Apparently, I’m old and dangerous

Peter Honey | 2 Jul 2009 | 11:29

According to the Office for National Statistics, for the first time there are more people aged over 65 in the UK than there are people aged under 15, and the fastest growing age cohort is the over-85s. The problem is that rising life expectancy is coinciding with low or falling fertility rates - and this is an economic time bomb. At present in the UK there are four people of working age supporting each pensioner but within, say, 30 years this will have fallen to 2.5 people.

Soon I will be 72 and, assuming I get to 85-plus, I am not only going to be a nuisance but, according to one report I have read, I shall be dangerous. Actually there are three Ds: doddery, dependent and dangerous.

The gloomy prediction is that us oldies, many with inadequate pensions, will not only be an economic burden but we will be competing with you younger folk for increasingly scarce resources – jobs, housing, exhaustible fossil fuels, food and water, the NHS and so on.

Solutions are easier said than done, but here are a few:

• old people should work until they drop (the participation rate for over-65s is currently only 7 per cent – and that includes me);

• we should boost labour output with more working women and/or more immigrants;

• we should invest heavily in lifelong learning so that an ageing population develops new skills and remains competitive.

The population time bomb may be every bit as serious as climate change. Doing nothing certainly doesn’t seem a sensible option. Or am I just being paranoid?

Self-service IT can give your career a boost

Keith Rodgers | 23 Jun 2009 | 17:11

Don’t tell your finance director, but we’ve finally got confirmation of something we’ve all long suspected: almost half of HR managers keep a crafty eye on their CV when they’re deciding which business software or services to buy.

This was one of the findings from a recent survey of 100 UK HR directors and managers, in which 44 per cent of respondents admitted that expanding their personal experience and enhancing their CV were important factors in helping them determine whether or not to invest in HR software or services. The surprise wasn’t so much that these self-serving instincts play a big role in corporate software selection – it was more the fact that so many senior HR professionals had the guts to admit it.

The choices you make about business software and services are bound to have an impact on your career - a very negative impact if you get it hopelessly wrong and end up running some sprawling IT project that never ends, busts the budget and fails to deliver anything remotely resembling tangible value. And there are plenty of people out there who’ll have realised during their software selection process that shoving a major SAP implementation on your CV isn’t exactly going to hurt it. In fact, software and services play such an integral part in modern people management that there are very good reasons why you should boast about what you’ve done on the IT front, assuming you can translate it into some kind of business benefit. The only question is: are you polishing your CV at the expense of the greater corporate interest?

Thankfully, the answer seems to be “no” for the majority of HR professionals. According to the survey, published by Webster Buchanan Research in association with Computers in Personnel, the biggest drivers for investment in software or services are improving quality of service to employees and managers, reducing HR admin costs and cutting IT costs – three factors that were each cited by almost nine out of 10 respondents. In addition, almost eight out of 10 respondents were looking to improve the quality of management information, and almost three-quarters wanted to free HR from its administrative burdens to provide more strategic input to the business.

This all helps explain why technology, such as manager and employee self-service, are grabbing so much attention in both HR and payroll. According to the survey results, 17 per cent of respondents now provide electronic payslips and a further 42 per cent plan to do so within 12 months – so if you’re not doing it yourself, you could soon find yourself in the minority.

Similarly, almost half the respondents planned to give employees access to their pay history online. A raft of other HR self-service initiatives are also in the pipeline, from recruitment to absence management to training.

Even if economic realities slow down the pace of self-service adoption (as they probably will), the findings suggest that the majority of companies now find the business case for HR self-service pretty compelling. And why not? You can cut admin costs by letting employees enter data and carry out routine transactions, and you can typically provide quicker services and better information access to everyone involved in the process. Achieve that kind of business outcome and, who knows, your revamped CV really might help to propel you to a better job.

Global unions such as Nautilus are the way to go

Iain Mackinnon | 18 Jun 2009 | 10:56

Whenever I tell people that I’ve been reading the Telegraph I get surprised looks. I work with the public sector so am careful never to declare my politics, but no one is likely to have me down as a classic Daily Telegraph reader.

Which is why I must explain that this Telegraph is the monthly journal of Nautilus UK, the Merchant Navy officers’ union, which I read because we do a good deal of work in the maritime skills sector. And the June edition is historic. The masthead has changed from the predictable and time-honoured blue to a more surprising orange – because Nautilus UK has merged with its Dutch sister, Nautilus NL, to form a genuinely international trade union, Nautilus International.

The logic behind the merger is compelling: shipping is an international business, so “the union for maritime professionals” must behave internationally if it is to do its best for its members. International trade unionism is hardly new, of course (that great stirring socialist anthem is called The Internationale, after all) but this is different.

This is a full-blown merger, with a single general secretary (initially a Brit, Mark Dickinson) and two assistant general secretaries, one each for the UK and NL sectors.

