Guru

A survey by the Institute of Leadership and Management has found the things that office workers hate the most in their colleagues. Here are the top nine most annoying things that colleagues can do according to whomever the ILM asked:

1. Arrive late for meetings
2. Leave dirty bowls and plates on their desk
3. Gossip about other workers
4. Discuss confidential work matters openly
5. Send an email to people they’re sat directly opposite
6. Leave their mobile phone on loud
7. Take regular cigarette breaks
8. Come into work sick
9. Bring their children into the office

Guru would like to make some further additions to the list and would welcome any other suggestions:

• Describe something as “scientific” just because it includes a graph
• Sneeze extravagantly
• Wear headphones into the office
• Act in a “polite” way that really inconveniences both parties, such as holding doors open for somebody while standing in the door
• Talk incessantly about concerns about getting home when there’s a whiff of snow in the air or they’ve seen a leaf fall off a tree
• Looking at people they have no business looking at when walking through an office (this is mainly done by people who want to be looked at themselves)
• Wear too much perfume/aftershave

According to the Daily Mail, Britain is bracing itself for a white weekend. For employers and HR staff this also means bracing ourselves for a blanket of hyperbole and grandstanding as the same few employees spend every day in which the temperature is below 10 degrees loudly fretting about whether they will be able to get home and whether they should rush out to stock up on tinned foods in case the snow rises above… well, there being any snow settled anywhere.

Guru suggests introducing a policy that anybody of this disposition be forced to spend the days where there actually is some snow on the ground shovelling snow outside in a t-shirt and shorts until they learn the value of a good day’s work. Guru is eagerly awaiting sign-off on the scheme.

Guru has been alerted to a baffling study about rudeness at work via the CIPD newsletter. The report from the International Journal of Research Slightly Less Valuable Than Commonsense, sorry, the Harvard Business Review, reveals that most people at work experience rudeness sometimes.

The report states that 98% of 14,000 respondents reported experiencing rudeness over the course of what is described as a “long-term” study. The authors describe this figure of 98% as “incredible”. Guru agrees: it’s absolutely gob-smackingly incredible that they found 280 people who did not ever experience rudeness at work. Where do these people work? Do they tend the gates of paradise?

Remarkably, the authors go on to claim that the 98% of people, who do experience rudeness sometimes, have 25% fewer ideas than the others… the others being the tiny, tiny fraction of people who claim to never have experienced incivility at work. Anybody with an ounce of sense will realise that this is a ridiculous way to report this data. The 98% are the overwhelming majority of people - they’re the normal people. The 2% are extremely odd, or working in very strange circumstances and the authors should report that people who claim to have never experienced rudeness have 33% more ideas than everybody else, and then tell us what the hell is going on with these people. Perhaps it will lead to a revolution in HR with all staff being sent to work in cabins in the woods, with a concurring leap in creative productivity.

As if this weren’t ridiculous enough, the authors also report the finding that 80% of customers would change bank if they witnessed an incident of rudeness between two employees at their bank. This percentage is so obviously ludicrous that, again, any reader with an ounce of sense can only be left wondering how they managed to gather such data. Guru suggests that the question was posed thusly:

Q. You witness a teller at a bank being rude to a fellow employee… do you:

Being a keen employer of school leavers and bright young graduates, Guru is taking an interest in the debate surrounding education. He’s noticed that it doesn’t appear to be a particularly popular view, but he finds himself of one mind with education secretary Michael Gove who’s reforming education back towards a more information- and memory-based approach.

Over the years Guru has met many bright young things with high marks and glittering records, and repeatedly been surprised that in all that education they don’t seem to have acquired any actual knowledge. The mantra to justify this state of affairs seems to be that children are taught “how to think”, but is being “taught how to think” necessary, and is it not possible to teach somebody how to think while teaching them some useful things to think about? Guru would suggest the answers are no and yes. Furthermore - particularly at degree-level, which is still largely the preserve of the middle-class - it is pretty insulting to suggest that young adults should be subsidised to spend three years “learning how to think” while everybody else learns how to think while providing useful services to society (like working their way up the HR ladder).

