Straight-talking HR for the people doing payroll, sales and playing workplace therapist before lunch.
If you run a UK small business, or you're the HR-of-one trying to keep the wheels on, this podcast is for you.
No corporate jargon.
No "synergy."
Just real answers to the people's problems no one warned you about.
Hosted by award-winning HR expert Kate Underwood, each episode tackles the moments small business owners actually face:
The employee who's brilliant at the job and causes chaos in the team
The manager who avoids hard conversations until they turn into a bonfire
The "small issue" grievance that suddenly becomes a formal complaint
The sickness pattern is suspiciously linked to Mondays and payday
The resignation that makes you think, " What did we miss?"
You'll get plain-English UK employment law, practical advice on performance, absence, hiring and retention, and grown-up culture conversations, all usable the same day. No theory. No paperwork museums. No advice that only works in big HR departments with unlimited budgets.
This is also a permission slip to lead like a human. Clear standards. Fair boundaries. Decent communication. Less drama. The goal is a calmer workplace, fewer sleepless nights, and a team that actually wants to stick around.
And yes, Hazel the office dog pops up too. Because nothing says "people management" quite like a judgmental stare from a Wellbeing Officer who's never written a policy in her life.
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Episode summary: It's National Inclusion Week (14 to 20 September), with Global Workplace Culture Day on Friday 18 September, so Kate makes the case that culture is behaviour, not branding. Five small habits any manager can build this week, then the heart of it: culture is decided in awkward moments, and the person standing in the middle of those moments is almost never HR, it's a line manager who was never trained for it. This is also the launch episode for Cake, Coffee and Compliance, the manager training built for exactly that gap.
Key points:
Culture is not your values statement or your logo colours. It is the accumulated pattern of what your managers do in small moments on ordinary days.
Five habits to build: learn how people want to work, make space for quiet voices, give credit out loud, handle the awkward moment, and follow through on the small things.
Small businesses have the advantage. In a team of nine, culture is three people's habits, so it can change in a fortnight.
Awkward moments never book themselves in. They happen in corridors at 4.15pm, and your line manager is the one standing there, usually with no training at all.
From 30 October the preventative duty on sexual harassment rises to all reasonable steps, with a broader third-party harassment liability alongside it covering any protected characteristic, and it rests on managers noticing and acting in the moment.
THE GROWL, our new segment: Hazel, our Wellbeing Officer, says the quiet part out loud about rainbow mugs and Christmas dos, and Kate agrees sideways.
LAUNCH: Cake, Coffee and Compliance. Twenty one-hour sessions, Tuesdays at 9.30am, three blocks across the year, evergreen so there's no wrong time to join. Block 1 starts Tuesday 13 October. Every session hands over a real document your managers keep. No exam, and recordings are up within 24 hours. HR Business Partner and HR Excel clients get all twenty in their retainer. Priced per person plus VAT, cheaper the more places you buy, full table in the brochure.
The first three sessions are all harassment, on 13, 20 and 27 October, landing before the 30 October deadline.
Links:
Cake, Coffee and Compliance, the training your managers were supposed to get and never did: kateunderwoodhr.co.uk/managers
Call to action: Pick one habit and practise it for a fortnight. Then get your managers a place on Cake, Coffee and Compliance before Block 1 starts on Tuesday 13 October, so the three harassment sessions land before the duty changes on 30 October.
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Picture this, it's an ordinary Wednesday, about half past three, and your team is in the weekly catch up. Somebody makes a comment about a colleague. It's dressed up as a joke, the sort with a little laugh on the end, so it can't quite be pinned down. And the room goes very slightly still. Nothing dramatic. But two people look at the table, someone laughs a beat too late, and the person the comment was actually about does the thing we all do, which is smile and carry on as though nothing happened. And then every single person in that room, without realizing they're doing it, looks at the manager. That half second is your culture. Not the values on your website. Not the poster in the kitchen. Not the lovely graphic you posted this morning because it's National Inclusion Week. What happens in the next half second is the bit your team will remember, repeat, and copy for months. It's National Inclusion Week this week, the 14th to the 20th of September, and Friday the 18th is Global Workplace Culture Day. So this is exactly the right week to have this conversation properly. Here's my argument for the next 20 minutes or so. Culture is behaviour, not branding. It gets made or quietly lost in awkward moments like that one. And the person standing in the middle of that moment is almost never HR. Kettle on. Let's get into it.
