HR Coffee Time

Cancer affects far more people in the workplace than many of us realise. As HR professionals, there may be times when you're supporting an employee with a cancer diagnosis, someone undergoing treatment, a colleague living with the long-term effects of cancer, or an employee who is caring for a loved one affected by it.

Knowing that support matters is one thing. Feeling confident about what to say, what practical help to offer, and how to create the right support across your organisation is another.

In this episode, Fay is joined by Tara Ferguson, Founder of Onward With You. Drawing on more than 20 years in senior HR roles and her own experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, Tara shares practical advice to help HR teams and managers better support people affected by cancer at work. Together, they explore the role good line management can play, the reality of living with cancer beyond active treatment, and the steps organisations can take to build greater cancer confidence.

What You’ll Learn
Why cancer should increasingly be considered a long-term condition rather than a short-term illness
The scale of cancer's impact on today's workforce, including employees with caring responsibilities
What Tara's line manager did that made such a positive difference during her diagnosis and treatment
Why work can sometimes play an important role in someone's recovery and wellbeing during treatment
What HR professionals need to understand about legal protections and reasonable adjustments
How to approach the first conversation when someone shares a cancer diagnosis with you
Practical steps organisations can take to improve awareness, support and manager capability

Chapters
[0:00] Introduction: Cancer at Work
[01:15] Meet Tara Ferguson
[02:50] Tara's Story: From HR to Cancer Diagnosis
[03:48] The Changing Face of Cancer in the Workplace
[05:12] How Tara Is Now: The Ongoing Impact
[08:07] Cancer in the Workplace: The Statistics
[11:36] What Good Line Manager Support Looks Like
[15:32] The Positive Role of Work During Treatment
[17:13] Legal Protections & Reasonable Adjustments
[19:05] Supporting Employees with Hidden Cancer Diagnoses
[21:40] Having the First Conversation About Cancer
[24:20] Organisation-Wide HR Strategies
[27:26] Book Recommendation & Resources
[29:27] How to Reach Tara
[29:55] Key Takeaways & Closing

Useful Links and Resources
Visit Tara's website:Onward With You
Connect with Tara Ferguson on LinkedIn
Connect with Fay Wallis on LinkedIn
Learn about Fay's Inspiring HR Leadership Programme
Treat yourself to a copy of The Essential HR Planner

Books and Resources Recommended in This Episode
The Leopard in My House, by Mark Steel
Tara also mentions a number of resources available through Onward With You, including:
A guide covering 12 common questions HR professionals and line managers ask about supporting employees affected by cancer
The Cancer Confidence Framework
The Cancer Confidence HR Masterclass

Enjoyed This Episode? Don’t Miss the Next One!
Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email for useful HR resources, ideas and new episode updates to support you in your HR career.

Have you ever found yourself going round and round in circles trying to choose between two options?
Perhaps you’re deciding whether to recruit externally or promote someone internally, introduce a new policy or stick with what you already have, invest in a new HR system or make the current one work, or even stay in your current role or apply for something new.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t thought hard enough about the two options. It’s that you’ve become so focused on them that you haven’t spotted another possibility.
In this solo episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay shares a real decision she recently struggled with while planning the 2027 edition of The Essential HR Planner, and how an unexpected suggestion helped her realise she had fallen into a common decision-making trap called narrow framing.
Drawing on ideas from Chip and Dan Heath’s brilliant book Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions, Fay explores two practical ways to widen your thinking and get unstuck when a decision feels like an either/or choice.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn
What narrow framing is and how it can limit your decision-making
Why the options in front of you may not be the only options available
How to use theVanishing Options Testto uncover different possibilities
Why asking someone else for their perspective can help you see what you’re missing
The questions to ask other people so you don’t accidentally keep them trapped inside the same narrow frame
How Fay used these ideas to solve her dilemma about whether to bring back the wire-bound version of The Essential HR Planner

Chapters
[00:00] Introduction: Stuck Between Two Options
[00:28] Common Either/Or Decisions at Work
[01:22] The Book: Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath
[02:43] Fay's Dilemma: The Essential HR Planner
[04:27] Should the Wire-Bound Planner Return?
[05:14] Asking for Feedback to Get Unstuck
[06:20] Claire's Game-Changing Suggestion
[07:53] Understanding Narrow Framing
[09:53] The Vanishing Options Test
[12:39] Getting Another Perspective
[13:50] How to Ask Better Questions When Asking for Advice
[14:44] Book Recommendations: Decisive, Made to Stick, and Switch
[15:28] Pre-Order the Wire-Bound Planner
[16:11] Closing Thanks and Sign-Off

Books Recommended
The book links below are Amazon affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you.
Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Switch: How to change things when change is hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

The Essential HR Planner
If you’re watching or listening to this episode close to its release date, you should now be able to pre-order the wire-bound 2027 edition of The Essential HR Planner.
Visit essentialhrplanner.co.uk to find out more and pre-order your copy.

