It’s only when managers come to rely on a job description at some point of impending opportunity or catastrophe that the importance of that simple document becomes apparent. Coupled with that, most JDs are just a list of duties and measuring performance against them is impossible. Here's guidance on fixing that.

We know that men and women must be paid equally for jobs of equal value so we can assume that pay discrimination is not the explanation for the recently reported gender pay gaps in most organisations. Our analysis suggests that the cause is something much, much deeper. Deep in society. And no amount of castigating employers will fix it. As a society, universally, women are paid less than men. And we have to fix the attitudes that cause this - in the family, schools and society as a whole.

Some managers are aware of the difference between the various types of dismissal that may be executed on an employee. There is an assumption that tribunal claims can only be made where a person has service at least longer than some qualifying period. This is not actually true; there are instances where employee can take an employer to tribunal without any qualifying period of service.

Technically, you can tell an employee that you no longer require them to work for you. You can pay them their notice and invite them to leave. Provided that you have no contractual obligation to use a protracted procedure, you might get away with this course of action. Fair dismissal is narrow and well-defined and hence so too is unfair dismissal.

The Health and Safety Executive has published a framework covering six areas that might result in an employee or employees suffering stress at work (the HSE Management Standards). These are things like lack of control over work and lack of management support. As we note in articles on our site, this framework is a good way of thinking about stress.

In the 1980s, a fairly standard form of appraisal emerged that aimed to assess current performance, improve the individual's performance in the immediate future, set and review performance objectives and assess training and development needs. This paper considers development since then considering applicable research and theory. It concludes that despite methods allowing performance appraisal to become more complex, the themes from the 80s persist today.