Hiring a school leaver in August feels like pure optimism: a bright new starter, a handshake, a start date, and you get back to your week. But there’s a timing detail in UK employment law that can catch employers out, and it starts much earlier than most people think. From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal drops to six months. That means anyone you hire from 1 July 2026 could qualify the moment the law takes effect, even though nothing “changed” on 1 July itself.

We keep this practical and calm: what the date really means, what else arrives in January (including the removal of the compensation cap and fire and rehire becoming automatically unfair), and why “protected” doesn’t mean “untouchable”. If someone is not right for the job, you can still act, but you need fair reason, fair process, and good notes. The law isn’t here to punish good employers, it’s here to make sloppy decisions expensive.

Then we get into the real pressure point: probation. If you run a standard six-month probation, your decision point can collide with the exact moment protection kicks in, leaving you no breathing space if reviews slip. We talk through how to set probation under six months, diarise review dates from day one, and complete a suitability assessment before the threshold. We also cover the day-one essentials that protect you and your new starter straight away: a written contract, right to work checks, and policies and payroll that reflect day-one rights like statutory sick pay, paternity leave, and unpaid parental leave.

If you want to sanity-check your setup, use the free HR health check and see what’s red, amber, and green before January arrives. Subscribe for more practical UK HR advice, share this with a fellow small business owner, and leave us a review with the one HR question you want answered next.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

You can feel it in early August: the office is quieter, half the team is away, and you finally get a clear hour to think. That’s exactly when the most dangerous HR deadlines sneak up, because this one looks like a “2027 problem” on paper while the clock actually starts much earlier.

We walk through the January 2027 UK employment law changes that reshape ordinary unfair dismissal: the qualifying period drops to six months, the compensation cap is removed, and fire and rehire becomes automatically unfair. The headline is big, but the hidden detail is bigger: anyone with six months’ service on 1 January 2027 qualifies immediately, which means people you hire from 1 July 2026 onwards are already in the window. Nothing changes on 1 July, but your risk exposure starts building from that day because service time is being banked right now.

We keep it practical and calm, focused on small business HR habits that actually protect you: contracts that match reality, probation check-ins that happen on time, and notes that show a fair process. We also share simple tools to help you see what’s coming and where you stand, so you can fix the one most exposed thing while the diary is still kind.

If you want fewer surprises and more control as employment rights tighten, follow along, share this with a fellow manager, and subscribe so you do not miss the next change. If this helped, leave a review and tell us: who have you hired since July, and is your probation process truly real?

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

Halfway through the year is where most small businesses quietly lose momentum and, sometimes, their best people. We are busy, we are heads-down, and suddenly it is July and nobody has revisited the objectives that were meant to guide the year. So we make a simple case: the mid-year review is the single cheapest, highest-return people tool you own. Half an hour per person, twice a year, can catch small problems while they are still fixable and make your team feel seen before disengagement turns into a resignation.

We walk through what a genuinely useful mid-year performance review looks like in a small business. Think conversation, not form. Two-way, not a verdict. A little time looking back with honesty, then more time looking forward with clarity: what matters now, what is getting in the way, and what support would help. We also get practical about good performance management and feedback: separating performance from the person, keeping language specific, and writing down a brief record so expectations and actions are clear.

We also cover the three most common manager mistakes that sabotage reviews: talking too much, rushing to fill the silence, and making it all targets with no human check-in. You will leave with a ready-to-use set of questions, a tip for sending them in advance, and a quick action list you can put in your diary this fortnight. If you want better employee engagement, stronger retention, clearer objectives, and a cleaner trail of feedback that supports you when things get tricky, this is your reset point. Subscribe, share it with one manager who is about to skip their mid-year reviews, and leave a quick review if it helped.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

Your employee handbook can be quietly betraying you. Not because you have bad intentions, but because policies drift while life moves on: new UK employment law, day one rights, fresh record keeping duties, and the hybrid working pattern that started as “temporary” and somehow became permanent. That gap stays invisible right up until the day you need your handbook most, when there’s a grievance, a dismissal, a complaint, or an inspection, and you reach for a process that no longer fits reality. 
 
