Notre Vista

"H" is for Human!

2012-02-07T02:11:00.000-08:00

By Mara Thorne

When someone says “HR Consultant” to you, do you imagine a stern-looking person perched in an office or loitering in the corridor, in a black suit, like some kind of corporate crow waiting to swoop down and find fault with something? And what does “HR” stand for, anyway?

Let me introduce myself. My name is Mara Thorne, and I’m an HR consultant, but I’m actually quite a friendly bird! I work with Fides Media to help keep their people focused, motivated and productive. For me, what’s important about HR is the “H”, the “human” bit. Never mind what the “R” stands for – could be Resources, could be Relations – what I am focused on is people in organisations. Or sometimes outside them, trying to get in....

HR is incredibly diverse. People come to you with the most bizarre situations, and you have to advise them, take action - do something. It’s not all about hiring and firing, there’s a whole load of other interesting stuff going on.

• Imagine a factory where about 200 burly blokes do metal fabrication; it’s a greasy, dusty, and pretty macho place. One of those blokes tells you he’s decided to become a woman. He’s been to the doctor and he’s taking female hormones. Before long, the bulges under his overalls start to attract attention - and he wants to start using the ladies’ toilets.... What do you do?

• What if a young girl in your department goes out one lunch time .... and doesn’t come back? She’s not answering her mobile and her parents don’t know where she is. Has she just got fed up, or has she been run over by a car? Do you get angry, or worried?

• One of your sales people rings to tell you he’s been followed back from a call, and when he’s stopped at a motorway service area, the car’s been broken into and the samples stolen. He’s pretty shaken up about it; what if they’d followed him all the way home? What do you say to him, and how do you protect the other sales people?

• A worker gets drunk at the Christmas party and takes a swing at his boss in front of half the company. So you tell him not to bother coming back, he’s fired. Next thing you know, there’s a Tribunal claim in the post. What did you do wrong?

Yes, these things really happen. I know, because I’ve had to deal with them. And that’s the sort of thing I help with now - as well as many, far less interesting things, like contracts, policies, disciplinaries, restructuring and a lot more besides.

So what do I stand for? Well, I believe that people are what make the difference in organisations – so you need to recruit the right people, manage them properly, and care for them, to get the best out of them. For me, it’s all about people.

Check out my website: www.mthorneconsulting.co.uk for full details of what I can do for you, or contact me on 01372 700139 or mara@mthorneconsulting.co.uk for advice and support.

‘Me ears are alight’…but I can still hear those mondegreens

2011-11-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

By Michael.

Remember Robert Palmer and that video from quite some time back?

Went like this didn’t it?

“You might as well face it you’re a dick with a glove…”

Er…and wasn’t it Nirvana who proclaimed: “Here we are now – in containers”?

I love a mondegreen me – a misheard song lyric that becomes, to a critical mass of individuals, part of the accepted version of that song. So when one of these individuals hears the song being played on the radio say, the default position is to sing-a-long and heartily emphasise the erroneous lyrics. That’s what I do anyway.

Like for example, Desmond Dekker (and the Aces)’ song “Me ears are alight”. Thanks to that ad on the telly a couple of decades ago some people still actually think it’s called “Isrealites”. No hang on – other way round.

C'mon, there’s loads of these. The band Queen is the source of untold unstaged mondegreens with plenty of examples riddled throughout “Bohemian Rhapsody” alone. There's one line in the verse of The Stranglers’ song “Golden Brown” which is subject to all sorts of interpretations including “M.A.S.H. re-runs” and “mancheeros”. Have a listen. Ooh, and remind me to bore you with how clever that song is in that it switches, very unusually, between time signatures 3/4 and 4/4 yet still workszzzz. Right, sorry did you nod off then?

Anyway, my interest is such that I demand to know why kd lang has been so keen to tell us that she “Can’t stand gra-vy” and what made her fellow Canadian, Bryan Adams want to reveal to the world that he had his first “sex dream at the age of five” in “Summer of 69”? I’d have kept that one schtumn if I were you pal.

Is all this a bit juvenile? Yeah course it is and that’s maybe part of the fun. A friend of mine recently made a perception-changing remark about that dreary old tune by misery-making, self-pity exponent Christina Perri which has been troubling the charts recently. As soon as my chum told me the song was officially called “Jar of farts” I was suddenly able to cope much more easily with the song’s hideous unctuousness.

