FedEE Blog

Goodness is so rare, it must be illegal. So why didn’t someone tell me?

It would be great to devote this column to praising good and worthy things, but alas they are far less common than the faults and ill

It curious that the European Union has Directives to cover many aspects of the employment relationship – but is silent about individual dismissal. If the EU was serious about the issue of employment protection why leave it up to individual

The girl at the lift scolded the old Chinese couple as they hobbled with difficulty slowly towards the stairs. When the tour bus is waiting such stragglers are “always a nuisance when operating to a tight schedule”, confided the guide.

Political pollsters in the UK are wringing their hands because they got the outcome of the recent general election wrong. But perhaps an important factor in the result was a tiny event – which has relevance to the whole concept

There is a far from aptly named brand of wines available in my local French supermarket – claiming to be a chosen by a club of wine experts. The truth is that their overpriced beverages struggle with kerosene and effluent

The other day I was asked what worried me most about the next two to five years. I had never put such a straightforward question to myself before and I would like to have replied that the world has its

I was in Cologne this week, chairing an HR conference for German companies. Almost every speaker took as a key perspective the gap between “baby boomers” and generations X, Y and Z. Of course, the whole thing is a myth

Companies give so much attention to warding off challenges from outside that they frequently fail to see the enemy within. Employees are a company’s greatest asset, but also their greatest source of potential liability. That is why JP Morgan has

The tragic outcome of Germanwings Flight 9525 has raised that perennial question – how much should employers know about the psychological and medical condition of their employees?

Privacy laws in many countries currently limit the amount of information that can

It is one of peculiarities of language that certain terms become so allied to certain meanings that their more general meaning is subverted to the one most commonly used. This has happened, for instance, to the term “discrimination”. We all

I have a cartoon hanging in my study that I commissioned long ago from a well-known Irish cartoonist. It is of a dam bursting and the reactions of all the cartoon characters in its wake. It was originally commissioned as

When I began my HR career I was warned that employees and their representatives perpetually steal from employers by preying on many individual manager’s good will which, in turn, leads to the generation of operational inefficiencies – so that the

Looking back at all the mighty companies that have fallen in the last 20-30 years makes you realize how much on a knife’s edge so many companies operate – whilst looking so solid from the outside. Although there have been

Have you noticed how insecure everyone around us seems to be? Snobbery used to be a minority sport, but now everyone is at it. It is nowhere stronger than in that pocket temple to inanity – the smart phone.

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