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There’s enough in the current Andy Gray saga to make a new drama series – so much so in fact, I almost wonder if that’s what Sky are up to. Though there are enough conspiracy theories abounding at the moment without me adding to them.

It is right that he was dismissed. His sexist comments may have been made when he felt he wasn’t being broadcast, but they were very much made while on duty. Sexism should not be tolerated; his repeatedly stating that women were unable to understand the rules of football, and asking a female colleague to tuck a microphone down his trousers in front of smirking male colleagues, rate pretty highly as sexism.

Sacking someone as high profile as Andy Gray, the star of Sky’s football coverage, sends a clear message to the rest of the organisation – that sexism at work, by anyone, will not be tolerated. Not only should this encourage more women to believe they can actually progress in a career as a sports official or sports reporter, but should also discourage those with bigoted views from the same path.

That said, the saga does also touch upon whether, even in cases of gross misconduct, it is possible to exit an individual with dignity. Watching Sky News last night I was struck with the official statement from Sky that Andy Gray’s behaviour was “unacceptable and offensive” and they had “no hesitation” in sacking him. No mention, on last night’s 6pm news bulletin from the broadcaster that was his employer for some 20 years, of his past service. Again, what message does this sends to the young, aspirant individuals who aspired to achieve Gray’s success? Is such an unseemly exit the reward for reaching the top and staying loyal to one organisation? It’s hardly a carriage clock. Yes, he needed to go. But surely there was a better way of doing it?

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When was the last time you heard someone seriously fretting about Generation Y attitudes at work? And I mean seriously, not simply anecdotal asides or pointed tutting. I’d bet it was about, oh, 2008. Around the time many consultants had to find alternative employment, and HR and management suddenly had far more important (ie, real) things to worry about.

It was a bugbear of mine back then. I must admit to falling into the age category typically cited for Generation Y (only just, mind), so naturally being yoked with a set of mostly negative age-defined characteristics rankled somewhat. But it was always more than that. It just seemed lazy, somehow – or worse, scaremongering based upon a fear of the other: ‘Those kids that lurk outside the local school scare me, therefore I don’t want them in my workspace.’

There was a more positive, well-meaning reason of course. That, because of a different societal and educational upbringing, young people were ill-prepared for work and needed help acclimatising. This wasn’t necessarily false, merely misguided – it has and will forever be the case that someone entering a new situation with new rules and social dynamics needs time and help to acclimatise. But mostly it was the premise that Generation Y were somehow unwilling and incapable of fitting in at work. Forgetting, somehow, that work and organisations (not to mention the need for a salary) shape people; it takes a long time for people to shape work and organisations. We were all young once, but it’s funny how soon we forget it.

I recently saw my first Generation Y-related story for ages. Rouen Business School professor Jean Pralong carried out an inter-generational study on 400 students and professionals, showing that workplace attitudes between Generation X (roughly those born between 1959 and 1980) and Generation Y are the same. More similarities were found in workplace attitudes and approaches between workers in Generation Y and Generation X than there were similarities between students in Generation Y and salaried workers in Generation Y, showing that context creates a far more significant link between these groups than age.

“For economists, a generation is constituted of people who confront the same conditions at work,” said Pralong. “The study showed that no difference exists between 25-year-olds and 45-year-olds at work. This shows that on a scientific level, Generation Y doesn’t exist.” Apparently, Pralong undertook the study because he realized that most perceptions of Generation Y were based on anecdotes told by managers or recommendations by consultants, not on actual research data.

The sad thing is that, come the next economic boom, we’ll probably start fretting about a new generation once again. And I’ll probably be old enough by then to agree with it all…

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Good news! So what if a fifth of the 2,000 employees surveyed by the CIPD report an impending round of redundancies and 50 per cent of public-sector workers are bracing themselves for job losses. The news is that, compared with the previous quarter, job satisfaction had increased significantly – people are happy once again!

