Sick on Monday; back by Friday – absence

Recent research by Mercer has found that 35% of all sick leave is taken on Mondays but only 3% on Fridays. Which must mean the vast majority of those away on Monday are back in by Friday (if not Tuesday).

Mercer suggest that Monday sickness and frequent short-term absences can be a symptom of low employee engagement and morale. More cynical readers might wonder whether this might better be credited to weekend excess and little fear of the consequences of staying away.

Cynicism apart, the real lesson of this survey is that the sophistication of many HRIS systems makes detailed analyses easier than ever. Mercer extend their own analysis to consider differences between men and women and between full- and part-time staff. But why stop there? Many investigations into absence fail to be useful because they aggregate too many different causes and situations. Modern HRIS systems enable you to avoid that pitfall and the consequent over-generalisations.

Perhaps you should code in all the additional stuff you know about your staff and work out what proportion of the Monday sickies had been playing soccer or rugby at the weekend? Or rock climbing? Or sky diving? You might improve your absence statistics at a stroke by sifting out all those application forms that proudly fill up the ‘other activities’ box with such high-risk pastimes. After all, few train-spotters or embroidery enthusiasts end up in A&E on a Sunday afternoon.

A name by any other rose is just as prickly

Human Resources magazine reports that Cable & Wireless has renamed its HR function “People & Brand”; to be lead by their new Director of Brand and Culture.

The news item says that the new man’s responsibilities cover HR, resourcing, talent management, culture change, corporate communications and brand management across the business. So possibly things are not quite as bad as they seem and when an employee (bet they call them colleagues) wants to discuss pay the door they go through may still say HR. If not, pity the poor graduate trainee  having to write ‘People and Brand Officer’ in the ‘what job’ box on the ‘where are they now’ section of the alumni newsletter.

OK, a new label can help to kick-start change but stick to words that work in everyday use and have face-value currency. I for one do not want to be accredited to a Chartered Institute of People.

To infinity and beyond

A recent survey on behalf of E&T magazine found 11 people who thought that the first person to step on the moon was Buzz Lightyear and eight who thought it was Louis Armstrong. Another survey found that six per cent of Americans believe the moon landing did not happen at all. A phantom survey by Frank Hobson Consulting discovered HR is not free from such myths. Among the ‘findings’ were that:

• 75% of those studying for their CIPD thought the three-day week was an early experiment in work-life balance;
• 40% of people think NLP stands for Nobody Likes Personnel;
• 60% of HR Officers believe it is illegal to specify the experience needed in an advertisement;
• most Human Resources staff think they are obliged to side with the employees;
• most employees think HR always sides with management;
• no man working in HR knows more than one other such.

The right to silence – recruitment

The recent court case in which Cheltenham Council failed in its attempt to sue its former managing director for not declaring her history of depression attracted much comment – mostly on the side of candidates’ right not to tell all. That is fine if the matter withheld really is long in the past; then why would an ex-condition ever come to light. It was because the condition was anything other than past that the lady’s medical history was relevant.

The root of the problem was, of course, the Council’s sloppy recruitment practices. They relied on a loosely-worded medical questionnaire that included such gems as “Do you normally enjoy good health?” Well, if I suffered from depression I would enjoy my occasional days of good health very much indeed. A self-administered questionnaire (even a better-drafted one) may be sufficient for run-of-the-mill jobs but appointing an MD should be treated more seriously.

The role of HR is one of the most linked-to tags in frankly HR and here is a good example of where HR can get it wrong. Clearly, I do not know the ins and outs of Cheltenham’s recruitment and HR processes but staffing – getting the right people into the right posts should be a central plank of any HR department’s role and is key to its reputation.

All to often, HR limits itself to setting up the recruitment processes and ducks out of the decision-making. There are many regulations and considerations of ‘fairness’ that HR must impose on reluctant line managers but there is a duty to the employer as well as to potential employees. If HR is not seen to be on both sides of that recruitment equation managers will draw the obvious conclusion.

AA – applicants anonymous

There is a proposal that candidates omit personal details from application forms to prevent employers gleaning any information about sex, race or age prior to interview. The idea is contained in an amendment, proposed by Lyn Featherstone (Lib Dem MP), to the Equalities Bill going through parliament. Sadly the CIPD appears to endorse the idea. This is the recruitment equivalent of preventing road deaths by reintroducing a man* walking in front of cars with a red flag (perhaps I should keep quite about that – someone might think it’s a good idea).

Quite apart from being totally OTT, how do they think it will work? Large organisations could possibly support a totally separate team of HR people to anonymise applications before passing them on for short-listing to a different lot but I cannot think of a better way of stigmatising HR as out of touch.

In most organisations a small HR team will be involved both in receiving  applications and short-listing them? I know! They could set up a new state quango (Central Recruitment Anonymisation Police?) and make it illegal to employ anyone through any other source.

Of course, to make an application totally ‘sexless’ you would not only have to remove the names, ages and race details but also schools, hobbies and career details in many cases. The list of give-aways is endless: educated at Cheltenham Ladies College; played rugby for Wasps first team; have ‘O’ levels rather than GCSEs; chair of the Seikh society at Uni; and many,many more.

