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.
☕ Start here: take the FREE HR Health Check and see where your risks and your quick wins are hiding.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
18:06
World Menopause Day is the way into a bigger subject: retention. Kate looks at how good, well-meaning workplaces quietly push out their most experienced people, often women going through the menopause at the peak of their careers, simply by never making it safe to say they're struggling. She covers the real cost of losing skilled people, why they rarely leave for money, and the small, cheap, humane changes that keep them.
Key points:
The people you can least afford to lose are often your long-serving employees, and many are going through life stages your workplace never mentions.
Replacing an experienced employee can cost many months of salary in recruitment, onboarding and lost knowledge, and in a tight market you may not replace them at all.
Experienced people rarely leave for a small pay difference. They leave because they stopped feeling supported. You can usually out-care the market more cheaply than you can outbid it.
Menopause support is largely cheap and practical: talking about it openly, desk fans, cold water, flexible start times, breathable uniform, and the freedom to step out of a meeting.
Flexible working requests can come from day one with a two-month response window. Treat them as a retention tool. Use appraisals as a genuine two-way check-in to catch the quiet wobble early.
Links:
YourAppraisal, turn appraisals into real, ongoing conversations that keep you close to your people: yourappraisal.io
Fractional HR Director, board-level HR expertise a few days a month, without a full-time salary: kateunderwoodhr.co.uk
Cake, Coffee and Compliance, one-hour manager sessions, Tuesdays 9.30 am, £75 a seat, Block 1 starts 13 October: kateunderwoodhr.co.uk/managers
Ready for 2027, contracts, handbook, policies, manager training and a year of support, all in place before January. Buy by 31 October: kateunderwoodhr.co.uk/offers/ready-for-2027
Call to action: This week, name the three to five people you can't afford to lose, and take one action from the list to make sure they feel supported. If you want a steadier senior hand building retention into how your business runs, talk to us about a Fractional HR Director. And if the whole foundation needs rebuilding before the January changes, Ready for 2027 does it as one piece of work, but it has to be bought by 31 October so there is time to deliver it properly.
If you’re not 100% sure how your HR is really holding up, take our free HR Health Check. It’s short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what’s working — and what needs a bit of love.
And if you do it before 30th October 2026 you’ll get a bonus 7 Pillar Strategy-on-a-Page, tailored to help you manage HR brilliantly for the year ahead.
That’s it for today, but if you fancy a bit of friendly HR advice in your inbox (with zero waffle), come and join our newsletter.
We send out bite-sized tips, plain-English updates, and handy things you’ll actually use — no spam, no fluff.
If you're not sure how your HR is really holding up, take the free HR Health Check. It's short, jargon-free, and gives you a clear score on what's working and what could do with a bit of love.
Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a review if you've got thirty seconds. It honestly does help more small business owners find the show, and it's the cheapest good deed you'll do all week.
Picture this. There's a woman in your business. Let's call her Jan. And Jan is the one who knows everything. She's been with you eleven years. She knows why you do that odd thing with the September invoices. She knows which customer needs handling gently. She's trained half the team and she's the calm in every storm. If Jan won the lottery tomorrow, you'd be genuinely, quietly, panicked. And Jan is having a rough year. She's not sleeping. Her body's doing things she doesn't recognise. She's forgetting words in meetings, and it's frightening her because she's always been the sharp one. She hasn't said a thing because she doesn't know how. And honestly, she's a bit embarrassed. So instead, she started thinking, very quietly, that maybe she's just passed it. Maybe it's time to step back. Maybe she should go. Nobody in your business has done anything cruel. And yet, without meaning to, you're about to lose the most valuable person you've got. Because nobody asked and nobody made it easy for her to say what was going on. This week, World Menopause Day, I want to talk about the people you can't afford to lose and the quiet, well-meaning ways good workplaces push them out. Kettle on, let's get into it.
The Welcome to the Hive. 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 modelling excellent retention practice by refusing to leave the warmest room in the house. Loyal, experienced, knows where everything is. Frankly, if she asked for a pay rise in biscuits, I'd have to consider it. Sunday is World Menopause Day, the 18th of October, and I want to use it as the way into a much bigger subject. Retention. Keeping the experienced, capable people who hold your business together through the life stages that would otherwise quietly cost you them. Menopause is one of those stages, and it's a big one because it hits people right at the peak of their skill and experience. But the lesson runs wider than that. Here's my promise for the next 20 minutes or so. No jargon, no doom, and I'm going to lead with humanity, because that's where this one lives. Just what it really costs to lose your best people, the small practical changes that keep them, and a short list you can act on this week. Let's go.