Actually, it’s not that simple, says Ben Willmott, CIPD senior public policy adviser. “When faced with an uncertain outlook, employees place more value on simply having a job than they do during more benign economic times.” This phenomenon is being called a “fixed grin”. That it has widened, Cheshire Cat-like, in the last quarter, suggests things are not getting better any time soon.

But while times aren’t booming, are they really that bad? When Lord Young had to quit his government advisory position recently for saying us Brits had “never had it so good” during this “so-called recession”, I could see where he was coming from. After continual diatribes in the media about the recession having been the worst since the Great Depression, unemployment has never come close to the levels of the 1980s – the years when Lord Young was in his political pomp.

The 1980s was a less severe recession, economically speaking. Most recessions have seen GDP growth dip briefly between zero and minus one before popping above the water again. The 2008-9 recession saw GDP growth plummet below minus two for six months, lasting a record six quarters. The difference this time, much highlighted by the CIPD, is that companies have clung on – they held onto staff through flexible working, rather than making mass redundancies.

However, the growth we’ve all been waiting for, has never quite built up a head of steam. It’s currently at 0.8 per cent - small, not unhealthy, but not enough. An elongated period of minimal growth with little spending, risk taking, or investment means that those companies who’ve been clinging on begin to fall. And the government’s austerity cuts over the next four years (front-loaded so the majority happens in the next two) will see £81 billion of government spending removed from the economy.

I’ve begun to notice signs of what you might call a stagnant economy. Not the woes of out-of-control unemployment, nor the highs of a boom – just flat. My walk to work takes me up streets that used to bustle with office workers clutching cardboard coffee cups, but they’re now a little less bustling. Windows look into large open-plan offices, empty except for the detritus of office life hurriedly left behind. I’m hoping the companies in them have simply moved on to bigger and better premises. I fear, however, they may be companies who could cling on no longer.

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At a time when the whole country is being axed… sorry, asked to spend less and do more, it’s all too easy to forget about advances in technology and the vast array of things we could spend our budget on, if we had one.

First, why pester people with a plain old A4 CV, when you can send a virtual one? And not just any virtual one, oh no – one that looks like something out of a James Cameron film, with a mini hologramatic you walking around with CGI special effects whirling around.

Imagine how much more fun Monday morning would be if you had an inbox full of these to go through, rather than Word documents that occasionally try to wow you with a wacky font. Don’t then think about the practicalities of candidates being able to assemble a team full of IT-wizards working on every aspect of a CV, nor the fundamental need for a CV to convey information that’s both succinct and to the point. No, that would just spoil the fun.

Second, to quote the press release, “You have been ‘fired’ - ‘let go’ -‘terminated’ - ‘exited’. There is no nice way to put it. Right now you may be sitting in an office or even a coffee shop wondering how to react, what to do next?” It’s an important question and a depressing predicament, especially for those who measure their money in terms of beverages.

But wait, it continues: “For the price of a latte and less than a pint of beer you download the app from the Apple iTunes Apps Store to your iPhone and then click on it and it immediately gives you over 10,000 words of practical advice about the situation and your rights and entitlements.” The app in question is called ‘I’ve Been Fired!’, and is the latest from HG Apps Store . Perhaps the next time you have to announce a redundancy, you can soften the blow with “but don’t worry, there’s an app for that!”

And finally, a new piece of kit from BIG ideas inc is a mobile phone interface that “allows users to chat via video and text, upload and view presentations and join discussions, disseminate information to an entire workforce and empower information and innovation sharing". This sounds eminently sensible. Indeed it’s the type of thing that only three years ago we imagined we would all be using by now.

The sad thing is that businesses, most hit by forces they had no control over, now have no money to spend on such nice-to-haves. And it would be nice to have, wouldn’t it? To be able to invest in new technology that unifies the workforce, and keeps everyone instantly in touch? Sadly at the moment the public sector is more likely to return to chalk boards and typewriters, while those lucky enough to own an iPhone could be heading to the app store.

