Adult Daycare: Dealing with Employees

has nothing to do with any of the points of the article which revolves around surveillance.
It does and it doesn't. Surveillance software has been around since at least the early 2000's - if you wanted it.

Is it an ad piece to inspire bosses to install one of the software mentioned?

As I state, in most cases, I'm very cynical towards these initiatives.
 
One important element missed from that, amongst several, is the commute. A long intense commute in heavy traffic, is tiring in itself. Much better to just get-up-and-go to work directly to home office set-up.
 
We're still measuring the current workforce who were together in a physical setting and then dispersed. It would be nice to look at the attrition rates, engagement scores, and other corporate culture measures to see if there is a discrepancy between people who started off on site and people who joined in a complete remote setting.

Anecdotally I have also seen pure remote folks cluster together.
 
We're still measuring the current workforce who were together in a physical setting and then dispersed. It would be nice to look at the attrition rates, engagement scores, and other corporate culture measures to see if there is a discrepancy between people who started off on site and people who joined in a complete remote setting.

Anecdotally I have also seen pure remote folks cluster together.
The new frontier is all being defined and mapped...

Notice a lot of office space can't be rented out. Still up for grabs from 2019 when I last made my move.

A number of my clients are experimenting with new staff working from home in various European countries. It makes sense on many levels. Others are being on-boarded and then returning to work to home in the States and the UK. Will it work? If you've a decent Cloud, rather than the old lagging systems for remote working. But it won't suit everyone and it won't suit every style of corporate culture.

My biggest issue with working from home is that you become the good-to-go family and free Uber driver, especially in the winter.
 
Why do I have personal questions assigned to me from some random department in a panel of executives they wanted to hear from...do I randomly go up to people and say, hey I want to know where you get hair done.
 
We had a company BBQ today. There was so much reorganisation last year that at one point I was managing everyone in the department. Someone normally three levels below me introduced me as boss at the BBQ to his wife, but I said no that's not me now. Last year I was boss. He said, "You're still the boss. You will always be our boss."
 
Caught one of the offices sub-contracting work out today. It was very obvious, so no great detective work. On being challenged it was a case of ''So what, what do you expect?'' Like they're hard done to. So instead of servicing their No.1 client, they gave it to some developing world national dragged in off the street through a third party who as it happens couldn't furnish us with his most important qualifications as he ''was working very far away'' from his certificates.

These are the same twits who decided to instigate an innovate report numbering system which instead of going sequential 1, 2, 3, 4... was all over the map with no traceability from report to records and databases.

In work, you should never underestimate some individuals and whole offices to turn a good thing into a total FUBAR.
 
Time to rate peers, peers of your staff, peers of your skip level reports, your boss and your boss' peers.

I chose the bare minimum to submit for 360 degree rating. Of course I no longer have staff so the list was even shorter.

Somehow I received an invitation from myself to rate myself as approved by my boss. For others requesting me to rate them I could decline the request but this request to rate myself cannot be declined.
 
Untapped recruiting pool:

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One of my successors is leaving. The one who took over staff I brought over from my previous firm. And I spent all that time relocating him and getting him a work permit.
 
thought of you fuckers when i read this



Okay. Taking care of citizens for life is a responsibility of the state and not the workplace though. A workplace takes care of the welfare of the workers to contribute to the firm so (hopefully) it provides services and goods to society (hopefully) at a profit to ensure the firm continues to survive.
 
The health screen questionnaire for coronavirus expired at work. I asked at reception when I entered and she shrugged her shoulders as I continued to do my temperature check. For the record I never exceeded 36c.

I still do the questionnaire for the co-working space every day, but it's horribly out of date as it asks whether I have had two doses and 14 days after the second dose. Did I travel to the US? (Not quite sure what happens if you answer yes).
 
They revived the coronavirus self screening health questionnaire at the office.
 
With Monkeypox questions added?
No. Same do you feel ill, did you travel in the last 14 days, etc.

The thing is if you answer poorly no one stops you from continuing to work in the office. No one checks.

We started doing it only because someone rang the ministry of labour in early 2021 and said we were having an unsafe workplace. Whistleblower telephone line.
 
We are literally going to work to "look busy" because some senior global executives are visiting.
 
This week has been great. I'm professor emeritus here amongst my successors.

Group A asks me - what would you do if you still had your job.

Group B separately asks me - what will group A ask me and what should I do to handle it.

Then we have an in person meeting where group A and B debate all the intelligence and talking points I fed them.
 
