit [02:49] Meet Amy Critchley: building a management development programme [04:11] How Amy identified the need for manager training [05:47] Deciding on the training content [08:28] Combining HR knowledge with management development [09:50] Designing engaging, brain-friendly training [13:27] Wraparound support: e-learning and drop-in clinics [15:28] From drop-in clinics to people partnering [17:46] Measuring success: executive buy-in and manager engagement [20:18] Changing the perception of HR [24:16] Making learning stick: worst-case scenarios and one-to-ones [29:06] How the programme changed HR's perception in the business [ [32:43] Book recommendation and wrap-up Useful Links and Resources Learn more about the Workforce Success Stories Summit Connect with Fay Wallis on LinkedIn Learn about Fay’s Inspiring HR Leadership Programme Treat yourself to a copy of The Essential HR Planner Book Recommended in This Episode The Trainer’s Toolkit: Bringing Brain-Friendly Learning to Life, by Kimberly Herr and Larry Reynolds Amy recommends this practical resource for ideas on keeping training real, recognising the different needs of people in the room, creating multisensory learning and managing the state of the group. Helpful Episodes to Listen to Next Episode 129: Five Essential Techniques to Become a Great Manager, with James Rose This episode is a helpful next listen if you would like further practical ideas for developing and supporting managers in your organisation. Search for HR Coffee Time in your usual podcast app to find it. Enjoyed This Episode? Don’t Miss the Next One! Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email for useful HR resources, ideas and new episode updates to support you in your HR career.

Cancer affects far more people in the workplace than many of us realise. As HR professionals, there may be times when you're supporting an employee with a cancer diagnosis, someone undergoing treatment, a colleague living with the long-term effects of cancer, or an employee who is caring for a loved one affected by it. Knowing that support matters is one thing. Feeling confident about what to say, what practical help to offer, and how to create the right support across your organisation is another. In this episode, Fay is joined by Tara Ferguson, Founder of Onward With You. Drawing on more than 20 years in senior HR roles and her own experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, Tara shares practical advice to help HR teams and managers better support people affected by cancer at work. Together, they explore the role good line management can play, the reality of living with cancer beyond active treatment, and the steps organisations can take to build greater cancer confidence. What You’ll Learn Why cancer should increasingly be considered a long-term condition rather than a short-term illness The scale of cancer's impact on today's workforce, including employees with caring responsibilities What Tara's line manager did that made such a positive difference during her diagnosis and treatment Why work can sometimes play an important role in someone's recovery and wellbeing during treatment What HR professionals need to understand about legal protections and reasonable adjustments How to approach the first conversation when someone shares a cancer diagnosis with you Practical steps organisations can take to improve awareness, support and manager capability Chapters [0:00] Introduction: Cancer at Work [01:15] Meet Tara Ferguson [02:50] Tara's Story: From HR to Cancer Diagnosis [03:48] The Changing Face of Cancer in the Workplace [05:12] How Tara Is Now: The Ongoing Impact [08:07] Cancer in the Workplace: The Statistics [11:36] What Good Line Manager Support Looks Like [15:32] The Positive Role of Work During Treatment [17:13] Legal Protections & Reasonable Adjustments [19:05] Supporting Employees with Hidden Cancer Diagnoses [21:40] Having the First Conversation About Cancer [24:20] Organisation-Wide HR Strategies [27:26] Book Recommendation & Resources [29:27] How to Reach Tara [29:55] Key Takeaways & Closing Useful Links and Resources Visit Tara's website:Onward With You Connect with Tara Ferguson on LinkedIn Connect with Fay Wallis on LinkedIn Learn about Fay's Inspiring HR Leadership Programme Treat yourself to a copy of The Essential HR Planner Books and Resources Recommended in This Episode The Leopard in My House, by Mark Steel Tara also mentions a number of resources available through Onward With You, including: A guide covering 12 common questions HR professionals and line managers ask about supporting employees affected by cancer The Cancer Confidence Framework The Cancer Confidence HR Masterclass Enjoyed This Episode? Don’t Miss the Next One! Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email for useful HR resources, ideas and new episode updates to support you in your HR career.

Have you ever found yourself going round and round in circles trying to choose between two options? Perhaps you’re deciding whether to recruit externally or promote someone internally, introduce a new policy or stick with what you already have, invest in a new HR system or make the current one work, or even stay in your current role or apply for something new. Sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t thought hard enough about the two options. It’s that you’ve become so focused on them that you haven’t spotted another possibility. In this solo episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay shares a real decision she recently struggled with while planning the 2027 edition of The Essential HR Planner, and how an unexpected suggestion helped her realise she had fallen into a common decision-making trap called narrow framing. Drawing on ideas from Chip and Dan Heath’s brilliant book Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions, Fay explores two practical ways to widen your thinking and get unstuck when a decision feels like an either/or choice. In This Episode, You’ll Learn What narrow framing is and how it can limit your decision-making Why the options in front of you may not be the only options available How to use theVanishing Options Testto uncover different possibilities Why asking someone else for their perspective can help you see what you’re missing The questions to ask other people so you don’t accidentally keep them trapped inside the same narrow frame How Fay used these ideas to solve her dilemma about whether to bring back the wire-bound version of The Essential HR Planner Chapters [00:00] Introduction: Stuck Between Two Options [00:28] Common Either/Or Decisions at Work [01:22] The Book: Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath [02:43] Fay's Dilemma: The Essential HR Planner [04:27] Should the Wire-Bound Planner Return? [05:14] Asking for Feedback to Get Unstuck [06:20] Claire's Game-Changing Suggestion [07:53] Understanding Narrow Framing [09:53] The Vanishing Options Test [12:39] Getting Another Perspective [13:50] How to Ask Better Questions When Asking for Advice [14:44] Book Recommendations: Decisive, Made to Stick, and Switch [15:28] Pre-Order the Wire-Bound Planner [16:11] Closing Thanks and Sign-Off Books Recommended The book links below are Amazon affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath Switch: How to change things when change is hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath The Essential HR Planner If you’re watching or listening to this episode close to its release date, you should now be able to pre-order the wire-bound 2027 edition of The Essential HR Planner. Visit essentialhrplanner.co.uk to find out more and pre-order your copy. Enjoyed This Episode? Don’t Miss the Next One! Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email to be notified each time a new episode is released – and get free career tips, tools, and resources.

