People.je is now entering its sixth year of business, and what a time it has been. When we started the business, back in Digital Jersey’s start-ups incubator hub, we had several aims.
We wanted to make corporate level HR quality available to small businesses in Jersey who had not yet grown sufficiently to justify hiring their own HR team.
We wanted to make good employment practices simple and accessible for local businesses, especially where the business owner was expected to become an expert in employment matters, which was never the reason entrepreneurs went into business in the first place.
We wanted to make it affordable, so that good people management was available to all, to the benefit of the whole island.
So how did we do that?
Well the first thing we needed was an excellent team of associates, and I’m delighted to say that some of the people who have worked with our clients these past five years, have been the finest HR practitioners on the Island and more than that they have become great friends to our clients and our team.
We also needed employment tools and templates, so we developed an original set of contracts, handbooks and letters which not only get the law right, but are drafted in an open, adult-to-adult tone, which creates high expectations of positive and productive employee relations.
We also wanted our business model to be different. So with our unique pricing model every client knows exactly what their service will cost, no matter how many issues they need us to help with and no matter how long it takes us to deliver the services. In People, clients simply choose which of our nine services to include in their packages and the price is scaled to their headcount. We don’t believe in time-based billing – where the client pays more if the provider is slow, or has underestimated the complexity. We don’t believe in lock-in or notice periods where the client is held hostage to the provider and service standards inexorably slip. We don’t believe that good employment practice should be out of the reach of the smallest businesses, which is why some of our clients pay less than a hundred pounds a month for the same level of services that larger businesses pay a bit more for.
“Looking back over the past five years though, its not the team, the tools or the business model that has created the most memories – it’s the times with clients when we have brought simplicity, clarity, peace of mind and an effective solution to a business problem that was seemingly intractable to the client. Personally I feel so blessed to have such a lovely group of people as clients. Thank you.”
Now we are entering a new phase. This website was well overdue for an overhaul. We’re in new premises. We have new people joining us and new clients coming on board. Our sister businesses in coaching, in business ethics, in training and in diversity are all doing brilliantly and have benefited from our group approach. The next chapter is exciting for us, and we look forward to bringing new people into our story.