Human Resources

Epicurus Business Solutions UK specialise in getting the best out of the people who work within your business. The Human Resource solutions can take a number of different forms but for ease this area of service is broken down into three distinct areas:

Recruitment and Selection – employing the correct people for therole.
Training your personnel – facilitating appropriate training and development solutions to utilise the human capital at your disposal.
Employee Relations – this section includes contracts of employment, policies and procedures and avoiding disputes

Recruitment and Selection
Choosing the correct person for the job role is fundamental in establishing the growth and development of any business. As a minimum, selecting the correct people will prevent unnecessary costs of recruiting again. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), stated in the report of Retention and Turnover (August 2007), that the average cost of recruiting employees is £7,750, rising to £11,000 for senior managers or directors.

Epicurus Business Solutions UK can draw on the experience of a number of HR professionals including Fellows of the CIPD to custom design an effective and efficient Recruitment and Selection solution that perfectly matches your individual business needs. Solutions that have been tailored for recent clients have taken into account some or all of the following:

Recruit to meet your business needs or tackle problem areas.
Benchmark salaries.
Set up good recruitment procedures, (and brief everyone involved in the process).
Draft a detailed job description.
Draft a person specification, (set out the skills you want the recruit to have).
Decide how much you are prepared to pay.
Make use of internal resources.
Carefully write your job advertisement, or agency brief.
Advertise - externally, consider using an employment agency, or Jobcentre Plus as a cheap and fast way of recruiting.
Build relationships with local schools, colleges and universities to attract promising candidates for trainee positions.
Invite applications in a form that helps you assess each candidate.
Use your job and person specification as a checklist to help assess each applicant.
Prepare a shortlist.
Interview shortlisted candidates.
Use work samples or exercises to assess candidates' ability to do the job well.
Take up references for the best candidate.
Send an offer letter to your preferred candidate.
Send polite rejection letters to any remaining unsuccessful candidates.
Plan a warm welcome and induction for new employees.

Analyse your recruitment methods.
Monitor your employee turnover.

Training your personnel:

After you have employed the best people for your business it is essential that you keep them up to date with changes and advancements to their role and maintain or gain a competitive edge over your comparators. In order to achieve this we promote the use of a Training Needs Analysis (TNA).

A Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is a method of identifying what development needs are required for an organisation to achieve their goals, it may also be used as an ‘organisational health check’.

By collecting data from a variety of sources, it is possible to objectively measure the achievement of objectives; customer satisfaction and employee performance. The TNA will identify the gap between actual and desired business performance and ensure that training needs are integrated with business outcomes.

An organisation will normally have a key motivator for undertaking a TNA:

To match the services or products provided by competitors and to satisfy its customer’s requirements.
To meet externally set standards e.g. IiP or ISO9000.
To exceed its customer’s requirements and become more efficient in the use of systems and technology.
To lead the competition and exceed set standards, i.e. to become a market leader.
Adopting new strategies or undergoing large-scale change to create new products or services.

To ensure the validity of TNA recommendations, the organisation must have a clearly defined vision and objectives. The TNA will provide a 360° view of development needs of the organisation, teams, departments and individuals. Data used to identify development gaps may be drawn from many existing sources within the organisation such as:

Performance appraisals
Skills Audits

Employee Satisfaction Surveys
Customer/Supplier Surveys

Other methods would also be used to obtain the required data, such as:

One to One Interviews
Focus Groups
Learning Styles Questionnaires
Management Styles Questionnaires
STEP and SWOT Analyses
Competency Frameworks

We will prepare a report and presentation for senior management. This will include the main findings, highlighting both training and non-training needs and with recommendations for development.

Employee Relations:

Having recruited the correct people and invested time and effort training individuals, there is also a need to clearly outline what their role is within the organisation. This takes the form of a contract of employment. Some of the content of this document is governed by legislation and other parts are prudent to include to ensure that if the employment relationship sours then the company is protected. Employment Law is continuously changing and staying abreast of all the appropriate changes can be a full time of its own.

Epicurus Business Solutions UK provide up to date, practical advice to comply with legislation, helping you to avoid the potential of costly claims. Are you aware, Maximum compensation awards for successful Unfair Dismissal claims are increasing year by year as is the average award per successful claim. Also, failure to follow the statutory conflict resolution procedure, which came into force on 1st October 2004, will automatically deem a claim against you to be unfair and any award made can be increased by a further 50%.

As well as Age Discrimination Legislation which came into force in 2006, and Smoking in the workplace legislation in July 2007, there continues to be a large number of changes and proposals from the EU.

Awareness of these changes is imperative; however, awareness is useless without compliance. Epicurus Business Solutions UK will assist your compliance, making sure that all key staff are fully aware of their responsibility.

Services Offered include: