Give her a break

Gill, my wife, works as a locum pharmacist. The other day she arrived at one of the large supermarkets (J Sainsbury) where she sometimes works, to find that the pharmacy kettle had disappeared. She found it in a cupboard with a tape stuck over it saying "do not use."

There was a note explaining that all electrical equipment in the store needed to be checked before it could be used. A check would cost £200 and, since new kettles were on sale in the store at £20, the management had withdrawn the kettle from use. Staff were being asked to use the canteen instead.

All well and good if you have breaks built in to your work. But this isn't the deal with locum pharmacists. If they take a break the pharmacy must shut down - since the presence of a pharmacist is a legal requirement - and the supermarket, which has a contract to provide 100 hours a week pharmacy cover, doesn't want that to happen.

So Gill must work the whole shift without a break and now, it seems, without a cup of tea. She used the kettle all the same. What else can you do when faced with such ridiculous measures?

These are the sort of everyday issues in the workplace that never come to the attention of the boardroom. They were the sort of "petty" things that led to strikes in the past when unions were stronger. Except they are not petty. These are basic issues that matter to people. Every employee should have an opportunity for a break

Recruitment just became sexy

Everyone, it seems, had an opinion on the latest series of The Apprentice. Suddenly we all have something to say on recruitment. After 14 years my patch has just become sexy. It's been a long wait.

After reading many of the comments I decided the subject had been flogged to death so have avoided it in my upcoming Thursday FT column which, instead, will have more to say on social networking.

I do, however, have some sympathy with the comments on CV cheating in this item on the Recruitment and Employment Confederation website. It doesn't say much for the recruitment industry when one of their own is caught out in this way.

A curse on work or an online aid to collaboration?

I don't know much about Zappos.com except that it is an online shoe retailer and that every member of the Zappos staff has a presence on Twitter.com, a social networking site. Why, you may ask? Social networking sites burn time among company employees. They must be banned.

If you have time to switch channels for a minute to the Donkin Life blog you can see the raw product of some discussion after my first attempts at twittering (although some may argue I've been practicing all my life). Jon Ingham and David Creelman make some interesting points. Note Jon's point that the Zappo twitterers (or tweaters) also include customers. Imagine the power of constant customer-employee dialogue. Just like it used to be before companies discovered the economies of online business.

Life and Music

You may be familiar with the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their South Park cartoon creation. I'm not a fan of South Park but I do like the way that Parker and Stone have used their animation skills to illuminate these short passages from the lectures of Zen guru Alan Watts.

The first of these, Life and Music, is particularly thought provoking if you are following a career in the City. It's worth thinking about.

Ending the "sickie" culture - investing in health

I seem to be writing quite a lot on health just now. It has become what HR people like to call a "hot topic." To keep up with developments I went along this morning to a conference called Healthy workplaces: building staff morale and measuring the impact on your bottom line" co sponsored by the Confederation of British Industry and AXA PPP Healthcare.

Susan Anderson, the CBI's HR policy director,had the latest results from the annual CBI AXA absence and labour turnover survey for 2007. The figures are very similar to those the previous year.

While absence fell on average from 7 days a year in 2006 to 6.7 days in 2007 the reality is that, for all the added attention given to absence management in the last few years, average absence levels in the UK are now only about a day and a half lower than they were 20 years ago. The public sector average is 9 days. All this adds up to a direct cost to the economy of £13.2 billion and indirect costs (including resulting loss of customers, goodwill etc) of around £20m.

Crap jobs

Susan noted that there was a disproportionate amount of absences on Mondays and Fridays - the days that are attached to the weekend, leading to suspicions that some people feign sickness in order to have a long weekend off work.

So what's to be done about it? I doubt that much will change until employers begin to get at the root of the problem. What is the problem? My own analysis is pretty simple: too many crap jobs, too much bad management.

Good mangers care about the people they work with. They care about workloads, they care about job content, they care if someone is troubled by something and they notice. It's called empathy.

Bad managers

Bad managers care only about their own agenda, meeting their budgets and sucking up to their immediate boss in order to get a promotion and more money. They think that nit-picking and micro-management is sensible.

Susan asked the conference delegates if anyone had ever "pulled a sickie." Not many hands went up but among those who did own up was Dudley Lusted, head of corporate healthcare development at AXA.

