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HR: A Different Breed
Feb. 27th, 2008 11:20 amA few of you might have noticed a news item in the UK yesterday about an employee at Legal & General having his appeal for wrongful dismissal turned down.
Peter Hopkins had taken L&G to the tribunal after it sacked him for appearing as "Mr Hocus Pocus", a children's magician entertainer, while off sick.
Journalists, being the lazy fucks they are, covered this story as presented, focusing on the hocus-pocusing, as it were.
But the reality was more interesting.
Hopkins was not "off sick", but was on extended sick leave (six months' worth). L&G was reported as saying that a human resources officer happened to be at the christening party.
Yeah, right.
In fact, L&G said that the HR officer was "surprised to see Hopkins well enough to perform as Mr Hocus Pocus."
The attempted implication from L&G was that the officer was surprised to see Mr Hopkins. The truth, I suspect, is that the HR officer went to the party knowing full well that Hopkins would be there, because Hopkins had been "off sick" for a long time, and had already received an official warning for appearing as an entertainer when "ill".
But, why lie? Or, rather, why fail to declare the truth that this was a planned operation rather than a chance encounter?
Well, there's the small possibility that this was a chance encounter, that a member of L&G's human resources team just happened to be at the party and just happened to recognize a man in magic gear as an L&G employee who was off sick. But, well, that stretches credibility.
More likely is that L&G's HR department lied because that is what HR people do. Their entire life is based on lying to staff, and it gets so ingrained that, given a choice between lying and telling the truth, when it doesn't matter one way or the other what they say, then a lie is what they will select.
If L&G had said that "we thought this guy was at it and we caught him. That saves the company lots of money in sick pay", then shareholders would have applauded and most staff would have said "good, he was a lazy bastard and now we won't have to cover for him". Instead, they dress it up as something that "just happened".
+++++++++++++
Royal & SunAlliance has gone insane. For more than 10 years, ever since the merger of Royal Insurance and Sun Alliance, Royal & SunAlliance had gone ballistic if you referred to it as RSA. It took them a couple of years to work out if they were Royal & Sun Alliance or Royal and SunAlliance or Royal and SunAlliance, but they were quite adamant that they were not RSA.
So, journalists abbreviated it to R&SA.
Today, the company decided that
Well, what do you expect from a company that with a straight face can invent a subsidiary called (sic) More Th>n?
History is not on Royal & Sun Alliance's side. I suspect that the reduction is implemented because people within a company always refer to their company by a shortened name. Since they assume that the rest of the world thinks as they do, they see no difference between RSA and Royal & SunAlliance.
Unfortunately R&SA is not the centre of our universe. When your average punter hears RSA, he isn't going to think of anything much -- although, if he does, it will likely be the Republic of South Africa rather than a modestly sized UK insurer.
Other companies that have made this mistake are Rio Tinto Zinc (became RTZ), Guest Keen & Nettlefolds (GKN), CRH (Cement Ltd and Roadstone Ltd) TDG (Transport Development Group).
The problem is, the three-letter initialism usually means nothing. As a rebranding, it's moronic.
More interstingly, companies that contract their name to an initialism tend to underperform the market after they have done so, or so I recall a piece of research in the 1990s showing.
+++++++++++++
I'm rereading Gladwell's "The Tipping Point". Initially I just glanced through it because I felt that in many ways it was not statring much more than the obvious, and I felt that it was somewhat overwritten with examples. On second reading, I can see that he is making some subtle differentiations of causation.
Anyway, this morning I was thinking about social epidemics -- in particular, marriage, babies, and divorce (and, quite possibly, death).
There are quite a few women on our floor who are "of an age". By that I mean, they are with a long-term partner and in their late 20s/early 30s, which is just about the "shall we have a baby" age in London.
One of these women is now pregnant. I foresee a social epidemic in the making here, and anticipate a raft of maternity leaves on our floor within 12 months.
I was having lunch with an old university friend a month or so ago and it struck me that the "marriage epidemic" strikes some circles, but not others. There's a crowd of six young women, all with boyfriends who are little different from the previous boyfriends they had the year before. One of them announces her wedding date. Suddenly, "the boyfriend this year" becomes the husband-to-be. Blokes are the same. One guy in a group of six gets married, and the group becomes five. Suddenly, marriage becomes an option. If one more of the group gets married, then the remaining four are hardly a quorum. So, they might as well get married as well. The group dissovles.
These are "tipping points" of a sort. Of a group of six, only a couple need to get married for the other four to cease to be a functioning group. If one of the group makes the decision, and a second man in the group was vacillating, but just needed a little push, then you zoom from one of the group getting married to five of them getting married (leaving, of course, Billy No-Mates as the bachelor looking for a new group of friends).
Does this happen with divorces as well? I wouldn't be surprised. And what about death? Is it perhaps possible that a sudden sequence of deaths at an old people's home is not a matter of bad hygiene, or poor care, but simply because a group leader kicks the bucket, and one of the others then follows. That reduces the size of the "group", so suddenly the majority of them give up the struggle to live another year.
