My own experience of late is most things (in my work) have become tick box exercises rarely reflecting the reality. No one wants any answer other than one that ticks the box. Doesn't really matter if that tick box makes sense.
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This Business and Moment...
- Thread starter randomshenans
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My own experience of late is most things (in my work) have become tick box exercises rarely reflecting the reality. No one wants any answer other than one that ticks the box. Doesn't really matter if that tick box makes sense.
People change their response overtime, experience and situation - especially the dynamic individuals. A static psych test need to address that. I’ll change my response based on what is required due to the complex input of situation, environment and people.
Same for all the companies I have worked for.
I don't know what happened to coming into work, doing my job and going home. Instead of having all these tick box excerises taking up my time for very little.
So that's essentially one of the drivers for it, understanding where there are cultural issues and then putting wheels in motion to address. Even if the underlying cultural issues may be slow-moving, some of the action points were pretty straightforward - managers sitting with teams is something that can be changed overnight. There were some low-hanging fruit, even if some things are a slower burn. TBH the company culture was not bad in my opinion, had a good industry reputation, and it was ranked in the top10 best companies for work for in the UK three years running (top 5 when I left). You can take Glassdoor with a pinch of salt but it's not something that's easy to benchmark. The irony was, it was the best place I'd worked for culture and at the same time was the one doing the most to try and improve things. The places with weak culture weren't doing anything about it.
The formal process was annual and was used to identify changes YoY i.e. to understand direction of travel in key areas, and benchmark across business units, region, industry etc. It was checkpointed less formally (i.e. no empirical data) more frequently. To be honest, due to the inertia of analysing results, devising a plan, implementing a plan and then having enough window to see the impact of the changes, I don't think you could do it more frequently than 6 monthly. Being annual gave consistency in terms of alignment to pay reviews, bonuses, other cyclical annual factors (e.g. due to the nature of their work some departments might have particularly hectic periods) etc.
Regarding the positive growth, that can be true if you consider it a scale rather than an absolute. So e.g. if something is flagged as terrible in survey N and becomes mediocre in survey N+1, that's a positive change, but could still be called out in the next survey, because there is more to do. Our surveys didn't always show positive growth, there was a big drop off in my business unit one year which was probably what spurred the biggest call to action.
Yeah it's something I'm not fully bought into and like most things depends what the org actually does with it. One company I joined, as part of onboarding you filled this Myers-Briggs thing out and were giving a personality type, you put it on your profile on the intranet but I never saw it actually being used for anything. Nor did I look people up and tailor my interactions with them. That doesn't mean I consider it to inherently be a waste of time, but if you don't execute on it then it is a waste of time.
On the recruitment front I was always a bit wary of coming across as overly introverted so at times was perhaps not 100% honest (putting neutral on a few things that maybe should have been swayed one way or the other).
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I appreciate your detailed reply. Your experience mirrors mine. However ours was used as tool to get high ratings and hr & industry awards without actually making any meaningful change in the ground in culture or otherwise. The biggest flag of that was staff turnover.
I think it's a bit odd to give disproportionate resources to personality vs productivity and output metrics.
That said their can be institutional blocks that interfer with those metrics. Like having to wait for approval and such.
A tech firm that I used to work for had semi-annual company-wide surveys and the matter of compensation always came up as a top priority. Over the years the language softened on a compensation question, I think partly due to the execs saying every year that they're "looking into it" but never doing anything meaningful about it. In the year that I left, the question had been softened from an initial "rate your happiness with your compensation package" to "do you feel that your compensation package is a reasonable exchange for your time and talent?"
The advent of Blind was a massive boon to the employees overall, as it gave everyone a single place to discuss our compensation. Over the years it became obvious through Blind that different groups across the company with the same job titles and roles were earning largely disproportionate amounts, through the use of out of (annual) cycle cash bonuses, pay rises, and RSU grants. It would be interesting to watch the discussion when the next "did everyone else get the new retention offer?" thread would inevitably appear in the company channel, along with a screenshot of text from HR saying, "do not discuss this matter with your peers". California (and Federal, I believe) law grants freedom of discussion of individual pay so those statements from HR were completely toothless and deemed to be incredulous by many.