John Monks, general secretary of the European TUC, is quoted in the Telegraph as saying that Nautilus International is “the first genuine international trade union in Europe – and that’s a major step in an era of globalisation”. Brendan Barber, general secretary of the UK TUC, praised Nautilus for “redefining trade unionism”.

But it’s not just about structure, important as it is. It’s a different mindset. When I talked to one of the most senior people in the union a little while ago, when exploring the possibility that the current Maritime Skills Alliance might have to get close to one of the 25 sector skills councils to continue to get government funding, his question about the possible choice was disarming: “Which one is the most international?” It was a tough question to answer.

It’s hard to avoid the temptation to use a corny maritime metaphor – and I’m going to give in. I think this makes Nautilus a pilot, and shows others (not just unions) the way to go.

‘Man-cession’ recession hits private sector hardest

John Philpott | 17 Jun 2009 | 17:55

It’s one of my busiest days of the month again – the regular trawl through the official labour market figures published by the Office for National Statistics. The latest set is the most eagerly awaited for a while, given that they appear amid mounting talk of economic “green shoots” and offer a picture of the first full year of the jobs recession.

Sadly, anyone looking for serious good news in today’s figures will have little to grasp at. The recorded quarterly fall in employment and rise in unemployment still ranks among the worst seen in the post-war era. Vacancies are drying up at a rapid rate and redundancies go on rising. The grim news thus continues, though this is not unexpected given the dire state of the economy at the turn of the year.

There is little in the figures to suggest that unemployment will not rise above 3 million next year. The one glimmer of hope is the claimant unemployment count (ie, people signing on for Jobseekers’ Allowance). Not only is the count increasing much more slowly than might be expected but, remarkably, the number of people flowing onto the count actually fell in May. If indicative of underlying economic factors – rather than the result of the way in which benefits are administered or a reduced propensity for unemployed people to sign on at job centres – these claimant figures are amazingly good given what we know about the state of the jobs market, though too puzzling to yet be seen as a genuine “green shoot”.

As for the human impact of the first full year of the jobs recession, the stats are fairly horrible. In all, 0.4 million fewer people are in employment. The toll on the private sector has been horrendous – almost 0.7 million jobs have been lost. The public sector, by contrast, has added more than 0.25 million jobs (a 5 per cent increase) – much of it because employees of the RBS and Lloyds Banking groups are now being counted as part of the public- rather than private-sector workforce. Although, as the CIPD warned earlier this week, the public sector is likely to shed 0.35 million jobs in the next five years once government gets to grip with its massive budget deficit.

Overall, the burden of net job loss has fallen entirely on full-time employees. The total level of self-employment and part-time employment is broadly unchanged from a year ago. It has also generally been a “man-cession”. The redundancy rate for men has more than doubled. The number of men in work has fallen by 2 per cent, the number of women in work by 0.6 per cent. The number of men unemployed has increased by 45 per cent, the number of women unemployed by a quarter. This pattern is mainly explained by the relative buoyancy of part-time employment and the growth in public-sector employment, types of employment in which women are strongly represented.

Young people aged under-25 have fared far worse than the over-50s, though the latter have seen relatively larger increases in unemployment because they have fewer education, training or employment options if they do lose their jobs.

The manufacturing sector has shed 0.2 million jobs – a 6.7 per cent decrease. The other big job-shedding sectors are distribution, hotels and restaurants and finance and business services. These sectors each shed 2.8 per cent of their workers. While this was a recession triggered in the finance sector, as in most previous recessions it is the real economy, and manufacturing in particular, that has suffered most. The amount of job losses in manufacturing is also noteworthy because this is the sector which has shown the greatest effort on the part of employers and workers to seek alternatives to redundancy, such as pay freezes, pay cuts and short-time working. Without such welcome action the impact of the recession on UK manufacturing employment might have been far greater still. So we can after all take some comfort from today’s jobs figures: things could be worse.

Expenses won’t be abused if staff feel valued

Lou Burrows | 11 Jun 2009 | 15:35

Perhaps, like me, you’re sick of hearing about MPs and their expenses?

Perhaps, also like me, you’re quite intrigued by the range of reactions from people. Reactions such as:
- is it really theft if it's "just expenses"?
- is it really their fault if the system is so poorly communicated?
- isn't this just because they are not paid the going rate for their work and they have to make up the extra somehow?

Why do you know more about their expenses than you do about their recent voting decisions in the House of Commons? Perhaps you work in a culture where it is widely expected that people can claim for a few extra (non-existent) taxis or dinners. Or some nights away when they actually got the last train home.

The more I talk to HR people, the more I've been struck by what is tolerated in the way of expenses claims. I reckon there are a few aspects of culture that can promote a sense of financial responsibility.