We talk through what “drift” really looks like in small business HR and why an out-of-date policy can be worse than none at all. I share the most common sections I find stale when I open the bonnet on a growing team: disciplinary and dismissal, probation, holiday and leave, flexible working and family leave, whistleblowing and raising concerns, and anything still written as if everyone is in the office full time. We also dig into the human cost, because stale policies do not just create compliance risk, they quietly break promises to carers, to people who need a safe route to speak up, and to managers trying to do the right thing with the wrong guidance. 
 
You leave with a practical plan you can actually use: a quick triage method, what to prioritise first, how to use reliable templates and sources, and how to make sure your written policies match how you truly work now. We finish with a simple habit that stops drift coming back: a yearly policy once-over in the diary. If you want plain-English HR advice, concrete next steps, and a calmer way to stay compliant, hit subscribe, share this with a fellow business owner, and leave a review if you’ve got 30 seconds.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

Your team set SMART objectives in January, you file them away, and by July half of them are pointless. Sound familiar? We are pulling apart the real reason performance reviews feel tense in so many small businesses: SMART goals quietly turn into paperwork, and the gap between “formal objectives” and “what actually gets rewarded” starts eroding trust.

We talk through why objectives matter more in an SME than in a corporate. When everyone is wearing six hats and priorities shift fast, a good objective is simply a shared picture of what success looks like for this role and this quarter, written in plain English. We also share the numbers that explain the mess: most SMEs set objectives, few review them more than once a year, and hardly anyone feels the process improves performance.

Then we get practical with three failure modes we see all the time. The unrevisited objective that becomes unfair after a pivot. The manager who gives everyone a four out of five because they hate difficult conversations. The “Tom” problem: a top performer who hits every target while being painful to work with. Our fixes are specific and doable: diary quarterly reviews, kill dead objectives fast, run a simple annual calibration meeting, and write every objective with a “what” and a measurable “how” so behaviour counts, not just output.

If you want a performance management approach that fits a UK small business without corporate fluff, hit play, share this with another owner or manager, and subscribe. If it helped, leave a quick review so more people can find it.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

You’ve got a contract term you regret. Maybe it’s overtime you can’t sustain, enhanced sick pay that keeps biting every winter, or a bonus structure that looked generous when the team was small and now feels ruinous. You’ve heard the “solution” at the golf club: dismiss them and re-engage them on new terms. The problem is that, from October 2026, that move becomes a legal landmine for most employers, with dismissal and re-engagement usually treated as automatically unfair dismissal under the post-Employment Rights Act 2025 landscape. 

We walk through what actually changes, why the public mood and tribunal risk matter for SMEs, and the narrow circumstances where the old approach might still be argued as business survival. Then we get practical. We lay out the five-step, grown-up method for contract change in 2026: build a clear business case, check the existing variation and flexibility clauses (and why they rarely cover big changes), consult properly rather than just “inform”, and make agreement more likely with fair trade-offs like phased changes or a one-off payment. 

We also bust the myths that cause the most damage, including the idea that you can simply give notice of a change, or that small businesses fly under the radar. You’ll finish with a quick action list you can do this week, plus a contract review conversation script mentioned in the show notes. If you find this useful, subscribe, share it with a fellow business owner, and leave a review so more people can find straight-talking HR help.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

A summer Friday work BBQ can feel harmless right up until it isn’t. One drink too many, an argument in front of clients, a messy taxi story that surfaces secondhand, and by Tuesday you are juggling a complaint, a possible safeguarding concern and a sensitive disclosure without a single written policy to anchor your decisions. We’re talking about the workplace alcohol policy gap most SMEs don’t know they have until it lands in their lap.

We break down what a fit-for-purpose alcohol policy actually covers and why it is not a sneaky attempt to ban fun. We get specific about alcohol during the working day and at work events, what to do when alcohol may be affecting performance, and how to respond when someone tells you their relationship with alcohol is complicated. We also share the numbers behind the issue, from productivity loss and presenteeism to how many employees say drinking has affected work without ever telling anyone.