The advent of Blind was a massive boon to the employees overall, as it gave everyone a single place to discuss our compensation. Over the years it became obvious through Blind that different groups across the company with the same job titles and roles were earning largely disproportionate amounts, through the use of out of (annual) cycle cash bonuses, pay rises, and RSU grants. It would be interesting to watch the discussion when the next "did everyone else get the new retention offer?" thread would inevitably appear in the company channel, along with a screenshot of text from HR saying, "do not discuss this matter with your peers". California (and Federal, I believe) law grants freedom of discussion of individual pay so those statements from HR were completely toothless and deemed to be incredulous by many.
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Compensation is always going to be a top priority regardless of the rhetoric you hear about other factors being more important. What's more, any survey question like this is going to attract negative responses, because even if people are happy with their package, they will think stating their happiness might reduce pay rises etc. Regardless of the wording, it is basically a question saying "do you wish you got paid more?".
There were some questions I thought were a bit 'naff' or open to misinterpretation, such as "I rarely think about leaving <org> to work elsewhere". I always answered "disagree" to that question, but that didn't necessarily mean that I was unhappy; to me it's perfectly natural to think about changing jobs, even if you never act on it. I mean if you open LinkedIn you see posts about jobs, so you are thinking about it. I also explained to people that having ambitious staff isn't necessarily a bad thing, what matters is whether they can achieve their ambitions at our organisation for mutual benefit.
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so I'm basically treading water but still.Just had my 1:1, after questioning he gossiped more information. Seems there’a a board switch from FTE to partner.. hence as they are in final consultation in a different area of the business.. they can’t make people’s roles redundant for 6m.. so we deliver out project and then 3 months after it gets interesting.. spose I’d better start tarting up the CV again.
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Happy New Year, all! Hope we're still plodding on!
Associate
I am officially unemployed for 2 weeks, until I start my new role.
Feels very weird. I haven't changed jobs in over 10 years and the move will be bit of a lifestyle change.
Feels very weird. I haven't changed jobs in over 10 years and the move will be bit of a lifestyle change.
Soldato
- Joined
- 24 Sep 2007
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I try to avoid recruiters as much as possible. They are just sales people.
Soldato
Go Direct.
My partner works for a recruitment company, when they are asked to recruit permanent candidates these usually come with the stipulation that after X term(usually 12weeks) the company must pay agency £X finders fee which is often well within the thousands
Go direct and the company is more likely to opt for you as they save thousands simply by taking you direct
Found out end of last week that we are going to continue to be on a hiring freeze in our division until at least July... a hiring freeze that started almost a year ago now!
Thing is ... we've had a number of good people leave over the last 12+ months, so we are already understaffed.
Only way to get new head count approved is to get the CFO for the whole Corporation to personally approve it. Our divisional management has a plan though - every other month between now and July they are going to ask the CFO to approve one junior head-count for our division. I've even seen a spreadsheet where they mapped out what they were going to ask for each month.
I'm honestly just laughing on the floor at this point, as our division is making annual profits (2022) that have hit 10 digits, but are slightly down on last year (2021) due to world events.
Oh - our Xmas party was cancelled to "save costs"
Thing is ... we've had a number of good people leave over the last 12+ months, so we are already understaffed.
Only way to get new head count approved is to get the CFO for the whole Corporation to personally approve it. Our divisional management has a plan though - every other month between now and July they are going to ask the CFO to approve one junior head-count for our division. I've even seen a spreadsheet where they mapped out what they were going to ask for each month.
I'm honestly just laughing on the floor at this point, as our division is making annual profits (2022) that have hit 10 digits, but are slightly down on last year (2021) due to world events.
Oh - our Xmas party was cancelled to "save costs"
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