185 | Cancer at Work: How to Support Employees Through Diagnosis, Treatment and Beyond (with Tara Ferguson)

Have you ever dismissed something you do brilliantly because it feels easy? Perhaps a colleague has praised you for something and you've thought, "That's nothing special. Doesn't everyone do that?" The challenge is that some of our greatest strengths can be hidden in plain sight because they come so naturally to us. In this episode, we explore why recognising and using your strengths can have a powerful impact on your wellbeing, performance and enjoyment at work. We also look at why many people spend too much time relying on learned behaviours rather than the things that genuinely energise them. To help us unpack this topic, I'm joined by chartered psychologists Michele Deeks and Martin Galpin, co-founders of Work Positive and creators of the At My Best strengths tools. Together, we discuss the research behind strengths-based approaches, how to identify your own strengths, and simple ways managers, leaders and teams can help people recognise what they do best.

Career progression does not always have to mean securing a promotion or climbing further up the career ladder. You may want to deepen your expertise, move into a different area of HR or explore a completely new path. In this solo episode, Fay talks you through four possible career directions: growing in your current role, stepping up, moving sideways or stepping out. She also shares practical questions to help you decide which direction feels right for the next stage of your career.

Managers are expected to handle everything from one-to-ones and development conversations to absence, performance issues and disciplinaries. Yet many step into management without having been properly taught how to deal with these responsibilities. For HR and People professionals, finding a way to build managers’ knowledge and confidence without overwhelming them can be a real challenge. In this special bonus episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay Wallis is joined by Amy Critchley, Head of People at Indigo Networks. Amy explains how she created a management development programme from scratch after joining an organisation that had not previously had a dedicated HR or People team. Amy shares practical ideas for combining essential HR knowledge with wider management development, making potentially dry subjects more engaging and helping learning stick. She also explains how the programme strengthened relationships between managers and changed the way they worked with the People team.

Have you ever found yourself going round and round in circles trying to choose between two options? Perhaps you’re deciding whether to recruit externally or promote someone internally, introduce a new policy or stick with what you already have, invest in a new HR system or make the current one work, or even stay in your current role or apply for something new. Sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t thought hard enough about the two options. It’s that you’ve become so focused on them that you haven’t spotted another possibility. In this solo episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay shares a real decision she recently struggled with while planning the 2027 edition of The Essential HR Planner, and how an unexpected suggestion helped her realise she had fallen into a common decision-making trap called narrow framing. Drawing on ideas from Chip and Dan Heath’s brilliant book Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions, Fay explores two practical ways to widen your thinking and get unstuck when a decision feels like an either/or choice. In This Episode, You’ll Learn What narrow framing is and how it can limit your decision-making Why the options in front of you may not be the only options available How to use theVanishing Options Testto uncover different possibilities Why asking someone else for their perspective can help you see what you’re missing The questions to ask other people so you don’t accidentally keep them trapped inside the same narrow frame How Fay used these ideas to solve her dilemma about whether to bring back the wire-bound version of The Essential HR Planner

What exactly is employee experience? How is it different from workplace culture, employer brand or your employee value proposition? And what can you actually do to improve it? In this episode of HR Coffee Time, I’m joined by employee experience expert Chris Manning, People and Culture Portfolio Transformation Lead at Primark. Chris explains what employee experience really means and why it matters for organisations of every size. He shares practical ways to understand and measure the experience your employees are having, whether you work in a small organisation or a huge global business. We also explore how design thinking can help you move beyond simply listening to employees and start making meaningful improvements. Chris talks us through a practical onboarding example, showing how journey mapping can uncover friction, identify opportunities and help you design a better employee experience. And if you need to secure investment for your ideas, Chris shares practical advice on building the business case and getting the buy-in and budget you need. Whether employee experience is already part of your role, or it’s an area you’d like to learn more about, this episode is packed with practical ideas to help you get started. What You'll Learn What employee experience actually means How employee experience differs from workplace culture, employer brand and EVP Why employee experience matters in smaller organisations as well as large global businesses Practical ways to measure employee experience How to gather useful feedback across the employee lifecycle Why post-onboarding and offboarding can provide valuable insights How employee data can help create more personalised employee experiences How design thinking can help you improve employee experience The five stages of design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test How to use journey mapping to improve an experience such as onboarding How to build a compelling business case for employee experience improvements How to combine qualitative and quantitative evidence to secure buy-in and budget