Overtime – who should get it?

Today the TUC report that the amount of paid overtime has fallen significantly over the last year. This is not surprising given the depth of the recession. Much of the reduction will have come from reduced output; especially in manufacturing; some will have come from organisations where overtime was reduced to save jobs. Countering this will be situations where job losses result in essential overtime for those remaining.

The working population falls into two groups. Those for whom paid overtime is a regular part of life and those whose monthly pay rarely differs from their basic salary divided by 12. Overtime is a valuable management tool for flexing costs in situations where attendance equals output (manufacturing) or where attendance is a necessity (counter or call centre staff). However, there is a grey area, particularly for office-based jobs, where output is not quantified and allocation of time is down to the individual.

Much administrative and managerial work requires social interaction as well as form-filling and decision-making. The HR Officer who never asks staff how they feel about their work or discuses last night’s football will be seen as aloof and will not understand employee attitudes as they should. But when, at the end of the day, they have to stay on to complete a promised report are they working legitimate overtime or did they spend too long discussing last night’s match? Did they choose the wrong priorities for that day’s many tasks?

Common practice, and the law, require specified hours work but there are many jobs where a day at work may not always equal a day’s work.

MoD bonuses – why the fuss?

Much heat and great indignation in the media today as it becomes known that the MoD (an arm of government that has overtaken the Child Support Agency in the public ordure stakes) is paying £47m in bonuses to its staff. Most of the critics seem not to understand the nature of this scheme. Essentially it uses a pot of money (possibly around 3% of payroll) accumulated by withholding small amounts from earlier pay reviews. It is distributed among staff as a non-consolidated payment based on annual appraisal ratings (it looks as though around two thirds of staff shared the pot). As it is not consolidated into basic, contractual pay it is not an addition to the annual paybill. It should be similar in amount to what was paid in previous years – just (potentially) distributed differently each year.

That nanny state again

If you were wondering how MPs are filling their time now that they have less to write on their expenses look no further than Labour member Ashok Kumar. He has tabled a motion that employers should be legally compelled to contact all applicants both to acknowledge receipt of application and again after selection has been made to notify applicants whether they have been successful. This may be good practice, and good manners, but think of all the red tape and opportunities for litigation that would follow. But why stop there? Why not impose a legal obligation on all teenagers to write prompt letters of thanks for Christmas and birthday presents? Not only would that breed a more polite society but might help fill the hole in Royal Mail’s business left by all those disgruntled customers who, thanks to the strikes, now pay all their bills online.

A good rant is good for you

It doesn’t matter how often I go into ASDA, TESCO, or even Harrods (actually I lie; I’m saving up for that last one) they just accept my credit card – or indeed, any card I know the PIN for. No questions asked. But try to buy on line and suddenly you are into Big Brother territory. (Yes I know this post is not about HR but even HR consultants can have grumpy-old-men moments).

You finally find what you want, get well into the buying process and click on ‘pay now’. Suddenly you get thrown out of the loop into a log-in-or-register-process. Why? I don’t have to sign up before I join the checkout queue in Tesco.

So you make up a username and password to placate their computer but there is worse to come. Apparently you bought something from that company once before and your email address is barred to anyone who does not know your password. This means you had already invented a username and password for that company – but forgot to add them to the list of passwords pinned to your computer (what do you mean you’re supposed to hide them?).

Even worse, some sites, such as the one that started me off on this, remember your credit card details and refuse your order because that previous payment was on a card that has now expired. Why is there never a forget-me-once-my-order-is-complete box? And if you ring up there will probably be one of those queuing systems that keep telling you that your call is important to them – how do they that before they answer? And another thing …..

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.

You have mail

A survey, of 4,000 people from 150 UK businesses, to be published on Wednesday, will show that the average worker wastes one hour every day through inefficient use of email. This obvious covers a range of factors (unnecessary copies, constant interruptions, personal emails, and the rest). I look forward to reading the report.

One aspect of emails that will probably not be mentioned but which I suspect makes a big contribution to the wasted time is the actual layout of emails themselves. Often there is a whole mass of extraneous detail to work through before you reach the actual text. If the email is continuing a topic thread there can be a whole series of similar rubbish accompanying each previous comment; not to mention the various disclaimers and addresses at the bottom. Depending on the email system the real text will be squashed alongside various columns and links. Then there is the annoying number of emails that appear in a typeface that is too small or, most annoying of all, written in lime green or sky blue.

This does not really line up with the way we interact with the printed word in any other context and must slow us down. But I am not sure I know how to do anything about it.

Annual hours?

~ there are 366 days this year

~ you give your staff 33 days holiday (25 annual + 8 public)

> this leaves 333 days

~ but the working day is only 8 hours (1/3 of 24 hrs)

> so really only 111 days available (333/3)

~ but they get weekends off (2×52 = 104)

> this leaves 7 days

~ surveys find UK average sick absence = 7 days

> this explains a lot !!

That pay gap again

The announcement last week that the gender pay gap had widened in 2008 brought the usual screams of indignation and demands that the government do something. The HR press was a little more temperate, though not exclusively so. The ONS announcement, of course, gives a much more considered interpretation. I have written before (The gender pay gap) about the need to break the gap down into its constituent causes if any useful progress is to be made so I will just highlight a few interesting aspects.

On the up

On the way up

A new discussion paper (Tougher at the Top) by the Audit Commission considers the labour market for Council Chief Executives. What they find is that there is an ever-upward spiral of musical chairs. This is caused by Councils insisting vacancies are filled by someone already in a Chief Executive post. Yet they find “There is no statistical evidence that chief executives recruited from other authorities are any more effective than first tier officers promoted into the role“. As well as generating a premiership-like ‘churn’ among Chief Executives this has significantly raised salary levels (up 34% in four years).

But this effect is by no means limited to those at the top. The pressure on salaries that results from over-specified recruitment briefs happens at all levels. Nor is it a new phenomenon. Managers, faced with vacancies, have always tried to specify someone who is at least as experienced as the person leaving rather than one with the skills and experience the leaver had had when they started the job.

The consequence is that they recruit someone for whom the job is a sideways move, who is already at a comparable salary (but probably wants a rise to join) and who will be ready to move on that much sooner. Those below will, rightly, draw the conclusion that their own promotion prospects lie elsewhere and so the spiral spins on upwards.

You might hope that the current financial climate would discourage this tendency but experience suggests the opposite. In straitened times training costs are cut, risk avoided and, in the absence of any real statistics for the effect on salaries, recruitment specifications are likely to be tightened rather than loosened. In the long-term managing your pay bill, not to mention the recruitment budget, can be as much about recruitment and promotion practices as about market testing and pay progression.

More reward facts

It is obviously survey season. This time it is Thomsons Online Benefits’ “Employee Rewards Watch 2008″. Covering some 755 organisations they claim it is the UK’s largest reward survey. The survey ranges quite widely across the reward environment and provides some useful insights into the business and HR challenges respondents face. Some of the findings that I picked up on include:

• that more than a third of companies believe their basic salaries to be in the second quartile (ie, below the median) which is pretty much what you would expect statistically;
• more telling is the finding that a quarter did not know where they stood in the market;
• two thirds of respondents are planning to pay a bonus over the next twelve months;
• the commonest factors on which bonuses are to be paid include company performance (80%), individual performance (75%) and business unit performance (45%) which means that most are paying on business success but flexing the amount to individual performance;
• around a third of respondents also thought their reward strategy was not valued by employees or not well communicated to them – so communicate it then.