It’s bizarre. We’ve a record 32.54 million people in work in the UK. But the number of job vacancies jumped to a record high of 853,000. Despite record employment today, companies are suffering skills shortages. Managers have three options - accept the lack of skills and invest in technology to sustain capability - or invest in the people they do have to improve productivity. Here's the rationale.

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.

It’s not always easy to know what to do when someone goes off sick. How long do you wait until you speak to them? Can you make decisions when they are off sick? Can you contact them? So many questions!

One thing that is certain – the longer you wait to deal with sickness absence , the harder it becomes. Find out what you should do, and when.

There’s been a plethora of articles in the management press and in management-oriented social media recently declaring that mental health is a big issue in firms. Here we temper this alarmism and give a practical three point plan comprising knowledge, awareness and sensing and intervention.

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’.

How many times have we heard it – “There’s no use offering jobs like that to Brits. They don’t want that sort of work”. The result is that British employers offer poor quality jobs to immigrants. But soon there will be no immigrants to take those jobs. If, as a country, we want to re-invigorate workers who do what are at present menial jobs, we need to redesign those jobs. Here's how.