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.

It’s snow matter

This week’s snow brought all the usual cries of doom and gloom and national self-deprecation (“Canada copes with snow much worse than this.” ” The buses never stopped during the war” etc, etc.). The estimate, by the Federation of Small Businesses, that this has cost us £1.2m has been picked up by most of the press. But is that really the case?

They base their estimate on a figure of £6m as being the normal cost of a bank holiday and a calculation that about 20% did not make it to work on Monday. But do bank holidays really cost us money? Employers calculate their staffing levels on productive capacity excluding holidays. Assuming the average working year is 227 days (5×52 minus 25 annual and 8 bank holidays) would the country really be just under half a per cent (1/227) richer if we cancelled Good Friday? We could always follow the example of French revolution when they experimented with a system of 10-day weeks and 3-week months!

Of course, not every hour lost this Monday is lost money. Yes there are obvious losers; city-centre caterers, petrol stations and wheel-clampers perhaps? Then energy companies will have heated otherwise empty homes during the day and toboggan shops should have cleaned up. In many cases, however, spending and production will simply have been deferred and any immediate shortfall will soon be made up. This is especially true for all those manufacturing companies that are currently on short-time working, imposing extended holidays or announcing redundancies. And it is always true for many office and administrative workers who easily catch up on lost time (once they have finished swapping snow stories that is).

Can I go home now please – unpaid hours

The TUC ushered in the New Year with its annual protest that vast numbers of employees in the UK do obscene amounts of unpaid overtime. More than five million people, they report, worked unpaid overtime in 2008, bringing its total value across the UK to a record £26.9 billion: according to an analysis of official statistics published by the TUC. The figures, which only count overtime of more than one hour in a week, show that the average amount of extra time for these 5.24 million people is seven hours six minutes. That is, very roughly, 20% of the working population, which I think is low. Probably because the rise in extended hours operations (shops and call centres, for example) means more of us are in rostered jobs where overtime is much more likely to be paid automatically.

The TUC implies that these figures reflect downtrodden workers who stay late for fear of losing their jobs. But is that always the case? If you stay until six because you had not finished at five-thirty have you given your employer an extra half-hour or did you under-deliver earlier in the day because of an extended business debate about last night’s Eastenders? Or were you simply feeling a bit lethargic and took longer than you should have over various tasks. Of course, there are no official statistics of those who are a few minutes late in the mornings or come back late from lunch.

Nobody condones organisations where staff are pressured into staying late but the danger of focusing on unpaid overtime is that it reinforces the negative view that you are paid for your time rather you’re your output or contribution.

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?

Logging in or logging out

A recent report claims that the trend within large organisations to ban private use of the Internet is bad for workers’ efficiency and motivation. The research (by Goldsmiths University) claims to show that a five- or ten-minute break taken at the computer is more stress-relieving and more popular than tea breaks or fag breaks. Though I imagine such ’surfing breaks’ would need to be in addition to the time it takes to get the cup of tea to accompany your surfing.

Apart from the problems associated with limiting such breaks to just ten minutes, I would have thought that more benefit would come from insisting they turn the thing off for ten minutes. That way they get a break from all those emails they have been unnecessarily copied in on and might actually meet their colleagues face-to-face at the coffee machine. Bye-the-way the research was sponsored by a company called PopCap games. Guess what they sell?