Sometimes on Twitter, really random conversations happen.  Someone tweeted me about a comment that was made about HR to the effect of HR being just internal PR.  Immediately, I was interested but saddened at the same time.  Little did I know that one tweet was going to lead me to a lady who writes under the pen name of Eva James and who has a blog called Bullied By the Boss.  I've been unable to read all her blog posts in one sitting as they stir up such conflicting emotions for me.  As a person who works to improve communication between employee and employer, who takes the ethos that HR has three principles - being fair, being consistent and being nice; I am both saddened and angered by what happened to Eva.  Luckily for the rest of us, she detailed her experiences so we could understand.  So often we see bullying almost as a concept, something we all know should not be allowed to happen but when it does, how many of us can confront it and take the necessary steps to make it stop?  How many of us would prefer to bury our heads and pretend it's not really happening.. especially when it's the boss who's the bully?  

I asked Eva to write a guest blog for me to explain her view of HR.  She's chosen to open her blog with kudos to me for allowing her to guest blog.  On the contrary, I don't feel that I could have not asked her to write about her take on HR.  Kudos to me?  More like kudos to her for standing up to be counted. 

All comments and debate welcomed!

I spent some time recently talking to my good friend Maxine Welford of maxxy.co.uk.  Maxine has a very successful telemarketing business and she's absolutely fantastic at what she does.  We were discussing the difficulties of recruiting the right people and that, quite apart from the financial cost, there are other implications of getting it wrong.  Maxine has written a blog post about it which I'm delighted to share with you. 

"I have learnt a lesson recently and wanted to share this with you.  Maybe it will help others to avoid the mistake I made.

Background

Recently, I mentioned on Twitter that we are teaming up with a Health & Safety consultant to offer those services to our clients.  After all, HR and Health and Safety are intrinsically linked.  I had a response from someone I tweet with quite ofthen who said something along the lines of "don't mistake Health and Safety for moral fortitude."  Intrigued, I asked him to explain and then asked if he'd consider writing a guest blog post on the subject.  This is the result (my twitter buddy has asked to remain anonymous).