____________
Peter Hopkins had taken L&G to the tribunal after it sacked him for appearing as "Mr Hocus Pocus", a children's magician entertainer, while off sick.
Journalists, being the lazy fucks they are, covered this story as presented, focusing on the hocus-pocusing, as it were.
But the reality was more interesting.
Hopkins was not "off sick", but was on extended sick leave (six months' worth). L&G was reported as saying that a human resources officer happened to be at the christening party.
Yeah, right.
In fact, L&G said that the HR officer was "surprised to see Hopkins well enough to perform as Mr Hocus Pocus."
The attempted implication from L&G was that the officer was surprised to see Mr Hopkins. The truth, I suspect, is that the HR officer went to the party knowing full well that Hopkins would be there, because Hopkins had been "off sick" for a long time, and had already received an official warning for appearing as an entertainer when "ill".
But, why lie? Or, rather, why fail to declare the truth that this was a planned operation rather than a chance encounter?
Well, there's the small possibility that this was a chance encounter, that a member of L&G's human resources team just happened to be at the party and just happened to recognize a man in magic gear as an L&G employee who was off sick. But, well, that stretches credibility.
More likely is that L&G's HR department lied because that is what HR people do. Their entire life is based on lying to staff, and it gets so ingrained that, given a choice between lying and telling the truth, when it doesn't matter one way or the other what they say, then a lie is what they will select.
If L&G had said that "we thought this guy was at it and we caught him. That saves the company lots of money in sick pay", then shareholders would have applauded and most staff would have said "good, he was a lazy bastard and now we won't have to cover for him". Instead, they dress it up as something that "just happened".
+++++++++++++
Royal & SunAlliance has gone insane. For more than 10 years, ever since the merger of Royal Insurance and Sun Alliance, Royal & SunAlliance had gone ballistic if you referred to it as RSA. It took them a couple of years to work out if they were Royal & Sun Alliance or Royal and SunAlliance or Royal and SunAlliance, but they were quite adamant that they were not RSA.
So, journalists abbreviated it to R&SA.
Today, the company decided that
As we move the business forward, it is now the appropriate time to simplify and refresh our corporate brand and name, and going forward we will no longer be known as Royal & Sun Alliance but will instead be known simply as RSA.
Well, what do you expect from a company that with a straight face can invent a subsidiary called (sic) More Th>n?
History is not on Royal & Sun Alliance's side. I suspect that the reduction is implemented because people within a company always refer to their company by a shortened name. Since they assume that the rest of the world thinks as they do, they see no difference between RSA and Royal & SunAlliance.
Unfortunately R&SA is not the centre of our universe. When your average punter hears RSA, he isn't going to think of anything much -- although, if he does, it will likely be the Republic of South Africa rather than a modestly sized UK insurer.
Other companies that have made this mistake are Rio Tinto Zinc (became RTZ), Guest Keen & Nettlefolds (GKN), CRH (Cement Ltd and Roadstone Ltd) TDG (Transport Development Group).
The problem is, the three-letter initialism usually means nothing. As a rebranding, it's moronic.
More interstingly, companies that contract their name to an initialism tend to underperform the market after they have done so, or so I recall a piece of research in the 1990s showing.
+++++++++++++
I'm rereading Gladwell's "The Tipping Point". Initially I just glanced through it because I felt that in many ways it was not statring much more than the obvious, and I felt that it was somewhat overwritten with examples. On second reading, I can see that he is making some subtle differentiations of causation.
Anyway, this morning I was thinking about social epidemics -- in particular, marriage, babies, and divorce (and, quite possibly, death).
There are quite a few women on our floor who are "of an age". By that I mean, they are with a long-term partner and in their late 20s/early 30s, which is just about the "shall we have a baby" age in London.
One of these women is now pregnant. I foresee a social epidemic in the making here, and anticipate a raft of maternity leaves on our floor within 12 months.
I was having lunch with an old university friend a month or so ago and it struck me that the "marriage epidemic" strikes some circles, but not others. There's a crowd of six young women, all with boyfriends who are little different from the previous boyfriends they had the year before. One of them announces her wedding date. Suddenly, "the boyfriend this year" becomes the husband-to-be. Blokes are the same. One guy in a group of six gets married, and the group becomes five. Suddenly, marriage becomes an option. If one more of the group gets married, then the remaining four are hardly a quorum. So, they might as well get married as well. The group dissovles.
These are "tipping points" of a sort. Of a group of six, only a couple need to get married for the other four to cease to be a functioning group. If one of the group makes the decision, and a second man in the group was vacillating, but just needed a little push, then you zoom from one of the group getting married to five of them getting married (leaving, of course, Billy No-Mates as the bachelor looking for a new group of friends).
Does this happen with divorces as well? I wouldn't be surprised. And what about death? Is it perhaps possible that a sudden sequence of deaths at an old people's home is not a matter of bad hygiene, or poor care, but simply because a group leader kicks the bucket, and one of the others then follows. That reduces the size of the "group", so suddenly the majority of them give up the struggle to live another year.
____________