* – yes, I know, but it always was a man in those days.

Odds and ends

Not everything in the news requires much in the way of comment and analysis. Here are a few items with links to HR that I have found in the last week or so.

• A bulletin from law firm Wake Smith & Tofields saying the government was consulting on “gingerism” as an extension of equality laws generated a lot of interest. Especially on it’s publication day of April 1st.
• Possibly not an April fool was the report that pilots and cabin crew on Easyjet will have to buy their own tea and coffee in the air. Though they can have free hot water in which to dunk their own tea bags. I wonder if they will still get priority seating?
• No need to recount all the details in the Damian McBride smeargate affair. But do not assume it is just a politics issue. Whispered innuendo is just as common in corporate life and is one (of many) reasons for having a robust, and objective, staff appraisal system.
• A recent survey is reported to have found that, while many employees think an untidy desk makes them look busy, most bosses think it makes them look disorganised. However, I am not sure that that means that bosses assume the opposite (ie a desk with just one folder) is a sign of hard work. Overall, I think it just shows how few office jobs have clearly defined output criteria.

Please sign my Xs, boss – expense claims

Thanks to the shenanigans of our elected representatives, expenses are hitting the headlines as much as bonuses these days. Human Resources Magazine website currently has three contrasting headlines about expenses. “Bogus expense claims average £17 a month per employee” claims a survey by Travelodge; “Business travellers frequently end up out of pocket because of complex expense procedures” claims a survey by KDS and research by CIPD and KPMG finds that “74% of private-sector and 50% of voluntary and charity employers have reduced their travel expenses“.

It would be interesting to know whether the Travelodge findings are the product of staff with fixed overnight allowances choosing budget rooms and pocketing the difference – surely not. The KDS survey has a marketing flavour as they are providers of on-line travel bookings and expenses management. The CIPD survey reflects organisations cutting back on actual journeys.

I have only ever worked for organisations where all expenses required receipts and matched the cash spent; and nowadays I have to be prepared to account for all out-of-pocket expenses to either clients or HMRC. Fixed allowance systems (traditional in the public sector and writ large for MPs) have apparent benefits, avoiding the need to challenge claims and being seen as even-handed. But they take away the need for the employee to be prudent and can, for some, become an income source (MPs again). Significantly they affect the role of the line manager who is also discouraged from being economical, having merely to confirm the trip genuine; leaving HR or Finance to approve or refuse the money claimed. This can encourage line managers to see themselves in the ‘us’ half of ‘them and us’: never conducive to effective leadership.

Communicating the reward package

One aspect of reward that came up several times, from both speakers and delegates, in this week’s Reward Forum seminar was that of communications to employees about the true extent of their reward package. Never easy, but charities and voluntary organisations (the focus of the seminar) can have their own set of difficulties in this area.

In many cases employees are personally and emotionally involved with the organisation’s work in a way not found in the private, or even public, sectors. This, together with their typically longer service, can lead staff to assume a greater right to have their say, if not their way, on matters of pay and conditions. Coupled with, in many charities, a workforce that is geographically spread this makes getting the message across more than usually difficult. In particular, all those non-pay benefits, terms and working conditions can be taken for granted and their actual cost, or true worth, dismissed. This is often accompanied with an exaggerated view of what is on offer in the private sector: all contributing to a general feeling of dissatisfaction.

Many organisations in the sector are some way off introducing a full-blown total reward system but that is no excuse for not trying to get the message across. There is lots written on this subject but one key factor is language. Avoid HR speak. For example, avoid the word ‘reward’ in communications to employees. This is another of those everyday words that HR has appropriated and assigned a different meaning to. It is fine amongst us professionals but to most people a reward is something akin to a prize and certainly nothing contractual. Talk about ‘pay and benefits’ or the ‘employment package’.

One element that can always cause trouble is not coming clean about where you position yourself in the pay market. Aiming to pay at around the median is sound practice for many charities but do your staff understand this? Or do you have to explain this means you expect their to be higher payers every time someone runs into HR waving a better-paying job ad? But do not talk about the median. It is a well-known fact (well, an urban myth at any rate) that only 30 per cent of the population know what a percentage is so guess what percentage understand ‘median. Just say you pay around the average. It is only a white lie.

Work for idle hands

Surveys are a great source of topics for blogs. A recent set of statistics by HireScores, a recruitment-related website, claims that Brits waste a third of their working day ‘pretending’ to be busy. Is that surprising? We all have procrastination strategies to put off difficult tasks or to avoid starting ones we cannot finish today. But 2 hours 20 minutes per day? And that is only the average. A whopping 32 per cent admit to wasting an average of 3 hours 15 minutes every day talking to colleagues and feigning work. That is nearly half of a typical working day.

And that, of course, is not counting all the time that they spend on work-related activities that are not actually needed: over-long meetings; meetings where they are only there to watch; reading emails copied to everyone in sight.

So why does nobody notice? Is it a failure of supervision or even lack of leadership? Primarily it is a failure, in many areas, to specify roles and outputs clearly, often accompanied by soft staffing levels. On the plus side, however, the survey did find that 40 per cent of workers stayed late at least once a week in order to finish a task. But then they would need to, wouldn’t they?

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?