Most importantly, we give you three practical conversations to keep in your back pocket: the short proactive team chat that introduces the policy, the concerned conversation that focuses on observable changes rather than accusation, and the disclosure conversation where your first 30 seconds can either open the door to support or slam it shut. If you want straightforward small business HR advice, clear process and humane boundaries, hit subscribe, share this with another owner, and leave a review so more SMEs stop having to “make it up as they go along”.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

That familiar small-business safety net, “they’re under two years so we can let them go”, is about to shrink dramatically. With the Employment Rights Act changes taking effect on 1 July 2026, unfair dismissal protection moves much closer to day one, and a rushed, undocumented exit in month nine can become the expensive problem you never saw coming.

We walk through what is actually changing, why the new statutory probationary period is designed to keep hiring workable, and the two words you need to remember: lighter touch. Not no touch. I explain the real-world impact for SMEs, from potential tribunal costs and management time to the trust ripple effect in a small team where everyone watches how you handle the hard moments.

Then we get practical. You’ll leave with a calm 48-hour plan: fix your probation clause in your contract and offer letter, audit everyone currently in their first few months, diarise short structured reviews, and start capturing feedback in simple written notes that are boring but bulletproof. We also bust the myths that cause last-minute panic, including the idea you can “notice” your way around statutory rights or beat the deadline with a hasty dismissal.

If you want straight-talking UK HR advice for small employers, hit subscribe, share this with one business owner who needs it, and leave a quick review so more people find the show.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

Someone on your team used to be unflappable, then suddenly they’re overheated, not sleeping, forgetting things, snapping over tiny issues, and quietly losing confidence. Many managers read that as performance or attitude. We see it for what it often is: perimenopause showing up at work, in a culture that still makes the topic feel awkward to name.

We get practical about menopause at work for small businesses and HR teams. We talk through what symptoms can look like day to day, why “quiet menopause” is the riskiest version for employers, and how a simple check-in can open the door without assumptions or embarrassment. We also unpack what’s changing in the UK, including the Equality Act 2010, the EHRC guidance on menopause, and the direction of travel under the Employment Rights Act 2025, which is making support a clear expectation rather than optional good behaviour.

You’ll leave with a clear, low-cost plan: a one-page menopause-aware policy, a manager conversation script, and reasonable adjustments that genuinely help such as flexible starts after a bad night, time for medical appointments, cooler uniforms, fans, and better room choices. We also flag the hidden trap in many absence policies, where menopause-related sickness triggers warnings and creates avoidable discrimination risk.

If you want to keep brilliant people and run a fair workplace, this is your nudge to start now. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, share it with a fellow small business owner, and leave a quick review to help more managers find it.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.

Someone on your team is still turning up, still delivering, still saying they’re “fine” and yet the spark has gone. That grey zone is where quiet quitting lives, and in a small business it does real damage long before anyone resigns: slower problem solving, lower energy, and a subtle drop in standards that others quietly copy. We’ve both been on the receiving end of it, and we know it’s rarely about laziness or attitude. It’s a signal that something stopped working.

We get clear on what quiet quitting actually means (and what it doesn’t), then dig into the most common roots we see in UK SMEs: poor or missing feedback, workload creep without acknowledgement, and managers avoiding the harder conversations. We also bring in the numbers that make this impossible to ignore, including UK engagement data and what exit interviews reveal about how long people think about leaving before they go.

Most importantly, we give you practical tools you can use this week. You’ll hear the exact sentence we use to open a real conversation, what to listen for without getting defensive, how to fix what you can quickly, how to name what you can’t change yet (pay, promotion, structure), and why booking the next chat is the difference between a one off talk and a genuine rebuild of trust. We also bust a few myths that keep managers stuck, including the idea that money solves everything.

If you manage people, press play, pick one person who has gone quiet, and act early. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, share it with another manager, and leave a quick review if it helped.

If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.

And if you do it before 1st April 2026, you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead. That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.

We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.

You can sign up here 

If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.

Got a question or need actual HR support? Find Kate at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk, email [email protected], or follow along on social.

Until next time, keep buzzing, and take care of your people.