WHAT YOU SAID

“Developing our staff is something that’s really key. When we speak to our staff about opportunities, we talk about the business direction and what the future holds. We always look to the opportunities that arise as we grow and expand, to see if our team want to move and develop.”

MARTIN MURRAY DUNNET BAY DISTILLERS

“In the Highlands, tourism is a very seasonal business, but to try and create as much security for our employees as possible, we’ve moved away from having lots of seasonal staff, and we now try and retain our core staff for 12 months of the year by focusing on things like winter promotions.”

ALI SMITH LOCHABER ACCOMMODATION SERVICES

“We’ve been fortunate enough to hire people though a number of schemes such as Kickstart, Modern Apprenticeships and Scotgrad. All these schemes provide an incentive for the employer, but they are good for the employee too, because they usually come with a structured training programme which is of real value.”

“As we expanded the team, we started to realise that contracts were important. It allowed our staff to know exactly the number of days leave, for example, and it gave them security of knowing they had a contract. Now every year we’re looking at the contracts and thinking can we do better?”

MARTIN MURRAY DUNNET BAY DISTILLERS

“We try as much as we can to give stability to folks. At the moment, we have a number of staff who have 20-hour contracts for the main body of work that we know that we can provide work for them, and then we use part time or zero hours contracts for the extra hours, and for a lot of people that works well.”

JO DE SYLVA, MACGREGOR’S BAR AND BOGBAIN FARM