HR in 90 Seconds - May 2019

In this month’s ‘HR in 90 seconds…’ we summarise the best of the new additions to the website. Including a number of new webinars which brought lots of advice answering your question in the area of GDPR and reminding everyone of the key elements of dealing with poor performance proactively. We also look at a short video demonstrating what the future of recruitment advertising might look like from a leading Northern Ireland company!  

Last week we heard from regular contributor Caroline McEnery talking to us through how to proactively approach performance management with employees, and provides some takeaway tips and advice on how to best to handle performance proactively. This was such a popular topic that we added an additional second part of the webinar to ensure that we got the best tips and advice communicated to all the listeners. Both parts of the webinar are definitely will worth a listen, however if you don’t have time the main thing that was popular with the listeners was Caroline’s advice on the best four questions to ask the employee at a performance appraisal meeting:

1. What is going well?
2. What's not going so well?
3. What are the smart goals we're going to agree?
4. Have you any issues?

Listen back to both parts of the webinar on our website at the following link: https://www.legal-island.ie/articles/ire/resources/webinars/2019/mar/dealing-with-poor-performance-proactively/

Continuing with the webinar series David Fagan from Business Legal teams up with Legal Island to answer the most Frequently asked questions on Data Protection and GDPR in Ireland. In this transcript David covers SAR’s, ramifications of a breach of the GDPR, fines for breaches and the role of the DPO.

As additional insight to the area of Performance Management, Dr Gerry McMahon continues his ‘How to…’ series considering the use of ratings as part of Performance Management Systems – is their use rising or declining? Dr Gerry references several research reports and their findings and summarises the advantages and disadvantages of using rating scales. He summarises them as follows:

Advantages:

• Rating scales are quick and easy to use
• Yields qualitative results – keeping people focused
• Provide a basis for rewarding and developing staff eg. Linking to performance related pay
• Enables judgements to be summarised and high or low performance levels to be identified
• Facilitate concentration (and consequently feedback) on employee behaviour
• Can motivate employees toward a performance improvement

Disadvantages:

• Question marks over their alleged impact on employee engagement
• Employees dislike being rated
• Can be an over-simplified technique that fails to recognise the complexity of performance over an extended period
• Can be demeaning and demotivating in its application
• Human dimension brings application problems
• Fear of angering or upsetting a poor performer 

Gerry also discusses how we can use the rating system to motivate people rather than and use reflective evidence to rate employees fairly.

Emma Kieran form Clarendon Executive recently wrote an article on harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence in recruitment. Emma identified that the use of AI is becoming a routine tool and that the recruitment industry is certainly not immune to this change. Emma discusses the use of videos in the recruitment process replacing CV’s and capturing video applications. There was a great example of the use if videos, without removing the human element, on LinkedIn recently from local Norther Ireland company Mount Charles in their recruitment for a Finance Assistant, watch this 2:33 video as a great example of recruitment advertising [2.33].  

If you have some more time, other items of interest include:

‘First Tuesday Q&A’ – this feature provides the answers to subscribers questions, this month Ciarán Lyng, Solicitor, A&L Goodbody, answers 6 questions taking a closer look at some of the practical and legal considerations for employers regarding transferring employees. 

In this month’s HR Updates we hear from Caroline McEnery, Managing Director of the HR Suite with 5 top tips on how to ensure that your Company is protected should a claim of unfair dismissal arise due to a poorly managed probation process. These include advice on the policy, the contract, induction, ensuring continuity and the importance of the paper trail. 

Irish Employment Law Hub

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