Terms of Membership
The Jam Jar · run by The Human-Centric Workplace Ltd
These are the terms you agree to when you join The Jam Jar.
The short version
- Pay monthly or yearly. It renews automatically until you cancel.
- Cancel any time, from your account. You keep access until the end of the period you have paid for.
- Changed your mind? Tell us within 14 days of joining and we will refund you in full.
- What people share in here stays in here. Don't repost it elsewhere.
- Be a good human. We will remove anyone who isn't.
- Your posts stay yours. We just need permission to show them to other members.
- Good professional guidance, yes. Advice on your specific situation, no — for that, get someone properly engaged.
The rest of this page is the detail behind those points.
1. Who you are agreeing with
The Jam Jar is operated by The Human-Centric Workplace Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 16215745, registered office 102 Lees Hall Road, Sheffield, England, S8 9JN.
Contact: simone@thehuman-centricworkplace.com
In these terms, "we" and "us" means that company. "You" means you, the member. "The Jam Jar" means the community platform and everything in it.
2. Who can join
You must be 18 or over. The Jam Jar is a professional community for working adults and is not intended for children.
Membership is personal to you. Don't share your access with anyone else, including colleagues. If we see one account being used by several people, we will close it.
We may decline or end a membership at our discretion, and if we do so for any reason other than your breach of these terms, we will refund the unused part of what you have paid.
3. Signing in
There are no passwords. You enter your email address and we send you a six-digit code. That means your email account is effectively the key to your membership, so please keep it secure.
Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to your membership.
4. What membership gets you
Access to the community and everything in it: the discussion boards, the Feed, Ask an Expert, the member directory, the bookshelf, research, resources, events, and the tools we build, including the BEAM feedback tool and the Leadership Passport.
The Jam Jar is a living thing. We add features, change them and occasionally retire ones nobody uses. We will not materially reduce what membership is worth without telling you first.
Some things are optional extras that carry their own price, and those are always clearly marked before you buy.
5. Paying
Price and billing
The price is whatever is shown at the point you join, and it is charged in pounds sterling. Prices are inclusive of VAT where VAT applies. Payments are handled by Stripe; we never see your card details.
Monthly memberships are charged every month on the date you joined. Yearly memberships are charged once a year on the same date.
It renews on its own
Your membership renews automatically at the end of each period, using the payment method you gave us, until you cancel. This is how you keep uninterrupted access.
If a payment fails
We will try again, and Stripe will usually email you. If it keeps failing, your access pauses until it is sorted out. Nothing is deleted while this is happening — see our privacy notice for what happens to your data if a membership ends for good.
If we change the price
We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before any price increase affects you, and it will only ever take effect at your next renewal. If you don't want to pay the new price, cancel before then and you will not be charged it. We do not change the price of a year you have already paid for.
6. Cancelling and refunds
Changed your mind
If you cancel within 14 days of first joining, we will refund you in full, no questions and no explanation needed. Just email us. This is more generous than the law requires once you have started using a digital service, and we are happy for it to be.
Cancelling later
Cancel any time from your account page, or by emailing us. Your membership then runs to the end of the period you have already paid for, and simply doesn't renew. You keep full access until then.
We don't give partial refunds for a month or a year already under way, unless we have got something wrong, in which case talk to us and we will sort it out properly.
If we end your membership
If we remove you for breaching these terms, no refund is due. In any other case, we refund the unused part.
7. Team and organisation memberships
Where an employer buys seats for its people, these terms apply to each individual member, and a separate agreement between us and the organisation covers price, seat numbers, invoicing and term. Where the two disagree, that agreement wins for anything commercial and these terms still govern individual conduct in the community.
Seats belong to the organisation and may be reassigned when someone leaves, but the departing person's contributions and account are handled as set out in our privacy notice.
We never report on individuals to an employer. No dashboard, no engagement statistics by name, no export of anyone's contributions. We tell an organisation how many of its seats are in use and nothing more.
But be aware: The Jam Jar is one shared community, so anyone holding an active membership — including colleagues and anyone senior to you who has a seat — sees what you post, the same as any other member. Post accordingly. If you want to raise something without your name attached, Ask an Expert lets you ask anonymously. This is set out in full in our Security & Data Protection FAQ.