Enjoyed This Episode? Don’t Miss the Next One!
Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email to be notified each time a new episode is released – and get free career tips, tools, and resources.

What exactly is employee experience? How is it different from workplace culture, employer brand or your employee value proposition? And what can you actually do to improve it?
In this episode of HR Coffee Time, I’m joined by employee experience expert Chris Manning, People and Culture Portfolio Transformation Lead at Primark.
Chris explains what employee experience really means and why it matters for organisations of every size. He shares practical ways to understand and measure the experience your employees are having, whether you work in a small organisation or a huge global business.
We also explore how design thinking can help you move beyond simply listening to employees and start making meaningful improvements. Chris talks us through a practical onboarding example, showing how journey mapping can uncover friction, identify opportunities and help you design a better employee experience.
And if you need to secure investment for your ideas, Chris shares practical advice on building the business case and getting the buy-in and budget you need.
Whether employee experience is already part of your role, or it’s an area you’d like to learn more about, this episode is packed with practical ideas to help you get started.
What You'll Learn
What employee experience actually means
How employee experience differs from workplace culture, employer brand and EVP
Why employee experience matters in smaller organisations as well as large global businesses
Practical ways to measure employee experience
How to gather useful feedback across the employee lifecycle
Why post-onboarding and offboarding can provide valuable insights
How employee data can help create more personalised employee experiences
How design thinking can help you improve employee experience
The five stages of design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test
How to use journey mapping to improve an experience such as onboarding
How to build a compelling business case for employee experience improvements
How to combine qualitative and quantitative evidence to secure buy-in and budget

Chapters
[00:00] What is employee experience and why does it matter?
[02:45] Meet Chris Manning
[04:35] What employee experience really means
[06:25] Employee experience vs workplace culture
[07:10] Employee experience, employer brand and EVP
[08:30] Why employee experience matters in smaller organisations too
[10:40] How to measure employee experience
[14:20] Using employee data to understand and personalise experiences
[18:20] Moving from employee listening to employee experience design
[19:40] Using journey mapping to improve onboarding
[23:30] A free onboarding journey-mapping resource
[25:25] What is design thinking?
[26:50] The five stages of design thinking
[29:45] How to get buy-in and budget for employee experience
[33:30] Chris’s recommended resource
[35:35] How to connect with Chris
USEFUL LINKS
Connect with Fay Wallis on LinkedIn
Connect with Chris Manning on LinkedIn
Read Chris’s article about employee experience inThe ELEVATE Hub magazine
Download Chris’s free employee experience journey-mapping resource:brightskyhr.co.uk/resources
Find out more aboutThe Essential HR Planner
Learn more about Fay’s leadership programme –Inspiring HR Leadership

Enjoyed This Episode? Don’t Miss the Next One!
Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email to be notified each time a new episode is released – and get free career tips, tools, and resources.

🎁 Download your free Personal User Manual template:
https://brightskyhr.co.uk/resources
Taking over the leadership of an HR team can come with a long list of things you want to improve, but one of the most valuable things you can do first is help your team build trust, understand each other and work well together.
In this episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay shares one of her favourite team-building activities: creating and sharing Personal User Manuals.
Personal User Manuals give everyone an opportunity to explain how they work best, the strengths they bring, what helps them thrive and what their colleagues should know about them.
They can make some of the information that is usually invisible within a team much more visible, helping people understand each other’s preferences, avoid misunderstandings and make better use of the strengths and experience already within the team.
Fay talks you through how to run the activity, from deciding what to include in your Personal User Manuals to facilitating the sharing session and turning what you learn into practical changes in how you work together.