So Guru supports Gove’s measures and looks forward to interviewing a new generation of HR candidates who can remember some actual information they’ve garnered from the hundreds of exams they’ve sat through.

The board that Guru answers to has the typical composition of egotistical, slightly autistic men, so Guru was overjoyed to stumble across the Telegraph’s fabulous new(ish) blog giving an insight into the machinations of the executive team from a female perspective. It’s just so typical of The Telegraph to stick up for the minority.

After what must have been hours and hours of deliberations, the Telegraph decided to call its new blog “Board Babe”, neatly summing up that the blog is written by both a board member of a company and a baby, sorry, a woman. It’s also alliterative.

The surprising thing about Board Babe is that it makes a very powerful argument that not only should board babe herself not be on a board, but that no women at all should be on boards. Speaking for all women in business, as board babe does, a reader cannot help but face the realisation that women are inane, vain, reductionist nitwits. Guru was astonished, because he’s met loads of women working throughout his working life who’ve managed to very successfully hide how stupid and self-satisfied they are. As such, he’s indebted to the Telegraph.

Here’s a particular gem:

“I have worked hard to get where I am, and perhaps quicker than the average women who has taken time out to have children and get married. Add to that some colourful life experience and yes, it’s fair to say I have wisdom beyond my years. But I would like to think it hasn’t aged me.”

Guru, along with all those “average” women who “took time out” to have children and get married, will be very happy to see no more women on boards ever if this self-satisfied twit is the standard.

Staff at the Shanghai Shinmei Electric Company held their managers hostage for a day in protest over time-limits on bathroom breaks and onerous rules on punctuality. Staff were restricted to two minutes per toilet break, and were fined for being late into work once, and fired for being late a second time.

Guru suggests that the Chinese employers introduce a more flexible approach to squeezing ever inch of productivity out of their team. For example, Guru has introduced a flexible toilet allowance that allows staff to use 20 minutes of toilet time over the week any time they like. And Guru doesn’t mind if they’re late so long as they work ten-hours or more a day.

Guru is back at work and is quite comfortable being back, having always believed that routine and hard work are healthy for the soul. What he isn’t comfortable with is the new year blight of being bombarded with “inspiring” messages from his colleagues and peers who obviously feel that a week’s holiday warrants a great inquisition on the nature of life.

In Guru’s Twitter feed, four of the last five tweets offer him unsought life advice from dead presidents and dead CEOs. At no point this morning was Guru seeking to escape a life of living in fear or find the formula to success or escape the claws of dogma. He just wanted to make a coffee and catch up with all the work he needs to do.

As such, Guru has devised this clever, very quotable, quote for all his inspiring well-wishers: “stop trying to inspire me and get on with your work”.

Although Guru takes an instant dislike to anybody who’s not embarrassed to identify themselves as a Tory, he was amazed to read this morning that a YouGov poll found that 49% of people think Andrew Mitchell would have been right to resign on the basis of having said “I thought you lot were supposed to f**king help us”.

What world are these people living in?! Firstly, as it seems to be commonly trotted out to support this view, this is not swearing “at” somebody. Swearing at somebody is calling them a swear word or using a swear word to emphasise the negative word you are directing at them. Guru has been on the wrong end of a “you’re swearing at me sir” from a train service revenue protection officer, and can attest that this disingenuous phrase is already well-worn by authority. People use swear words all the time - the fact that public officials are prone to come over all “you’re swearing at me” when somebody swears benignly and is otherwise acting entirely without aggression, is something that should be bemoaned by the public, not used to support calls for somebody to resign.

