Category Archives: Dealing with clients

How to deal with a client who won’t do what you want

Clients are usually completely lovely, of course. And by and large, the employers who choose to engage an HR consultant are the ones who genuinely want to do the right thing by their workforce, and the simple fact that they are choosing to pay for

Sensitivity to the personal nature of small business relationships

One of the things I noticed fairly quickly after starting work as an HR consultant for small businesses was how personal things are in a small business. When meeting with a potential client to find out about their business, the discussion is often a very

Sensible conversations as an HR strategy

Are you overly concerned about process? It’s understandable in many cases. If you’re working in a big organisation then it’s important to be consistent and the more discretion involved in handling employee issues, the harder it can be to achieve that. The other thing many

Ways we enable rather than restrict our clients

One of the most important things our consultants want is to ensure their clients feel the advice and support they get is a positively beneficial thing for their businesses. We want to help clients do what they want to do. We want to help them

The importance of commercial awareness when advising small businesses

It’s very easy working in HR to drift through working life with insufficient commercial awareness. Lots of HR professionals have spent most of their ‘proper’ working life (i.e. not counting summer jobs or similar) cocooned away in HR departments providing business support, rather than in

Our end result focus to client problems

One of the things really important to our approach to HR advice is having a focus on what end result the client wants for their issue, and basing our advice and support on that. Many other advisory services, particularly those of a helpline nature, give

Demonstrating value

Getting clients as a self-employed HR professional is one thing, but if you want to keep them it’s crucial they feel they are getting value from your services. That doesn’t mean feeling they are getting a cheap deal, it means ensuring they feel that they

Local support for local business

At face2faceHR we’re passionate about working with and becoming part of our local business community, and we find that clients like this too. One of the things we get a lot of feedback on when we ask clients why they contacted us or decided to

How to use variety in your clients to develop creative solutions

We think one of the best bits about being an HR consultant to small businesses is the variety you get. It keeps life and work interesting for the consultant, which is something many of them are seeking, particularly if they have been employed in one

Is a formal procedure always best?

Mention of HR frequently elicits eye-rolling, as stereotypes (sometimes fed by real-life experiences) cause a negative reaction. Clearly a tendency to tar with the same brush all members of any particular profession with which we’ve had a negative experience is not uncommon, and certainly not