Kate works at Humber HR and has been doing HR for over 20years.  Kate has lived in several European cities before coming back to Yorkshire.

Kate says understanding how people present and communicate at work is useful for photographers. Understanding how this works will help us work better with more clients. Kate’s degree is in psychology, and she says the way we present ourselves to the world depends on a huge number of factors. She says people present themselves in several ways. Extraverts and introverts are examples of this. And it can be difficult when people at the opposite ends of the spectrum meet. Another concept is pace. With pace, some people pick up work and run with it very quickly, while others need a lot of time to get the details and understanding before they feel able to start. This is the basis of disc profiling, and anyone can get a disc profile of themselves.

Disc stands for Drive, Influence, Steadiness (pace), and compliance, and these are sections of the disc “pie”. Sam asks how you can do this when you can’t ask your clients and leads to profile themselves. Kate says understanding your profile is an important part of this. So, for example, don’t give a longquote to someone who doesn’t want much detail and vice versa. Kate says you don’t need someone to do a profile to work out what their disc styles are. We can use clues in the way they communicate, dress and behave to determine where they fit into. So knowing your profile and understanding the system helps you with this.
The conversation moves on to working with freelancers. There are two types of working together in the UK. Either working together as freelancers or being employed. There are no grey areas in between. There are 7 tests to see if someone is employed or a freelancer. It asks questions like Does someone have to wear a uniform?

Or do they use their equipment?

The way to ensure this is clear is to put together a freelance agreement. This needs to make it very clear that this person is afreelancer, not an employee. You have to be careful that this doesn’t creep over time. The issue is that if someone could be thought of as an employee, they could be entitled to all sorts of things like holiday pay, and they could take you to a tribunal asking for backdated holiday pay.
Once you start to employ someone, there are lots of things you need to think about. But it’s not as scary as it seems, just set it up correctly at the beginning. There are day one rights that need to be made clear, like how they are paid, etc. Having a handbook is also an idea. The key is that the handbook is written for your business. So, for example, including intellectual property in the handbook makes it clear that the work they create belongs to the business.  

Marcus asks how to put together these documents. Kate says Don’t ask your mate down the pub, Google or a previous employer. The Chamber of Commerce and FSB have some templates that you can use. There are lots of HR consultants who can do this for you.

You can find Kate on LinkedIn here

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