Category
A meeting in which managers compare and adjust their proposed ratings for their teams before those ratings are finalised — and it explains a great deal about why a review outcome can differ from what
A conversation with an employee who is still there, asking what would make them stay and what might make them leave — the logical counterpart to an exit interview, and far more useful, since the
Find out why, specifically, before deciding anything — because the response to "you were close and here is the gap" is completely different from the response to a decision that was never about you.
By treating the first weeks as a deliberate process rather than an administrative one — because early experience predicts how long someone stays and how quickly they become effective, and most
Enough that a competent person unfamiliar with your work could continue it — which is a much higher bar than a list of tasks, and is where most handovers fail. What to include: A current picture of
The shared belief that you can speak up, admit a mistake or ask a question without being humiliated or punished — and it is one of the better-evidenced findings in organisational research, though it
Work out which kind of bad you are dealing with, because the response to an overwhelmed manager, an incompetent one and a hostile one are completely different — and treating all three the same is why
By making your manager's job easier and by taking responsibility for the information flow between you — which is not politics or flattery, but recognition that they cannot read your mind and are
By deciding what decision or output the meeting exists to produce, and cancelling it if there is not one — because most bad meetings are not badly run, they are meetings that should never have been
Promptly, privately, and about observable behaviour and its effect — because the two things that make feedback fail are delay and vagueness, and both come from the giver's discomfort rather than from
By being explicit about which kind of delegation this is — because most delegation failures are not about capability, they are about two people holding different assumptions about how much authority
Through a defined process — identifying a pool, applying objective criteria, scoring individuals, and consulting — and the fairness of each step is exactly what a tribunal examines if the dismissal
By comparing the things that will actually determine your experience, which are mostly not the things that dominate the decision in practice — salary and job title. Compare total compensation, not
They give employees an ownership stake, usually through options — the right to buy shares at a fixed price later — and the details determine whether the arrangement is genuinely valuable or largely
Usually yes, if the contract says so — and the answer turns almost entirely on what your contract actually states and what has happened in practice since, rather than on what feels reasonable. Start
Considerably less than candidates fear and more than they expect, with the scope depending heavily on the sector and the seniority of the role rather than on a single standard process. What is almost
By treating it as their meeting, not yours — a regular protected conversation about how things are going, rather than a status update the manager could have read in a report. What it is for:
By accepting that it is a different job, not a promotion within the old one — which is the single adjustment new managers most often fail to make, and the reason so many are unhappy in the first
A company that employs contractors and pays them through payroll on behalf of the agencies or clients they work for. It exists to solve a tax-status problem, and it has become the default route for a
By describing the job and the conditions honestly, and by removing the barriers that quietly exclude good candidates — most job adverts fail at both, which is why they attract the wrong applicants
Generally permitted unless your contract says otherwise — but several things can restrict it, and the tax treatment catches people out more often than the employment side does. What your contract may
You become a creditor — and the practical answer is that some of what you are owed is payable by a government scheme rather than depending on whether there is money left in the business, which is the
Yes in specific ways, and not in the general way it is usually described — the value comes from what you actually do and who you meet, not from the fact of having volunteered, which on its own
By working backwards from the income you need, not forwards from what you used to earn per hour — because the arithmetic of freelancing is fundamentally different from employment and almost everyone