A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Or, to be more specific, yesterday, we sent our team of Skywalkers 121 miles down the M1 to take on a rewarding personal challenge: conquer their fear of heights by scaling The O2, in support of our charity partner, Rainbows Hospice for Children and Young People.

Despite the grey Autumn skies, our team’s spirits were high and they reached London’s summit at around 2:30 pm.

Coming back down proved to be slightly more challenging, with the team facing a 35 degree decline from 52 metres above the city, but the Skywalkers have now returned from their mission having overcome their fear of heights.

Better yet, they’ve raised an amazing £645 so far for Rainbows – 129% of their original target – taking our total for the year to over £6,000.

Well done from everyone at VinciWorks!

The words ‘health and safety’ often conjure up images of things like safety shoes, black and yellow tape on steps, and hi-vis jackets – the kinds of equipment we use to prevent accidents and injuries, and keep people safe.

But what about the ‘health’ half of the phrase, which is equally important?

Businesses tend to have a good idea of what goes into creating environments that encourage safety, but looking out for employees’ mental health and welfare is a different challenge altogether.

Employee wellbeing

National Stress Awareness Day is Wednesday 4th November, and this year’s theme is “Employee wellbeing as a worthwhile investment in your business.”

Last year, stress accounted for 35% of work-related ill health cases, amounting to a total of 9.9 million lost days, so it’s clear that potentially huge productivity increases are possible by reducing workplace stress.

Stress is caused when individuals don’t feel able to cope with what is demanded of them, and many factors can contribute towards stress at work including worries about redundancy and relationship conflicts between colleagues.

As well as being a cause of numerous illnesses leading to absence, stress causes people to be more prone to errors, fatigued, unhappy and overall unproductive.

Helping employees manage their own stress

Being able to recognise that they are stressed is the first step an employee can take towards managing stress and reducing its negative effects, leading to better business results.

Helping managers to create harmonious workplaces

As well as training individual employees to identify and manage their own stress, businesses should ensure their management staff are supporting a stress-free environment and have a thorough understanding of how to manage stress issues in teams.

To support this need, we also provide a course on Managing Stress in Your Team, which shows managers how to manage effectively without causing stress and identify possible sources of stress within teams long before they cause a serious issue.

Over the past year, we have written a series of posts on the SRA’s new approach to CPD. We have consolidated the key points into the presentation below:

Download the presentation

Julie Brannan, Director of Education and Training at the SRA sums up the new approach as follows:

The new approach has competence at its heart. Individual solicitors and firms will be in the driving seat. They will need to think about what they should do to ensure that their work is up-to-date and competent. They will be able to choose how best to do this.

There will be more flexibility about how people learn. For example, it will no longer be necessary to learn in hour-long blocks. People who prefer to learn in bite-sized chunks, perhaps over their phone or tablet, on the go, will be able to do so. People who learn through reading and researching for a particular case will be able to have that recognised as part of their learning and development.

A spate of recent news stories have raised the issue of corporate culture and the risks to a business when a culture becomes toxic.

Volkswagen earned acres of negative press recently after they were caught cheating emission tests in the US. While the full story is yet to emerge, early reports suggest that a negative corporate culture may be partly to blame.

Former VW executives have described a climate of fear, distance and respect in which the CEO’s ultimate authority was never checked. Even senior executives would be berated openly for their alleged mistakes.

“We need in future a climate in which problems aren’t hidden but can be openly communicated to superiors,” wrote Bernd Osterloh, a member of VW’s advisory board, in a letter to employees, “We need a culture in which it’s possible and permissible to argue with your superior about the best way to go.”

Organisations failing to listen to employees

Even when organisations aren’t silencing their employees, they often fail to listen, which can be equally damaging to an organisation’s culture and creativity.

Recent research (conducted by idea management company Wazoku) suggests that employers commonly fail to listen to employees and are ill-equipped to capture employee ideas and suggestions.

Employees are only likely to put forward ideas if they expect to be heard and respected. The company culture must be open to, and accepting of, new ideas and innovations.

Clearly, an organisation that is ruled by fear is unlikely to get the best ideas bubbling to the top – and unlikely to benefit from these opportunities to innovate.

Your corporate culture

How is your organisational culture defined? Your culture might be defined in a mission statement, or it might permeate your branding, or be reflected in the way your managers relate to employees.

