What are the opening hours?

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: ££

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.

04/09/2026

Most SMEs get these three things wrong about sickness leave and they cost them the most money every year.

"I cannot ask for a doctor's note in the first week."

You cannot ask for a fit note. You absolutely can ask for a completed self-certification form, and you should, every single time. Silence in the first week is the more expensive option.

"Self-certification is basically a joke."

It is a legal document. If it turns out to be untrue, that is a disciplinary matter. If you never ask for one, you have quietly waived your own protection.

"I can dismiss them after X days."

There is no magic number. Anyone giving you one is making it up. Long-term sickness dismissals need capability procedures, medical evidence, reasonable adjustments, and proper consultation. Get it wrong once and it will be the most expensive process your business has ever run.

The truth underneath all three.

Sickness absence is one of the most emotionally charged bits of HR, and most managers avoid it because they are worried about seeming heartless. So they say nothing. Do nothing. Hope it resolves itself. And inherit a much bigger problem three months later.

Kindness and process are not opposites. The kindest thing you can do for a sick employee is have a warm, curious conversation early, with a manager who actually knows what they are doing.

And if you are the one currently off sick, reading this on your sofa with a cup of tea and a slight sense of guilt, this is your reminder that you are allowed to rest.

Actually rest. Your work will wait. The people who love you would rather you got properly better than half-answered emails in your dressing gown.

Look after yourself. Everything else can wait until Monday.
🫶

03/09/2026

The corporate phrases we should have quietly retired years ago, and their honest translations. Reader, we deserve better.

"Let's take this offline."
Translation: I do not want to say this in front of witnesses.

"Circle back."
Translation: I will forget this in nine minutes, and so will you, and we shall never speak of it again.

"As per my last email."
Translation: I am, quite specifically, at the end of my rope.

"Let's align on this."
Translation: You are going to agree with me, and we shall both pretend it was a discussion.

"Wearing many hats."
Translation: We are catastrophically understaffed and I am about to ask you to do finance.

"With all due respect."
Translation: With no respect at all.

"I hear you."
Translation: I have heard the sound of your voice. I have not listened to a word.

"We are like a family here."
Translation: Please do not ask about overtime.

"That is a really good question."
Translation: I have no idea.

We can do better.

Not by inventing new phrases (please, no more), but by saying the actual thing.

"I disagree." "I forgot." "I am cross." "I do not know." "Let's have a proper conversation about this on Thursday."

All perfectly good sentences. All curiously rare in workplace communication.

Your team can already tell what you meant. You might as well say it.

31/08/2026

Genuinely curious question for the HR humans reading this.

How are you actually using AI in your work right now?

I ask because the conversation online has been stuck for about eighteen months on the wrong question. "Will AI replace HR?" No, obviously. Everyone has said this. We can move on. The far more interesting question, and the one nobody seems to be talking about honestly, is: what does good look like now?

So let me go first.

I use it every day. It drafts my first-pass letters. It answers the "quick question" that would have taken me an hour to Google. It helps me think through the structure of a difficult conversation before I sit down to have it. It has, honestly, made me a better consultant.

But I have also had to work out my own rules for it as I go, because nobody is teaching this yet.

I do not use it for anything that needs judgement about a real named human. I do not use it to draft anything I have not sense-checked with my own eyes. I do not paste anything into it that I would mind a stranger reading. And I never, ever, let it summarise a conversation I actually need to sit with.

Those rules are working for me. I would love to know yours.

What are you using it for? What are you refusing to use it for? What have you tried that felt wrong? What have you tried that surprised you?

Drop your take in the comments. I promise to read every one and reply properly. 🫶

27/08/2026

If your part-timer works Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. She has never worked a Monday in her life, which means she has also never had a single UK bank holiday off…

Are you giving her the equivalent time?

If the answer is "no, but nobody has complained," you might be quietly running one of the most common summer tribunal risks we see in this country.

I have written a proper (short, promise) blog on the annual leave rules every UK SME owner needs to know before the September restart. Bank holidays, part-timers, the pro-rata calculation, and the four things everyone gets wrong.

Read the blog here: https://www.epochrebel.co.uk/the-hr-blog/bank-holidays-part-timers-and-the-annual-leave-chaos-of-august/

26/08/2026

What Float in the Forest taught me.

I have been floating twice now, and yet, I am still not zen. My brain still tries to make lists in the dark. It still remembers a thing I forgot to reply to on Tuesday. It still occasionally reminds me, quite loudly, that there is a spider I have been ignoring at home.

And yet.

The floating still works. For one hour, I am somewhere the world genuinely cannot reach me. Just me, some warm salty water, an unreachable phone, and an ongoing negotiation with my own busy little head.

This is the bit I have been chewing on since.

We have made rest into a graduation ceremony. You are only doing it properly if you have quieted your mind, hit peak flow, sat in blissful stillness for the full 60 minutes and emerged sparkly and reborn. Anything less feels like failure, and the whole practice gets quietly abandoned.

Most of us, most of the time, are still half-thinking about the shopping list.

And that is fine.

The gift of Float in the Forest is the hour where the world simply cannot reach you. Where your brain is allowed to be its noisy, snacky, list-making self, without also having to answer an email at the same time.