Had to terminate someone's contract today and it was always going to be so at the starting gate. When someone wants a couple of times what's on offer, think they can negotiate it further, then begrudgingly takes the position, you know they're not going to deliver.

And I told everyone at the time. There's a part of me that thinks: maybe they were just misunderstood and I could have helped and mentored them more. But I don't have time for that and for what they were getting paid, they should have hit the ground running.

Such is life. Shit hits fan daily, you should expect it and be adept in the somewhat dark arts of getting out of it. You can't readily teach that academically.
 
Wow and wow again: an ex-colleague of mine has reinvented herself as a professional earth mother including CBD oil making, Moonmagick, Cosmonaut, ''Soul midwifery and Placenta Encapsulator'' reinforced as an all round mushroom tea and ayahuasca truth seeker. Complete with mystical name change except the surname. This be her in Pre-Raphaelite pose:

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I knew she was looking for something a bit more than she was getting from her current situation, but at the time I wasn't going to risk anything.
 
Wow and wow again: an ex-colleague of mine has reinvented herself as a professional earth mother including CBD oil making, Moonmagick, Cosmonaut, ''Soul midwifery and Placenta Encapsulator'' reinforced as an all round mushroom tea and ayahuasca truth seeker. Complete with mystical name change except the surname. This be her in Pre-Raphaelite pose:

View attachment 44844

I knew she was looking for something a bit more than she was getting from her current situation, but at the time I wasn't going to risk anything.
She looks well.
 
Thank fuck for the Mooncake Festival, I was still gett emails near midnight from our Chinese chums. Had to tell them to enjoy your public holiday and do rest for a change.
 
Is diversity about acknowledgement, recognition or appreciation?
 
I have to agree with the head boss. If we're picking charities then why do we pick controversial ones? It's not like it's our bread and butter and it generates noise. Some people are under the impression this youth program offers counselling including gender conversion and all those LGBTQ hot topics.
 
I spent two hours this morning in a windy cloudy and damp day helping people unpack food donations and then using a scale that you use to weigh fish to check how much the bagged contents weigh. Some people brought boxes so there was a lot of rearranging and eventually sorting. I did about 700lbs of dumb bell rows of various reps and weights ranging from 5lbs to 35lbs.

Then after a brief break so I could warm up we did photographs and met the charity people and local politicians.
 
Yesterday I took IT security training. In one 'lesson' I had to play Space Invaders and shoot up weak passwords like welcome123. There were three stages and the strongest passwords took 3 shots. You had 3 lives and I made it to the final stage with two passwords remaining.

Someone walked by my desk as I was hammering away at my space bar key.
 
I'm consolidating people's annual performance pay out factors except I don't actually rate anyone. I'm just collecting the distribution and mix from various directors to make sure we don't have too many people rated too high and we don't pay too much bonus.
 
I get to stand next to some executives and get my photograph taken with some local charities and a giant souvenir cheque.
 
Doing three hours of performance panels, calibration, benchmarking... Whatever you want to call it for all employees directors and above.

Except I don't have any staff to horse trade to meet certain performance bell curves. It's like going to the UN General Assembly as a representative of Palestine.
 
HR just told me they might get fined because I only took one week off in 2022. Since I joined the firm late 2018, I only ever took 3 weeks off total so I'm not sure where this rule came from. Maybe it's because I got demoted from work till you die executive rank to peasant rank.
 
Doing three hours of performance panels, calibration, benchmarking... Whatever you want to call it for all employees directors and above.

Except I don't have any staff to horse trade to meet certain performance bell curves. It's like going to the UN General Assembly as a representative of Palestine.
I somehow missed this but I‘m really interested (will eventually have to professionalize such thing). How exactly did you spend those hours? Was that useful (generally, as a task. Not you specifically rather doing something else)? How do those horse trades exactly work? How much additional time and usefulness (generally, etc…) would those have taken?
 
I somehow missed this but I‘m really interested (will eventually have to professionalize such thing). How exactly did you spend those hours? Was that useful (generally, as a task. Not you specifically rather doing something else)? How do those horse trades exactly work? How much additional time and usefulness (generally, etc…) would those have taken?

Because I am cynical and critical of the entire performance review process I would say not useful. I subscribe to a management podcast. Performance reviews were what 20th century organisations adopted because the military was one of the first organisations of people. It was used in the military to determine successors. Now it is some contrived process you throw people into because you need to have something that is simultaneously transparent and opaque.

