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April 2008 Archives

April 2, 2008

Key Performance Indicators: The New Bane of My Existence?

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...

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April 3, 2008

Battle lines are drawn regarding work responsibility

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.

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April 7, 2008

The Core Competencies of an HR Officer...

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.

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April 9, 2008

Close Encounters of a Disturbing Kind: One Cleaners obsession with an HR Officer...

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...)

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April 14, 2008

Workplace Drug Dealing: Is there a stupider way of earning cash on the side?

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.

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April 15, 2008

HR Hartley 1, Senior Management 0

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.

Continue reading "HR Hartley 1, Senior Management 0" »

April 17, 2008

Health and Safety Violations: Not to be taken lightly

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.

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April 18, 2008

A Hart of Gold: Resisting Pressure to Dismiss an Employee (For Now)

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.

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April 21, 2008

Delaying the Inevitable: Doomed Employee Absent (Again)

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...

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April 24, 2008

Employee Assistance Programme Close to Launch

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.

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April 29, 2008

An Expensive Mistake

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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About April 2008

This page contains all entries posted to H aRRgh!! in April 2008. They are listed from oldest to newest.

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