Straight talking HR training for small businesses. Bring a brew.

I am Kate Underwood, HR Queen Bee at Kate Underwood HR and Training. Twenty eight years in HR, more than ten of them working with small businesses, and really only one job: taking employment law apart and handing it back to your managers in a form they can use on a wet Tuesday.

Cake, Coffee and Compliance is our live programme for line managers, supervisors and owner managers. One hour, once a week, online, in blocks across the year. It starts on time and it finishes on time, because you have a business to run.

Now more than ever. The Employment Rights Act 2025 has been landing in stages all through 2026 and it is not finished. The tribunal time limit for most claims doubled to six months on 1 October. On 30 October the harassment duty becomes all reasonable steps rather than reasonable steps, and you become directly liable when a customer or a contractor has a go at your team. On 1 January 2027 the qualifying period for unfair dismissal drops from two years to six months, and the cap on the compensatory award goes altogether.

And six months before 1 January 2027 was 1 July 2026, so anybody you took on this summer already has the service they need the moment the rules land. This is not a January job. When somebody asks what you did to prevent it, "we have a policy" stops being the answer. The question becomes what training your managers actually had, what they did differently afterwards, and whether you can show it. Whether that is a team of managers or just you, now is the time to get it done.

Here is what it is not. It is not a law lecture, there are no case citations, and nobody reads slides at you. What we do instead is practise. In week one we fill in a harassment risk assessment together, live on screen. In week two you type your own version of a difficult script into the chat and I read three of them out. You will have said the words once before you ever have to say them for real.

You leave every session with a proper form you can put your own logo on, one thing to do on Monday with your name and a date against it, and the evidence that the training actually happened. That last one is the bit everybody forgets until somebody asks to see it.

It is written for real small businesses. The examples are a team of eight, not eight hundred. No HR background needed, no legal knowledge assumed, and none of the steps I recommend cost real money. Everything is checked against ACAS, GOV.UK, the HSE, the ICO and the EHRC, and I tell you where I got it from, because a lot of what is sold online is still teaching the law as it stood before 2026. That is worse than no training at all, because people act on it.

CIPD qualified, HRi Gold accredited, HR Director level. Based just outside Southampton, working with businesses across Hampshire, the New Forest, Dorset, Surrey, London and UK wide. Tell us on the booking form if you need captions, the materials in advance, a larger font or a break part way through. We sort it, and you will not be asked again every week.

And yes, there really is cake. I am coeliac, so mine is gluten free, because I am not sitting there watching everybody else eat. Hazel, my German Shorthaired Pointer, takes a keen professional interest in the biscuits and occasionally appears in shot. Consider her part of the package.

Kettle on, standards up. Questions in the chat are always welcome.