Now is (not) the winter of our discontent

Personally, I’d be happy to return to an era when the pop charts were filled with classics by The Police, Pink Floyd and The Boomtown Rats (though I’ll pass on Dr Hook, The Bee Gees and Lena Martell), but it seems that despite a rash of strikes involving Royal Mail, British Airways refuse collectors and the fire service, fears of a return to the UK-wide strikes of 1979 are overstated.

The CIPD’s employee relations adviser recently said that the UK was unlikely to face a repeat of the “winter of discontent”. He claimed that the disputes in Royal Mail and the transport sector were “anomalies in terms of industrial relations, because the government is still seen as the ultimate banker or guarantor of service continuing”

The adviser did add, however, that during the current recession, the private sector would “still have lower levels of industrial action because of changed staff attitudes and an increasing need to be competitive globally.” He also predicted there would be more strikes in the public sector, particularly after the likely spring general election. This prediction is based on the assumption that there would be a backlash against a new Conservative government proposing to introduce legislation to deal with industrial relations in essential services.

Sounds pretty much like 1979 to me.

By the way: best selling UK single of 1979? Bright Eyes by Art Garfunkel.

Yuk.

The cost of poor HR: €1 billion and 25 lives

Regular readers of HR Case Studies will be familiar with the shocking series of suicides at France Télécom which have taken place while the Company has been implementing a modernisation drive.

Since February 2008, there have been 25 suicides and a further series of attempted suicides.

The cost of a badly managed restructuring programme now stands at a 6.4 per cent drop in third quarter profits, 25 lives and (announced yesterday) a €1 billion stress-reduction programme intended to enable staff aged over 57 to work part time. The part-time jobs would be made available on a voluntary basis to employees who felt that full time work was endangering their health.

Company Chairman Didier Lombard is blamed by unions for disorientating staff through a massive change programme since the business was privatised in 2004. Unions blame performance targets, tough management and imposed workplace mobility measures for the series of suicides.

The former state monopoly has been forced into a wide-ranging review of working practices overseen by Stéphane Richard, a former French government adviser who took over as deputy chief executive this month.

Mr Richards has already admitted that the group has ''gone too far'' into its attempts to supervise staff through the introduction of ''control tools''.

Times Online: France Télécom to invest €1bn to prevent suicides

• How could the engagement of a robust HR function have prevented this situation from developing?

Royal Mail dispute: what's all that about then?

Is it just me, or are you also in the dark over what the Royal Mail strike is actually about? OK, it’s obvious that management of Royal Mail want to “introduce modern working practices” (whatever that actually means) and striking staff feel the need to protest against Royal Mail for “making efficiency cuts without modernising the service” but beyond that, the details of the dispute seem to have evaded me.

With that in mind, I’m therefore not sure whether my local postie is a workshy, lazy, trouble-maker (assuming that he’s one of those on strike) or a strike-breaking scab (if he’s not!)

Terminology like this is the subject of a brief article in this week’s Personnel Today, which also explores the inevitable polarisation of opinion that takes place during any dispute. The forced choice for Royal Mail staff to nail their colours to the mast of either “striker” or “scab” leads to the inevitable creation of stereotypes which in turn brings about “a self-fulfilling cycle that further divides the groups, as they consistently look for positive similarities with their own group while making negative comparisons with colleagues in the other group. Any small or insignificant differences are quickly blown into major points of disagreement, leading to emotional, long-lasting divisions between once friendly and supportive colleagues”

So, as the article suggests, although the Royal Mail dispute may have a short-term resolution, the rifts that form during strike action tend to be long-lasting and deep.

Strikes: the psychological impact on non-striking staff

• One for teachers: research the background to the Royal Mail dispute to ensure that students are aware of the positions of both parties
• One for HR professionals: if you were part of Royal Mail, how could you improve the public’s awareness of what this dispute is actually about?
• One for the rest of you: where do your sympathies lie in this dispute?

Cocaine in the City: not so much a reward system - more a way to keep going

According to a report in yesterday’s Financial Times, the use of cocaine remains a serious problem among City workers in spite of rising unemployment and lower wages following the credit crunch.

A spokesman for The Priory psychiatric hospital in north London, told the FT that the number of bankers coming for treatment had risen significantly over the past three years, even when taking account of a large dip after the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

The Priory spokesman earlier told MPs on the parliamentary home affairs committee that people working in financial services were more likely to run into problems with powdered cocaine abuse than other elements of society. "They often have a high-pressure job and will often start using it not so much as a reward system but as a way to keep themselves going," he said.

Recent Home Office figures show that Britons are the biggest consumers of cocaine in Europe, with at least one million people estimated to have taken the drug in the past year. About 12,000 people are being treated for their use of powdered cocaine.

