How Not To Deal With A Cynical Staff: Part Two

So in the last post you read the way our Director intends to address our attitude to the company. Here's what you might need to know and what we shouldn't need to tell him. No-one but you has ever read this.

(starts)

Dear Director,

It's clear from your recent mail that you are concerned about a number of factors that point to the level of morale and feeling of engagement amongst the people in the Loans business. But we don't think you have addressed them. Here's why.

Of course we can read the objectives on the Intranet, but that's the problem, the Intranet is nothing but PR fluff and regulatory box-ticking. Many of us are involved in the budgeting process, so we know that the business has real financial objectives, and none of those appear on the Intranet. What else are the management hiding? That's why we say we don't understand the objectives of the business - because we know we haven't been told what the real objectives are.

As for involvement in decision-making, we're also a realistic lot, so we don't expect to be involved in any meaningful sense in any decision taken in a business that employs over 100,000 people. We know that decisions are made mostly at your level and above on the basis of reporting that comes directly from IT and Group functions. We know that the majority of the implementation resources in the company - from IT to Branch - are taken by senior-level projects, so that proposals from business units can only be marginal in extent and effect. Except pricing. Is anyone going to ask us if we want to move office from (nice West End address) to the City fringes next year? We're pretty sure the decision has already been taken and we're just waiting for the official spin.

On the matter of training, many of us have friends who work in the Investment Banks, have been through the big consultancies and have worked in other industries, and know that companies committed to training are pro-active - they do not tell their staff that it is up to them to jump endless bureaucratic hurdles and persuade a senior manager to sign off on an external course or membership of a professional association. And what sort of company spends millions on new software and then leaves it up to the staff to decide if they want to get trained on it: The Bank did when it failed to incorporate training into the roll-out of Sharepoint. One more thing we're sure you're aware of: if the "training" does not enhance our CV's, we are not going to count it as serious. Training that is of value to The Bank is likely to be of value to another employer, and we know how interviewers regard internal courses and Intranet training - because we recruit people ourselves.

Sometimes we answer as we do because you are not asking us the questions we need you to ask, so we punish you for that. Of course we have read our job specs and filled in Balanced Scorecards. And of course we know that all that is empty HR box-ticking. We know that because many of us are managers who struggle to explain, for example, to a junior analyst how they have a TCF responsibility. We know they don't, they know they don't, but the box must be ticked. We know what our jobs really are, what we don't understand is what that reality has to do with the verbiage on the forms.

Of course we understand how our performance is judged - that's why often we don't approve of the results. But you don't ask us if we approve, you ask us if we understand, and the only way we can punish you for that is to tell you we don't understand. Actually, we don't understand how you could continue to use a system so obviously open to abuse, and that each of us have had experience of being abused by. In our experience, confident managers usually rate their people fairly, while weak or insecure managers use the process to get back at their staff.

As for the feedback on our performance, most of us have experience of hearing one thing in our appraisal meeting and then reading something entirely more harsh and damning on paper. Some of us are embarrassed by the fact that our recognition for someone's performance will not be matched in their pay packet. When there is neither significant financial reward nor development opportunity as a result, praise is cheapened.

Many of us have lost count of the number of Directors who have started their tenure by telling us how much they believe in personal development and then let it drop as they struggle to keep up with the demands from Board level. The ex-MT's have their careers pro-actively managed in the early years and the difference between their experience and that of a normal hire is salutary. We know how easily a manager can lock someone in - a simple "partially met" usually does it - and how few people move around and upwards. Of course we do not think anyone has serious opportunities for personal development.

ends

In the next post I'll explain why "hey, this is life in the modern corporation, just ignore it" won't really do as a mature and responsible response.

How Not To Deal With A Cynical Staff: Part One

Some background. Every three months The Bank conducts a staff satisfaction survey. It asks us a number of questions that the management want to ask, not that we want to answer (e.g. "Do you understand how you are appraised", not "Do you think your manager appraises you fairly"). For the last three surveys those of us in my business have been caning the management on the following:

a) Clear understanding of goals and objectives of The Bank (we say we don't have one);

b) Very clear idea of job responsibilities' (we say we don't have the first clue);

c) Understand how performance is judged (we say we don't);

d) Manager gives regular feedback on performance (we say they don't);

e) Sufficient opportunities to receive training (we say there are none);

f) Opportunities for personal development' (ditto);

g) Enough flexibility to provide good service (we say are you kidding?).

h) Involvement in decisions (we say, you what?)

When I say "caning" I mean our part of the business has come bottom of the lit. Three times. So this is what our director sent round - the third time.

(starts)

Firstly, thanks to everyone who took the time to complete the survey. I think this e-mail will demonstrate that it really does have impact and things do happen as a result!!

