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Public-sector pay caps are the right issue, but wrong target
David Cameron's commitment in last week's Guardian - to set up a fair pay review and establish a pay cap of 20 times the earnings of the lowest paid for top public-sector executives - has certainly...
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The reality behind senior public-sector pay
As election fever grips the British public, or at least the press, it’s a case of another week, another public-sector senior manager pay “scandal”. Last weekend it was the Observer railing against...
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A fair pay commission for public servants promises a wider impact
Will Hutton wrote a couple of months ago in The Observer that the British “are suddenly discovering a truth that was buried in the New Labour boom years: that fairness matters”. Fairness was a key...
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Setting the retirement agenda
Establishing independent reviews to address complex and sensitive issues and cuts is a tactic that the new coalition government is already making extensive use of. Figures published by the new Office...
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Top earners’ pay goes public
David Cameron’s commitment to “lifting the shroud of secrecy” over government is certainly being delivered in terms of public-sector pay. Last week the details of over 300 directors of non-departmental...
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Law changes could be a step forward
With the economy and the private sector slowly starting to recover, what can we expect on the employment front from Messrs Cameron, Clegg and their ministers - and what will be the likely context for...
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Pay pitfalls in the NHS
“To provide maximum scope to encourage local bargaining on self-financing pay increases” Chancellor of the Exchequer “Why is the NHS adopting pay strategies rejected by the private sector?” Health...
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The courage of HR’s convictions
The British Sociological Society's conference last week at the University of Brighton hosted an excellent session on HR leaders, led by leadership and OD expert Linda Holbeche and based on her recent...
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Deliver what you promise on rewards
HR and reward directors identify weak communications as the key problem with contemporary reward arrangements and are investing ever-increasing amounts in evermore sophisticated media to “get the...
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Is performance management failing?
I was lucky to chair the packed CIPD Performance Management conference in London this month. The excellent speakers and lively delegates provided a great view of the state-of-the-nation on this...
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Trust in involvement for engagement
Not surprisingly perhaps, employee engagement has taken a battering in the private and third sectors over the past two years of recession – a pattern now repeated in the public sector as the scale of...
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Why HR should care about low pay
I was shocked to learn that, as most of us were enjoying our festive lunch, almost one million UK staff were engaged in a normal working day on 25 December. The largest group of those workers? Care...
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Variable pay is superior to bonuses
On the face of it, the past fortnight has not been good for fans of bonus plans. The government's ‘Project Merlin’ deal extracted a miniscule commitment to slightly enhance pay disclosure and lower...
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Manage an age diverse workforce
At a recent sector HR director group I led a discussion on the impending abolition of the default retirement age. The move has been controversial, with the CBI claiming that “with the scrapping of the...
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What price fair pay?
'Fairness matters': Will Hutton is not a simple bloke. Working with him on the expert group to the Fair Pay Review, whose final report was published yesterday, you realise that his brain is enormous....
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Budget could be bad news for HR
With last week’s news dominated by events in Libya, which over-shadowed even chancellor George Osborne’s so-called ‘budget for growth’ and ‘budget for jobs’, now is perhaps the time to review the...
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Paternalism revisited – creating shared value
I remember listening with growing annoyance to a corporate benefits director some years ago arguing that the move away from defined benefits (DB) pension plans was a good thing, that employees needed...
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Rewarding thought patterns
Insight-led HR is what the latest report from the CIPD's Next Generation research admonishes us all to engage in. Forget just copying supposed best practice or being totally process-driven – HR has to...
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The business of HR is… society
The origins of HR lie in the welfare workers employed by Quaker firms who addressed the lack of social welfare with their own personnel policies. It was good for society and good for them. Novelist and...
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Pay cuts that cost too much
I listened last week to the unedifying sounds of council and trade union leaders arguing over the airwaves and blogosphere about the proposed pay cuts at Southampton City Council, which occasioned the...
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