View from the Hill

Yam Jam at breakfast - more than just toast and jam

Some interesting words reverberated around the lively agenda-setting session at the breakfast table at Roast on Thursday morning for the first SHR networking breakfast of 2012.  Strategic review was swiftly followed by strategy, business objectives and restructuring; budgets, economy, offsite and time fitted nicely with volume; intranets and wikis; and last but not least governance, reliability and compliance.

 One can be confident that 12 people working in strategic information roles will have something to say.  Those present represented all the facets of information not just sectorally but also nationally and globally

 It was exciting to hear of different organisations' views and usage of the myriad of communication channels.  Not all firms are fast movers and adopters and it seems that IT still hold the reins and are hesitant to condone organisation wide of tweeting, yammer, wikis and more.  Yammer implemented firm wide but working outside of the fire-wall raised eyebrows and certainly was of great concern to IT and we were greatly amused by the idea of a Yam Jam.  The need to drive IT to manage cultural shift away from fear of sharing was high in everyone’s minds.  At least one person found it frustrating and pointed out the difficulties in not being the owners of our destiny and thus needing to take a place in the IT queue which placed CRM ahead of KM.  We needed more time to talk about wikis vs intranets vs web but I heard enough to think I could find a use for an internal team wiki.

 I confess I came straight back to work and checked out http://digbig.com/5bfnkn a great blog by Austin Hunter on how he as a non social media user was able to use Yam Jamming as a way to discuss business priorities. 

Concern about corporate memory and impact of its loss came to the fore.  (Is corporate memory becoming an eroded value asset?)  So too did the mix in old business values re new highly mobile bright social media communicators.  This works well when we can ensure diversity in attitudes to work and life balance and boundaries. It’s good when oldies can understand young folks’ need to publicise all they do, and young ones understanding oldies need for boundaries between work and personal life in return!   

We all felt strategic reviews were happening more frequently and not always with good reason.  They shouldn’t’ be driven by panic.  Some felt them hard to endure and wondered what the end game was but others had found them positive and resulting in the creation of exciting new opportunities, directions and ways of working.

Our delicious breakfast (eggs benedict, full veggie borough, boiled eggs with marmite soldiers and more) nourished us for the day and also nourished our minds.

Economy and change - I'll say it again "Economy and Change - and did I hear outsourcing?"

Breakfast at Roast Restaurant this week ended with a vox pop of the eleven replete breakfasters.  The question asked was: "In one word, what has had the biggest effect on your daily work in the last five years?"   We all thought, wrote down our word and then said it out loud:  economy, change, economy, enterprise2, change, outsourcing, change, outsourcing, transparency, market research, change!  So four for change, two each for outsourcing and economy (surely related in some bizarre spider web way) and one for the rest.  There was consensus that the speed of change was the highlight.  It will be interesting to see who has what to say on that topic next week.

 

Earlier, while delectable kippers, old-fashioned boiled eggs with marmite soldiers, lush eggs Benedict and copious quantities of coffee were consumed the conversation focussed on the many things that occupy our working (and sometimes waking) hours.  Change of course had featured then as well.  A recruitment freeze was seen as both positive and negative in that it encouraged managers to think smarter as teams got smaller.  That tied in with showing demonstrable ROI when new systems or ways of working were introduced.  Decision making surfaced both as a positive (where prompt and effective decisions were made) and as a negative where failure to make decisions is like a weight around our necks impacts on progress.  Decisions lead to change - keep change positive - give colleagues credit to understand why change is needed, keep communication lines open and include them.  There was more of course - at times intense and at times we roared with laughter.   

 

Want to know more?  Come to a Sue Hill Recruitment Networking Breakfast.  You won’t be scrambled or boiled - just the eggs will be. 

 

- Sue (Hill)

 

 

Working 9-5, what a way to make a living

I hope you're now all humming the fabulous Dolly Parton song. That'll get the blood pumping on a Tuesday morning.

However, it seems that we are heeding Dolly and fewer of us are working the standard 9-5 office hours now. Was reading a LinkedIn blog about Bert Martinez, CEO of a business-training firm in Houston, who has decided to blow away the five-day workweek for himself and his staff of 28.