I have now had the opportunity to read and reflect on the scores from the very latest survey. On one level I'm delighted that we have moved up 12 points or 26% on the Q4 survey. However, the fact is that I'm still a long way from satisfied with the results and consequently it's really clear that the Exec Team and I have still got a lot of work to do! It is the most important thing to me that you all feel positive and motivated and I'm determined that we will react clearly to what the results are telling us.

Looking through the questions there are some simple things we will do to try and address concerns.

Turning to each question.....

‘Clear understanding of goals and objectives of LBG' - I would encourage everyone to take a little time on our Intranet pages to remind themselves of our plans. We want to be Britain's Best Bank as judged by being the most Recommended and we will do this by focussing on Developing Core Relationships with Customers. Our product is a key part of Core Relationships as our Franchise only acquisition strategy means we either create or retain a core relationship with every sale. I will also update on headline performance at our team huddles from now on.

‘Very clear idea of job responsibilities' - I have asked the Exec team to ensure that each person in the team is supplied with a copy of either their Role Profile if signed off or a job specification by the time we hols H1 appraisals. Anyone should feel free to shout up if they do not have the right level of clarity.

‘Understand how performance is judged' - I am re-assured that everyone now has a completed Balanced Scorecard on the system. This should be specific enough to give clarity around expectations for the year. These should be reviewed monthly in your 1-1's with your manager. Yet again, if this is not already happening please shout up.

‘Manager gives regular feedback on performance’ - There are four things that are/should be happening in this space. Firstly, your monthly 1-1 should, in part, focus on a review of what you have been delivering and should contain feedback on positive performances and opportunities to improve. Secondly, I am asking each Manager to have a quarterly discussion focussed around prospective ratings. Whilst these do not need to be submitted anywhere and I believe there is real value in a more frequent discussion. Thirdly, each of the Exec Team will ensure that all their team are involved in a discussion around how calibration actually works. This will help you understand how this operates to remove any 'mystique'. Finally, I will continue with the floor meetings to give updates on trading and financial performance as well as any topical issues.

‘Sufficient opportunities to receive training’ - In this space we now have an Induction Programme up and running and I was pleased to take part in the first session with around many new starters to the team. I am asking (name deleted) to issue details of how people can access training on line and we will look to build on the induction programme with a series of internal 'specialist sessions' that will be timetabled and available on a first come first served basis.

‘Opportunities for personal development' - This is more personal than the one above and one that needs to be on the agenda for every 1-1. In addition, everyone should take ownership for driving their own development and it is an integral part of everyone's scorecard.

‘Enough flexibility to provide good service' - I think there are two things to call out here. The first is the fantastic work that (name deleted)'s team are doing on complaint reduction which focuses cleanly on service improvement. I'll ask (name deleted) to share this work with everyone so you can all see our plans emerging and can all be assured that we have service at the heart of our plans. The second thing is that as part of the induction programme we are ensuring that everyone gets time out in branch and call centre, inc. collections, to understand our internal customer needs.

‘Involvement in decisions' - I think it's very important that you feel involved in what we are doing. The issues wall was great when we first moved to the 6th floor. We have established a working group under (name deleted) with all teams represented. In addition, we will have a drop in hour every other week where different members of the Exec are present to give updates and take questions or discuss issues. Coffee and tea will be on offer so we'll circulate the times/dates/locations shortly. We will rotate this around teams so every team has a session every couple of months or so in case there are particular issues for particular teams.

It goes without saying that we will ensure we manage these developments across all locations wherever possible.

Again....thanks for completing the survey and letting us know what we need to be doing.

(ends)

In the next post I'm going to put the reply everyone wants to send but no-one will. And in the post after that I'll explain why this kind of stuff is much more serious than it looks.

It's That Pollen Time Again

Every year I suffer it, usually worse than the previous year, and every year I forget it as soon as it's passed. Suddenly in the middle of the afternoon I will fell tired and incredibly reluctant to do anything - the willpower just drains right out of me. I can't string two consecutive actions together. I blame what I've eaten. I blame what time I went to bed. I blame myself. And I should be blaming the damn pollen. Because that's what it is. It lasts about eight weeks - April through May, maybe a bit of June. I fall asleep on the train - in fact, you should see my train in the evening once it's passed through Barnes: most of the carriage is sound asleep or knocked out, eyes closed, heads back, mouths open. Oh hell. And there is nothing the doctors can give you for it. I try the normal Boots antihistamine but it has no effect.

Anyway, I've been trying out the 3.2 MP camera phone on my new Sony Ericsson C510 and here are a few results. It doesn't cope with glare too well, but it's not bad.

First, a little place that does German sausages, fried potato cubes and sauerkraut, by Smithfield market...

Next, a pretty decent example of one of the best cars ever made, the Citreon DS21...

This is a cafe set up on the corner of Howland Street and Tottenham Court Road, Cilantro...

