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Monday 9am - 5:30pm Tuesday 9am - 5:30pm Wednesday 9:30am - 5:30pm Thursday 9am - 5:30pm

EpocH Rebel

Name: EpocH Rebel
Address: Unit 1 & 2 Steadings Business Centre, Gloucester, GL28EY, GB
Telephone: +447990494112
Price range: ££

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For PBSA sector businesses and SMEs aiming to help staff thrive in a positive culture.

We’re a revolutionary and
passionate HR consultancy focused on engagement and putting people beyond policy.

28/10/2026

Plenty of purpose-driven businesses can recite their purpose in one breath, and their people can usually tell whether anyone actually lives it.

A purpose statement on the wall and a values page on the website are standard for a modern business, and done well they can lift employee engagement and strengthen an employer brand. The uncomfortable truth is that people judge a purpose by what happens on an ordinary Tuesday. Here is where the gap tends to appear.

➡️ The company talks about caring for its people, and the workload, pay and rotas tell a different story.
➡️ “We are on a mission” gets stretched to cover unpaid extra hours, and nobody has ever paid a mortgage with a mission statement.
➡️ Values appear in the recruitment ad, and the decisions made during restructures and performance reviews follow a different set of priorities.
➡️ Leaders talk about purpose at the all-hands meeting, and the managers in the middle are left to work out what it means for everyday decisions.
➡️ The purpose gets written once by the leadership team, and nobody checks whether the people doing the work believe it.

Employees notice that gap early, and it shows up in trust, retention and the calibre of people who choose to apply. A purpose only carries weight when it shapes how a business treats its people on its hardest days.

A good test is to look at how you handle pay rises, mistakes and goodbyes, then ask your team where they see the purpose in action. If the answers disagree with the statement, change the behaviour or change the statement, and either way you will have a culture people can trust.

Would your team say your purpose is alive in how you treat them on a bad week? Asking for a friend. 🫶

27/10/2026

Zero-hours contracts are changing under the Employment Rights Act 2025, and the rota most UK employers built years ago is about to meet a new rulebook.

The Act became law in December 2025, and the zero-hours reforms are expected to come into force in 2027, with the exact date still to be confirmed. Zero-hours contracts remain legal, and the new rules add security for the people working them. Here is what employers need to know.

➡️ Workers on zero-hours contracts, and those on low-hours contracts below a threshold still to be set, will gain the right to be offered guaranteed hours that reflect what they regularly work over a reference period.
➡️ Workers will be able to turn the offer down and stay on a zero-hours contract if the flexibility suits them, and the offer will need to be made again from time to time.
➡️ Employers will need to give reasonable notice of shifts, and reasonable notice if a shift is cancelled or changed.
➡️ Workers will be paid when a shift is cancelled, moved or cut short at short notice, with the detail of how much and how much notice to be confirmed in regulations.
➡️ Agency workers are included, so businesses that rely on agency staff will need to plan too.

These rights will be enforced through the employment tribunal, including protection from unfair dismissal and unfair treatment for workers who exercise their rights around guaranteed hours.

A good place to start is mapping who in your business is on zero-hours or low-hours arrangements, tracking the hours they actually work and reviewing your contracts and rotas, so you are ready when the final detail lands.

Do you know how many people in your business are on zero-hours or similar contracts right now? Genuinely curious. 🫶

22/10/2026

Interview icebreakers, ranked by how quickly the candidate’s soul leaves their body.

Hiring managers reach for an icebreaker with the best of intentions. The candidate has been in the building for ninety seconds, they are clutching a lanyard and a lukewarm cup of water, and then it arrives. Here is my official ranking, from mildly awkward to full cringe.

“Did you find us okay?”
Perfectly lovely, because the candidate says yes, you both nod and everyone keeps their dignity.

“Lovely weather we’re having.”
A British classic that has carried many an interview through its first thirty seconds.

“Tell me a fun fact about yourself.”
Suddenly every candidate’s fun fact is that they once stood behind a minor celebrity in a petrol station queue.

“If you were an animal, what would you be?”
The candidate prepared for three days of competency questions and is now choosing between a dolphin and a wolf.

“Let’s play two truths and a lie.”
The candidate is quietly working out which lie is safest to tell the person deciding whether to hire them.

“Shall we start with a team stretch?”
The candidate is now touching their toes beside the finance director while still holding their CV.

A good icebreaker has one job, which is to settle the candidate’s nerves so you meet the real person. Offering a drink, asking about their journey and talking through how the interview process will run does that beautifully, and it improves the candidate experience before the first proper question has even landed.

