Threat of redundancy forcing us into unpaid overtime

posted at 17:00:32
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

The BBC is reporting that we're up to our usual tricks again - working too many hours overtime and not getting paid for it. From the article:

According to the TUC the average amount of unpaid overtime was more than seven hours a week, and workers were missing out on an average of £5,000 of pay.

£5,000? That's a lot of beer tokens!

I've written before about the state of UK working hours and our lack of Lack of enough public holidays in the UK so now it would appear that company's are using the current economic climate to eek even more work out of us.

Great.

We have some of the longest working hours in Europe and now, because we may all lose our jobs at any given moment we feel the need to stay chained to a desk for no extra pay. Plus you may still get made redundant even after all that hard work.

Mr Barber added: "Long hours are bad for people's health, and employers should never forget that each extra hour worked makes people less productive once they are over a sensible working week."

So, if your boss asks you why yo....

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Aug

26th
2008

UK National Holidays - are we getting a bad deal?

posted at 18:11:03
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

There was no post from me yesterday as it was a Bank Holiday here in the UK, which got me to thinking - how do we fare in terms of holidays compared to the rest of Europe/The World?

I was all prepared to say how hard-done-by we are but the research I did was quite enlightening. The main problem is sifting through all of the available information on the Internet to find the relevant stuff!

Please note that the following table is based on the data that I found and chose to use. There is actually quite a big discrepancy is the data available - not in terms of holidays allowed/given, but in terms of how long we work.

I've written before that we Brits often get a bum deal at work, and some of the studies I've found prove this - others say that we do as little as 34.5 hours a week! I don't know how there can be a difference of 14 hours, but I guess it depends on the data that you've got available and the type of workforce you're looking into.

Anyway, the chart below details working hours and National Holidays - it doesn't include any reference to paid holidays that you may be entitled to. For instance, I get 26 paid days leave a year with my current job (4 of those need to be kept for the Christmas period), in my last job I think I had 18!

T....

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Aug

19th
2008

Jargon Warning - it may be heading to your office soon!

posted at 09:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

It's summer, your boss has just returned from holiday and all of a sudden all of this new jargon and buzzwords fill the office.

The reason?

Your boss has been reading management books on his holiday!

The BBC has an interesting article on some of the new jargon that could be heading our way - and if you're in the UK you may not be able to avoid it even if your boss isn't in to that sort of thing. David Cameron has a list of books his MPs are required to read over the summer:

David Cameron has set a reading list of 38 non-fiction books for Conservative MPs to work through on their sun-loungers.

And he's not the only boss who'll be dropping new buzzwords and outside-box thinking. Recent years have seen a spate of books marketed at managers, often from the worlds of "behavioural economics" and pop psychology, and yours may be the latest to enthuse about nudges, tipping points, wikinomics, or - for those behind the curve - long tails.

38 Books? Well, I get that's the reason MPs in the UK get about 6 weeks off then!

So, what sort of claptrap are we going to have to put up with?

Th....

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Jul

2nd
2008

UK Firms failing to train staff

posted at 09:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

An article on the BBC website states that 1 in 3 firms aren't bothering to train their staff and not only that, they missed out on £15 million (approx $29.6 million) free funding from the governement for their staff so they didn't even have to shell out any money in the first place!

About £15m of government funds set aside for work-related training has not been taken up and has been reallocated, Skills Secretary John Denham has said.

Companies are often bemoaning the fact that their staff are useless and inadequate in their jobs and yet fail to train them using their owen budget or government funding.

Quite often, especially with the financial constraints that are being placed on business, training is the only reward that employees get and it's a shame that they (well at least a third of them anyway) are obviously missing out.

Companies need to realise that money isn't the only thing that keeps us working for them - it's respect and an opportunity to improve too.

Jun

26th
2008

Spending a penny costs a packet

posted at 15:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

I just read an article on the BBC website which caught my eye - which isn't suprising as it's headlined "Row over firm's toilet break rule".

The issue us that workers aren't being paid to use the toilet, they have to clock on and off when they want to have a comfort break:

...The employee, who asked not to be named, told the BBC that a single toilet break could take up to 10 minutes.

"We have to clock out, take off our wellies, overalls and hairnets, we have to run up stairs, have to come back in get dressed again," she said.

The factory manufactures (or packages, the article isn't that clear) food for a major UK supermarket chain so I can understand that it's awkward trying to preserve health and hygene regulations (hence the 10 minute loo break I guess!) but just because it takes that long (which it has to if all legal obligaitons are to be observed) doesn't mean that the staff should be penalised surely?

If you think about it, say you went an average of 3 times a day (and remember my maths is really bad so I'm probably going to work this out all wrong):

Average number of working days per year: 260 (I read that figure somewhere!)
Number of bog breaks a year: 780 (260 x 3)
Time spent going to the toilet: 7800 minutes or 130 hours
Min....

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Jun

17th
2008

Money isn't the key to worker happiness

posted at 09:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

A recent article on the BBC website caught my attention - Money 'does not make staff stay'

From the article:

A strong interest in the job and a good work-life balance are more important to workers than the size of their pay packet, a survey suggests [...]

"Companies can no longer rely on those established reward-and-recognition policies that fail to resonate with employees," said Bob Coates, managing director of City and Guilds.

I think I can agree with this in part - an employee will not stay in a job if they are unhappy, overworked or surrounded by horrible/useless/iritating/back-stabbing co-workers however I disagree with the fact that companies can't rely on reward and recognition.

We recently held a staff survey and one of the things that came out of it was that we'd like to be recognised more by managers and co-workers for work that we do for them. It doesn't have to be a monetary thank-you, a simple spoken "Thanks" is often enough.

Companies need to understand that rewards and recognition do not necessarily mean cash (which in this troubled financial time they can little afford) it could be something simple as a free lunch for the team that worked on the project, time off in lieu or a fancy certificate - whatever best fits the staff and the organisation.

Mind you, ....

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Jun

11th
2008

RSI costs UK 300 Million GBP a year in lost Productivity

posted at 16:15:55
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Business

Scare tactic headline? Not according to Microsoft.

A recent article on Ars Technica called "RSIs on the rise, says report, but prevention is simple" states:

According to Microsoft, RSI costs UK businesses around £300 million [approximately $590 Million US] a year in lost productivity, and the European Trade Union Federation estimates that the condition affects nearly a third of workers in the EU.... Published peer-reviewed studies^* put the overall incidence in the population at between five and ten percent, but for certain professions this can rise as high as 40 percent.

Crikey! 40 percent of for certain professions?? The mind boggles. Can you imagine if nearly half your workforce went down with something they can come back and sue you for - not to mention the cost of having them all off sick.

As more businesses turn to computers t....

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