The Welcome to the Hive intro. Welcome back to Buzzing About HR, the podcast that makes sense of the world of work. One honeycomb of good advice at a time. I'm Kate, your HR Queen Bee, and Hazel, our well-being officer, is on duty as always. For anyone new here, Hazel is my German short-haired pointer, born in January 2024. Which means she is still firmly in the phase where she has opinions about everything and absolutely no filter about sharing them. Which brings me neatly to the first of two new things in this episode. From today, we've got a new regular segment called The Growl, where Hazel says the quiet part out loud and then I say the version you can actually put in an email. It sits about two-thirds of the way through. You'll know it when you hear it. The second new thing is a launch. It's what I've been building quietly all year. It's called cake, coffee, and compliance, and it's for your line managers. I'll come to it later on, because it only makes sense after the rest of this episode. So here's the promise: no jargon, no doom, no guilt trip about your inclusion graphic. Just what culture actually is, five small habits that build it, the awkward moment where it's really decided, and the person we keep asking to handle that moment without ever giving them an hour of training for it. Let's go.
The buzz. Let's start with the week itself, because it's worth knowing what it's for. National Inclusion Week runs from Monday the 14th to Sunday the 20th of September, and it does a genuinely good job of getting belonging onto agendas where it otherwise wouldn't appear. Then, on Friday the 18th, we've got Global Workplace Culture Day, which I think is a useful pairing. Inclusion is who gets to feel at home in your business. Culture is how your business behaves when nobody's writing it down. And that's the heart of it. Culture is not your mission statement, it's not your values, however carefully you chose them. It's not the branding, the logo colours, or the heartfelt post. Culture is the pattern of what people in your business actually do, repeatedly on ordinary days when there's no hashtag involved, which is genuinely good news for small businesses. You don't need a diversity department or a budget. In a team of nine, culture is set by about three people and their everyday habits. You have more control over this than a company of 5,000 does, and it costs you nothing but attention.
So let me give you the five habits I'd build. These are the ones from this week's blog, and none of them is a grand initiative. They're all things you can start on Wednesday. Habit one, learn how your people actually want to work. Inclusion starts with not assuming everyone is like you. The person doing the school run, the colleague who thinks best in writing rather than out loud, the team member managing a health condition quietly. They all do their best work under slightly different conditions. So ask. What helps you do your best work is a lovely question, and it's astonishing how rarely anyone gets asked it. You won't be able to accommodate everything, and that's fine. Knowing what matters to someone and adjusting where you reasonably can tells them they're a person and not a slot on a rotor. Habit 2. Make sure the quiet voices are heard. In almost every team, a few confident people do most of the talking, and a few thoughtful people say very little and then have the best idea by the kettle afterwards. Left alone, that quietly teaches half your team that their contribution isn't wanted. So make space on purpose. Say, let's hear from a couple of people we haven't heard from yet. Ask for thoughts in writing beforehand so the reflective thinkers can prepare. Small moves and they change who feels they belong in the conversation. Habit 3. Give credit out loud. The fastest way to make somebody feel invisible is to let their good work vanish into a general well done everyone. The fastest way to make them feel they belong is to name what they did in front of other people. That was Priya's idea, and it saved us ours, costs you one sentence. Watch out for the pattern where the same person's ideas get repeated back by someone louder and credited to them. Catching that is inclusion in its most practical form. Habit four, handle the awkward moment, don't walk past it. That's the big one, and it's where the rest of this episode is going, so I'll hold it for two minutes. Habit 5. Follow through on the small things. Trust, which is what inclusion actually runs on, is built by reliability rather than grand gestures. You said you'd look into their request. You said you'd feed their idea back. Did you? Close the loop, even when the answer is not yet, or I'm afraid not, and here's why? A no delivered honestly does far less damage than a promise quietly dropped. Five habits. No budget, no away day, no survey. That's the buzz. The
hive check. Now let's check the thing that trips people up, because this is where good intentions go sideways. The muddle is this. Most business owners hear inclusive culture and think of it as a project. Something you launch. Something with a name and a logo and possibly a working group. So it goes on the list somewhere below the VAT return, and once a year in September it gets a graphic, and everyone feels vaguely guilty that it isn't more. But culture isn't a project and it can't be launched because it already exists. You've got one right now, including if you've never once used the word. The only question is whether it's the one you'd have chosen. Here's the heart of it. Culture is the accumulated total of what your managers do in small moments. Who gets interrupted and whether anyone steps in? Whether the request for a slightly different start time gets a real answer or a vague one. Whether the comment at the end of the meeting gets addressed or absorbed. Nobody writes any of that down, and all of it is being recorded in the memory of every person in the room. So, the honest check is this. Forget the values on the wall. If I asked your newest, quietest team member what actually happens here when someone says something they shouldn't, what would they tell me? That answer is your culture. And unlike most things on your list, it's within your power to change, because it's made of behavior, and behavior can be taught. The sting.