Managers can define the atmosphere and influence the attitudes of their employees, so it’s critical that they understand your company culture and know how to embody your ideals.

Performance management training from Vinciworks

Vinciworks offers a range of eLearning courses to equip managers with the skills they need to excel in the modern workplace.

After a long wait, in October 2015 the SRA finally published the wording for the annual declaration required under its new approach to continuing competence:

“I have reflected on my practice and addressed any identified learning and development needs.”

Practising Certificate Renewal Exercise (PCRE)

The declaration is made on the Practising Certificate Renewal Exercise (PCRE) forms. Either individual solicitors, or entities who complete the PCRE in bulk, can make the declaration.

The SRA will monitor PCRE forms to identify those solicitors who have not confirmed that they have reflected on their practice and addressed learning and development needs. They will use this information, along with other information they hold or receive, to explore concerns that they may have with the competence or standard of service provided by a solicitor.

Solicitors who have chosen to move to the new approach this year will make their first declaration (for the 2014-2015 practice year) in October 2016. In October 2017, there will be no declaration required for 2015-2016 as the SRA shifts to align the declaration with the current PCRE year. In that year a declaration will be required by all solicitors for the new approach for the 2016-2017 year. Despite the fact that no declaration will be required for the 2015-2016 year, this does not remove the regulatory responsibility for all solicitors either to comply with the old approach by doing 16 hours of CPD or to adopt the new approach.

As a reminder, under the new approach, a solicitor must: Continue reading

Every business understands the need to be compliant, but actually achieving it is a complicated and ongoing process which causes headaches for business leaders.

An overwhelming number of regulations must be followed, and as organisations grow and the number of moving parts increases, so does the level of risk – and the complexity of managing it.

The problem? Compliance can’t be solved for an entire organisation in one fell swoop. Yet businesses still seek out ‘quick wins’ to their compliance problem.

Organisational behaviour

Organisational compliance is only possible when each individual employee understands exactly what is required of them. With regulations frequently changing and employees coming and going, each having their own job role and learning style, this is no easy task.

That’s a big part of the reason why many organisations’ compliance training efforts fail to yield the results they need.

Ideally, you’ll already have an awareness of what training is required for each employee, but even if you do, actually implementing the training can still prove a headache.

Segment learners

In order to achieve regulatory compliance, certain employees will require training which is totally irrelevant to others.

Allocating training based on job role or department does not entirely solve this problem, which is why Astute enables custom segmentation of your learners.

Careful use of Astute’s custom fields allows you to segment your learners, rapidly delivering training to the right employees, at the right time.

Learning Analytics

Knowing which employees have completed what training is vital not only for audit purposes, but also determining your learning and development strategy.

When it comes to analytics, eLearning comes into its own against other training solutions.

Astute’s Learning Analytics go far beyond course completion reports. The Learning Analytics dashboard can be drilled into to give you powerful insights such as:

  • Which teams, departments or segments of employees are more engaged with training
  • Which subject areas would benefit from further training intervention
  • What the impact of your eLearning efforts has been on other key performance indicators
  • And of course, Course completion status for any segment of employees

Having an overview of which areas of knowledge are lacking in your organisation, or which employees are less engaged with training gives you more insight than ever before, which can dramatically boost your compliance efforts.

All businesses have a responsibility for fire safety including carrying out risk assessments, communicating risks to staff, putting in place appropriate safety measures, and delivering fire safety training.

The latter need in particular is frequently the cause of headaches for those designated as the ‘responsible person’ for fire safety, especially when required to deliver the training themselves, face to face.

It means that whenever a new person is hired, the responsible person has to take time out of their day to put together training materials and deliver training, as well deal with the necessary admin, which magnifies as a problem the bigger an organisation becomes.

eLearning benefits

While it’s true that face to face training has some unique benefits, eLearning is just as effective at reducing fire risk, as well as meeting your legal requirements around fire safety.

There are also several benefits for fire safety training only made possible with eLearning:

1. Training on demand

The online nature of eLearning means learners can be enrolled onto eLearning courses instantly and taking training within seconds.

This makes eLearning the most effective way to ensure new hires receive their mandatory fire safety training at the earliest opportunity, and more experienced members of staff can receive necessary refresher training whenever required.

2. Learners can train at any time, in any location

eLearning is the only training model where time and location are immaterial.