What is the most cringe icebreaker you have ever been on the receiving end of? Genuinely curious. 🫶

21/10/2026

Two colleagues sit at neighbouring desks doing very similar work, and one of them earns noticeably more. If someone asked your business to explain why, how long would the silence last?

That question could carry real weight for UK employers, because the proposed Equality (Race and Disability) Bill is intended to give ethnic minority and disabled workers a full right to equal pay in law, and the government says it wants unequal pay claims to become much easier to bring. Mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting would apply to employers with 250 or more people, while equal pay law reaches businesses of every size.

Plenty of small teams have built their pay structure one hire at a time, with each salary agreed in its own moment. That history makes sense to the people who lived it, and it looks quite different to someone comparing their payslip with a colleague’s.

The good news is that preparation is simple, because a spreadsheet, a look at starting salaries and a written reason behind each pay decision will take an SME a long way.

See comments to read the full blog. I’d love to read your thoughts on this. 🫶

20/10/2026

Your most reliable manager is often the last person anyone checks on, and that is exactly why manager burnout tends to go unseen.

Good managers absorb pressure so well that everything looks fine from the outside. The team brings them their problems, leadership hands them the tricky projects, and somewhere in the middle nobody asks how they are doing. Here is what tends to show up first.

➡️ They reply to emails late at night and at weekends, and everyone has quietly started to expect it.
➡️ They say yes to every new request, so their workload keeps growing while their own priorities slip down the list.
➡️ Their patience has shortened, or the energy they usually bring to meetings has dimmed.
➡️ They are skipping lunch breaks and holding back annual leave, or they check in constantly while they are away.
➡️ They cover for gaps in the team, so the team looks brilliant on paper while the manager carries the cost.

Burnout in high performers can take a long time to be spotted, because they are skilled at keeping everything running. By the time it becomes visible, you may be facing sickness absence, a resignation and a team that loses its anchor all at once.

A few small habits help, starting with real questions in your one-to-ones, such as what is taking up most of their energy right now. Look at their actual workload and take something off the pile. Encourage them to use their full holiday allowance, and give them a trusted person to talk to.

Your best manager will rarely put their hand up and say they are struggling, so someone has to ask first.

When did you last ask your best manager how they are really doing? Genuinely curious. 🫶

16/10/2026

A client told me recently, in the middle of what was supposed to be a quick catch-up call:

“Most business owners don’t really like HR, because the HR people they’ve met tend to be yes-men who have forgotten how to be human. You’re not like that, are you? You push back. You put people first. You’re the tallest poppy in a field of short ones.”

I thought about that line for the rest of the week.

Partly because it is the kindest thing anyone has said to me in a while. Partly because it quietly captured the exact reason I left corporate HR in the first place.

I spent too many years watching good people get HR advice that was really just risk advice dressed up in a cardigan. Policies that protected the business from the employee rather than the other way around. Conversations that got softened to the point of saying nothing at all. A whole profession, in some corners, that had quietly forgotten whose side it was meant to be on.

epocHRebel exists because I did not want to do that version of the job anymore.

Which means, yes, I will push back on a decision I think is wrong. I will tell a founder when the policy they are reaching for is going to hurt the person it is aimed at. I will have the harder conversation with the kinder outcome, every single time.

If that makes me a tall poppy, I will take it. Cut flowers do not last very long anyway. Standing ones, surrounded by people who get what you are trying to do, last considerably longer.

Thank you to the client who said it. You have no idea what that landed like. 🫶

14/10/2026

I understand business owners who hire for “culture fit.” It lands warmly in a hiring debrief, and protects something you have genuinely worked hard to build.

But let me gently de-influence you on it.

“Culture fit” has quietly become one of the most damaging phrases in modern recruitment, and most of the SME owners using it have no idea what it is costing them.

In most hiring processes, it has become a polite phrase for “would I have a pint with this person”, which almost always means “does this person remind me of me.” Which, over time, turns a team that was supposed to be strong into one that is quietly homogeneous.

Three costs most SME owners miss.

The brilliant candidate you did not hire because something felt slightly off. Usually the exact person who would have challenged a few of your weaker decisions in useful ways.

The quiet discrimination you did not realise you were doing. Culture-fit decisions rely on gut feel rather than evidence, which is one of the quickest routes to an unlawful discrimination claim at tribunal, even when no bias was consciously intended.