What exactly is employee experience? How is it different from workplace culture, employer brand or your employee value proposition? And what can you actually do to improve it? In this episode of HR Coffee Time, I’m joined by employee experience expert Chris Manning, People and Culture Portfolio Transformation Lead at Primark. Chris explains what employee experience really means and why it matters for organisations of every size. He shares practical ways to understand and measure the experience your employees are having, whether you work in a small organisation or a huge global business. We also explore how design thinking can help you move beyond simply listening to employees and start making meaningful improvements. Chris talks us through a practical onboarding example, showing how journey mapping can uncover friction, identify opportunities and help you design a better employee experience. And if you need to secure investment for your ideas, Chris shares practical advice on building the business case and getting the buy-in and budget you need. Whether employee experience is already part of your role, or it’s an area you’d like to learn more about, this episode is packed with practical ideas to help you get started. What You'll Learn What employee experience actually means How employee experience differs from workplace culture, employer brand and EVP Why employee experience matters in smaller organisations as well as large global businesses Practical ways to measure employee experience How to gather useful feedback across the employee lifecycle Why post-onboarding and offboarding can provide valuable insights How employee data can help create more personalised employee experiences How design thinking can help you improve employee experience The five stages of design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test How to use journey mapping to improve an experience such as onboarding How to build a compelling business case for employee experience improvements How to combine qualitative and quantitative evidence to secure buy-in and budget Chapters [00:00] What is employee experience and why does it matter? [02:45] Meet Chris Manning [04:35] What employee experience really means [06:25] Employee experience vs workplace culture [07:10] Employee experience, employer brand and EVP [08:30] Why employee experience matters in smaller organisations too [10:40] How to measure employee experience [14:20] Using employee data to understand and personalise experiences [18:20] Moving from employee listening to employee experience design [19:40] Using journey mapping to improve onboarding [23:30] A free onboarding journey-mapping resource [25:25] What is design thinking? [26:50] The five stages of design thinking [29:45] How to get buy-in and budget for employee experience [33:30] Chris’s recommended resource [35:35] How to connect with Chris USEFUL LINKS Connect with Fay Wallis on LinkedIn Connect with Chris Manning on LinkedIn Read Chris’s article about employee experience inThe ELEVATE Hub magazine Download Chris’s free employee experience journey-mapping resource:brightskyhr.co.uk/resources Find out more aboutThe Essential HR Planner Learn more about Fay’s leadership programme –Inspiring HR Leadership Enjoyed This Episode? Don’t Miss the Next One! Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email to be notified each time a new episode is released – and get free career tips, tools, and resources.

🎁 Download your free Personal User Manual template: https://brightskyhr.co.uk/resources Taking over the leadership of an HR team can come with a long list of things you want to improve, but one of the most valuable things you can do first is help your team build trust, understand each other and work well together. In this episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay shares one of her favourite team-building activities: creating and sharing Personal User Manuals. Personal User Manuals give everyone an opportunity to explain how they work best, the strengths they bring, what helps them thrive and what their colleagues should know about them. They can make some of the information that is usually invisible within a team much more visible, helping people understand each other’s preferences, avoid misunderstandings and make better use of the strengths and experience already within the team. Fay talks you through how to run the activity, from deciding what to include in your Personal User Manuals to facilitating the sharing session and turning what you learn into practical changes in how you work together. In this episode, you’ll discover: Why investing in relationships can create a stronger foundation when you take over an HR team How Personal User Manuals can help your team understand each other’s strengths, preferences and ways of working How the activity can help you start building greater psychological safety Ideas for useful categories to include in your Personal User Manuals Why it’s helpful to ask your team what they think everyone should include How to create the right environment for people to share what they’ve written Why you, as the leader, should share your Personal User Manual first Questions you can use to encourage positive reflections after each person has shared How to turn what you learn into practical improvements to the way your team works How to keep the learning alive after the activity Chapters [00:00] Why relationships matter when you take over an HR team [01:20] What is a Personal User Manual? [02:50] Why Personal User Manuals can be so useful [04:55] What to include in your Personal User Manuals [06:50] Involving your team in choosing the categories [07:50] How to run the sharing session [08:50] Why the leader should go first [09:30] Encouraging positive comments and reflections [10:40] What have you learned about yourselves as a team? [11:35] Keeping the learning alive [12:35] Download the free Personal User Manual template Useful Links Download your free Personal User Manual template:https://brightskyhr.co.uk/resources Connect with Fay Wallis on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/faywallis/ The Essential HR Planner:https://essentialhrplanner.co.uk/ Learn about the Inspiring HR Leadership Programme:https://brightskyhr.co.uk/hr-leadership-course/ Enjoyed This Episode? Don't Miss the Next One! Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email to be notified each time a new episode is released - and get free career tips, tools, and resources.