First: whether people are trusted with cash. When I arrived at !What If?, I was told that we all sign off our own expenses up to the first £250 because "we can be 100 per cent trusted to take responsibility for the company's money – we are thrifty as if it were our own money".

I asked if there had ever been abuse and was told that in the past 10 years there had been only one person who had taken advantage and had to be spoken to. As we grow, we still find that trusting people to judge for themselves if a cost is appropriate is by far the best route rather than heavy controls.

Second: how we communicate about the cash. Every week we update the whole company on the sales results and the work in the pipeline. Everyone knows week to week how much work we are converting and how we are performing against our target.

Some might say there is too much information, but we think it’s really important that everyone understands how we are doing and can see the hard work paying off. They will be interested as we approach the profit targets as they know this will trigger profit share for everyone, regardless of role.

Lastly, I do think that there is something in the issue of being paid a fair wage for a fair day’s work. We Brits tend to shy away from conversations about salaries unless it’s the review period. Or perhaps a conversation is started when someone resigns over money. We need to change this and get comfortable talking about money. Making sure that people are being paid correctly is incredibly important to how they relate to the company and to ensure that they feel valued – and less likely to be looking for opportunities to “make up” for the value they feel they are losing out on.

Sir Alan Sugar as an adviser? Pull the other one

Peter Honey | 9 Jun 2009 | 13:12

I’ve never met Sir Alan Sugar in person but, even allowing for the distortions of an editor determined to up the aggro, his behaviour on The Apprentice leads me to worry about whether he appreciates what being an adviser to the government will be like. He doesn’t strike me as a man who has the temperament or the skills required to be an adviser. I see him more as someone who is comfortable issuing orders and, naturally, expecting them to be obeyed, rather than someone who offers recommendations and hoping they might be taken up.

Being an adviser is a frustrating business because, even though you know you are right, you have no authority when it comes to taking action. Advice inevitably triggers resistance – lots of it subtle and hard to detect – because the people who are supposed to be taking action usually see the advice as implied criticism.

Poor Sir Alan has already said something ill-advised that will put the people he aims to help on their guard, even if they have never watched The Apprentice. He said: “With all due respect to the people in Victoria Street [the offices of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform], they are what they are, they are civil servants, and they have never actually been in business. You have got to have someone there to guide them in the right direction.” Not, I think, designed to endear him to his new audience.

I can offer some advice to Sir Alan about being an effective adviser:

• ask people for their ideas (yes, even people who have never been in business) and work out how to build on them;
• make gentle suggestions, not dogmatic proposals;
• welcome criticism (preferable to acquiescence);
• understand the objections - they give you valuable information about where people are coming from;
• ask questions, rather than indulging in justifications; and
• remember that if your advice is rejected, it was your failure, not theirs.

I’m confident that this advice will not be heeded. But, unlike Sir Alan, I’m quite used to having my advice ignored.

An ode to John Denham

Iain Mackinnon | 5 Jun 2009 | 16:54

I’m sorry that John Denham has left the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills. Regardless of the politics of it, I rate John Denham highly as a man who really cares about making a difference for learners. I’ve only met him once, wearing my hat as chairman of Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College - I found him intelligent, thoughtful and genuinely wanting advice on the complex problems he was wrestling with. He wasn’t after quick headlines – and, thanks to a financial muddle in the Learning and Skills Council, most of the headlines his department hass got recently have been rather negative - and he seemed very much after changing the world. As I retain my schoolboy enthusiasm to do just that, I think that’s a good thing.

I praised him here a couple of months ago for trying to propel the agenda through his honest appraisal that the government can’t do everything, and his invitation to people outside government to form an intelligent partnership with him. No doubt he’ll find plenty of opportunity to follow the same logic in his new job as communities secretary – but I’m sorry he won’t be following it through in skills.

More European social policy? No thanks

Peter Reid | 3 Jun 2009 | 11:56

Some 20 years ago Andrew Moore, then CBI Brussels business bureau chief, introduced me to the wonders of the MEP’s daily allowance. Sitting quietly at the back of the Strasbourg hemisphere, I watched the unedifying sight of hundreds of MEPs filing in for a few minutes so as to claim their daily allowance. They left as quickly as they arrived, leaving a near-empty chamber echoing to their departing shrills. How the UK prime minister could have suggested an allowance system a la Europe as a response to the British MPs’ expenses debacle is beyond comprehension.

To many of us who love and deal with Europe on a daily basis the financial irregularities of the institutions are more than embarrassing, but we still try to hide them. This blog is far too short to do any more than list a few: the failure to have accounts signed off by the auditors year after year, the refusal of MEPs to reform their own bloated system of allowances, and the endemic abuse of MEP’s assistant payments for decades are just the icing on the cake. The abuse of allowances is legion. Any system that encourages corruption must be changed or ended otherwise it damages the legitimacy of the democratic process. Claiming reimbursement for a first-class fare on a second-class journey is wrong. No more, no less.

