Leadership Archives - Purple Cubed

Redundancy with kindness

Many in HR are having a very tough time dealing with the fall out of Covid-19. This blog provides a simple plan for dealing with the inevitable redundancies with compassion. You’ve exhausted all the options around flexible furlough, job rotation, career breaks and sabbaticals and are regrettably faced with unavoidable redundancy consultations. Exhausting, depressing and negative for everyone, redundancy ranks as one of the most stressful life experiences. In the current climate, its effects are amplified. For many organisations, particularly those in hospitality right now, mass redundancies are a very sad fact of life. Handling lay-offs in the [...]

Tom Lake 2020-06-26T09:29:38+01:00 June 26th, 2020|

Extended furlough: five ways to keep people on top of the situation

Five ways to keep people on top of the situation is also available as a podcast. You can listen to it here: The Chancellor’s announcement that furlough is to be extended until October, came as a welcome surprise to many. The furlough scheme, whereby the government will cover 80% of monthly wages up to £2500, is already benefiting one million businesses and seven and a half million workers in the UK. Whilst businesses and many workers will welcome this extension, for many employees who are now approaching the completion of eight weeks of [...]

Tom Lake 2020-05-21T13:46:40+01:00 May 13th, 2020|

How leadership will change post Covid-19: 10 ways to get fighting fit…

This blog in brief: Although businesses face logistical and financial hurdles as we plan to come out on the ‘other side’ of Covid-19, make the most of enforced downtime to plan for new and better ways of operating in the future. Think Culture, Flexibility, Leadership, Wellbeing, Learning, Community, Digital, Communication and the Employee Experience… How leadership will change post Covid-19 is also available as a podcast. You can listen to it here: For some time before the virus, the concept of ‘disruptive business’ was dancing around all of us, with some embracing it and others still with their [...]

Tom Lake 2020-05-01T09:35:08+01:00 May 1st, 2020|

The angels and demons of crisis management

By business author and Purple Cubed founder, Jane Sunley The angels and demons of crisis management is also available as a podcast. You can listen to it here: There were a fair few comments about a statement I made at the end of a previous blog to do with employee satisfaction and loyalty levels rocketing as a result of their employers having taken an empathetic, kind and caring approach towards dealing with the current crisis. It stands to reason that if you look after your people they will remember and appreciate the effort long after the current [...]

Tom Lake 2020-05-01T09:40:52+01:00 April 20th, 2020|

The importance of inspiring trust in the workplace – and how to do it…

We live in an age of fast and furious information flow where transparency and, in some cases, over-sharing have become a social norm. It therefore stands to reason that employees will expect trust and openness at work in the same way they expect equal, adult relationships. Hopefully it’s been quite a while since you heard that awful phrase ‘mushroom management’ (where people are kept in the dark and fed sh*t), though, sadly, some organisations still have a long way to go when it comes to creating, maintaining and growing trust. Harvard’s global survey on the ambiguous state of employee [...]

Tom Lake 2019-10-18T16:07:05+01:00 October 18th, 2019|

10 tips to create powerful internal brand ambassadors

By business author and Purple Cubed founder, Jane Sunley For quite some time now the lines have been blurring between internal and external communication. Therefore, alignment between the people function and marketing has become business critical. Today’s people leader is fast becoming a marketer. If you think about it, the principles of marketing can also apply to attracting, engaging, and retaining your people and thus enabling them to become your brand ambassadors. Take SharpSpring’s Top 10 Tips for Marketing 2019, for example: Look for opportunities to diversify - in a literal sense, diversity and inclusivity are vital, though also [...]

Tom Lake 2019-10-01T08:17:18+01:00 October 1st, 2019|

Reinventing your organisation with a human focus

Our five-minute take on this year’s Global Human Capital Trends Report from Deloitte We like this research because it gives weight and rigor to the trends and advancements we know anecdotally to be the case. It also provides lots of helpful stats to help persuade budget holders of the critical aspects of investing in the future success of ‘the people stuff’ and to target this investment in the most effective way. This year Deloitte surveyed over 10,000 people across 119 countries on a range of workplace issues. So you don’t have to read 100+ pages, here are some of [...]

Tom Lake 2019-09-16T11:34:40+01:00 August 27th, 2019|

Toxic bosses – how to consign workplace bullying to the last century (a three minute read)

By business author and Purple Cubed founder, Jane Sunley Ever since I wrote this viewpoint about a grad’s experience of an organisation’s misguided recruitment process, I’ve been hearing from other young people starting out in the world of work. Whilst there are many excellent employers out there, some of these stories make for uncomfortable reading. Purple Cubed is all about sharing great practice and it would just be too negative to write about them all. However, I do feel compelled to write a piece about workplace bullying and to share with you the worst example I’ve heard so far (are [...]

Tom Lake 2019-06-18T10:23:01+01:00 March 6th, 2019|

Change series blog (7): Clarity fuels businesses – kicking off a successful approach

Clarity has always been a business imperative; perhaps, never more so than in these times of great challenge, rapidity and change. The ability to simplify the complex is an essential skill for leaders at all levels – for organisation, team and individual. Yet so many businesses suffer from ambiguity, leading to employee disengagement, customer dissatisfaction, inefficiency, lack of innovation and inability to adapt, all of which are potentially detrimental to the bottom line. Making things simple is tough; yet it’s something that deserves thought, effort and, probably, a change of approach. It starts at the top: People need to [...]

Tom Lake 2019-05-09T11:05:04+01:00 November 9th, 2018|

Purple Breakfast Club – Summary of Outcomes

On 3rd October, at an exclusive event for the C-Suite, business owners and investors within the hospitality space, an exclusive audience of 30 of hospitality’s ‘great and good’ gathered to debate: PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST - YOUR BEST BUSINESS MOVE Richard Branson’s been saying it for years, Luke Johnson wrote about it in The Times. So why isn’t every board putting people at the top of the agenda? PANEL: TIM KIDD, MD, Kantar Worldpanel, Europe and US - placed 5th in The Glassdoor Top 50 most people-centric CEOs (ahead of Mark Zuckerberg, Rob Papps, Tim Cook) KIERAN LAWTON, [...]

Tom Lake 2018-10-10T11:15:40+01:00 October 10th, 2018|