Mara Thorne's Page

Of all the management issues you will face in the workplace, a medical certificate signing an employee off with stress, anxiety, depression, or some other form of mental illness, is guaranteed to make your heart sink. A variety of questions spring to mind: how long will the person be away? Is the workplace somehow responsible for the problem? Could you have seen it coming and done something to prevent it? What are you going to say to the person when they do come back? What,…

Following the revelations of sexual harassment and assault - and allegations of rape - by Harvey Weinstein that filled the news media a few weeks ago, I recently heard Sir Tom Jones on the radio admitting that something similar was attempted against him early in his career. There have been many scandals involving sexual harassment and abuse (including child abuse) in recent years; among the most notorious sexual predators here in the UK were Jimmy Saville and Cyril Smith, not to…

My cousin Laura told me when we caught up recently that she’d left her job with nothing else to go to, and she was sure she’d made the right decision. I was surprised: Laura has always been a very solid and responsible woman, and has worked continuously since the children were in their teens. Perhaps she had taken early retirement? No, despite being 62 years of age, that wasn’t it. She’d left because she’d been bullied at work for about six months, and had…

The HR community has been buzzing recently, following the announcement that some very large, high profile organisations including Microsoft and Deloitte have abandoned their formal Appraisal Schemes, in favour of on-going performance discussions between managers and their team members. "How sensible!", many people have said. Appraisals are old hat. They are too bureaucratic. They are tick-box exercises that don’t motivate anybody or improve performance. Far…