Management Archives - Peter Thomson, speaker, writer, coach

Managing Home Workers – Manage by Output

09/04/2020

We are living through an extraordinary period, having to find our way in uncharted waters. This is particularly true for managers who have suddenly found their employees are now all based at home and they themselves are also working from home. Fortunately some help is at hand. Here at Wisework we have been helping organisations to implement home working for the last 20 years. We have encouraged organisations to implement their flexible working in a planned way and not force…

Share your experience here and pick up ideas from other managers

23/03/2020

This is a resource open to any manager who is faced with managing people now working at home. Whether you have managed home workers for some time or you have suddenly found your employees sent home, we welcome your contribution. Tell us about your experiences, good and bad, pose questions and share ideas about how to cope in the current climate. Peter Thomson and the Wisework Partners will also be sharing their experience of working with many flexible working organisations.

Are home workers over working?

15/01/2019

A recent survey from health insurance company BHSF adds to the concerns about people’s ability to turn off when working at home. 92 percent of the 897 survey respondents said they reply to emails outside of their normal working hours. Of these, 44 percent respond to emails out of hours every day, and 82 percent responded to out of hours emails at least once a week. But it can’t automatically be assumed that this is a bad thing. The act…

What do we mean by ‘New ways of working’?

23/02/2018

This blog is contributed by Shirley Wakelin, Wisework Partner. It is based on a discussion amongst the Partners. The past decade has seen increasing noise around new ways of working. Concepts such as agile, flexible, activity based working, employee engagement, company culture etc are ever more commonplace. It’s a big topic. As a group of consultants sharing an interest in supporting organizations through transformational change, the Wisework partners network reflected on what we mean by ‘New Ways of Working’, and…

Taylor Review on Good Work makes sense

19/07/2017

It’s good to see that the Taylor Review has taken a sensible view of the way work is evolving and is proposing that legislation should catch up with what is now happening in the real world. We have seen a rapid growth in non-standard working patterns and the introduction of ‘gig working’ using platforms such as Uber. This has resulted in confusion about the status of workers. When are they ‘self employed’ versus being employees of some sort? The review…

Improving Productivity

05/08/2015

The subject of productivity has been in the news recently. The government is trying to improve the UK’s ranking against other countries and struggling to work out how to do it. Having a flexible labour market should help but it hasn’t worked too well so far. This could be because managers still don’t know how to transform agile working from an employee benefit into a business strategy. Moving from a low skill, low wage economy to the opposite certainly sounds…