For some people, however, the exercise of power without real checks, balances or accountability and truth is the ultimate fraud. In area after area within the EU, grants and allowances are proffered for ill-thought-out schemes where there is no real assessment of their value. “Jobs for the boys” is just too polite for this abuse of power.

Enough of this depressing discussion that demoralises and undermines Europe – let’s turn to social policy. Given the collapse of working time talks last month, readers may have assumed that there would be no further European social legislation for a few months. This would give the new lot (commissioners and MEPs) time to formulate action plans and programmes. I assumed I would be writing an article letting the profession know that there would be “a year of nothing new”. How wrong I was. Step forward the social partners who have trotted in to fill the vacuum (as if we needed any more legislation). So now extended parental leave rights are being debated by employers and trade unions. The proposal raises the minimum entitlement to four months’ leave for parents with children under nine years old, which will have a direct impact upon the UK. European commissioner Vladimir Spidla stated that the proposals would “encourage more parents and hopefully more fathers to take leave and for longer”, while the employers’ spokesperson for Business Europe said that “approval of the agreement would send the right signal about the importance of social dialogue at European level, even in times of crisis”.

After 20 years of Brussels-watching, it is depressing to see that the European institutions are still more concerned with their own internal processes than the economic reality we all face. What about something to really help companies and organisations trying to keep their heads above the water? Do nothing. That’s right; it’s very simple and it would work. No reports, proposals or initiatives; just leave us alone for 12 months.

Oh, and please remember Europe is far too important not to vote on Thursday.

What are prisons for?

Peter Honey | 29 May 2009 | 14:49

I was shocked by the Baby P case: the mistakes, the denials, the fact that it had all happened before and, despite claims to the contrary, that previous lessons had not been learnt.

Now I’m shocked all over again at the outcry over the prison sentence given to Baby P’s mother. This wretched young woman has been given an indeterminate sentence “for public protection” with a minimum term of five years. This means that she has to serve five years, less the time she has already been in prison, before she can be considered for parole. There is no question of an automatic release. The independent parole board has to be satisfied that her continued detention is no longer necessary to protect the public.

Two children’s charities, the NSPCC and Kidscape, have complained that the prison sentence for Baby P’s mother is inadequate. The NSPCC said: “For the sake of Peter, and for the sake of children who are alive today and whose care teeters on the brink, this case should be referred to the Court of Appeal without delay.”

I can’t understand how giving Baby P’s mother a longer sentence has anything to do with improving the life chances of other children “whose care teeters on the brink”. Presumably the NSPCC believe that a longer prison sentence would be a deterrent to other negligent mothers.

No, rather than want a longer sentence for Baby P’s mother, I want to know why she is in prison at all. It can’t be to protect the public; it can only be to punish her and/or to rehabilitate her. Sadly, prisons do not have a very good track record when it comes to rehabilitating people. Removed from society, inmates usually emerge thoroughly institutionalised, dependent and less able to make decisions and cope with life’s complexities than they were before their incarceration.

So what do you think prison is for? I’d better declare my interest: I’m vice-chair of Prisoners’ Education Trust, a small charity that believes that offering prisoners access to education improves their self-esteem and enables them to choose a more constructive way of life, thereby making it less likely that they will reoffend. I very much hope that Baby P’s mother will apply to us for a grant but this may be a forlorn hope - prison is not by any stretch of the imagination a learning-friendly environment.

It’s the system, stupid

Peter Honey | 18 May 2009 | 14:52

We’re going to do some supposing.

Suppose you join an organisation and, as part of your induction, you are briefed on the system for claiming expenses. You are given guidelines that are, shall we say, open to interpretation.

Suppose, after a couple of months in the job, with lots of travelling and nights away from home, you want to have your expenses reimbursed. You go to the department that processes expense claims to collect the forms you need. The expenses you can claim for fall into various categories, some needing receipts attached and some not. It all seems rather confusing, so you seek advice. The official is helpful but rather offhand and more or less says that what you claim is up to you.

Suppose, still feeling unsure, you seek clarification from some experienced colleagues who have been with the organisation longer than you. They advise you to claim all the different allowances open to you. They assure you that everyone does this to compensate for salaries that are openly acknowledged to have fallen behind market rates.

Suppose, despite some misgivings, you act on the advice and claim all you have been told you are entitled to. Your claim goes through with no questions asked and the money is paid into your bank account.

Suppose you gradually get used to the system; it all seems normal and routine and your expense claims are never queried. Your job is demanding and you are very busy. You start to get “careless” and claim for some things that you know are iffy. No questions are ever asked – your claims, just like everyone else’s, always go through on the nod.

In the light of all these suppositions, what would you do if, suddenly, your expenses were challenged and you were asked to justify them?

I bet you’d blame the system.