How Not to Make Friends
Spoilsport:
I believe Ms. Rogerson is in desperate need of a blanket party. I'll bring the soap bars.
British businesses are losing more than £50m a year because of employees skipping off work on Friday afternoons.
The company which produced the study says it has developed a computer programme which tracks patterns of employee absence and recommends appropriate disciplinary action.
Pam Rogerson, head of personnel at Employersafe, said: "Our evidence suggests that more and more workers are seeing Friday afternoon as an unofficial holiday. "We have estimated that this is costing British business just over £50m a year, which all goes to form part of the overall £13bn cost of workplace absenteeism."
I believe Ms. Rogerson is in desperate need of a blanket party. I'll bring the soap bars.
posted by Jar(egg)head at 08:34
3 Comments:
This kind of reasoning always makes me laugh. In a, these people are complete morons type of way. They don't take into account the effect of moral on productivity at all. If my moral is high then I accomplish more in a shorter time. The numbers they like to throw around about how much money is being lost are just silly. The number of factors they would have to track are hard enough to pull together to get a true figure. Considering some of the factors would cost more to track than the supposed absenteeism I doubt they've checked them. And do they think that making sure an employee stays at their post will increase work being done. Once again, what happens to moral with the Draconian time clock rules?
One thing must always be kept in mind by employers. Employees are emotional beings and as such you have to take that into account at all times. Regardless of how professional I might try to be, if you make to big an issue of certain things I'm going to start balking at putting forth much of an effort.
Another thing is are they taking into account the free labor they get out of an employee who is happy with their job. This is a very real thing. A satisfied employee will take care of something even when they're not on the clock simply because the company cuts them some slack here and there. It's always a give and take kind of thing.
Speaking as a consultant (or hired corporate mercenary to some) my work scheduled is dictated by what I need to get done, when I need it to get done by, and what part of the world I need to be handling activity in. Sometimes I may bill 60 Hrs / week, sometimes I may do 40, and sometimes I may just take a couple of days off in the middle of the week.
One of the more annoying accounting planners made a comment once when I came into the office at 10am one morning that "Our workday starts at 7am". I informed her that "She must be happy to have a job that is so predictable and with set hours, but my responsibilities are global, and my workday starts whenever I start working and it stops when I've done what I need to do regardless of the day or hour."
When Management watches the clock they get staff that works to the clock. When Management watches productivity and quality you get staff that works to be productive and produce quality. It's all about incentive and the type of behavior you want to encourage. My incentive is a nice bill-rate and control of my own time (within the bounds of what needs to get done), and I know the way I can keep those incentives is by the productivity and quality of my labor.
And echoing what Churt mentioned re: work employers get for free. Because my clients are reasonable and flexible with me I'm flexible with how I bill them for my time. A few hours here or there when I'm meeting my financial goals aren't going to matter to me. Everyone's happy, everyone wins.
The main thing that irks me about the original article is the whole concept of a manager abrogating the decision making process re: disciplinary action. In the Mad Builder's world, if a manager needs to use a computer to tell them when and what disciplinary action to take on an employee then that manager is unsuitable for their job. I'm sorry but a BASIC requirement for me elevating someone to management is the ability to take personal responsibility for the MANGEMENT of their staff, and that includes disciplinary action. It's like these companies that use these 3rd Party administered "personality tests" as a basis for their hiring and promotion decisions. This trend of managers abrogating their responsibility to make and take responsibility for important personnel decisions really bugs me. Nobody seems to want to take personal responsibility for making a freaking decision anymore.
There is a saying in business that says a person is promoted to their highest level of incompetency. What this means is that when a person is seen as doing a job well, they get promoted, and keep getting promoted until they reach a job they can't do . But now it is to late and they can't be demoted because the incompetent person above them won't admit the mistake.
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