The buzz. Let me set the scene properly because the numbers make the human story land harder. When an experienced person leaves, the cost isn't the leaving due and a card. It's the knowledge that walks out with them. The relationships. The years of, oh, I know how to handle that. Replacing a skilled established employee can cost many months of their salary by the time you've advertised, interviewed, onboarded, and waited the long stretch before the new person is anywhere near as useful. And that's if you find someone. In a tight market, you often can't, not quickly, and not for the money you'd like. Now here's who's most at risk of quietly slipping away. And it's not who a lot of businesses assume. It's not the flighty news starter. It's your long servers, your mid-career and later career people, precisely the ones carrying the most knowledge. And a huge number of them are women in their late 40s and 50s going through the menopause at the exact point they should be at the height of their careers. The statistics on this are sobering, and I'll keep them honest. A significant number of women reduce their hours, pass up promotions, or leave work altogether because of menopause symptoms they felt they couldn't talk about or get support for. Not because they stopped being brilliant. Because the workplace made no room for a normal, temporary, manageable life stage, and they decided the simplest option was to shrink or to leave. So that's the buzz. The people you can least afford to lose are often the ones going through something your workplace has never once mentioned. And the cost of losing them is far higher and far harder to recover from than the tiny cost of supporting them.
The hive check. Let's do a quick check on the thing that catches good employers out, because it's rarely what they think. Most businesses assume people leave for money. So when someone resigns, the instinct is to reach for the checkbook or to shrug and say the market's just expensive right now. And sometimes, yes, it is money. But experienced people, the jarns of this world, usually don't leave for a few hundred pounds. They leave because they stopped feeling seen. Because something got hard at home or in their health or in their body, and work felt like one more place they had to hold it all together and pretend. They leave the feeling of being unsupported and they call it a new challenge on the way out, because it's easier to say. Here's the heart of it. Retention isn't mostly a pay problem. It's a does this place make room for me to be a whole human problem? And that's actually wonderful news because it means keeping your best people is far more within your control and far cheaper than an endless bidding war. You very rarely need to outbid the market. You need to out care it. So the honest check is this. When your experienced people go through a hard patch, does your workplace bend a little to keep them? Or does it silently expect them to cope or clear off? Because one of those keeps your yans, the other trains them to leave.
The sting. Here's the part worth sitting with gently. The cruel thing about losing your best people this way is that it almost never looks like a crisis. There's no dramatic row, no grievance, no walkout. It's quiet. It's a brilliant person slowly deciding they're the problem. When actually the problem was a workplace that never gave them a way to say, I'm struggling and I still want to be here. Think about what menopause can actually bring. Broken sleep for months on end. Brain fog that makes a sharp, confident person suddenly doubt themselves. Anxiety that arrives from nowhere. Hot flushes in the middle of a meeting with no way to cool down and nowhere to step out. Now imagine going through all of that while feeling you can't mention a word of it. Because it's not the sort of thing that gets talked about here. And you're worried it makes you look past it. That's not a small ask. That's asking someone to run a marathon in secret, in the wrong shoes, and to smile while they do it. And here's the sting for the business. That person doesn't fail loudly. They just gradually turn themselves down. They stop volunteering for the big projects. They step back from the promotion. And one ordinary Tuesday, they hand in their notice, and everyone says, such a shame, we'll never replace her, which is true. And which nobody connects to the fact that in 11 years, not once did anyone make it okay to say she was having a hard time. None of this needs a medical degree or a big budget. It needs a fan on a desk, a flexible hour, a quiet chat, a manager who knows not to make a joke of it. Tiny things. That's the sting and the reassurance in one. The changes that keep your most valuable people are almost embarrassingly small compared to the cost of watching them walk out.
The growl. So I read you the subtitles. Subtitles on.
SPEAKER_00
Could not run this place without her, you keep saying. Lovely sentence that. Said it to her, have you? Eleven years she has been here. Eleven years and not once has anyone asked how she is doing in a way that left room for an honest answer. There is Brave waiting for the exit interview to find out. She is not leaving for the money mind? Never was.
Kate
Subtitles Off. That was meant kindly, I think, to the person it is about rather than the person it is aimed at. Let me put it properly. We tend to tell everyone, except the person, how much we rely on them. The praise goes round the room, into appraisals, into the thing we say when they are not there. And because they never hear it, and because nobody has ever made it safe to say, I am finding this hard and I still want to be here, they conclude that struggling would be a problem. So they go quiet, they turn themselves down, and one ordinary Tuesday they hand in their notice and we call it a shame. The conversation that would have kept them was available every single week for 11 years, and it was free. Which is, I notice, the same point as the dogs, only longer. She has put her head on my knee, which she does when she has decided I am the one who needs asking. The waggle dance.