8. How to behave in here
The Jam Jar works because people describe real situations honestly. That only holds if everyone behaves. So:
Do
- Disagree, robustly, with the idea rather than the person.
- Assume positive intentions.
- Share what has actually worked for you, including the bits that went badly.
Don't
- Harass, bully, demean or abuse anyone, or post anything hateful about a person or a group.
- Name and shame a named employer, colleague or client. Describe the situation, not the person.
- Post anything confidential to your employer, or anything covered by an agreement you have signed.
- Post anything unlawful, defamatory, or that isn't yours to share.
- Sell, recruit, pitch or spam. If you want to tell people about something you have made, ask us first.
- Scrape, copy or export the member directory or other members' content.
We moderate with a light hand and a long memory. We may edit or remove anything that breaks these rules, and we may suspend or remove a member who does. For anything serious — harassment, or exposing someone's confidential information — we will remove the account immediately and without warning.
9. What is said in here stays in here
Members share things they would not put on LinkedIn. That is the point of a closed community, and it only survives if everyone respects it.
So: do not republish, screenshot, quote or forward another member's contributions outside The Jam Jar, and do not identify another member or their employer outside it, without that member's explicit permission. This applies during your membership and after it ends.
You are free to take an idea you learned here and use it in your own work. What you cannot do is take someone's words or their situation and put them somewhere they did not choose to put them.
10. Who owns what
Your contributions
You own what you post. By posting it, you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store it, display it to other members, and include it in things like the weekly digest and search within the platform. That licence exists so the community can function and for no other purpose.
If we ever want to use something you wrote outside The Jam Jar — in marketing, a talk, or a book — we will ask you first, every time.
As set out in our privacy notice, your contributions remain in the community after you leave so other people's conversations still make sense, shown as "Former member" with nothing personal attached. You can ask us to delete them, and we will.
Ours
The platform, the tools, our written materials, the BEAM framework and the Leadership Passport remain ours. Membership gives you the right to use them for your own work, not to resell, redistribute or build a competing product from them.
11. What this is, and what it isn't
The guidance in The Jam Jar is professional guidance. We are qualified practitioners, our experts are experienced professionals in their fields, and what is shared here is considered, informed and offered in good faith. We are not going to describe our own expertise as worthless in order to cover ourselves.
What it is not is advice given to you personally. Someone answering a question in the community has your question and nothing else — not your contracts, your policies, your history or your legal position. Nothing shared here creates a professional or advisory relationship between you and us, or between you and our experts.
So use it, and apply your own judgement. Where something carries legal, financial, medical or regulatory consequences — a dismissal, a settlement, a contract, a grievance that might end up at tribunal — take formal advice from someone engaged to look properly at your particular situation. Decisions you take remain yours.
If you want that formal relationship, we offer it. Coaching, consultancy and training are engaged separately and governed by their own terms.
The BEAM tool uses AI to help you frame feedback. AI gets things wrong. Read what it produces with your own judgement before you act on it, and please don't put colleagues' real names into it.
Other members' views are their own, not ours.
12. Availability
We aim to keep The Jam Jar running and available, but we don't guarantee it will be uninterrupted or fault-free. We may need to take it down for maintenance, and we'll give notice where we can.
13. Our responsibility to you
We are responsible to you for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of us breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill.
We are not responsible for loss that is not foreseeable, for business losses such as lost profit or lost opportunity, or for anything you or anyone else does as a result of something read in the community.
Where we are liable, our total liability to you is limited to the amount you have paid us in the 12 months before the problem arose.
We never exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.
14. Changing these terms
We may update these terms. For minor changes we will update this page and change the date at the bottom. For anything that materially affects your rights we will email you at least 30 days beforehand, and if you don't want to accept the change you can cancel before it takes effect and we will refund the unused part of your membership.
15. Your data
How we handle your personal data is set out in our privacy notice, which forms part of these terms. Our security arrangements are described in our Security & Data Protection FAQ.
16. If something goes wrong
Email simone@thehuman-centricworkplace.com and tell us. We are two people and we would much rather fix it than have you stew on it.
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your own country's courts.
17. The legal tidying-up
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don't enforce something straight away, that doesn't stop us enforcing it later. You may not transfer your membership to anyone else. We may transfer these terms to another company if our business is sold, and we will tell you if that happens.