Save your local bin man – reacting to the recession

Personnel Today* reports on one local council that is asking staff to work fewer hours, or take unpaid leave, “to help save jobs”. In the same article they quote the CIPD, the CBI and the Bank of England as cautioning (not necessarily referening to this council) that this sort of action may only be delaying redundancies rather than saving jobs. I would add another concern.

By taking this approach the council is implicitly assuming that all its jobs are needed and that as soon as the economy picks up the status quo can resume. If you are manufacturing widgets and orders turn down there will be a fairly simple correlation between orders and production hours. In administration and the public sector the connections are much more complex.

The danger is that, if the economy does not pick up as hoped, the council will be forced to make savings quickly. If this happens the cuts will have to be in the larger staff groups. These, of course, are the ones that deliver the ‘real’ services that we all want – refuse collection, gardeners, teachers, etc. – not all those nice-to-have jobs with obscure titles that proliferate across local government. These latter jobs, often resulting from one political pet project or another, are scattered around in smaller groups so any culling inevitably takes longer. To protect real services they need to start reviewing these areas now.

* I’m eternally grateful that this publication has avoided the temptation to become HR Today

HR by numbers – measuring workforce performance

The CIPD has announced the latest in its compendium of toolkits. This one is on Human Capital Management (HCM). Mostly I am very impressed with their toolkits. They provide a good deal of clarity and help people understand what the various topics involve (thankfully, without implying that it is so easy that they do not need professional help!). In this case I am not so sure.

It may just be that I have always reacted badly to HCM as a piece of jargon. ‘Human Resources’ as a replacement for ‘personnel’ was meant to imply a wider, less bureaucratic role but soon became just as easy a butt for jokes (and HR is easier to say than personnel) so some tried to achieve the same end by implying that Human Resource Management (HRM) was the ‘something else’ that could take HR to the centre of organisational life. That never found currency outside the HR bubble. Human Capital Management is a term mostly kept away from the workforce, which is just as well as it is meaningless in everyday life. However employee-centred your company’s approach, do you really want to be referred to as piece of ‘capital’ that has to be ‘managed’. So; putting that little rant aside there is a lot of good stuff in the toolkit. So what’s my problem?