In this episode, you’ll discover:
Why investing in relationships can create a stronger foundation when you take over an HR team
How Personal User Manuals can help your team understand each other’s strengths, preferences and ways of working
How the activity can help you start building greater psychological safety
Ideas for useful categories to include in your Personal User Manuals
Why it’s helpful to ask your team what they think everyone should include
How to create the right environment for people to share what they’ve written
Why you, as the leader, should share your Personal User Manual first
Questions you can use to encourage positive reflections after each person has shared
How to turn what you learn into practical improvements to the way your team works
How to keep the learning alive after the activity

Chapters
[00:00] Why relationships matter when you take over an HR team
[01:20] What is a Personal User Manual?
[02:50] Why Personal User Manuals can be so useful
[04:55] What to include in your Personal User Manuals
[06:50] Involving your team in choosing the categories
[07:50] How to run the sharing session
[08:50] Why the leader should go first
[09:30] Encouraging positive comments and reflections
[10:40] What have you learned about yourselves as a team?
[11:35] Keeping the learning alive
[12:35] Download the free Personal User Manual template

Useful Links
Download your free Personal User Manual template:https://brightskyhr.co.uk/resources
Connect with Fay Wallis on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/faywallis/
The Essential HR Planner:https://essentialhrplanner.co.uk/
Learn about the Inspiring HR Leadership Programme:https://brightskyhr.co.uk/hr-leadership-course/

Enjoyed This Episode? Don't Miss the Next One!
Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email to be notified each time a new episode is released - and get free career tips, tools, and resources.

HR professionals have a huge opportunity to shape how, why and when AI is used across their organisations.
Because AI is not only changing technology. It is changing jobs, skills, teams, management and the way work gets done. And HR is uniquely placed to make sure those changes work for both the organisation and its people.
In this episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay is joined by People Consultant Charlotte Goulding to explore how HR professionals can help shape successful AI adoption across their organisations.
Charlotte explains why HR should not wait to be invited into conversations about AI and shares how her Five People Foundations Framework can help organisations put the right people foundations in place as work changes.
Together, Fay and Charlotte explore what each of these foundations means in practice, including why traditional job descriptions may no longer be enough, why managers will become even more important and how performance, recognition and HR operations may need to evolve.
Charlotte also explains how HR can help organisations make thoughtful decisions about AI while keeping people, trust and culture at the heart of them.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
Why HR shouldn't wait to be invited into conversations about AI
The difference between “AI for HR” and “HR for AI”
How the Five People Foundations work together
Why skills and capabilities could become more useful than job descriptions
How managers can support people through AI-related change
How performance, recognition and HR operations may need to adapt

Chapters
[0:00] Introduction: Why HR must lead AI adoption
[2:01] Welcome, Charlotte Goulding
[2:24] HR for AI, not just AI for HR
[4:41] From pandemic hero to recent criticism
[6:31] How the Five Foundations framework came about
[10:42] Overview: The Five People Foundations
[11:35] Foundation 1: Identity
[15:34] Example: Values in your AI hiring process
[19:13] Foundation 2: Clarity
[23:28] Applying skills-based roles in HR
[26:31] OKRs and quarterly goal-setting
[28:05] Foundation 3: Enablement
[29:12] Managers: the most overlooked foundation
[36:51] Foundation 4: Recognition
[39:01] Rethinking career progression and rewards
[40:42] Foundation 5: Operations
[42:22] Mapping your most critical processes
[43:38] Working with Charlotte
[45:37] Book recommendations
[47:05] Wrap-up and outro
Useful Links
Connect with Fay on LinkedIn
Learn about Fay’s Essential HR Planner
Learn about Fay’s Inspiring HR Leadership Programme
Complete Charlotte’s free Five People Foundations diagnostic.
Visit Charlotte's website:The People Thread
Connect with Charlotte Goulding on LinkedIn

Books Recommended in This Episode
HR Disrupted by Lucy Adams
Built for People by Jessica Zwaan

Helpful Episodes to Listen to Next
Ep 164:Becoming More Strategic as an HR Team: Three Ways OKRs Can Help
Ep 166:The Biggest HR Strategy Mistake and How to Fix It, with Dean Corbett
Ep 172:How One Company Helped Employees Embrace AI, with Laura Maffucci
Ep 173:How to Build a Better Workplace Culture (So People Thrive at Work), with Aoife O’Brien

Enjoyed This Episode? Don't Miss the Next One!
Sign up for the free weekly HR Coffee Time email to be notified each time a new episode is released - and get free career tips, tools, and resources.