Guru

Personnel Today achieved great success with its recent campaign for "HR with Oomph", timed to coincide with the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development's (CIPD) Annual Conference and Exhibition in Harrogate.

The magazine and its readers defined 'oomph' in the context of HR, with words like: committed, confident, creative, credible, determined, driven, dynamic, energetic, enjoyable, enthusiastic, forward-thinking, inclusive, influential, innovative, inspirational, involving, passionate, persuasive, proactive, professional, visible and visionary.

After much negotating with the CIPD, Personnel Today's journalists were even allowed to set up their new video equipment outside the conference to capture some "HR with Oomph" voxpops from delegates.

Talking of Personnel Today's 'HR with Oomph' campaign...

When asked: "Who is the celebrity or business leader with most oomph?", Personnel Today's readers voted Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson the clear winner.

Soon after this result was revealed, Guru received the following press release from Maris Interiors.

Branson plans world domination...with a little help from Maris Interiors

One London company is this year throwing its staff a Christmas party to remember – with a little help from Sir Richard Branson.

The office design and fit-out specialist, Maris Interiors, plans to pay homage to the bearded tycoon with a Guinness World Record attempt that has never been tried before – employees are to use props such as a goatee beard and a pastel shirt to create the largest group of Richard Branson look-a-likes under one roof!

Maris has a great track record when it comes to breaking Guinness World Records. Last year the wacky company saw 109 of its employees dressed as Elvis sing their way into the record books before boarding a flight to Las Vegas. This year the company is sending its lucky employees off on a three-day break to Miami, in appreciation of 12 months’ hard work.

“There’s no doubt that we’ve been bitten by the record-breaking bug,” says Michael Howard, chairman of Maris Interiors. “We’re celebrating another excellent year for Maris Interiors, and this is a great opportunity to take the festivities that little bit further. Sir Richard helped us last year by allowing us to do a sponsored walk on one of his flights and even posed with our Elvises. By way of acknowledging his support, we have chosen to ‘be him’ for this year’s Christmas jaunt. The Guinness Book of Records has accepted the challenge and so we are all really gearing up to be Sir Richard Branson for the day."

A recent post on the excellent Evil HR Lady blog struck a chord with Guru.

For those of you unfamiliar with Evil HR Lady's work, she is a kind of human resources agony aunt. The Claire Rayner of HR, if you like. Employees write to her with their problems and she solves them.

(Guru once had the most bizarre Sunday lunch with Claire Rayner, Jasper Carrott-sidekick Robert Powell, perma-tanned travel-show presenter Judith Chalmers and the late, great Stannah Stairlift promoter Dame Thora Hird, but that's a long story for another day.)

Anyway, some poor soul recently sought Evil HR Lady's advice on the subject of salary. The complainant had inadvertently seen a document on the boss's computer screen listing the salaries of everyone in the company, and realised that someone else working at their level was earning $20,000 more.

Guru doesn't have to cast his mind back far to a day when he spotted a similar list on the desk of his HR manager. He managed to engage the HR manager in some polite smalltalk, while simultaneously memorising every last name and number on the page.

And you know what, he now desperately wishes he hadn't. For now he risks confusing salary with value. Whenever Guru comes across anyone who was listed on that page, he recalls what they are paid and where they sit in the pecking order, making immediate comparisons. It's totally distracting - does anyone know a good hypnotist?

Guru's father (Guru Senior) was absolutely right when he told a young Guru-ling: "If anyone offers to swap details of your respective pay and benefits, immediately decline. One of you will inevitably end up feeling rotten."

See - Guru can do advice too!

Following Guru's post about the recent Secs Survey, the team behind SecretarialCareers.co.uk staged a demonstration in central London as part of its week-long campaign to highlight the work of secretaries. (Guru doesn't think he caused it.)

Secretarial Careers Awareness Week championed PAs and secretaries to show how essential they are in the workplace and culminated in protests at key landmarks around London, a demonstration in central London, a petition, and a variety of guerrilla marketing activities across the capital.

The activity received widespread press coverage on TV and radio including BBC2's Working Lunch and regional BBC stations including Radio Leeds, Newcastle, Oxford and Swindon. It was also featured on the front page of City AM, the “Office Hours” section of The Guardian and BBC Online.

Laurence Owen, group marketing manager, said:

"We feel it’s about time the bosses of today show their appreciation for these unsung office heroes. The reality is that secretaries and PAs are actually multi-skilled and talented yet feel undervalued and unrecognised.

"We would like everyone to show their support by signing our online petition which, once completed, will be handed in to number 10 Downing Street."

Click here to sign the petition.

Following Secretarial Awareness Week and its accompanying protest, Guru has just been made aware of another London protest (it seems to be all the rage).

While at the barber (getting the blue rinse touched up), Guru happened upon an issue of the lads' mag Loaded, which included a feature on the publication's Straight Pride march.

Editor Martin Daubney wrote:

Today we are in Trafalgar square to celebrate our right be heterosexual. Many people might ask is this demonstration anti-gay, and the answer is no. Gay Pride is not anti-straight and therefore we are not anti-gay. We are doing this because we feel that being heterosexual is undermined and unfashionable these days.

Judge for yourself:

Guru received an email yesterday telling him that the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has ‘launched a tool to handle difficult people’. Guru had one of them once – it was called a mallet.
Reading on, it turned out that the CIPD’s tool ‘can be tailored to a wide range of learning needs, such as customer service, combating stress in the workplace, communication skills, influencing skills, assertiveness, leadership and management skills, and interpersonal skills’. Yep, Guru still reckons a mallet will do.

News has reached Guru from his Eastern European contact - the one he meets on a bench in Hyde Park reading a day old copy of the Times and wearing a mac and bowler hat - that towns in north-west Bulgaria are suffering a policeman shortage.

