April 2008 Archives

We finally had our new, high-tech whiteboard delivered today, after weeks of frustrating delays.

This was a cause of excitement for some, though this was sadly short-lived.

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Next week we will be launching an 'Employee Assistance Programme' that we have established with a leading international provider of such schemes.

As the team that will be responsible for telling people about what a wonderful benefit this is for them (and how thankful they should be to the company for being such caring employers), we have been learning all about it today.

You may recall that I was in a particularly chirpy mood on Friday, sparing an employee from the sack with the plan of doing the deed today.

With a terrible absence rate (with no underlying reasons as far as we can tell), the employee's time with us is very much up.

They, have, however, managed to gain at least one extra days grace...

It's a Friday, so I'm feeling in a very good mood and want to spread a bit of joy, whether it is through amusing plays on words (see above), or by being kind and considerate towards our employees.

One such employee was facing dismissal today for having an appalling absence record only 2 months in to his job.

This week we have been undergoing a health and safety audit.

Everything has been going very well, though it could have been a different matter thanks to one of our employees.

A few weeks ago I was accused by one of our most senior managers of losing some very important paperwork.

At the time, a lot of fuss was made by him as he attempted to portray himself as some sort of saviour for having saved electronic copies of the paperwork (as if that was an unusual thing to do...).

I was adamant at the time that I had never had the paperwork, but my reputation for being slightly messy preceded me and my protestations fell on deaf ears.

Sometimes in life, events occur that leave you utterly perplexed.

Putting these into words, whilst still trying to fathom what has just happened, can be tricky, but I'll give it a go now... We have just dismissed a temporary worker for attempting to deal drugs at work.

Every so often I have days where I am unsure whether to laugh or cry, and today definitely falls in to that bracket.

Somewhat disturbingly, our somewhat strange cleaner seems to have developed some kind of obsession with me (obviously she wouldn't be the first...)

As a generalist in the weird and wonderful world of HR, there are many skills that I know are required of me.

Some which I thought might be very important, such as empathy and people skills, have turned out to be of very little importance in an area which has very little time for dealing with the everyday problems of our workforce.

However, there are some skills required to work in HR that I would never have been aware of until I started working in the area.

As feared, our work yesterday on KPIs was to no avail, as our MD has decided he wants something far more time consuming and difficult to measure.

Quite why he couldn't make his wishes clear originally remains a mystery.

Brilliantly though, where as the KPI that we had worked on would have given us quite a bit of work, the new one that we have managed to agree upon with the MD leaves us in HR with very little work, but our management structure with an awful lot of work.

As we have entered the new financial year, we our now adhering to a new set of KPI targets.

Up until yesterday, we thought we were continuing with the same as the previous few years, in relation to absence, employee turnover and health and safety.

That was until our MD stuck his oar in...