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

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.

Literal lateral – organisation charts

An organisation chart from a potential client this week came with an unusual twist. It reads from left to right – literally lateral thinking. It looks something like the made-up example below. I’m not sure what software they used (I’ve used Excel but have not quite manged to get as good a picture of it as I would like) but it certainly does away with those cumbersome boxes. Any other unusual approaches to report?

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?

A Rose by any Other Name – job titles

Job titles matter and deserve more thought than is often given. After all, a person’s job title is the public face of their identity both inside and outside the organisation. They can be a frequent source of discontent and division.

In some organisations such as the armed forces, police and the large consultancy and accounting practices the title is, deliberately, the grade or rank. Titles such as Colonel, Inspector or Senior Consultant tell others in the organisation something about the level of work, but not the content. Essentially, these are personal grades which can be useful where staff are frequently re-assigned or work in cross-functional teams.In most enterprises, however grade goes with the job, not the person. But all too often the organisation bites back.