The slow narrowing of your team’s thinking. The best teams I work with mildly disagree with each other, from different angles, and have to properly talk things through before they decide anything.

What good hiring looks for is culture add. The question becomes “what does this person bring that we do not already have.” That reframe sounds subtle. In practice, it changes everything about who you interview and who you hire.

Culture is something you build by hiring people brave enough, different enough, and warm enough to stretch it gently in a better direction.

If your last three hires felt like safe choices, that is worth sitting with for a moment.

You know where I am. 🫶

13/10/2026

Have you ever done a return-to-work interview?

If you have, you already know how much quiet value they carry. If you have not, you are in good company, because most UK SMEs skip them, and I think it might be time we gently brought this little bit of HR practice back.

A return-to-work interview sounds formal, and in practice it is a short, warm chat with someone when they are back from a period of sickness absence, even if that absence was only a day.

I have always used WARM as the basis for the conversation.

➡️W is for Welcome. Welcome them back, ask how they are feeling and check they are fit to return to work.
➡️A is for Absence. Talk about the reason for their absence, explore any underlying issues and work out whether they need extra support or adjustments.
➡️R is for Responsibility. Talk about attendance, review any absence patterns and reinforce expectations sensitively.
➡️M is for Move on. Bring them up to date with anything they have missed, agree any support or actions and help them settle back into work.

WARM works as a gentle framework for a proper conversation, with plenty of room for the person to talk.

What it quietly does is remarkable, and it works for everyone involved.

For the person coming back, it tells them they are welcome, that someone noticed they were missed and that nobody is keeping score of their absence. That is often all they needed to settle properly back into the week.

For you as the business owner, it is the easiest way to spot absence patterns before they become problems. Short absences that keep landing on a Monday, or around a specific manager, almost always mean something, and these conversations are where those patterns gently reveal themselves.

For the team, it builds a culture where people feel safe to actually rest when they are unwell, so they come back properly recovered.

Try it with the next person who returns from a sick day, and see how much lands in a short, friendly chat.

You know where I am. Kettle on. 🫶

08/10/2026

Grievances are one of the quietest, most misunderstood bits of UK employment law.

Most SME founders go years without ever handling one, which means the first time it happens tends to feel significantly more alarming than it needs to.

So I have written a proper, warm guide to the whole thing. The five steps that keep a grievance manageable. The one legal number genuinely worth remembering (hint: it is a quarter of whatever a tribunal would award). The common mistakes that quietly cause the most expensive outcomes. And the cultural shift that stops most grievances from needing to be written at all.

See comments to read the full blog. I’d love to read your thoughts on this. 🫶

07/10/2026

Are you absolutely sure you're calculating holiday pay correctly?

Most UK businesses are still confused with the rules on holiday pay, and understandably so.

The rules on holiday pay for workers with variable earnings have shifted twice in the last decade, and plenty of payroll systems are still running the old calculations.

Here is what the current law actually says.

For workers with variable pay (anyone regularly earning overtime, commission, or shift premiums), holiday pay must reflect their normal earnings, not just basic pay. This was established in Bear Scotland v Fulton in 2014 as case law, and formalised in statute on 1 January 2024 under regulation 16(3ZA) of the Working Time Regulations.

The calculation is based on a 52-week reference period. Average weekly earnings across the 52 paid weeks before the holiday is taken, with zero-pay weeks excluded and the look-back period extended up to 104 weeks if needed. (The 52-week rule replaced the old 12-week period back in April 2020.)

That averaging only applies to the first 4 weeks of statutory leave. The additional 1.6 weeks of UK leave on top of that can still, in theory, be paid at basic rate, though in practice most employers apply the averaging across the full 5.6 weeks because tranche-by-tranche tracking is a nightmare.

For irregular-hours and part-year workers, there is a separate rule brought in on 1 April 2024. Holiday is accrued at 12.07% of hours actually worked, with pay calculated either as rolled-up holiday pay or at the 52-week average when leave is taken.

If any of your workforce earns regular overtime, commission, or variable shifts, this is worth a proper look. Underpaid holiday can be claimed as an unlawful deduction from wages, backdated up to two years. Which is a bill that quietly grows the longer it goes unnoticed.

My DMs are open if any of this needs unpacking. 🫶

Address

Unit 1 & 2 Steadings Business Centre
Gloucester
GL28EY

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5:30pm
Tuesday	9am - 5:30pm
Wednesday	9:30am - 5:30pm
Thursday	9am - 5:30pm

Telephone

+447990494112

Website

http://www.epochrebel.co.uk/

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