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This is for anyone who visits London on business, or any other city that has or is planning a bicycle hire scheme, and is about to embark on their maiden voyage. These tips should stop you from making all the mistakes I made yesterday lunchtime:

DO bring a spare top or T-shirt. Cycling, astonishingly, can make you sweaty – arriving back at work with your sweaty work shirt stuck to you, like cling film to a leg of lamb, is deeply unpleasant for all concerned.

DO keep deodorant at work – see above.

DO check the weather before you go out. Rain is bad. Especially when travelling at speed. It will make you even wetter than sweat glands alone can manage.

DO bring a raincoat – see above.

DON’T plan on visiting a bicycle shop at the end of your journey with a discount voucher for said bicycle shop in order to purchase a helmet, if you have forgotten to bring the voucher for said bicycle shop with you. It kind of renders the whole trip pointless.

DON’T plan on also dropping off dry cleaning en route, without first checking that the nice cheap dry cleaning shop that you once went to still exists. Cycling around on your maiden voyage, wet, with no helmet, is already unpleasant – doing so with (ironically wet and uncleaned) dry cleaning in a bag, is worse.

DO plan a route, including which “docking station” you will pick your bike up from, and which to drop it off at. Cycling blindly around seeing the sights is good if you’re a tourist - not if you’re rapidly eating into working hours.

DO stop and inform your boss, or client, whom you should currently be meeting, via mobile telecommunication to inform them that you will be late.

DO have your lunch before setting off. When arriving late to your meeting, wet, smelly, your shirt stuck to you like cling film, with wet dry cleaning in a plastic bag, it only makes matters worse if you promptly tuck into your lunch in front of them.

DON’T stop these tips from signing up to the scheme though; it’s great. Just as long as you’re not an idiot, like me.

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At last the government has given some detail on its idea for public-sector co-operatives.

Back in July, Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office, made a plea for “answers on a postcard please!” to how mutuals in the public sector might work. Clearly, he received a bulging mailbag. The other week he announced 12 “pathfinder” pilot schemes: “trailblazing” public-sector providers who have decided to give mutual ownership a go. While the exact structure of each is unclear (they are, after all, experimental), they are united in the aspiration to be part employee-owned and/or employee-run.

The UK has traditionally been shy of such models. Their reputation took a bashing in the 1970s when Tony Benn recommended that workers in failing businesses formed co-operatives. Many of these came to messy ends – most notably Meriden, the erstwhile owners of the Triumph motorcycle brand, which spluttered to a halt as a co-op in only a few short years.

Yet that was then. We don’t have to look far for successful, long-lasting mutuals. We have our own John Lewis, of course. And Spain’s seventh largest business, The Mondragon Corporation, is a co-operative wholly owned by its circa 85,000 employees. It is actually one large co-op made up of around 150 smaller co-ops. Within the corporation, workers vote on key business decisions and an elected board is directly answerable to a workers’ committee. Research has found five times as many Mondragon workers feel involved in major decisions compared with equivalent private companies, and are much more engaged as a result.

Adapting such models to the UK’s public sector is, however, arguably very different. While a centralised bureaucratic system is an unruly beast, it is one beast. Would many separate and necessarily single-minded organisations create a whole jungle? We may have had social enterprises working on the periphery of the public sector for a while now, but they can be run with the same hierarchical ruthlessness as any private-sector company. Co-operatives and mutuals, with all the democracy and employee empowerment they entail, cannot. Would this slow the public sector down, or speed it up?

I’ve been working on a feature article looking at how established employee-owned mutuals and co-operatives throughout the UK run their businesses, and manage their HR – I’ll report back on that at a later date. But it has left me with many questions. Top of which is this: if this initial trickle of 12 public service bodies reforming as mutuals turns into a torrent, could it change public service provision as we know it?

