Jim Moore, Hamilton Nash

Found some prawn gyoza in the freezer. These will still be okay, right? 🥟

Very proud of our legal team who negotiated a settlement agreement worth almost £200k for a client. A great result! 🎉

A young lady, with a congratulatory First degree from Oxford and a distinction in her Masters from Imperial can't even get an interview for a research assistant job.
Never mind not getting an offer, we're talking about not even getting through the sift to an interview.

Wow. It's tough out there!

It’s been a busy weekend and finally, a chance to relax 🥃

Consider my flabber completely ghasted. What did they expect?

I'm also firmly against forced distribution curves in performance management processes, or a Jack Welch-style compulsory pruning of the bottom 10%

Agreed. My view on this is:

Protected conversations are an opportunity for the individual and employer to part ways amicably.

However, if managers have been managing performance properly all along, it shouldn't be necessary to find alternative methods to show people the door in the first place.

The actions of the Trump administration have fanned the embers of the 'united states of Europe' conversation. EU-separatist sentiments have been dampened & people are talking again about a united Europe. If that happens, the US will find it's power and influence will wane, as we rely less upon them.

Good Lord, it's depressing to observe what is going on in the world right now.

Fortunately, I'm extremely busy with work, and it has become the sand into which I can bury my head.

Sorry, just posted this on Twitter/X and then remembered you asked about this here. Hope this helps, on the off chance.

When the stakes are high, understanding the dynamics of disagreement can make the difference between deadlock and progress.

Our ‘dynamics of disagreement’ workshop helps senior leadership teams transform friction into positive outcomes.

www.hnis.co.uk/workshop-ide...

That's where mediation can come in.

Mediation is all about helping people reframe their conflict away from a "why we can't" work together position to a "how we can" perspective.

I'm a strong advocate for mediation, and recommend exploring that option wherever possible.

Deciding who's right or wrong doesn't do anything to repair the breakdown in the working relationship. Unless the matter involves conduct that warrants a disciplinary sanction, the individuals involved are still going to have to work together. [...]

Workers can raise a grievance about anything: other people, processes, pay, etc. However, most grievances relate to other people - often between individuals and managers.

The problem is that interpersonal grievances don't really solve anything. [...]

What on earth bit me last night?

I ran deepseek-r1 locally. It wasn't that impressive, to be honest. It was a good natural language processor but doesn't have a sufficient training set to answer questions with factual accuracy. I can't run deepseek-v3 as I only have 200GB memory and it needs over 400GB!

An enquiry from a prospective client highlights why management training is SO important, as a manager's conduct & behaviour can potentially be a real liability for employers sometimes!

I enjoyed giving an informal talk to ~20 interns on conflict psychology. Really enjoyable and nice to field questions from some bright, switched on people. I'm sure they'll go on to have thriving careers

Ugh. A payment platform that doesn't use form field validation on a purchase page has just told me (via a support rep) that "they don't have this feature" but will pass it on to the product team.

Missing field validation is a bug, not a feature request.

I deal with workplace conflict professionally, but I find these principles apply beyond conflict in workplaces. I am a strong proponent of mediation.

Very few people are inherently malign. As per Hanlon's Razor: don't ascribe to malice that which can be explained by error or miscommunication.

4. Beware of false consensus bias. You may think a particular view is self-evidently right or wrong, but that doesn't mean every other "right thinking person" agrees with you.

Echo chambers are notorious for reinforcing false consensus bias. Don't confine yourself within one.

[...]

We accept that not every racially slanted adverse comment or conduct may constitute the violation of a person's dignity. Dignity is not necessarily violated by things said or done which are trivial or transitory, particularly if it should have been clear that any offence was unintended. While it is very important that employers, and tribunals, are sensitive to the hurt that can be caused by racially offensive comments or conduct (or indeed comments or conduct on other grounds covered by the cognate legislation to which we have referred), it is also important not to encourage a culture of hypersensitivity or the imposition of legal liability in respect of every unfortunate phrase

In Richmond Pharmaceuticals v Dhaliwal 2009 IRLR 336, Underhill LJ pointed out that the intended "purpose or effect" of the comment or behaviour needs to be considered.

[...]

3. It is okay for someone to hold and express views that others find objectionable.

As long as those views aren't weaponised, i.e. expressed in a manner that causes someone to suffer a detriment, then airing those views is lawful. Being offended is not, in and of itself, a detriment.

[...]

2. In a situation where the rights of different groups are in tension, finding a balance between them can be tricky.

Each situation needs to be considered on its own merits. The existence of this difficulty doesn't make either of the groups inherently 'bad' or 'wrong'.

[...]

It's important to remember some core principles when we encounter views we disagree with...

1. There is no hierarchy of rights. One group's rights are neither superior nor subordinate to another group's rights.

[...] 🧵

Government drafting an employment rights bill…

Wow, 2025 has kicked off at a sprint! Lots of queries around contract T&C changes, returns from maternity, settlement agreements and a few grievances that stalled over the festive break.

I like it! The response to "What employment case law within the past ten years involved menopause as a factor?" was much more useful than that produced by the generic GPT engine.

Happy New Year to you all. Let's hope 2025 is a good one!

Couldn’t agree more! We do exactly this but all too often I find organisations are cowed by strident voices. I do see the pendulum of society’s attitude starting to swing back in the other direction.