Guru briefly considered catching a Ryanair flight to Sofia to go on the loot, but realised that hordes of Englishmen had probably already done that in the name of a stag do. So instead Yours Truly enquired as to what had caused this drought of law enforcers.

Was it fear of tackling drunk Cockneys after the pubs shut? A wave of migration away from the towns to their new EU sister countries? Sharp increases in the price of doughnuts? Apparently none of the above.

The news that the government has ‘borrowed’ Tory ‘policies’ in its pre-Budget announcement comes as no surprise to Guru – nor other Personnel Today bloggers – as when he was a mere ‘young shaver’ Yours Truly used to indulge in the occasional bit of ‘borrowing’.

Having spent the past two days on tour with some former Soviet chums, Guru found himself deep in conversation with Disciple Boris talking about the shoddy way his Russian compatriot Alexei Smertin has been treated while plying his trade in the UK.

It turns out that Smertin is a soccer player and has passed from club to club in the UK without so much as a thank you.

Guru has to admit he has come up with some pretty far-fetched excuses in his time.

He once told his teacher that his homework had eaten his dog (he had a small shitzu and the assignment in question was to look after the school goat).

Mrs Guru still believes that he turned up late for his wedding, wearing the previous night’s clothes, because an escaped elephant ran amok in his house, soiling everything else he owned.

And whatever the traffic warden thinks, Guru didn’t actually undergo a miracle recovery just before he came back to his car parked in the disabled slot.

With his several of his monthly ‘art’ magazines long overdue, Guru is delighted that an end to the postal dispute seems to be in sight.

However, he must declare that he is of the strong belief that any agreement must see an end to the disgraceful ‘Spanish practices’ exposed by Royal Mail chief executive Adam Crozier.

Guru is outraged that his postmen, rather than delivering letters and parcels in all weather and guard dog conditions like their upstanding forefathers, were lounging around drinking San Miguel, eating tapas, gelling up their hair and slagging off the Portugese.

Being too lazy to read an email on screen last week, Guru printed it out and discovered it was a report about unnecessary printing of emails.

It seems somebody at Fujitsu Siemens Computers had nothing better to do – probably because they were banned from printing documents – so they phoned 2,011 adults and asked them about their printing habits.

Today Guru is celebrating the return of imperial ambitions as the UK puts in a claim for the icy wastes of Antarctica.

Apparently, because 1cm of the world’s biggest block of ice protrudes into the offshore waters of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia – a miniscule spec of an island 600 miles east of the Falklands, it belongs to Blighty.

‘British Antarctic Territory’ turns out to be quite a big slab of the ice shelf (about a fifth), but the area being claimed by the UK is also being sought by our good chums in Argentina and Chile who’s lands also nudge into the area in a similarly spurious way.

Guru fully understands the need to grab territory, however, on account of having to

Talking of invading territory (see below), Guru notes that the England rugby team has been rather good a grabbing territory during the Rugby World Cup in France.

That is apart from the 36-0 drubbing the team received at the hands of the South Africans in the early stages of the tournament.

Of course, Our Boys have now made it to the final, pushing aside all opposition with in-your-face displays reminiscent of… um… well… your average South African.

The fact that the Springboks have done so well could be down to their tendency to

Guru is delighted to hear that employees can no longer use flights as an excuse for being out of contact with their bosses.

For too long Yours Truly listened to answerphone messages while employees were larging it up in business class, drinking champagne and watching Meet The Parents with their shoes off.

Tesco made its maiden shipment of goods by canal last week, shipping 20ft containers of wine from Liverpool's Royal Seaforth dock to a bottling plant 32 miles away on the banks of the Manchester ship canal.

This was great news for the company’s carbon footprint, for users of the M62 and for wino barge owners in the Lancashire area.

Surely IT employers are completely missing the point with their campaign to get more students to take the subject.

People don’t stay away from the IT degrees because they worry about not getting a seat on the board when they’re 45 – they sign on to geography because that’s where the best girls are.

After all this talk of Blue Cards and Green Cards, Guru is today announcing a consultation on his very own Red Card scheme.

The European Commission (EC) yesterday unveiled plans for an EU-wide Blue Card visa similar to the US Green Card.

This would allow workers from outside the EU to work in all member states. Guru would like to launch a scheme that permits him to ban all workers from member states - his Red Card.

Being of sound heart and mind, Guru is far from a Spurs fan - but he does have to wonder if employers could learn a little from maestro of people management Daniel Levy.

Yours Truly doesn't mind admitting that he watched with a little bit of awe as the Tottenham chairman ruthlessly replaced his under-performing manager.

Skills shortages get blamed for everything these days.

Having been told that the Olympics is going to be rubbish for visitors because we’ve got no decent waiters, and that the world is going to end because we haven’t got the nuclear power experts to drag us away from burning fossil fuels, we now hear skills shortages mean we are all going to die of bird flu...

In case it had escaped your attention among the Halloween hype and fireworks, it is currently National Commute Smart Week.

Guru got up early yesterday to put on his top hat and tails before driving to work, but apparently he had the wrong end of the stick.

It turns out that the event, run by not-for-profit initiative Work Wise UK, is all about thinking of different ways to do your job without clogging up the roads and trains.

The office and the gym are two of Guru’s most hated locations. So the thought of the two of them combined makes him feel slightly panicky.

In fact, when he first heard about the Walkstation, Yours Truly had to spend a few hours in his ‘special place’ – a room he designed to combine his two most loved locations, the bedroom and the pub. He claims this is his contribution to National Commute Smart Week, but either way, it leaves Mrs Guru to write today's blog entry on the Walkstation.

Here goes...