SME companies want employees with excellent skills with a great attitude to work. It is as simple as that. They want employees who can help them to grow and improve their business, who can work on their own without too much checking and correction. Who have initiative and come up with simple ideas on how [...]

You have devised a great strategy for your company and all the indicators show that you should get a big return on investment. Yet when the year comes to end the results have brought not what the strategy suggested. What has happened? You spent so much time in getting the strategy right and now there [...]

Some eight percent of the European workforces suffer from bullying and mobbing in the workplace. This causes European business to lose profit through absenteeism, staff turnover and on a personal level, leads to some three suicides per week in Belgium alone. In Ireland a survey carried out by SIPTU reported that 87 percent of those [...]

You thought having a Performance Management System was the end of the exercise and all would be well after that! We are all interested in creating better performing companies, increased productivity, competiveness, value and your organisation reputation in the community. Having a performance system can be the start of a long, but very rewarding, path [...]

‘Take our twenty best people away, and I can tell you that Microsoft would become an unimportant company’ - Bill Gates, Chairman Microsoft. In today’s lightning fast business environment the competition is smart, tough and coming from every direction. Those who succeed will do so because of the talent they put on the field. The [...]

Jack Welsh, the former GE Chief Executive, stated recently that Human Resources should be every company’s ‘killer app’. What could possibly be more important than who gets hired, developed, promoted or moved out the door? After all business is a game, and as with all games, the team who puts the best people on the [...]

In the current economic climate we need to improve our performance as individuals, organisations and as a country. Whoever we are, we need to take stock and assess how and what we could do to improve our performance. As individuals we have to be realistic and see what actions we need to develop in order [...]

Business is a performance sport. That was a slogan I read while buying new shoes. I can’t see the relationship between this slogan and shoes, but I do agree with this statement. If business is a performance sport then only the organisations with the best performance will survive. We have seen many non performing organisations [...]

As you may know I am a Dutchman who is living and working in Ireland for the last 20 years. I have also worked in HR in the Netherlands for 12 years. Recently an Irish company was having difficulties in the Netherlands with some employment regulations and they asked me for advice. In their industry [...]

Irish Water paid bonuses to their employees even if they had a ’Needs Improvement’ rating on their performance Review. You might ask what is so unusual about paying bonuses in a company, don’t all companies do this and isn’t this the way to stimulate performance in a company and from what we have seen of [...]