DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

You'll never get a better time to persuade staff to sharpen up their act. Use the economic climate to really crack down on expenses control, budgeting, efficiency and productivity. If you have lost work and need to make redundancies, plan carefully how to lose the staff that don't deliver and seek advice on how to craft a redundancy policy that allows you to retain the best. Make sure you follow the process to the letter to avoid unfair dismissal claims as these have soared since the recession started. Cover workload gaps by seeing what work you can parcel up and farm out to freelancers through sites like peopleperhour.com. There are some amazingly competent people moonlighting or coping with redundancy if you resist the temptation to run with the cheapest bid for handling your work, but watch out for data protection issues and get non-disclosure agreements in place and check how secure the freelancers systems are.