Managers expect that employees will turn up on time and be upbeat, fit and well and ready to do what’s asked of them. Employees expect that managers will give them interesting, good quality work that’s within their capabilities. But much can go wrong. There's much spillover degrading employee wellbeing. Managers must step up and embrace their responsibility to manage whole-employee wellbeing, albeit recognising that a big part of the scope of that responsibility will be marked ‘private’.

There’s no doubt: ask any senior manager how he or she would evaluate training and the response will always be given in terms of how the business can now do something it previously couldn’t, or how productivity has been raised. It’s the effect on the business that matters. And yet so often, assessment about training success is made much earlier in the personal development process. Here's how to think about training to realise business outcomes.

It's not always easy to know whether someone is classed as an employee or as a contractor. Many managers would want it one way or the other but unfortunately it’s not up to management. Others such as HMRC or an Employment Tribunal will make the decision.

Organisational development (OD) is different from human resource management (HRM). Organisational development involves exploring options that will permit strategies to be achieved. OD techniques such as modelling permit outcomes to be predicted and the right plan to be selected. People are of course the lifeblood of any firm. They join, they leave, and in between they have to be managed. Everyone who manages or supervises people has to double as an HR generalist. Here's the scope of HR and OD.

Managers can find it extremely attractive to ‘employ’ foreign staff resident abroad. Engaging workers in foreign countries is complex. In many cases it is better to trade at arms length through business to business agreements, paying against invoice. But that won't suit many firms, particularly where they have constraining upstream contracts. They must employ workers locally. Here are all the issues for firms wanting to gain worker services in both EU and non-EU countries.

The UK is suffering a massive skills and labour shortage. Whilst we hear a lot about the NHS, any manager in a technology-centric business will tell a similar story – we simply have too few engineers and scientists. Employing overseas workers can help. This article discusses how you apply for a visa sponsorship licence.