In my current company, we take all VPs and above, then all Directors and above, then all Managers and above in groups. The performance calibration session is your peers and one level above. You have a spreadsheet of their competency (How), aggregated rating of their assigned performance objective results (What) and the combined rating. Then you have the bonus payout % driven by the bands of the rating. (95 percent to 110 percent, 110 and above, etc). The manager submitted all these ahead of time. Someone in HR who consolidated it is typically appointed as the live editor. Usually each year the company is assigned a distribution target. No more than 10% can be exceeds. 80% met their target. 10% can be below target. The rankings are 1 to 3. The ratings submitted by the managers for this group are usually plotted on the graph to figure out visually if we met the distribution target.

Then you proceed between each manager peer to describe their people and what they rated. Alternatively you can go over all exceeds, all below target and then lastly the meets. A good manager prepares some commentary on their accomplishments, interactions with other teams, and overall value to the company's direction, strategy or P&L. If you are pushing for exceed or eventual promotion you might have pre wired ahead of the session with other peers so they agree. Then afterwards the facilitator usually asks if there are objections. This commentary is all anecdotal and people who make comments don't even know what objectives you assigned to your people never mind the metrics achieved.

Typically group think prevails. If there is one strong character who says this person isn't exceed or meets, others will chime in to reinforce it and the employee gets knocked down. If there are two departments heads that don't co-operate then there will be an axe to grind. Sometimes (more rare) people might say you forgot he or she saved my ass on A or B. And try to get it pushed up. Those who get moved down will concede by saying they accept the group's judgment and will convey this feedback to correct them for next time. Or they will "performance manage" the affected employee. The group think rating will send a message to the employee is another popular saying. If you want one of your staff in the exceed category you are usually willing to throw one of your meets under the bus or you nominate two or three exceed with full knowledge only one will make it. If you want others to agree with your exceeds employee you try to save their people from being knocked down or agree with their exceed rating for their preferred person. You can also claim flight risk to try to maintain or reward an employee but smarter participants will want retention as a topic for discussion outside of this. Historical ratings are also discussed. If someone has been exceeds for 2 or 3 cycles, others will find ways to say high performance is now just normal performance.

95% of the time the results come in with too many people in exceeds and no one ranked below target unless they were fired, resigned, or transferred. You need to throw some people in there to meet the distribution target.

If it is a 3 hour session and you have 20 people to discus, most discussion will be about the 5 people for 2 hours. Then the facilitator will realise there is no time left and people will rush through their favourites or the bad apples and then you barely gloss over the people who just meet expectations. Maybe you'll go back and adjust one person who was riding the positive or negative momentum at the beginning of the session.

At the end we tally the bonus percentage column to make sure we didn't exceed the designated bonus budget from Finance.

In my previous company the bonus payouts were fixed based on a scale of 1 to 5. It was called performance panel and it started with managers, directors, AVP/VP, CxO all in one room reviewing all the people below manager. The point of having everyone was to try to figure out who marked people easy and who (more rare) marked people too hard. The same haggling happened. This went on the entire day because once the managers were finished with their staff, the managers vacated the room and the directors talked about the managers. As you move up you have fewer people to discuss in the group so you can get to more specifics. But the same group think, horse trading, sh%tting on people in teams you had a grudge with, etc happened. Then all the directors vacated and the discussion goes up one level.

The same distribution curve applied. My old company would never let anyone who joined mid year be rated as meets expectation because they need to be on the job for a year. Your bonus is therefore a partial pay out even if you did everything right. You had to actively find people to throw under the bus as below target because people fired or resigned don't count as cannon fodder for below target. Any exceed rating was always challenged with a comment from the facilitator or peer, "is that above and beyond or part of their job description"

One gracious thing is the CxO head of the function had authority to ask who in this group was the shining beacon of the team. That person received a maximum exceeds rating of 5. This wasn't counted against the targets. It was the perogrative of the head of function.

My first company called it performance rankings I think. I was a lowly manager so all I did was submit all my folks to my boss and she would knock the ratings around in front of me in a spreadsheet. Then I think she took it to her peers and some process transpired there. There wasn't a distribution target but in a performance scale of 1 to 5, it was known getting a 5 meant you flew to home office and attended the chairman and CEO award for a Platinum level prize. One of the VPs at the time had an aspiring high potential manager. But he said to everyone including the manager that he would never award a 5. He was a coloured man and told the manager, a white man, you will have to lick my ass so much that it turns white before I put you up for that.
 
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