He recalled a time early in his career when, after the clocks went forward in the spring, he found it difficult to get to work on time. His boss was not pleased and after it happened a third time in the same week told him that any further lateness would result in his dismissal. Lusted slept in again the next day and, not wanting to lose his job, called in sick.

Why work sucks

Funnily enough I had read almost the same story in a book I am mentioning in my FT employment column this week. The book, Why Work Sucks And How To Fix It (yes, it's American) promotes the novel idea that people should be rewarded for their results rather than the time they spend at their desks.

If that were the case then a lot of these absence statistics would be a nonsense. Who would care if you were at work or not, so long as your work was completed?

I left full time employment seven years ago. In that time I have been ill a few times but I have managed to juggle my work commitments and deadlines around my illnesses. Am I lucky? Not entirely. I invest in my health through undertaking regular gym sessions.

Delegates were asked how much they spent on employee health annually? Only one of them knew - Lusted again: some £100,000 a year among 2,000 employees. That comes to an annual spend of £50 per employee.

Fit for work

In my business - that's me - I spend £500 per employee: me again. That's roughly the amount I pay to undertake regular gym sessions in order to stay fit and that means fit for work. This is important to me because I aim to play the long game in work. I don't like the thought of retirement. It should be noted that this is an investment in time as well as money. Since my time is expensive it's a big investment but it's non-negotiable. I consider it an essential business cost.

Lord McKenzie of Luton, Parliamentary under secretary of state at the Department of Work and Pensions was also speaking, much of it related to support for Dame Carol Black's recent report calling for "fit notes" from General Practitioners among other things.

I asked him why, when some people invested in their own fitness to ensure they could work and contribute to the economy, could they not set their fitness expenditure against tax? Why, if employers subsidise gym membership for their employees, is this contribution treated by HM Revenue and Customs as a "benefit in kind," in other words, a taxable perk?

Lord McKenzie's reply was disappointing, something about lines needing to be drawn, but he thought there might be scope for better tax treatment for those using a gym for rehabilitation.

This is just the kind of outdated thinking that ignores the need to transfer our health system from one that is focused on cures to one that focuses instead on prevention.

Managing creative people

I receive a lot of management books in the post and the quality is generally poor. Some are simply promoting a consulting business and others are dense or badly written with the kind of diagrams that have more arrows than a Roy Rogers film.

But this week I found a book that was so good it could have produced two columns. Gordon Torr's new book, Managing Creative People, discussed in this column, is well written and stimulating.

Reading his description of genuinely creative people I began to think that they are so much a part of the awkward squad that they would be too hot to handle for the kind of management that exists in most companies today.

Mickey Mouse

He doesn't have too many kind words for the Disney corporation, the supposed home for so many creative types, other than the subversive revelation that Micky Mouse smokes Marlboroughs.

Overall, he left me feeling pessimistic about the possibilities for truly creative people in big companies. I agree with his comment that "There is hardly anything in this world as offensive to most people as an idea they haven't thought of themselves." I've had ideas and I've seen this in reality.

Just occasionally, however, someone likes an idea, and, even better, is prepared to run with it. But the creative individual should never interpret this enthusiasm as "loyalty to self." It is loyalty to the idea. Torr describes this relationship well. It's not cuddly. Sometimes its cruel, but making ideas happen is a tough business. Those that succeed, perhaps, were meant to suffer.

Rare breed

I once spent an illuminating couple of hours chatting with Sir James Dyson at his home in London. After all his success with the Dyson vacuum cleaner he was still angry at the memory of all the difficulties he had to overcome. He is a rare breed, an inventor who is also a businessman. He brought his products to market through sheer persistence and will, negotiating the minefield of patent law and facing down the kind of competition that would gladly have seen his ideas strangled at birth.

Could I have imagined Dyson as a trainee at Hoover? Never in a month of Sundays. They couldn't have contained him, and that's the real issue for creative people, because most managers, shaped by their company cultures and structures will run a mile from great ideas.

Companies say they want to be more innovative, that they want people to "think outside of the box." No they don't. That's what factories and offices are for - they're boxes for people and generally have little more scope for self-expression than a goldfish bowl. Ideas go in the suggestions box. You're supposed to feel privileged that someone will look at your idea.

That's no way to handle creative people. If you know you're brimming with creative talent, take my advice, go your own way.

Processed lives

Two views of office work. I notice that one of the labels refers to Chiswick Park, a complex I featured here.