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I was pleased to learn that BT and the Communication Workers’ Union have come to an agreement on pay, thus avoiding strikes. Perhaps it’s the good weather that’s put everyone in a conciliatory mood.

People Management reported on Friday that an “unprecedented” 9.3 per cent pay increase over 39 months has been agreed between the company and the union. BT’s initial offer – a 2 per cent rise this year and 3 per cent next year, plus a lump sum payment – had been rejected by the union.

Given current market and economic conditions, an annual increase of around 3 per cent is pretty impressive. Indeed, perhaps even a risk on BT’s part. The double-dip believers out there would have us think that while the worst may not be yet to come, we may at least see a return of the… even the basic argument causes me to lose the will to finish that sentence.

But the thing that tweaked my interest about the new BT pay deal was to do with how much its directors get paid. Now of course company executives and directors get paid a lot - and for very good reason. But having recently trawled through a number of company reports while researching a feature, it’s the year-on-year hikes that really stand out.

Against a backdrop of quibbling over a 2 or 3 per cent pay rise for the rank and file, from 2009 to 2010, BT CEO Ian Livingston’s total remuneration package increased from £1.174 million to £2.105 million. Not only that, but Gavin Patterson, chief executive, retail, increased his from £698,000 to £1.113 million; and Hanif Lalani, director, global services, went from £805,000 to £1.166 million… in fact, barring those that were either recently appointed or recently retired, all the directors seemed to have got rather large reward increases.

I should be quick to point out that BT is by no means unusual in this regard. Most companies I’ve looked at have acted similarly. And a 1 per cent pay increase to several thousand workers affects the bottom line rather more than upping a handful of directors’ pay by several per cent. Yet the year-on-year-on-year increases in executive pay across big business appear self-perpetuating. As one company does it, the others feel they have to do the same to keep pace. Meanwhile, quaint notions such as David Cameron’s 20:1 pay differentials seem further removed from reality. I don’t ask why we are paying our directors such extravagant sums. I ask, why are we raising the bar every year?

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It’s admittedly clichéd to write about the cultural differences between Americans and the British. The “two nations divided by a common language” thing is often overplayed. The similarities are far more evident, certainly in terms of current HR challenges. The call to do more with less, the same uncertainties over economic recovery, the concern over government cuts – all shared burdens no matter which side of the pond you’re from.

But maybe it’s the packaging that’s a little different. First, scale. I was forewarned about the size of the SHRM conference but, until you walk into a conference hall the size of an aircraft hanger filled with 11,000 people, you don’t really know what that will look like. Second, I’d also been forewarned about the enthusiasm of American audiences. So what is there to get enthusiastic about? Well, for one, seeing the SHRM president and CEO both take part in a glee club-style song and dance routine on stage, made to look as if it had spontaneously erupted between some stage hands. Many of the audience jumped out of their chairs and spontaneously joined in. The enthusiasm is contagious and the pride in the profession is tangible. People are happy to be in HR, happy to be among others in HR, and happy to dance accordingly.

However, some things are admittedly a little strange to British sensibilities. After their dance, both the CEO and president proceeded to open the conference by thanking their families, expressing their love for them, and the big screens around the aircraft hanger beamed pictures of their family, several generations of which were dutifully lined up on the front row. If attempted in the UK, such platitudes would be drowned out by the sounds of disapproving tutting. But the US audience, at least the few thousand sat near me, found it genuinely warming.

The lack of cynicism, for better or worse, is palpable. When an army veteran addressed the throng to tell them that “nothing could be more honorable or inspiring” than HR, and that HR professionals “bring light where there was darkness, and hope where there was fear”, no one seemed overtly embarrassed by the hyperbole.