Courses are delivered online, so all learners require is a device with access to the Internet – no need to book an available face to face trainer and training room, or even for training to take place in regular work hours, or even at work.

3. Learners can train multiple times

With face to face training, work is carried out every time the training takes place, so if a learner needs refresher training, the cost is paid out again.

On the other hand, the bulk of the work in eLearning goes into the production of the course. Once that’s completed, learners can complete the course multiple times, perfect if they missed something during training or simply want to refresh their knowledge.

4. Some people engage better with eLearning

Appealing to different personality types and demographics is an increasingly discussed topic in business, as workplaces now span multiple generations and employers take factors like levels of introversion or extroversion into consideration.

The fact is that some demographics simply learn better through computers than face to face – if your staff are among them, then forcing them to train in other ways will always lead to poorer results.

5. eLearning makes record keeping far easier

If your business is ever audited, then you’ll be expected to present detailed records of your fire safety training, including the who, where, when and what of your training.

eLearning is the only training delivery model where record keeping is done automatically as a result of training being delivered. With any other form of training, it becomes someone’s job to maintain records, which leaves it open to human error and an endless amount of admin being created.

6. eLearning can be tailored to meet your organisation’s exact needs

Unlike training DVDs, eLearning courses are simple and cost-effective to tailor to the specifics of your organisation, which is a legal requirement of your fire safety training.

If there are any particular procedures which only apply to your business, or even a specific office, editing the content of an eLearning course is no more complicated than editing a Word document or PowerPoint presentation. If anything changes, eLearning can be updated rolled out to everyone within minutes.

Fire Safety eLearning

eLearning delivers a number of benefits which simply aren’t possible with other forms of training.

Sweden is encouraging businesses to implement 6-hour work days to reap benefits like increased employee energy levels, lower staff turnover, improved productivity and even raised profits.

There was a mixed reaction to the news here in the UK (where the average employee works 8.7 hours per day) with some even suggesting that if employees can get as much done in 6 hours as they did in 8, they must not have been working very hard.

… which is kind of the whole idea behind the 6-hour work day.

The theory is that employees working for 8-hours-plus only tend to get six hours of useful work done anyway, filling the rest of the time with personal tasks, breaks, and distractions, leaving them tired in the evenings, with less time to spend with their families.

Here in the UK, there’s certainly a desire for increased flexibility around work, and work-life balance is one of the top priorities for today’s workers, so a reduction in working hours would certainly be welcomed by employees – but would it really improve productivity on the whole for businesses?

Here are some of the challenges that changing the working day as we know it could bring:

Need to ensure time is spent working to maximum capacity

Moving to a 6-hour working day only makes sense if employers don’t believe their workers are fully productive over 8-hours – otherwise there’d be no gain to be made. So, if your staff aren’t working to 100% capability in 8 hours, what has to change to ensure productivity improves in 6-hours?

Sweden’s answer: eliminating distractions including access to social media, freedom to chat with colleagues, and getting stricter about how employees spend their time.

Reportedly, staff responded positively to this increased intensity, with boosted happiness and energy levels.

Whether this would be the case for all staff is questionable, and management must therefore consider whether potential productivity increases would outweigh the impact of a more intense and potentially stressful day, as well as the impact of increased scrutiny on employees.

Need to cover more hours

Regardless of productivity, certain jobs require employees’ presence within set hours. In those cases, reducing hours may benefit employees but necessitate hiring more, which is exactly what happened in a Swedish nursing home which trialed the 6-hour working day to reduce burnout among staff.

Following the changes, staff and residents reported boosted happiness levels, although this came at a cost in the region of $1m spent on hiring staff to cover the required hours.

The question for management is whether possibly increasing happiness and energy levels in staff would justify significant cost increases, whether overall productivity would be improved, or if there are other ways that money could be spent to yield better overall results for the business.

Need to adjust communication methods

Communication is vital in all businesses, with meetings and conference calls among the most commonly-used tools to achieve this, especially in businesses with employees around the globe.

Cutting the work day down to 6 hours further limits the windows of opportunity for communication to take place, and may increase the pressure on staff to be available at all hours, which could prove counter productive to the aims of the 6-hour work day.

In Sweden, management took steps to reduce meetings, conference calls, and work in general which were not essential or productive. While results so far appear positive, management would need to consider how to ensure reducing hours wouldn’t slow down communication and decision making.