Smart Hiring, Strong Retention: Helping SMEs Drive Productivity

About the Workshop

Time-poor SME owner? Discover practical hiring tools, retention strategies, and a tailored action plan to boost productivity. Limited spots — secure yours today!

Running a growing business means wearing a lot of hats. As a business owner or senior leader, you’re balancing strategy, operations, and people management, often without the dedicated HR support larger companies rely on.

This interactive session is designed for:

• Small to Medium Business Owners
• Directors & Senior Managers juggling operations with leading their teams

What you’ll walk away with:

• EX (Employee Experience) - the entire employee journey - Recruitment to departure (a full lifecycle)
• Recruitment Toolkit: Job ad template + culture-fit interview questions.
• Retention Toolkit: 100-day onboarding plan + exit interview questions.
• Productivity Tracker: Simple KPIs for people performance.
• Action Plan: 3 personalised next steps.

Whether you want to strengthen your hiring, boost retention, or improve team performance, this workshop gives you practical, ready-to-use tools you can apply the very next day.

Please note: this workshop is for alumni of Help to Grow Management, please only book the alumni tickets if you have taken part in the course: https://smallbusinesscharter.org/help-to-grow-management (course alumni may bring a colleague- please do email s.white@kingston.ac.uk to let us know if you plan to). There are also limited tickets avaliable for businesses who are non-alumni to select but they must have at least 5 employees to be eligible to attend.

Expert Speakers and Facilitators:

Louise is a CIPD-qualified HR professional with extensive experience across industries including PwC, RSM, Eurofins Forensic Service and PageGroup. A true generalist, she brings expertise in recruitment, employee engagement, talent management, organisational design, culture and change. She has led initiatives in performance improvement, diversity and inclusion and team building, while also applying her coaching and mentoring skills to support individuals and teams.

Help to Grow Alumni Program

The Alumni Workshop series are designed to help managers and key decision makers of SMEs create nurturing work environments through supportive peer ecosystems. The initiative is part of the Help to Grow Programme at Kingston University led by Dr Bahare Afrahi since 2021.

For questions about these events please email Sophie White, SMEs relation lead, s.white@kingston.ac.uk.

The Help to Grow Management programme

Our Help to Grow Management programme is a 12-week course designed for managers and small business owners who are interested in innovation, resilience, and improving. Since 2021 we have successfully helped over 600 SME owners’ managers to grow their business and take it to the next level since.

To find out more about more including upcoming start dates at Kingston Business School contact Maliha Haider, Marketing lead of the programme at Kingston University London. S.M.Haider@kingston.ac.uk