Here's the part I'd really like you to sit with. Every culture is decided in awkward moments, and awkward moments do not book themselves in. They don't happen in a meeting room with an agenda. They happen at 4 15 on a Thursday, in a corridor, on a shop floor, on a video call with 11 people on it. No time to think, no time to look anything up, and no time to call me. And here's the bit that should genuinely change how you plan your year. The person standing in the middle of that moment is almost never HR. It is almost never you, the owner. It is a line manager. It's your supervisor, your team leader, the person you promoted 18 months ago because they were brilliant at the job they were doing before. They are the ones who hear the comment. They're the ones the room looks at. They are, in every practical sense, your culture. Now here's the uncomfortable question. What training did we give them for that? For most small businesses, and I say this with real sympathy because I've watched it happen a hundred times, the honest answer is none. We promoted our best salesperson or our most reliable technician or the person who'd been there longest. We gave them a small pay rise, a team, and a job title. And then we quietly started expecting them to handle a comment about somebody's accent, a grievance that arrives by text on a Sunday, a request for time off that might be a reasonable adjustment, and a member of staff crying in the stockroom. Nobody ever sat them down for an hour and showed them how. And then, when they freeze or say the wrong thing or do the human thing and hope it settles down on its own, we're disappointed in them. That isn't a manager problem. It's a training problem and it's ours. And the cost of it isn't only cultural. From the 30th of October, the preventative duty on sexual harassment rises to all reasonable steps, and a broader third-party harassment liability arrives on top of it, covering harassment of your staff by customers, clients, contractors, and the public related to any protected characteristic. The whole of that duty rests on somebody noticing and acting in the moment. That somebody is your line manager. So the awkward moment isn't just where your culture is made, it's now where your legal position is made too. Which is why I've spent this year building something specifically for them.
Right. The segment. This is where Hazel, our well-being officer, thinks the thing I'm actually thinking, and because she can't say it herself, I read you the subtitles. Then I give you the version you can safely say out loud, subtitles on.
SPEAKER_00
Nobody has ever left a job because the mug in the kitchen didn't have a rainbow on it. They left because Gary said something at the Christmas do. Everyone looked at their shoes, and the manager suddenly needed to check on the buffet. Subtitles off.
Kate
And we do not name Gary in this house, not even a hypothetical one, however legally distinct she thinks that makes it. Let me put that properly. Culture is not measured by what a business publishes about itself. It's measured by what a team observes their manager doing in the moments where doing nothing is the easiest available option. A single unaddressed comment teaches a room more about what is genuinely acceptable here than a year of internal communications, because people believe what they watch happen far more than what they're told. Or, as the subtitles had it, the shoes thing. That is the same sentence with better manners, isn't it? It usually is. And for the avoidance of doubt, address it doesn't mean a confrontation. Most of the time it's five words in the room, said calmly, and a quiet conversation afterwards. What it can't be is nothing because nothing is also a decision, and your team will read it as one. She's still looking at me. I think she wants the buffet. The waggle dance.
So let me tell you what I've built, because it's the direct answer to everything I've just said. It's called cake, coffee and compliance, and the hook is simple. It's the training your managers were supposed to get and never did. Here's how it works. Twenty sessions, one hour each, running on Tuesdays at half past nine in the morning. Twenty hours of proper manager training, taken one hour at a time, so nobody has to lose a day or travel anywhere or pretend they can clear a Thursday. It runs in three blocks across the year, and block one starts on Tuesday the 13th of October. It's manager training, not a webinar, and it isn't legal advice. That distinction matters to me. Every single session hands over a real document your managers keep and use. A script, a checklist, a template, a one-page process. So they don't leave with notes and good intentions. They leave with the thing they'll be holding when the awkward moment turns up. Twenty sessions, twenty documents, and by the end of the year, your management team has a toolkit that belongs to your business. There's no exam. Nobody is being assessed, nobody is being caught out, and nobody has to speak if they'd rather not. It's an hour, a brew, something to take away. That's the whole promise. And every session is recorded, with the recording up within 24 hours. So if a manager is on a customer call or off sick or simply has a week from hell, they haven't lost the session. It's Evergreen 2, which is the bit I'm most pleased about. The sessions rotate through the three blocks across the year, so there is genuinely no wrong time to join. If you find us in February, you start in February. Nobody is ever behind. Now, the reason I'm telling you this today rather than in November. The first three sessions in block 1 are all on harassment, and they land on Tuesday the 13th, Tuesday the 20th, and Tuesday the 27th of October. The duty to prevent sexual harassment rises to all reasonable steps on Friday, the 30th of October, and the new third-party liability starts the same day. So those three sessions finish three days before the duty starts, and we trained our managers is one of the strongest pieces of evidence there is that you took all reasonable steps. That timing isn't an accident. It's the whole reason Block 1 starts when it does. If you're an HR business partner or HR Excel client of ours, good news, all 20 sessions are already included in your retainer. You don't need to do anything except send your managers the link. For everyone else, it's priced per person plus VAT, and it gets cheaper the more places you buy, so a management team of six costs a lot less per head than one person coming along. The full table is in the brochure because I'd rather you looked at what's in it than at the price first. Everything, the 20 session list, the block dates, and the brochure is at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash managers. And if you want to know where your business stands before any of that, start with the free HR Health Check. Five to seven minutes, instant red, amber, green, and a report in your inbox telling you which of the autumn changes you need to worry about. It's at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash hr-health-check. The swarm.
