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Simon Daly @ 10:38 yesterday said:

'2nd step would be to bring in an independent professional to talk in absolute confidence with staff so that the partners get anonymised feedback on how the staff really feel and what changes are needed.'

In a firm which operates as McMillan Williams apparently did, who would believe that the professional, employed by the firm, would be truly 'independent' and that any comments that they made would be supplied to the firm on an 'anonymised' basis only? I suspect that the professional would be met with a wall of silence or, at best, would be the recipient of platitudes only.

I worked for a firm that brought in an 'independent' HR consultant to undertake an exercise similar to that suggested by Simon Daly. Some of us were amazed, come our next appraisals, how much of what we'd said 'in confidence' to the HR consultant formed the basis of the discussion at the appraisal meetings. But then, he who pays the piper ..... ! I now realise how naive I, and others, were at that time. But never again!