Cocaine use in the City still 'a real problem'

• Are you surprised by the figures quoted in the report above?
• What do you believe that organisations should do to minimise the incidence of drug use in or around the workplace?
• Bankers "often have a high-pressure job and will often start using it not so much as a reward system but as a way to keep themselves going." What do you think of this statement?

BMW Links Executive Pay to That of its Line Workers

While the salaries of UK FTSE-100 chief executives are rising twice as fast as salaries for shopfloor workers, in Germany, BMW has become the first major company to link the bonuses of its top managers to those of its assembly line workers.

The company stated that creating a fairer work environment was its reason for adopting this approach. Given BMW's size and weight in the global business market, other firms seem set to take notice.

Starting in 2010, the company will use a common formula to ascertain and award bonuses to its upper and lower level employees, based on the company's performance as measured by profit, sales and other factors. That means that upper level management could potentially lose more money than their lower level counterparts for bad performance.

A spokesman for BMW said the company's goal was to create fair and transparent compensation practices and to prevent a gap between management and the workers, as the underclass, from developing. "We don't just want to build sustainable cars. We also want to have sustainable personnel politics. We think this is good for the company culture," said the spokesman during an interview with Spiegel Online.

BMW Links Executive Pay to That of its Line Workers

• What are your view on such an approach?
• How do you think that this approach will be viewed by (a) senior managers and (b) lower level employees?
• Do you think that this approach is likely to spread beyond Germany?
  

Targets made easier to hit for UK Chief Executives

Why does this not surprise me?

Despite the country being in the depths of recession, the chief executives of Britain's top companies earned the same amount in the past year as they did during the booming economic times in 2006.

According to pay specialists Income Data Services, the total cash remuneration for the bosses of companies in the FTSE 100 fell by an average of just 1.5% in 2009 compared with 2008, with a 29% drop in bonuses partially offset by a 7.4% rise in salary.

Or, in plain English, what the Chief Executives lost on the bonus swings, they more than made up for on the salary roundabout.

Though the reduction in bonuses may be the largest fall in the past decade, it still means that the typical chief executive took home an extra £500,000 on top of their basic salary. The IDS research also shows that the average bonus payment fell from £707,000 to £502,000 over the past 12 months. Hard times indeed for the Chief Executives!

A spokesman for IDS said that "what is surprising is that the credit crunch has had so little impact on the rate at which chief executives' salaries are rising. Salaries for FTSE-100 chief executives are rising twice as fast as salaries for shopfloor workers."

It also seems that the chinning bar is being lowered to increase the likelihood of success for the Chief Executives. The IDS spokesman said: "This recession is posing difficult questions about how directors should be remunerated. When incentive plans fail to trigger, remuneration committees often respond by redesigning schemes so that targets are easier to hit.”

Shareholders are understandably becoming worried that the rules of the game are constantly changed and this has provoked a number of pay protests at company annual meetings this year, including at Royal Bank of Scotland, Shell and BP.

The HR Case Studies editorial team will be returning to this issue over the course of the week, but feel free to add your comments below!

Company bosses' earnings remain at boomtime levels

• Can there be justification for Chief Executive Salaries to be rising at twice the amount of shopfloor workers?
• What are your views about the suggestion that the targets for Chief Executives are being made easier to hit?

The Brits: Miserable again.

It’s cold, raining, and windy.

The clocks going back mean that it’s dark just after lunch.

Hardly any wonder that we’re a miserable bunch.

But it’s official. For the average employee in the UK, job satisfaction has plunged from a score of 46 to 37. To make the situation even grimmer, 28% of us believe that our personal living standards have worsened, compared to a miserly 14% (presumably bankers!) who consider them to have improved.

Fed up yet? It gets worse! Six month ago only 38% of us reported excessive pressure at work, but this has now risen to 42%. We’re also more likely than a few months ago to say that we have seen increases in stress and conflict at work, as well as bullying by line managers (of whom women are by far the worst, as readers of HR Case Studies already know.)

The CIPD, who commissioned the survey, interpret its results by saying that “in the spring we interpreted high job satisfaction in the face of the recession as a 'fixed grin', where employees felt lucky just to have a job. In this quarter, the fixed grin is slipping”

To top it off, more of us would ideally like to change jobs (if we could actually find one to go to)

What does this mean for employers? “Employers could face a talent drain as the labour market recovers – just when they need all hands to the pump to capitalise on recovery,” says the CIPD. “Employers must also focus on developing the people management skills of their front line managers if they want to manage stress and encourage and enable employees.”

Hemlock anyone?

UK job satisfaction has plunged, says CIPD report

• What can companies practically do to motivate employees during such challenging times?
• The survey concludes that “productivity and competitiveness could be undermined in firms most affected.” What is this likely to mean in practice?
• Deep and philosophical question: Spike Milligan once said, "Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery." Was he right?