So what actually keeps your jans? Here's the honest practical version, and none of it is expensive. Talk about it out loud. The single biggest change is breaking the silence. A workplace where menopause and life stages generally can simply be mentioned is a workplace people don't have to leave to survive. A short plain policy, or even just a line from you that says, if
you're going through the menopause and something at work would help, come and talk to us changes the whole temperature. Permission is free and it's powerful. Make the small practical changes. A desk fan, a seat near a window or away from a heat source. Uniform in breathable fabrics if that's your world. Easy access to cold water and to a loo. Flexibility on start times after a broken night. The ability to step out of a meeting without it being a thing. Every one of these is cheap, and any one of them can be the difference between someone staying and someone quietly giving up. Flexibility. Handled fairly. Life stages and flexibility go hand in hand. Remember requests can come from day one now, and you've up to two months to respond. Treating those requests as a chance to keep good people rather than a nuisance to bat away is one of the highest return decisions you'll make. Train your managers to respond, not freeze. A manager doesn't need to be an expert in the menopause or anyone's health. They need to know how to have a kind, private, unflustered conversation and not turn it into an awkward joke or a performance review. Notice, ask, listen, adjust. Use your appraisals as a genuine two-way check-in. This is where a good appraisal earns its money. Done right, a regular one-to-one is where you catch the quiet wobble early, where someone finally says, actually, I've been finding things hard, long before they're drafting a resignation. That's exactly what your appraisal is built for: turning appraisals from a dreaded annual box tick into a real, ongoing conversation that keeps you close to your people. Have a look at your appraisal.io. And if all of this feels like it needs a steadier hand at a senior level, someone to build the retention, the policies, and the manager capability into how your business actually runs, that's what a fractional HR director is for. Board level HR Thinking. A few days a month without a full-time salary. It's how a smaller business gets the strategic people expertise the big firms take for granted. If that's where your head's at, come and talk to us at kateunderwoodh.co.uk the swarm.
Mythbuster parade. Let's clear up four things I hear a lot about keeping experienced people. Myth one, people only leave for money. Rarely for your best people. They leave because they stopped feeling supported and they call it a new challenge on the way out. You can usually out care the market far more cheaply than you can outbid it. Myth two, menopause isn't really a workplace issue. It absolutely is when it's driving experienced, skilled people to cut their hours, turn down promotions, or leave entirely. Anything that quietly costs you your best staff is a workplace issue, and this one has a simple, cheap set of fixes. Myth 3. If I start supporting one life stage, I'll have to do it for everything. Good. That's called being a decent employer, and it's the whole game. The muscle you build, supporting one person through a hard patch is the same muscle that keeps everyone else too. It's not a slippery slope, it's a culture. Myth four. Talking about it will embarrass everyone. What embarrasses people is struggling in silence and feeling they can't say a word. A calm matter of fact, if this affects you, we're here to help is the opposite of embarrassing. It's a relief. You'll be amazed what people say once they know it's safe to.
The honeycomb, your quick action list. Here's your list of six things to take away from today in order. 1. Name your jans. Write down the three to five people whose departure would genuinely hurt and ask honestly when you last check they feel supported. 2. Break the silence on menopause. A short policy, or even one clear message that says, if this affects you, come and talk to us, changes the whole temperature for free. 3. Sort the small practical stuff. Fans, water, flexible start times, being able to step out of a meeting. Cheap changes, big returns. 4. Brief your managers to respond, not freeze. Private, kind, unflustered, no jokes, no panic. Notice, ask, listen, adjust. 5. Treat flexible working requests as a retention tool, not a nuisance, and handle them fairly within the two-month window. 6. Make your appraisals a real two-way conversation so you catch the quiet wobble early. Take a look at your appraisal at your appraisal.io. Flying the hive.
So that's the one I really wanted to say this week. The people you can't afford to lose are usually the ones quietly deciding they're a problem, when all they needed was a workplace that made a little room for a normal life stage. Menopause is the door-in because World Menopause Day is Sunday, but the lesson is bigger. Retention isn't a bidding war. It's whether your people feel like whole humans when they're with you. Get that right and you keep your jans, your knowledge, your calm in the storm. Get it wrong, and you spend the next year and a lot of money trying and failing to replace what walked quietly out of the door. If you'd like a hand building the kind of support and the manager habits that keep your best people, that's exactly what we're here for. Head to kateunderwoodhr.co.uk or drop us a line at buzz at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk. No pressure, no jargon, just a proper conversation about the people who matter most to your business. Until next time, keep buzzing, look after your people, and go and tell your Jan she's appreciated. Kettle on.
