The Brightmine Podcast (UK‪)‬ Brightmine.com

Bags for life, tea containing a surprising substance and more: Susie Munro, senior legal editor at Brightmine, discusses four recent employment tribunal cases where employees were dismissed for misconduct after making what they said were mistakes. 
Related resources Misconduct dismissals following employee mistakes: Employment tribunal round-up
How does a tribunal gauge whether an employee has been unfairly dismissed on the basis of misconduct?
Misconduct - line manager training

Steve Allan joins us to talk about HR's role in mergers and acquisitions and offers five top tips for getting M&As right. We talk about:
company culture; the impact of AI; understanding TUPE; and how to get integration right. Related resources Hiring across borders: Five compliance challenges and how to solve them
Podcast: Global hiring - AI, EORs and worker misclassification risks 
Guide for global employers: Recruitment and selection

Miranda Zolot, general counsel at Oyster, talks about the benefits and challenges of distributed working and global hiring. Join her as she discusses subjects including:
•    EORs and PEOs;
•    compliance issues;
•    employee/contractor misclassification risks; and
•    AI.
Related resources
What is an employer of record?
Hiring across borders: Five compliance challenges and how to solve them
Guide for global employers: Recruitment and selection
Guide for global employers: International assignments

According to research, almost half of the skills used by the workforce today will no longer be relevant in a couple of years. Given this context of a fast-evolving workplace with shifting needs, it's perhaps unsurprising that organisations are struggling to hire people with the right skills. What is to be done? Career mentor Laurie Macpherson joins us to discuss ways for HR and employees to begin to rethink recruitment and reskilling.
Read the transcript here
Related resources Four steps HR can take to help businesses and employees embrace the new "squiggly" careers era Whose responsibility is employee development anyway? Managing retention: Creating a retention strategy Global learning and development 2024: XpertHR survey report

A raft of employment law changes have come into effect over the past few months. In this edition of the podcast, Zeba Sayed and Stephen Simpson discuss some developments that have perhaps received less attention than others: the changes to special redundancy protection for family-related leave that came into force on 6 April 2024.
Read the transcript here
Want to learn more? April 2024 employment law changes: Eight-point checklist for HR
Redundancy policy
Redundancy: Letter offering suitable alternative vacancy to pregnant employee
Redundancy during or after maternity leave: Letter offering suitable alternative vacancy to employee

International and domestic politics, issues of gender and sexuality: people disagree about lots of things. Understandably, many organisations worry about the impact of controversial beliefs being expressed in the workplace - perhaps because of the effect on other employees, perhaps just because of the distraction that disputes can cause.
In this edition of the podcast, employment law specialist Darren Newman joins us to discuss how organisations can navigate conflicts of belief in the workplace. Darren sets out the relevant case law and tackles questions including:
Can employers distinguish between what is said in the workplace and what is said elsewhere, eg on social media? Can they put rules in place governing how people talk about controversial issues? What can they do to protect themselves and their employees? Read the transcript here
Related resources Gender reassignment discrimination: Gender fluid and non-binary identities are protected Religion or belief discrimination: Gender-critical belief is protected, EAT holds Balancing competing rights: A difficult challenge for employers