Author Archives: Peter Burton

Why aren’t great workplaces universal?

Writing in the ‘Best Workplaces’ supplement published with the FT on 20 May 2010, Will Hutton, Executive of The Work Foundation, muses why the ‘great place to work’ is not universal, given that it produces such good results for its companies. He writes: “One of the conundrums of the modern workplace is why ‘high performance’ [...]

Rise in City jobs leads to poaching fear (FT 4 May 2010)

According to Brian Groom, FT Business and Employment Editor , quoting research , by Astbury Marsden, the average number of qualified candidates for each new City job vacancy has halved from 5.7 a year ago to 2.7 in March   He believes the jump in demand could prompt a return to the aggressive poaching of talented [...]

Grey power at MacDonald’s

I recently re-read an article by Stefan Stern in the 23 Feb 2010 issue of the FT, which describes research done by MacDonald’s in conjunction with Professor Paul Sparrow of Lancaster University Management School. The work covered 635 MacDonald restaurants and the 26,000 people who worked there.
They found that the branches where staff [...]

Treat your people like human beings, not human resources

Treat people like human beings, not human resources
The success of any organisation depends on its people. Early management attempts to achieve organisational success were based on removing the variability of people’s behaviour by requiring compliance with rigid procedures, treating people essentially like robots, eg Fordism, Taylorism. It was eventually realised, thanks to the work [...]

The business value of a great place to work

One of John Kay’s columns in the FT  (March 24 2010)  tells the story of Nobel prize winner James Black, who was responsible for the development of highly successful drugs which made massive profits for the pharma industry, including ICI.  He had joined ICI because it offered a ‘stimulating and well-funded research environment’. For Black [...]

Can you engage and keep your best people? A free self-test

Questionnaire from Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc) ISBN 978-1-57675-557-0. Adapted and reproduced by permission of the authors. Learn more by visiting their website www.keepem.com.

So, how do you score? Here is how to make sense of the test and decide what to do next.