Other quirks include speakers’ regular name-dropping of former inspirational presidents (in every session I’ve been to!) and a notable edge of BP-bashing (understandable given the very real effect the disaster is having on the American coastline, but possibly not always balanced given the track record of the oil industry as a whole). There’s also very real concern over the implications of President Obama’s healthcare reform, signed into legislation on 23 March this year. And not necessarily from a political standpoint either. The statement that this is the biggest change that has hit HR in America in 50 years, as one session speaker put it, was met with grave nods of agreement. Now there’s a topic that really does highlight the differences, not the similarities, of Americans and the Brits. One I’ll be writing about at a later date.

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Don’t worry non-football fans, this is one for you too. Actually, I probably lost you at the headline, didn’t I? In which case, welcome football fans, here’s an HR take on the World Cup so far!

It is already the tournament of upsets. And it’s looking more than likely that at least one of the big powerhouses of European football will not even make it to the knock-out stages. France, England, Spain and Italy have all started dreadfully. So bad were the former two, that there has been talk of dissatisfaction and disharmony in the camps, fall-outs with the management, players sent home and coaching staff quitting. In the French case, with a squad stocked with players who already boast bulging trophy cabinets, it certainly has far more to do with the clashing of egos than quibbles over technique and tactics.

There’s a clear issue over management of “top talent” and motivation here. It seems to me a classic case of the strength of the team versus the power of the outstanding individual. Of the four teams I just mentioned, a colleague of mine asked: “It is any coincidence that they are the highest paid at the tournament?” Good question. In fact, football in New Zealand, which drew with current World Cup holders Italy on Sunday, is an amateur game. As such, a small number of their players need to hold jobs outside of football to pay the bills – something the Italian stars have likely never experienced. The kiwis’ main motivation is the pride of playing for their country and enjoying their involvement in the sport’s foremost competition. It is proving to be the best motivating factor by far.

It’s not only the players – England’s manager Fabio Capello is the highest paid in world football, on a contract worth £6 million a year; it’s fair to assume his counterpart on the Algerian bench on Friday night was paid substantially less to achieve the same result. And New Zealand manager Ricki Herbert is, according to BBC Sport, on a basic annual salary of £25,000. That is far less than the average English Premier League footballer’s weekly wage.

So how do you get the best out of your star performers? Brazil also has some highly paid superstars. Yet one of the most famous, Ronaldinho, was left out of the squad for the simple reason that he was no longer seen as a team player, known more for individual flair rather than work rate. The players that strict disciplinarian manager Dunga has on the field are not necessarily the best players his nation has to offer, but they are the best team.

As for the success so far of Maradona’s Argentina, with dangerously flammable egos at every turn? Well, some explanations are best left to the (hands of) Gods.

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A press release has arrived reminding me that “in 10 months’ time, new fathers will finally gain the right to request six months paternity leave, bringing the UK into line with much of Europe”. That reminder came courtesy of “cloud services provider” Star. Other, erm, cloud service providers, are available I’m sure.

I’ve blogged my thoughts on increased paternity rights before, and why I’m all for it. But I was intrigued as to the “bringing into line with the rest of Europe” comment. It’s true that the UK’s current two week offering for fathers is pretty paltry by continental standards – and shocking that fathers had none at all in the UK until as recent as 1999, pretty much the last EU country to do so.

Now here’s the thing: other countries tend to pay parents more for their leave. In Norway, for example, parents get up to 44 weeks with 100 per cent pay compensation or 54 weeks with 80 per cent compensation. Of these, six weeks are reserved for the father.

Six weeks may be rather short of the UK’s impending six months. But there are plenty of naysayers at the moment saying that fathers won’t take such lengths of leave - and I’m inclined to agree. But it’s got nothing to do with any notion of males clinging to their masculinity or being work obsessed. It’s just down to economic realities. How many workers can afford to take months of unpaid or minimally-paid leave? Minus from that the amount who could still afford it with a new child to pay for, and you’re left with very few.

How many Norwegian fathers take their month and a half of leave to look after their newly born? Ninety per cent. And 17 per cent would like to take more leave than allowed by the regulation.

It’s not the UK’s length of parental leave that needs bringing into line with Europe. It’s the pay.

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