Last week the ConsultingTools Sales team had an interesting week exhibiting at HRD at eXcel in London. As part of our plan for world domination we were giving away free Jelly Babies in a competition to find them on our website. We will announcing the winner of our Jelly Baby prize draw in a couple of weeks, so keep checking back to see who has won the years supply of Jelly Babies. I was rather surprised at the various different thoughts as to which colours were the best. Being a red and black girl myself i just assumed that everyone would be the same, however one of the visitors to our stand claimed that ladies like the red and blacks and men like yellow and greens and orange are a unisex colour enjoyed by all! So I began to test this theory and my conclusion is that most people will eat any of the flavours given half a chance! So come on then which ones are your favourite?
Archive for April, 2009
The news sandwiches our day, generally being watched or listened to be most households in the morning and more often than not the 6.00pm or 10.00pm news is a popular choice for a lot of people. If we were to watch a SKY news channel in the day then potentially the news also provides the filling to our sandwich as well. Given that it is virtually impossible to get though a news broadcast without reference to the current economic climate that we find ourselves in and the numerous Companies that are either going into liquidation or making redundancies, is it any wonder that people appear to be unhappier than they have for years at work. Is this due to the recession, and the fact that they feel unable to change jobs, grateful that unlike many friends of theirs they still have a job? Or, is it because they turn on the news daily to hear that if they were to change their job then the chances of finding another one are getting harder and harder? Whatever, the reason, I can’t help but pick up a general sense of doom and gloom whenever I have discussions with friends about work, or turn on the news.
This topic has been on my mind for some time now and as I prepare to talk about this at HRD this Tuesday I feel that some positive changes can be made in this time of recession. This could be because I am an eternal optimist, it could be because my profession concerns itself with improving the well being of others, or, it could be that Organisations really can get the most out of their staff in this tough economic climate. By using the right development and assessment tools, Companies can get to know their staff better, raise morale, and ultimately improve performance in what has been the worst financial down turn we have experienced for quite some time. It doesn’t have to be a bad year for business!
It’s long been recognised that major mileposts during the year - Christmas, Summer holidays, New Year, even bank holidays - give people an opportunity to consider where they are, what they’re doing and, in some cases, make changes. The whole ‘New Year Resolution’ idea causes a lot of career change, job hopping and staff turnover: so does two weeks in a sunny, laid back Southern European environment ! The ‘groans and grumbling’ people give voice to when they come back to work and understandable, unavoidable…and not trivial - they tell you something about staff attitudes and about where good management needs to be applied.
UK staff are less engaged and trust their leaders less than mainland European counterparts. Anyone working in organisations over the last months as the financial crunch has - well- crunched, will have come across statements like ‘ morale is low’, ‘people are waiting for the next shock’ or, more positively ‘everything changes - it stops things getting boring’.
Commitment to work is at a particularly low ebb given all this - not everywhere, but in a far higher percentage of organisations and workforces. It’s no use cheerleading at times like this even if that’s given leaders success in the past. In fact there’s a real danger here as people like Bob Hogan have pointed out. In difficult times, leaders need to change what they do, not do what they’ve done in the past but more so.
So we’re facing a particular problem over this Summer. More people unsettled; more people looking around for greener grass or, if unable to find it, staying put unhappily. Its going to impact on older experienced workers particularly: many of them will have been through recessions before and may decide ( perhaps wrongly ) its easier to go it alone rather than face the possibility of premature redundancy. Chosing to go is very different psychologically from being told to go. All this at a time when staff costs must be controlled BUT it’s essential to keep KEY staff in place to ride out the problems and gain momentum quickly at the upturn. Over the Summer we might lose those very key staff through inattention.
When people come back from a holiday ( Easter or Summer ) or have had some time off, we often do little more than ask them how they’ve enjoyed themselves, flick through the holiday snaps then let them get on with catching up on 1000 e-mails. But this is precisely when managers ought to spend a bit more time with their staff. In fact an hour spent with someone before they go away will pay dividends. Clearing up everything before heading off is always stressful - it sometimes tires you out and spoils the first few days of a holiday. A bit of help, support and understanding from the boss helps people go away with a good feeling. Coming back to work is also an opportunity to strengthen work relationships and commitment. The person who’s been away has usually had a great experience and wants to share it. He or she is probably also slightly nervous about what’s happened in their absence, slightly unsure about slipping back into their role.
I’m convinced that using personality measures can help managers understand better how people react to these ‘weak points’ in the year; and can help people feel valued at that awakward time when they sit at their desk and wonder what they’re doing there.
This is a real issue, one that’s regularly featured in the business press at this time of year. I wonder if anyone else has come across it or addressed it in organisations.
I recently spent a day working with a charity organisation on a senior recruitment exercise. The day consisted of a pretty thorough assessment centre made up of a role-play exercise, a Facet5 psychometric test (which was my reason for being there), a presentation to the team and a formal panel interview with me and 4 others. In addition to this all the candidates spent lunchtime with the other candidates and the rest of the organisation.
One candidate ‘performed’ far better than all of the others on the day. He took the lead in the role-play exercise and did all the right things. He had the most suitable Facet5 report (we used the Audition module that maps candidates to an ‘ideal’ template as defined in advance by the organisation). His presentation was excellent, and certainly the best one we witnessed by some distance. He was excellent at the formal panel interview and was a thoroughly nice chap.
We did a score-sheet and this guy came out on top – everyone marked him as top in each category. So, when we came to decision time I was expecting it to be a quick process, but there was one thing that stopped him getting the job. The Chief Executive put a spanner in the works by announcing “I just don’t think he’s an ‘XXX-Company’ type”.
So, after much discussion and debate the decision was made to give the job to the second choice candidate.
I left feeling that they’d made an ‘easy life’ appointment. But just how important is corporate culture?
“Concern after hacking hits Facebook” was a headline that caught my eye this week, and the article stated that the popular social networking website used by millions worldwide was hit by hackers five times in a week.
Data Protection and Information Security have always been important, but are growing as issues of concern for both individuals and organisations alike. Awareness has increased following high-profile news stories covering the loss of personal data, such as that from HM Revenue & Customs last year and credit card details being stolen from the retailer TK Maxx.
We know it’s a growing issue of importance and concern for our clients too as we’re being asked more as to what steps we have in place to process and protect data, and also around the physical and logical security of our on-line systems.
At the end of February a colleague and I attended a seminar run by the Association of Survey Computing consisting of two separate talks, one on Data Security and the second on Data Protection (more on Data Protection in a separate posting).
Mark Green (a Certified Information Security Manager) presented the session on Security Threats and indicated that the threat of data loss has increased dramatically in the last 5 years due to more data now being held electronically by organisations than ever before.
A common perception is to see Information Security as something that sits with the IT department. Information Security is both a business management and IT issue, and much is dependent on the human factor. For example passwords should be changed reguarly and not written on post-it notes or shared to cover holidays. Taking doucments or files off site can also pose a security risk. It’s important that organisations have security awareness programmes in place to educate employees who are mostly unaware of their responsibilities or the consequences of their actions.
Hacking is a criminal offence and those involved range from teenage hackers such as the one potrayed by the actor Matthew Broderick in the 1980s movie WarGames to those in organised crime who see it as a low risk form of bank robbery. I joined our IT Manager in January on a one-day Securing Web Applications workshop where we too were taught the ’skills’ of hacking web applications. While our motives aren’t sinister (UK banks have enough to worry about at the moment) for us it provided a unique insight into the vulnerablilities of many web sites and will help us to ensure our systems remain secure.
We know data security is a serious issue for our clients and we are currently working towards the ISO 27001 standard on Data Security.