But, more simply, what Andrew Mitchell said is not approaching a sackable offence or even a disciplinary offence! It’s somebody getting a bit annoyed about being inconvenienced at the end of a long day. We’re all allowed to get a bit annoyed at other people if we express it in a (just about) harmless way - in fact, it’s not even a matter of being allowed, it’s just inevitable and all we can do is apologise and try to restrict such outbursts. Clearly, in this case, although it wasn’t the nicest thing he could have said, it was unlikely to cause great offence.

So, Guru’s Christmas message is that we should all forgive Andrew Mitchell for his minor outburst or commit ourselves to lives of suppressed inner rage. And if in the course of your work somebody swears while talking to you and it offends you, bloody well grow up. People swear all the time and you probably do too.

Cathay Pacific staff have voted to withhold food, alcohol and smiles from customers during the Christmas period over a pay dispute. Management are offering them a 2% payrise, but union bosses want 5%.

Guru doubts the measures will make much difference. Guru has barely smiled in 40 years and nobody is offering him a payrise.

Amongst all the miserable weather and the rapid approach of the odious time of year that is Christmas, Guru has been hugely uplifted by the publication of a document entitled “Implementing Employee Owner Status: Government Response to Consultation”.

The BIS is not usually a source of happiness and laughter, but the document delivers in spades. An early highlight is the admission that “a very small number of responses welcomed” the Government’s proposal that employers give employees shares in exchange for rights related to unfair dismissal, statutory redundancy pay, flexible working and training.

The report goes on to reveal that employers feel that the situation regarding different employment statuses is already complicated enough (with “employees”, “workers” and “self-employed”) and that introducing another status (the provisionally named “employee owners”) would just add to the confusion. Furthermore, employers felt that having another set of workers with diminished rights could lead to friction in the workplace.

The report really hits its stride with the consideration of how the buy-back of shares should work. The Government’s spirited suggestion that businesses be able to sack employees who’ve sold their rights and then buy back their shares at rates below market rate was met with “surprise” by employee representatives, who clearly hadn’t even considered that the Government’s proposal might be quite so demented. The report cites their response as “the employee would, in effect, be giving up employment rights for nothing”. Brilliantly, business organisations suggested that employees who leave on good terms get market rate for their shares and that employees who are dismissed (remember: not necessarily for any good reason) get a lower rate. In effect, they have suggested that employees sell their rights for something of indeterminate value, with employers having the discretion to define the final value of the share. That should inspire confidence.

Even better than all this is the general bafflement over how the hell tiny businesses would actually value their shares at all and, then, what say in the management of the business these shares would give the “employee “”owners”” (sometimes there aren’t enough quotation marks in the world), and, indeed, whether employers would really want to give these desperate disempowered workers any say in the running of the business. Law firms helpfully told the Government that it would be very easy for companies to ensure workers with full voting rights actually have no power at all by diluting the influence of their shares.

By this point, Guru was practically beside himself with joy over the collective commonsense of his fellow employers, but the report just keeps giving. In response to the, fairly important, question: “What impact will allowing individuals limited unfair dismissal protection and equity shares have on employers’ appetite for recruiting?” 80% of respondents said it would make no difference and 8% said it would have a negative effect.

A further, related, question asked “What impact do you think the proposal will have on labour market flexibility - that is, in relation to hiring and letting people go?”. To this hopeful question 54% said it would have no effect at all and… wait for it… 25% said it would have a negative effect. One-quarter of respondents said the measure would have a NEGATIVE effect on the very thing it was introduced to improve. The Government may as well have been suggesting adding whiskey to drinking water to curb alcoholism.

It really is an amusing read, and Guru recommends that everybody finds time to look over it. The message Guru takes from the document, possibly rather sentimentally, is that both employers and employees regard employment rights as, well, rights. There really does not seem to be a general appetite to meet business challenges by encroaching on the dignity and security of employees. Furthermore, businesses are telling the Government that the scheme won’t actually work and that it is confusing and impractical for most businesses.

So, essentially, the Government has proposed an immoral and unethical monetisation of hard-fought rights that in the minds of employers will not solve any problems. It’s a damning verdict for the Government - but an early Christmas present for the rest of us.