The wellbeing lesson buried in there, if you want one: rest counts as long as you actually let it happen. That is the whole test.

Book the thing. Turn the phone off. Show up as the busy-brained human you already are. That is enough.

Thank you again to the lovely humans at Float in the Forest for the reminder.

When did you last go somewhere the world genuinely couldn't reach you?

25/08/2026

If you hired someone you cannot trust, is that a reflection on the team member or on the leader?

Genuine question. Because "I cannot switch off, my team just are not quite there yet" is one of the most common sentences I hear from business owners.

And I always want to ask, gently, "who hired them?"

Because if the answer is "I did," then this is a conversation about the leader, not the team.

Trust is not a personality trait you either have or you do not. It is a decision, made again and again, in small unglamorous moments. It is written on your calendar. It is audible in the way you brief people. It is visible in what you do not check up on.

When a leader says "I just cannot trust anyone here to do it properly," what they usually mean is one of three things:

They hired for compliance, not judgement, and are now quietly surprised nobody is showing any.

They have never actually explained what "properly" looks like, so their team are performing a mind-reading act rather than a job.

Or honestly, letting go feels a little bit like disappearing, and that is much scarier than doing the job themselves.

None of these are moral failings. All of them are worth naming out loud.

Because your team can feel distrust from a mile off, and it is not a private feeling. It is a management style. And it will cost you your best people, quietly, over eighteen months.

So the harder question first.

Did you hire brilliant people and slowly train the confidence out of them?

Or did you never really hire people you trusted in the first place?

Neither answer is comfortable. Both are worth sitting with. 🫶

24/08/2026

A business owner got in touch with me recently.

She had been paying one of the big national HR helplines for a while, and it had been doing what it was supposed to do, right up until it wasn't.

She came to me because she needed real, in-person HR support. Someone who could sit with her, understand her business, and give her proper advice on what was actually going on.

And honestly, this is where the big outsourced HR services quietly come unstuck.
They are genuinely useful for the standard case. All the compliance, templates and ticks in the box that keep a business ticking over on an ordinary Tuesday.

They start to feel rather beside the point the moment the thing in front of you is anything other than ordinary. When what you actually need is a person, not a portal.

That is the difference between "we have HR" and "we have good HR."

HR you tick off as a line item does its job. It keeps the paperwork in order and the compliance officer smiling.

Good HR, honestly, is priceless. It is the thing that stops a small crack becoming a tribunal. It is the thing your team feel quietly, in how they are treated on a Thursday afternoon.

If you have been feeling the difference lately, you know where I am.

21/08/2026

Does your company have a courageous work culture?

It does if:

✅Your managers give feedback in the room, not in the corridor afterwards.
✅Your founder can say "I got that wrong, sorry" to someone junior, without a "but" attached.
✅Someone can look at a five-year-old policy and say "shall we bin this" without it being career-limiting.
✅Your leaders tell the truth about the numbers in the team meeting, even the ugly ones.
✅Someone can say "I don't think that's right" about the founder's own idea, and the founder actually listens.
✅Your managers back their team against a rude client, even though the client pays the bill.

Read that list again. None of it is on your values poster. All of it is your actual culture.

Courageous cultures are built by choosing the harder, kinder, more honest option in moments this small, over and over, when it would be so much easier not to.

Your team can feel it either way. They feel it when you do the brave thing. They feel it, just as loudly, when you don't.

So don't ask "how do we build a courageous culture." Ask "what's the small, awkward thing sitting in my inbox this week that I've been hoping goes away."

Start there.

Genuinely curious, which one of those six is the hardest for your business?

Tell me below. 🫶

20/08/2026

"Can I say no? She has only been here four months."

It is a question I get asked a lot at this time of year, so let me answer it properly, once, in a post you can save for the next time it lands in your inbox.

The short version. No, "four months" is not a reason to say no. Since April 2024, every employee in the UK has had the right to request flexible working from day one of employment. Not after six months. Not after they have "settled in." From their first day.

So the "let's see how you get on first" answer is not just unhelpful. It is against the law.

The slightly longer version, because you probably want to know your actual options.

An employee can make two flexible working requests in any twelve-month period. You have two months to deal with each one, appeal included. You are allowed to say no. But only for one of eight specific business reasons, and you need to be able to evidence it. "It doesn't really suit us" is not on the list. "The team won't like it" is not on the list. "We've never done it before" is definitely not on the list.

Here is what most managers get wrong.

Treating it as a yes or no question, when it is really a conversation.

- What is she actually asking for?
- Could you trial it for three months?
- Could you meet her halfway on the days, the hours, or the pattern?
- Is there a version of this that works for both of you that neither of you has thought of yet?

Nine times out of ten, she is not asking for the moon. She has been staring at a wall calendar in her kitchen and quietly working out that the school holidays, the childminder's diary and her own workload are not going to coexist without help. She is asking for a bit of dignity around it.

Handle it well and you keep a brilliant employee who will run through walls for you in September.

Handle it badly and you risk a resignation letter, a tribunal claim, or both, arriving on your desk before she has come back from Cornwall.

The request on your desk this week is a good employee telling you what she needs to keep doing a good job.

Meet her there. 🫶

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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