Osiris Training

Did you hear the one about the pizza delivery driver who saved a customer’s life? It happened in Memphis, Tennessee. Every day for the last three years this elderly woman, who lives alone, ordered a large pepperoni pizza. When she went three days without placing her usual order her regular delivery driver became concerned and called in to check she was ok. Unable to get an answer and looking through the window the delivery driver saw her on the floor so called the police who broke in. The frail elderly customer had fallen and unable to get up or summon help had lost consciousness. Now recovering in hospital she owed her life to her regular pizza or more accurately her regular pizza delivery driver. My initial reaction was not this is an example of the Big Society in action but only in the USA would someone live on pizza. Then I thought hold on this is a glimpse of the future when they is no  Home Help service for frail elderly people and the Meals on Wheels service has been privatised.

www.blairmcpherson.co.uk

What happens when managers stop thinking of staff as individuals?

Difficult and controversial decisions need to be made to deliver the required budget savings. The cuts will be painful and unpopular but” we have no choice”. It is all too easy to talk about pounds saved ignoring the uncomfortable truth that we are talking about individuals losing their jobs, struggling to pay their mortgage and losing sleep over mounting debts.

 Once we treat staff as numbers we dehumanise them we forget they are real people and treat them differently to how we would treat people we know and whose circumstances we are familiar with. This tendency to disregard people’s feelings simply because the decision was “inevitable” came to mind when I heard not for the first time of staff being told they were being made redundant by text. On this occasion it wasn’t an uncaring multinational or a get rich quick private company it was the British Army! On more than one occasion I have heard a public sector chief executive dismiss the concerns of staff about redundancies and changes in working practises with the expression “turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”. Perhaps this is a coping mechanism by some senior managers may be they think their ability to make unpopular decisions would be impaired if they were too close to their staff.

Clearly the decisions being made are financial and should be made on rational business criteria not be swayed by emotions but what happened to the idea that front line staff had a unique insight into the business? What happened to the concept of staff as a source of ideas on how the business could be made more efficient? What happened to the view that staff being closer to the customer could give real examples of the implications of management decisions? In other words staff unlike “turkeys” have a contribution to ensuring solutions are good in practise not just good on paper.

Staff will certainly be apprehensive about redundancies and antagonistic to changes in working practise which mean they work harder or longer for less pay. So negotiations will be tense but changes in working practices may be preferable to increased redundancies and criteria will need to be worked out for who is offered voluntary redundancy and who is offered early retirement as a way of reducing the number of compulsory redundancies. Staff may not be entering these negotiations from a position of strength but they do need to know their views are valued and that the range of individuals circumstances will be acknowledged. The point being staff are people not numbers and not turkeys.

Blair  McPherson is author of People Management in a Harsh Financial Climate and  Equipping Managers for an Uncertain Future both published by www.russellhouse.co.uk 

First the good news after years of procrastination we have finally put right the unfair pay differences between men and women. You can now look forward to being paid more for work that in the past has been undervalued. I think you will agree this is good news for the majority of women we employ and as women make up 80 % of our local government work force this is good news for a lot of staff. Now the bad news as you know the government has reduced our budget by 28% over the next 3 years. Rather unreasonably they expect us to make the majority of this saving in the first year. You will be aware that we are having to close some libraries, shut some day centres, sell off our newest leisure centres and with draw home helps from some fairly frail and vulnerable older people. Unfortunately to make the saving required we must also reduce our workforce. We have previously offered voluntary redundancy and early retirement to staff but the take up has not been as big as we hoped. We must now look at compulsory redundancies. As women make up the biggest share of the workforce they are more likely to lose their job. Sorry about this but it not just here it in all councils. The GMB union has surveyed 193 councils and concluded that 84,000 women face unemployment compared to 28,000 men. I know this must seem unfair but hopefully there will be more jobs in the private and voluntary sector like in care homes but obviously they won’t pay as well as we were going to. Sorry.

Blair McPherson  is author of An Elephant in the Room an equality and diversity training manual and Equipping Managers for an Uncertain Future   both published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

If U turns were always wrong then all we would need is leaders who didn’t listen and didn’t see!

Effective leaders don’t suffer self doubt but that doesn’t mean they never change their minds. So how do you know when to stick to your guns and when to re think your plans?  What is the difference between a leader who is focused and one who is blinkered, one who is strong and one who is simply ridged, one who demonstrates single mined determination and one who is stubbornly obstinate? When does that lack of self doubt become arrogance? Which voices should you listen to and which should you ignore?

Being prepared to change your mind does not make you a weak or indecisive leader. Being unable to make your mind up makes you appear indecisive and changing your mind based on whoever you spoke to last makes you weak.

People expect a leader to be explicit in what they want to see happen and prepared to give the reasoning behind their decision. People don’t have to agree with a decision but they need to understand the thinking behind it. And having heard your reasoning they may provide you with a new piece of information which may or may not cause you to think again.

Blair McPherson is author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

Two prominent sports commentators persistently make sexist comments to colleagues and guests off air. Why didn’t someone do something? Just as bullying and racism are present in the work place so too are those who watch it happening but do nothing. Often those present know instinctively what’s happening is not right but they do nothing to stop it. Why? Is it fear that they too will become a target of the bullies or is that they feel powerless in the face of the prevailing office/staff room culture?