Starting next month the entire company is going to work for four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days, and the company’s workweek will stay that way if productivity and profits stay the same or increase. Martinez wants to spend more time with his family and is curious to see whether results stay the same.

This kind of compressed working week has also become more common over here in the UK. PricewaterhouseCoopers introduced the compressed working week in 2000 and believes that it has been a big benefit in terms of staff retention.

Compressed working weeks tend to involve either working 10-hour shifts for four days a week - leaving a three-day weekend every week - or working a nine day fortnights -  80 hours over nine days (working perhaps four and a half days each week or five days one week and just four the next) to have a two-and-a-half-day weekend every week or three-day weekend every other week.

It has obvious advantages in that workers get an extra day a week (or a fortnight) to spend however they choose while still preserving full-time income. Commuting outside the usual hours generally leads to a less stressful journey. However, compressed working weeks lead to long days and can be exhausting - not much point in having an extra day off if you just spend it recovering from the other four!

I know a few dads of young children who are doing compressed weeks and they love having that extra day to spend with their children. My friend Steve feels it's really helped him to bond with his twins, now two, and he likes the break in his working week. It also helps that his partner can go out to work without having to pay for childcare (times two) for that day.

Myself, I'm not sure I'd be able to take the hit of longer days to enjoy the day off, if I worked full time which happily I don't anymore. I would also be reluctant to give the children longer days at the childminder as it would be tiring for them.

What do you think? Is the compressed working week a good option or are other flexi-time options better? Is the 40-hour Monday to Friday too entrenched in the national psyche to change anytime soon?

- Fiona

 

What don't you know, that you don't know?

What you don’t know that you should was brought home to me quite clearly this morning at our regular Roast Breakfast. We operate Chatham House rules so can only make broad statements about the discussions that evolve from having eight or nine senior people with different approaches to and backgrounds in information management talking about what currently concerns them. Today everyone was asked to say in just three words what their three biggest issues of concern were.  The list was interesting:-

• Too much admin

• No budget yet again

• Cloud computing, scary

• What to keep?

• Slow decision making

• Business acumen

• Outsourcing, headcount, law-suits

• Local, national elections

• Lack of mid-range jobs

Thinking of law suits. Three people at the table were quite frank and related stories illustrating the dangers of non 'information ethical' staff abusing copyright and the interesting causes and effects.

One firm's non info team happily shared passwords and the information person present spent an inordinate amount of time trying to educate them about copyright and getting them to desist. Time has a cost which people often forget.

Another was cheerfully using and re-using data that a client had legitimately paid for and illegally passed on. A naïve individual rang the source to ask for some updated input and the cat was suddenly out of the bag. As it was too politically difficult to ask the client to pay up, the firm took a hefty slap in the pocket that could have been avoided, had the information specialist been alerted to what was happening. The partner concerned was forced to take the hit on his budget as a 'subscription' or fine!

And finally at another firm as well as illegal sharing of passwords research reports, that had been bought and paid for, were stored centrally and reused (which was outside the terms of the licensing agreement), resulting in an expensive lawsuit from the vendor. This led to the closure of the central resource and certainly raised the profile of information management and copyright issues within the company!

In each case the information person who worked in the organisation worked hard (pushing water uphill) to try to explain the intricacies of copyright to senior individuals who either didn’t get it or didn’t see it affected them. Having found out that such things went on, their concerns now are what else is going on that they don’t know. Lawsuits have a way of focussing the mind.

Taking responsibility and accountability for not only service strategy, but also staffing decisions and resource purchasing decisions helps move along a strategy. The road block in decision making that can scupper many a new project is management by committee, playing to the inability of managers to take ownership and some would say leadership. 'Common sense is the most underrated attribute' as is presenting and talking in plain English. Being explicit in educating staff and colleagues on the ethics of using and sharing information is vital and necessitates plain language that cannot be open to misinterpretation.

Do you know what you don’t know? If not - what is your plan to find out? - Sue Hill with input from Nicola Franklin and sue Edgar

Well, isn't it a lovely day...

... as Gorky's Zygotic Mynci once sang. And while my patio isn't quite on fire, the sunshine is looking pretty tempting today.