Four things I expect to hear this week. Myth one. Inclusion is a big company thing. We're too small for all that. Genuinely the opposite. In a big company, culture is diluted through layers and policies and a comms team. In a team of nine, it's three people's habits, and you can change it in a fortnight. Small isn't a reason to skip this, it's the reason it works. Myth two. Our culture's fine, nobody's ever complained. Subtitles. Nobody complains to the person they're worried about. That's not a culture. That's a silence with a logo on it. A bit much before ten in the morning. It's also correct. Absence of complaints is not evidence of a healthy culture. It's evidence that nobody has complained. And those are very different findings. The businesses I worry about most are the ones with a spotless record and no route to raise anything. Myth three. Culture is HR's job. I love that you think I'm that powerful, and I promise you I'm not. I can write you a beautiful policy, and it will not be in the corridor at 4 15 on a Thursday. Your line manager will be. Culture is set by whoever is standing there when it happens. Myth four. Handling that stuff is just common sense. A decent manager should know. Some of it is instinct and plenty of it isn't. Knowing what to say in the room, what to write down afterwards, when something has become a grievance, when an adjustment is legally reasonable, none of that is common sense. It's learned. We just usually expect managers to learn it by getting it wrong on a real human being first, and that's an expensive way to run a training program.
The honeycomb. Your quick action list. Six things and you can start every one of them this week. One, pick one habit, not five. Choose the one your team most needs right now and practice it for a fortnight until it feels normal. Then add another. 2. Ask three people this week what helps them do their best work. Write the answers down and act on one of them. 3. In your next team meeting, deliberately invite in someone who hasn't spoken and name one person's specific contribution out loud. 4. Ask your managers what they'd actually say if a comment landed badly in front of the team. Not a training session, just a conversation. What comes back will tell you how much support they need. 5. Get your managers signed up for cake, coffee and compliance before block 1 starts on Tuesday the 13th of October. So the three harassment sessions land before the duty changes on the 30th. It's at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash managers. 6. Take the free HR Health Check at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash hr-health dash check so you know which of the autumn changes actually apply to you rather than worrying about all of them equally. Flying the hive.
So that's National Inclusion Week and Global Workplace Culture Day on Friday the 18th. Post the graphic if you'd like to. There's nothing wrong with it. But the graphic isn't the work. The work is five small habits done repeatedly by ordinary managers on ordinary days. And it's mostly done in one place. The half second after something awkward happens when a room full of people is quietly waiting to find out what kind of business this is. Your culture is whatever happens next. That's the whole thing. Which means the kindest and most useful thing you can do this week isn't a values exercise. It's giving the people who stand in those moments the training they were always supposed to have. That's what cake, coffee, and compliance is for. Twenty hours across the year, one at a time, with a real document at the end of everyone. Block one starts on Tuesday, the 13th of October, and the first three sessions are all harassment, landing before the duty rises on the 30th. Have a look at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash managers. And if you'd like an honest picture of where your business stands first, take the free HR Health Check at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash hr-health dash check. Five to seven minutes, a red, amber, green report in your inbox, no sales pitch attached. Or just email me at buzz at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk and tell me what's going on. No pressure, no jargon, just a proper conversation. Until next time, keep buzzing, look after your people, and don't walk past the awkward moment. Kettle on.