Some of the customers settle in for quite a while. I was there for an hour or so working on my new Asus netbook. I made a remark about his customer staying some time to the manager and he said that they had people who came in at 11:00am and left at 7:00pm, "they work here" he said. Like the lady in the last shot...

Those are medical textbooks she has on the table and that's a glass of water. I never saw what she had to pay for the seat.

The SAS Course I Really Need

For the last three days I've been on the SAS Essentials course. For the girl with a First in Maths from Kings who has joined straight from university, it's been a stressful time. She's had a lot to make sense of. Mind you, the brains that got her that First mean she is making sense of it quickly.

By contrast my grey head knows a fair amount of SQL and programming and I have a ton of muscle memory and preferred tricks about this stuff. The data I use is in SQL databases or spreadsheets, not SAS datasets, and I do all my report formatting, graphs and the like in Excel so it can be read across to Powerpoint. SAS has a lot of advanced analytics that Excel doesn't, but the chance of us ever using it is small - the audience wouldn't understand it. The SAS modules we have at work are the basic stuff - nothing fancy like data mining and time series forecasting. (Forecasting? What's that? I did more forecasting when thirty years ago in British Rail than anyone does here at The Bank.)

SAS isn't really a language - it's a command-line compiler that's grown like Topsy and now has a batch file  editing interface. So it has all sorts of weird notations (putting : in front of format statements when reading data but not when writing it) conventions and behaviours. The one about using an if-then with no clause after the "then" as a loop control device is something I'm sure not to do in future. As for those sodding semi-colons...

What I need is a conversion course. Throughout the three days I've been relating the SAS stuff to what I do elsewhere. Length statements are like dimensioning variables, but not quite as you don't have to Dim numerics. There's an analogue of the SQL select statement in Keep and so on. But it's been three days and we haven't done inner joins, which is presumably on the advanced course. Ah. another £5,000 or however much in the bank for SAS. I'd like to have covered that much in one three-day course.

The IT education industry has not yet caught up with the fact that their audience is split into two: complete newbies and permanent low-level users of anything, and the rest of us who have reasonable-to-serious chops in programming and data-handling in at least one tool-set. The first group need the basics courses, the second lot need to incorporate the new stuff into their existing knowledge. The courses are different.

Feeling Guilty About Inactive Weekends

I'm not getting out of the house a lot at the weekends. I used to, but I'm not right now. A quick trip to the local Sainsbury for food is about it. There are lot's of little reasons for this: the weather has been dismal for most of the weekends this year, nothing but grey skies until too late on Sunday afternoon; there hasn't been a lot on at the movies I don't see during the week; I don't have to go shopping for Stuff now that the house is more or less as I want it (for the moment); I don't have anyone to drag me out since the LTR ended all those months ago; and of course there are all those parents pushing those huge prams around, scowling at each other and pretending not to notice that their children are shouting, crying, yelling and generally behaving in a way that suggests neglect if not outright child abuse to me. Saturday is when they go out and I'm sure I've written about that before.

It's a little deeper than that. I really don't feel the urge to dash out and Do Things. My energy levels feel low and I have to say the thought of whatever I might do does not fill me with any particular zip. I used to man the phones at the AA call centre once a month, but the local phone rep stopped calling and the trek to Cynthia Street was a little depressing first thing of a Saturday morning, so I let it drop. I'm going through a period where I don't want to get away anywhere - first, because I always wind up coming along with myself and second, because why would I want to go away when I don't want to come back? (You either get that or not, it can't be explained.) 

Yesterday I woke up after eight good hours's sleep (as opposed to this morning when I woke up absurdly early) and my first thought was "I need to find another job". I think I'm avoiding something. I tell myself that I'll discuss the grading issues with my manager at the half-yearly review (if it's good, I have some leverage; if it's average or worse, I have to go anyway and there's nothing to discuss). I think I should be doing this and that - visiting old friends, a day at the beach, except that doing them on one's own is a little weird after an LTR. It's not that I think it won't be fun, it's that I think it won't change anything, and that means there's something I need to change, and I'm not sure what.

Or it could be that I'm just more comfortable being around me, especially since I've done the house more or less to my liking. One reason I used to go out was that it was depressing staying in. Given that I'm living in a white box at the moment, I'm not sure what that says. It's not terribly intimate but I do feel relaxed in it. Perhaps that's how it's supposed to be?

Michael Phillips' "The Undercover Philosopher"

There are a number of books based on the recent work by psychologists and experimental philosophers which look at the way ordinary people argue and make inferences. It's not a pretty sight. Michael Philips' book is as good as any of them (I've read a few) and if you don't know about Confirmation Bias, Anchoring, the Familiarity Heuristic or just how low the standards for science journalists are, then it is well worth the read.

