Guru

Image: Rex Features

Guru has noticed a tactic in media reporting of the Olympics that could be of benefit to employers hoping to galvanise their staff round a common cause: xenophobia.

Yesterday, British teenage superstar Philip Hindes powered Britain’s men’s sprint team to victory with a sensational first lap. This morning, the "German-born" Philip Hindes had tainted the victory by, according to one interview, admitting he’d purposely crashed in one of the heats to prompt a restart after a dodgy start.

Clearly, employers must be careful when adopting this approach in the workplace, because of various laws about this sort of thing, but Guru still thinks that used subtly this could be a potent tool for bonding staff to your cause (admittedly, not so much for the person being discriminated against). The first step to harnessing this tool is discovering the backgrounds of all your staff, perhaps with a phoney "Cultural Awareness Day" inviting staff to share their ancestry for at least three or four generations. Then you can get this information working for you. So, for example, you’re in a meeting and one of your team disagrees with a suggestion you’ve made and you say something like “Oh, Stephen, that’s just the sort of thing I imagine your German great-great-great grandfather might have said in this situation”… then watch as everybody decides they agree with you and not with that stinking foreigner Stephen.

Image: Rex Features

Employers all over Britain are going to be feeling nervous as it has emerged that if you are British you are almost certainly capable of winning an Olympic medal in one or more sports. Employers should be particularly wary of entering into conversations with any tall employees, all of whom could definitely win a gold medal in rowing if they decide that’s what they want to do.

Guru recommends that employers adopt the same approach to potential Olympians (anyone British) as they do when dealing with recently married women - just as you cannot ask a new bride if babies are on the horizon, it would surely be folly to ask a British employee if they are likely to be abandoning a successful career in HR for gold medals in Rio. It’s inevitable that there will be a raft of discrimination cases hitting the tribunals as employers try to protect their businesses from the consequences of staff abandoning the office to go to dominate world sport instead, and Guru doesn’t intend to be one of the many employers who fails to foresee the consequences of potential-Olympian discrimination.

Image: Rex Features

Researchers have found that Monday is not an unusually depressing day. It’s actually just one of four extremely depressing days running from Monday through Thursday.

Data collected from Gallup telephone interviews indicates that people are equally unhappy on all working days except Friday.

According to Professor Stone of Stony Brook University (his own personal university?), who led the team that conducted the research, people have a perception that Monday is the worst day of the week because of the contrast from the weekend when they might not be extremely unhappy.

The obvious cure to this malaise is to have people in on Sunday.

Image: Rex Features

If you want to tear down barriers in your organisational hierarchy, consider organising a choir. Gareth Malone, the bloke off The Choir (a show in which he probably organised a choir full of rough inner-street kids whose lives were turned around by singing together), has been doing just this at the NHS and the Royal Mail. He says it “was great to bring together people from different levels, especially in a hierarchical place like a hospital”. Apparently, having surgeons singing alongside porters has had some positive effect on the hierarchy there.

Guru thinks organising a choir is far too risky - what the hell would you sing? Hymns? Obviously you can’t do that. Popular music? That would probably discriminate against old people and people with taste. Basically, you’d have to let everybody sing whatever they wanted and that wouldn’t be a choir at all - it would be people independently singing in the same room. A bit like the Spice Girls.

Navigating discrimination laws can be genuinely difficult for employers, but there are cases that are more clear cut than others. The following advert, posted on Gumtree by a subcontractor working for Coles supermarket in Australia, probably crosses the line into unacceptable:

“Positions available for experienced cleaners in supermarket cleaning for night and/or morning work. Must be able to work unsupervised, to a time limit and have an eye for detail. Must have own transport + licence and abn (Australian business number). Store requires no Indians or Asians please. MUST SPEAK ENGLISH.”

The problem with this advert is that it not only discriminates against Asians, but also against Indians, which is very serious.