I have just read an article listing the top ten issues for executives in Australia at CEO Online.Wow did I have to laugh at some of what is there. Whilst it is a serious matter for many companies, the interest of executives in the short term bottom line has meant that they have many problems. A number of these which are the doing of past hasty managements decisions.One I had a seen at first hand is the lack of employee loyalty especially of new recruits. Now let men see, there was the J Curve and the recession we had to have(an Australian phenomenon) which gave a lot of current employees a taste of employer loyalty when things go bad. Now I fully understand that it was a difficult time financially and a number of good people, were hurt badly in all of that.

The problem is that those people and those that lost out in the dot-com crash and no they were not all IT junkies, what about the HR and other admin staff of those businesses, are all a little gun shy of employers good deeds.

Many see that employers are having a good year or two or three and some a lot more, yet they have had little financial gain in the big picture, and remember some CEO’s of businesses that bit hard into there employees in the 90′s are now enjoying a largesse of being CEO’s in good times.

What we have is a distortion, a CEO who might have had a $1M package in 1990 has a $7M to $10M package, hmmm 700% to 1000% pay rise whilst an employee has had a modest gain of 25% or even a really good fortune of 50% so for doing more or less the same job as then his $45,000 is now $65-70,000. This employee is saying well it’s only now you want to adjust my salary to a better package after I am leaving even though I asked for a better package over the last 4 pay reviews. Now how is he actually supposed to be loyal. Oh and because he applied a bit more pressure in the last pay round he knows if you have an opportunity you might want to just take him off the payroll, I mean lets face it some one younger, who probably is cheaper can do the same thing after all. Employers are having trouble of loyalty, well have a look around and make sure your people are having some good reasons to be loyal.

Do you train your managers, do you train your staff? The in principal idea of the training guarantee was good, the implementation was crap, but do you realistically spend anything like that amount on training?

Do you try and make your workplace family friendly?

Do you know your employees or if you are so big is it important for your managers to know for you about their staff and making sure that home and work are in balance. I know for many its a case of I did 80 hours starting up, and now I hope you are getting your rewards. Your employees are not as risk driven, that is why they are employees, not the competition. Make sure they are fairly rewarded and make sure you and you managers are looking after them.

I could say “Don’t worry those pernickety employees they will have their day as soon as this current boom is over”. That is one way to do it

What will your choice be?

See ya round

Peter

This would have had to been one of the best cases of people clearly not well managed. They clearly have not been taught to use email effectively, sure everyone is basically blaming it in the technical event but what we have here is two failures of management.

The people managing this server clearly don?t know what they are doing, no that is not the techo’s that is their managers. Why did they authorize this without a suitable test plan, and who let them use a mail server as a list manager. I know Notes is a great system and capable of lots of good stuff but a long time ago some very smart guys wrote mailing list managers that sent messages out to large groups of people very efficiently and kept everyones details nice and safe. Management has failed here not the technology or the people that work on the systems

Hopefully they are going to learn, but expect to see another issue like it again in the press, lets face it until it is perceived as a risk to the business it wont get funding.

See ya round

Peter