We are not talking hear about physical abuse, overt racism or inappropriate sexual behaviour we are talking about the office banter, the sexist joke, the insensitive remark about a disabled person, the ageist assumption, the casual reference to the “Paki shop” or the inappropriate reference to someone’s sexuality. If you’re the only women, the only Muslim or the only disabled person in the team, if you’re new to the office or the most junior member of the team or if your line manager appears to collude with this behaviour reluctance to challenge is understandable. Staff on Equality and Diversity courses have spoken about their concern that they will be dismissed by colleagues as being PC and oversensitive and labelled ” difficult ” by their manager and accused of seeing offence where non was intended.

An organisation that states everyone is responsible for Equality and Diversity needs to teach people how to challenge appropriately, to challenge without damaging your career prospects or resulting in no one talking to you in the canteen/staff room. At the same time as we raise people’s awareness and instil a personal responsibility we must prepare people for retuning to the reality of their workplace.

 As part of taking the Equality message to a large group of front line staff the organisation I worked for ran conferences which involve workshops and a theatre group. The play takes a workplace situation and uses it to illustrate discrimination, prejudice, myths and stereotypes in the workplace. The play is set in an old people’s home and is about the induction of a new member of staff by someone who has worked at the Home for years. She has some rather negative attitudes to older people and is preoccupied with not catching anything from the residents. Our new member of staff is a male in a predominantly female environment he is also east European providing plenty of scope for the actors to explore attitudes to immigrants. As a new member of staff, Illich, has concerns about the care practice in the home and the attitude of staff to the elderly residents but he quickly learns that he is not expected to question the actions of experienced staff.  The manager of the home calls him in to her office to ask him how his first day has been he tries unsuccessfully to raise his concerns.  Illich remains in character to ask the audience how he should challenge both staff and the manager. Illich meets with the manager at the end of his first week and intends to challenge her about what’s going on in the home but he is on his probationary period and can’t afford to lose this job. The audience are asked to stop the action at any point and advise him what to do and say. Despite a large audience of over a hundred people participation is high people get really involved. 

When we briefed the actors we deliberately choice a setting that none of the audience worked in because we did not want people to get distracted by challenging the accuracy of the action, nor did we want people to think we were saying this type of behaviour was typical of their workplace.

Feedback was excellent.

Blair McPherson is author of An Elephant in the Room an equality and diversity training manual published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

The Big Society is dead strangled at birth by a government that failed to recognise that cutting Local Authority budgets would lead in turn to cuts in grants to voluntary groups. At first it was just naive government not to understand how financially dependent small local voluntary groups and community groups were on grants from local authorities. May be some in government really believed their own rhetoric about efficiencies and cutting back office cost but now it appears to be bloody minded ideological dogma. By now they have the figures they know that local authorities are the most efficient part of the public sector, they know cutting management posts by as much as 25% and combining Finance, HR and IT departments across organisations will only save a fraction of the money that is needed .A medium size authority cuts £10 million from its management costs but needs to find savings of £150 million over the next 3 years. What do they do? They close half their libraries, they close day centres for people with a learning disability, they reduce home help support to older people, they sell off the new leisure centre and they increase charges for cremation and burial. Naturally they want to keep these deeply unpopular cuts to a minimum, so they save money by reducing or removing grants to voluntary and community groups. The trouble is small voluntary groups exists on small grants take them away or even reduce them and they can’t meet even their modest over heads, the hirer of the hall, the telephone bill, volunteers expenses, the salary of their only full time member of staff, the cost of getting the minibus through its MOT.

Large voluntary organisations have been for some time replacing vulnerable annual grants with Service Level Agreements in effect contacts for taking over services which otherwise would be provided by the local authority. They can do this cheaper than the local authority if they pay their staff less, offer less generous holidays, sick pay and pensions. So in this sense despite the harsh financial climate the voluntary sector will survive but it will not be the small local voluntary, community and faith groups if will be the big voluntary organisations who will have a secure future providing services that were previously provided by the local authority. Which of course may be what was intended all along.

Blair McPherson is author of Equipping Managers for an Uncertain Future published by www.russellhouse.co.uk

It used to be that managers described themselves as “hands on”, now its hands off. Management styles like fashion go in and out of vogue. At one time every ambitious manager would describe themselves as “hands on”. This was management speak for someone who prided themselves on keeping in touch with the shop floor, who despite their seniority and busy schedules made time to meet and talk to front line staff and who expected to be kept informed and updated with regular briefings.

 At its best this led to management that was approachable, knew the business, knew what was happening and was very much in control. It could also be stifling as everything and to be shared with and discussed with senior management leading to endless briefings, little delegation, an aversion to risk taking and a drag on innovation.

The new vogue is for “hands off” management. In part this is a result of the current harsh financial climate which requires innovation if more is to be achieved with less money and in part it is the need to delegate decision making as a result of the reduction in the overall number of managers.

 Management restructurings aimed at cutting costs have resulted in fewer mangers and increased spans of responsibility. To cut costs a diverse range of services have been grouped together under a vastly slimmed down management structure. Middle and senior managers now find themselves responsible for services they have no professional background in this coupled with the size of their new Directorate means they have to be more hands off. The advantage is a loser grip which is more conducive to innovation, a fasted decision making process and so in theory a more flexible and responsive organisation. The down side is that managers know a lot less about what going on, are more reliant on others who have specialist knowledge and experiences they lack and are not sure who will be held accountable if something goes wrong. A good example of this is Children’s services where former Directors of Education find themselves with an expanded portfolio of services which now includes the highly sensitive child protection and social work services.

Fashionable managers will now describe themselves as” hands off” others may mutter about passing the buck and being out of touch.

Blair McPherson is author of Equipping Managers for an Uncertain Future and People management in a harsh financial climate both published by www.russellhouse