However, there's one thing Philips and the others miss. People don't hold silly beliefs because they can't think straight. No. They don't think straight so they can hold silly beliefs. And people hold silly beliefs because it helps them define themselves, blocks out unwelcome facts and justifies their choice of goals and ambitions. Christian. Accountant. LISP programmer. Liverpool supporter and Oakland Raiders fan. Such people believe certain things to be true and have devout hopes that other things will be. Having a personal and intellectual identity that is not based on a core set of beliefs is right up there with triple-lutzes and the ability to speak six languages as requiring years of study, practice and the right genes in the first place.

If that seems hard to believe, then think about what it's like at work. The fact-free management strategies; the products launched without the slightest testing; the endless spin from HR, IR and PR; the need to go along to get along; the group-think; the staggering hypocrisy of the "corporate values". The opposite of science, said Lewis Wolpert, isn't art, it's politics. Policies must be seen to be right until their sponsoring Minister is relieved of her post, when the outgoing Minister's fact-free policies are replaced by the incoming Minister's fact-free policies. Everyone knows it's nonsense, but since everyone's jobs depends on it, everyone has to behave as if it's all true. This is known as "denial" in the trade, and that everyone knows they are professing twaddle only makes the denial more vehement and the peer-pressure more intense.

The spin and nonsense that pours out of politicians, bureaucrats, PR firms and corporate PR is not caused by an inability to apply deductive logic. It is a way of jamming the lines of communication, so that nothing of any significance can be transmitted. While the newspapers, bloggers and pundits are discussing the latest distraction or blatant codswallop, they cannot be laying out the facts - which would be far more damaging.

As for the more technical fallacies of reasoning explained in these books, there is no way that a GP or Health Service bureaucrat is ever going to understand that if the false negative rate of a test is nine times the prevalence of the disease, the chance that a positive reading means that you actually have the disease is only ten per cent. Because if they did, they would realise that testing for low-prevalence diseases is going to be very expensive if accurate and stigmatise way more people than it would save if cheap.

And if that paragraph meant nothing to you, or you didn't understand the calculation, then read Philips' book. Carefully.

Moving to the Cloud

I have taken my first tentative steps to using the Cloud. In other words, I'm slowly transferring my computer life from a housebound computer to servers situated God knows where but that I can access from anywhere at anytime. I read about Dropbox in Rands' blog about his favourite development tools and wondered about using it for on-line backup of the few files I really need to keep. I'd set up a Gmail account a while ago and had played about with setting up iGoogle, but not really got much further than making it a fancy personal portal. Reading a review of an Android phone, it seemed that Google had advanced since I'd last looked at it. So I went back to take a look.

It took me a while of experimenting to get the hang of it, but I've made the jump. Google co-ordinates with Windows and Mac, which is useful since I have a MacBook Pro and a Windows 7 Asus netbook. As always, before you do this at home, take backups of your Address Book / Contacts / Calendar / Mail.

I set up Gmail to collect the mail from all my other accounts, and my computers' mail clients to collect mail from Gmail. Two things here: 1) Make sure you leave the original on the server when your mail client downloads; 2) set up a rule to copy the messages from your Inbox to a local folder on your machine. Otherwise when you delete or archive the original in the Gmail Inbox, you'll lose the copies on your machine next time it synchronises. Don't forget to change the account you're sending the mail from to your Gmail account. After a while people will update their contacts and you can close down the other e-mail accounts. Don't do that, however, until you have contacted all the recruitment agents you have ever talked to and updated the contact details on LinkedIn, Monster and any other site you are on.

I set up Gmail contacts - use the Google Contact Manager gadget in Gmail - with all my contacts and then synced the Mac Address Book to it. Finally I set up a Google Calendar and an account for it in iCal.  So Google is acting as the central server for my mail, contacts and calendar. Again: I use the Google account in iCal to make appointments in the future, when an appointment is done, I move it from the Google calendar to a local one. So I have a record of what I've done on the Mac, but not on Google. I did this because the Google Calendar functionality for recurring events isn't quite as smart as iCal and I nearly lost the records of one recurring event by doing so.

I set up Dropbox on the Mac and Asus. Henceforth any documents I want to work on from multiple locations have to be stored in the Dropbox directory. And you must close the file you're working on before it will update from your PC to the cloud copy at Dropbox, ready to be downloaded to your other machine. Dropbox handles conflicts sensibly, so you won't lose stuff if you work on the document on two machines but for some reason don't update the copy on one of them first.

There's more involved than you might think, but it's less complicated than it sounds. The reward is that all your computers are using the same data and sync to your cloud server. There's still more tweaks to learn, but it feels good. And because I've set up an amazing iGoogle, I can go anywhere, log on and have my life in front of me just like that.

However, the To-Do and Notes are in my Moleskin cahier notebook and that's where it's staying. As one acquaintance said when I jotted something down "Wow, that's real old-school". It's also way, way, faster than trying to type it on your iPhone or even on your computer.

Happy Easter