Being stuck in an office, staring at the sun out of the window and knowing you're going to be inside for the entire day is incredibly annoying, particularly if it's forecast to rain at the weekend. Four out of five respondents in a BT survey described themselves as 'unmotivated' knowing that they will be stuck indoors while the sun is shining, and 65 per cent even claimed that the lack of exposure to sunlight made them 'depressed'.

So what can you do to stay motivated when the sun is shining? The most obvious thing is to use your lunch hour to get a bit of vitamin D. Go for a walk or a run, go and sit in the local park for a bit or head to a cafe with outdoor seating. It never ceases to amaze me how many people stay at their desks with a sandwich when it's a lovely day. It may go against prevailing long-hours office culture but getting some fresh air and a proper break is more likely to make you more productive in the afternoon and any boss who can't see that is a fool. 

BT were actually encouraging their workers last summer to take advantage of the growth of remote and mobile working technology and work outside. While that's quite appealing it seems to me to have a number of problems: finding a safe and secure location to work in with reliable wifi; keeping track of employees; covering the phones or the enquiry desk; getting a headache from squinting at your laptop screen. Also, it seems that mobile working is currently on the decline, as fears over possible redundancies make workers want to be "seen to be doing their job" in the office.

So while wifi and an ice-cream on the beach seems to be unrealistic for most people, a lunchtime stroll will have to do. Go on, if last year is anything to go by, it might be the last bit of sun we see all year!

Lazy, bad mannered or just plain selfish?

Just every now and again I could scream.

Every day we hold interviews to enable people who are job seeking to register and come and present to us not just their credentials (Passport, ID checks etc) but also to chat about what they want so we can make a good match.  We offer Saturdays too as we know not everyone can get here during the week.

You would be surprised how many people don't bother to turn up and can't, don't or won't make the effort to phone, email or wite to let us know or to apologise.  If my team are prepared to give up a Saturday they expect people on the list to show.  Last week there were three who couldnt be bothered.  Particularly annoying as there was a waiting list.  How selfish is that?   Could we trust those people to turn up at a job interview?

On the day the snow was deep and crisp and even and not even London's buses were running, we had an interview candidate arrive on time who had walked to get here.  Good to know the world isnt totally going to pot.

On that note I am off for a little r&r.

Is your CV ready?

You’ve probably heard it said before but it bears repetition, ‘treat your CV as a marketing document’, and what is important about all marketing?  It’s current.

I have told many people how essential it is to have an up to date CV ready to roll and recently I was required to practise what I preach when I was required to submit my CV as part of a tender with a tight deadline.  I hadn’t updated my CV in almost four years and had in fact lost it, so with a sigh of resignation I was faced with a blank A4 page and the problem of trying to calculate what year I graduated.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that half an hour later I was done!

Keeping on top of your CV is important but it doesn’t have to be tedious or time consuming. We recently helped someone find a new job at a government agency.  When we spoke to her about the job the deadline for application was the following day and her CV was nowhere near current; ‘I will send you an updated version in a week or so.’  Luckily she was persuaded to bring this to the top of her to-do list (a subject close to Fiona’s heart) and a week later rather than sending us an updated CV she had already been offered the job.

Time management and to-do lists

I confess, I am a to-do list addict. At the start of each day, I optimistically list everything I need to do and then I'm generally disappointed to get to the end of the day to find that not only have I only achieved about half of what I had planned but that I've accumulated several new items as well. I then add everything undone for that day on the next day's list and so it feels like my to-do list is never-ending.

What to do then, work harder or give up the lists altogether? I was delighted to read these simple suggestions on to-do lists in This Column Will Change Your Life by Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian on Saturday. I am hopeful that they will finally enable me to get the lists under control...

• Keep two lists a "master list", which you should never expect to "finish", and a daily list, created by selecting tasks from the master list.
• When making the daily list, pick the three or four most important things, and really commit to doing them, even if you think they'll take you only a couple of hours.
• The daily list should be a "closed list": new work floods in constantly, but don't add it to the current day's list unless it's an emergency: keep that list "closed" and add the incoming items to the master list.

Happily my favourite activity - adding tasks you've already completed for the joy of ticking them off - is allowed!