30 years of HR. This is what it looks like.

I have spent 30 years working in human resources, most of them in complex, high-pressure environments where the margin for error was small and the consequences of getting it wrong were significant.

My speciality has always been employee and industrial relations. Over the course of my career I have chaired and managed hundreds of disciplinary hearings, represented organisations at the CCMA, led wage negotiations across unionised workforces, and guided executive teams through section 189 retrenchment processes. I have worked in financial services, logistics, media and local government, in environments ranging from small HR teams to nationally distributed operations with thousands of employees.

What I know is that workplace processes only go wrong in a small number of ways. Someone did not follow procedure. The manager acted on instinct rather than the policy. Nobody documented what happened or when. The disciplinary code had not been reviewed since it was drafted in 1998. These are fixable problems, and most of the time they are preventable.

SQO Consulting exists because South African businesses need a trusted, experienced HR partner they can call when those problems arise, or better still, before they do.

I am not a large firm and I do not intend to become one. I work directly with the organisations I serve. When you speak to SQO Consulting, you speak to me.

I have been in rooms where the outcome affected hundreds of people's livelihoods. That shapes how you approach every process.