Dry subject + Imaginative presentation = Instant Attention!

Preventing Against Disasters in your Business (Lewis Silkin) – Cautionary tales for Employers

But such hubris could not long endure once HMRC came knocking at Godolphin’s door

I loved this presentation. Not especially because of the subject matter – Employment Law – well….yes actually, because of this rather dry subject matter was presented in such a thoughtful and an imaginative way.

This underlines the importance of presentation – setting Five Employment Tribunal Case Studies to rhyme (in the style of Hillaire Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tales’), complete with characters from Belloc’s tales, all in a pamphlet-style format really helped to grab (and hold) the attention.

Background

On 21st April 2016, B4 hosted the 3rd Annual ‘Business in Oxford’ Event, at the Saïd Business School.

This is a summary from one of the 12-minute POD sessions that took place during the day.

Three key Employment Law takeaways

1. Cautionary tales were told for:

• Holiday pay (must include commission & overtime payments);
• Equality Act 2010 (limited ability to ask pre-employment questions about health);
• Gender Pay Gap (new legislation from Apr-17 onwards will have a material impact);
• Redundancy during Maternity Leave (must be offered suitable alternative vacancy or sex discrimination fines will accrue)
• Health & Safety (Employer’s duty of care – failure to comply will lead to increasingly large fines).

2. The more complex the subject matter, the clearer the presentation is required:

• Use of colours – the title of the Employment Law subject matter in red at the top of the page draws the attention
• Drawings – the eye is also drawn to these initially, and whilst they don’t necessarily ‘tell the story’, they do help to break up the text and set the ‘tone’ of the story.
• Use of contrasting fonts – the name of the Tale is in big bold letters, and beneath it, in smaller italics, is a 3-line summary of the Case itself.

3. If you’re not a poet, help is at hand from the internet:

• There are ‘rhyming’ programmes out there should you ever feel the need to go into verse
• http://www.rhymer.com was one of the tools used by the presenter of these Cautionary Tales