So the motto is - in the interest of keeping things nice and light - let’s hear it for the mondegreens!

'What's the game of the name?' How some brands got their names...

2011-10-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

By Michael.

I don’t know about you but I find some of the stories of how companies or brands got their names ever so interesting.

Not so much the obvious tales behind eponymous businesses like Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury or er… Freeman, Hardy and Willis, but others that might have more of a ‘did you know’ factor.

Let me give a couple of examples. Everyone knows Persil. But did you know the name comes from a fusion of two of the washing powder’s original ingredients ‘perbate’ and ‘silicate’?

Or that Smart, as in the stumpy little cars, comes from a blend of Swatch + Mercedes (the two companies behind the project), mixed together with ‘Art’?

Now something you might not know is that leading mobile phone network O₂ was nearly called ‘Bob’.

I know this because the naming and branding came from BT’s brand team who I happened to work with and know quite well in the early 2000s, the same time as when O₂ (then a division called BT Wireless) demerged from BT.

I can’t recall exactly why ‘Bob’ was given the old heave-ho, but I was told that the name O₂ derives from the idea that oxygen is an entity that individuals always need around them. It’s something they’d never leave home without – like their purse/wallet or their keys.

The thinking was that a mobile phone should always be with you just like oxygen. Which subsequently became ‘O₂’.

Keep the faith

Our company’s name, Fides (pronounced Fie-deez) Media comes from the Latin word for ‘faith’. It was the brainchild of our associate and friend Jonathan Lambeth. I say brainchild, but it wasn’t really that considered.

Three of us spent ages trying to think of a name. In the end we had a conference call with each of us suggesting a trio of potential candidates. On the call we opted for a Eurovision Song Contest voting system to pick the best of the nine put forward – and no quibbling. My strongest suggestion was ‘Flourish’. That, disappointingly at the time, received nil points.

The name ‘Ellipses’ – which is the term used to describe those three dots that sometimes follow a word (see paragraph number two above), was well in the running. But it turned out to be the ‘Cliff Richard’ – i.e. it came second – and we were left with the jury’s favourite, ‘Fides’.

And I for one am glad because in my experience, it’s an incredibly tricky job choosing a name, especially one that does the job, and somehow ours seems to work. Mind you, I still like ‘flourish’…

'A first class gaffe.' The need for media awareness...

2011-10-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

By Tim.

Media training is in high demand because dealing with the media can be a risky business. And quite right. If you’re going to speak to the press, you need to be trained. But for the majority of people, it’s far more important to be media aware.

This conversation was overheard on a train and published in the Evening Standard’s City Spy.

"We can charge them £500 a day, or we could pitch in at £750 and see if we can get a bit extra on top. Let's face it, we're only going to spend between £30 and £60 on coffee...”

The potential customer, in this case, was banking giant RBS.

Oh dear, what an embarrassing blunder. Thing is, we’re all guilty of doing it. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t end up in print. But I’m not so sure. With Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media outlets, we’re all journalists now. Something said on 5.32pm from Waterloo could be making the digital headlines by the time you alight at 6.17pm.

'Corporate reputations on the rope' by Tim Richardson

2011-10-07T05:02:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of social media, then just ask Tesco what it feels like to be collared by Nancy Atkinson Turner. This mum of two was doing here weekly shop in Tesco in Havant, Hampshire, when she was wrongly accused of shoplifting.

She wrote on her blog Not Now Nancy: “Accused of shop lifting. Kids upset. No apology. I was humiliated by a company I had been loyal to for three years. I left the store feeling angry, belittled, confused and with two children in floods of tears, visibly shaken by the whole ordeal.”

Her response was to pen such a powerful polemic that she became an overnight hit in the blogosphere.

“It took my blog post, and 60,000 people reading it in 24 hours, to extract an apology from Tesco,” she wrote. “It has left a bitter taste in my mouth that as 1 voice I was ignored but as 60,000 voices I became important. My children no longer want to shop with me. They no longer feel comfortable in super markets.”

Her story hit a chord with so many people that it was picked up by traditional media – the Telegraph, Mail, the BBC and a string of local papers all covered the story.

As Nancy’s stock rose, Tesco’s reputation was taking a hammering.

At this point, perhaps I should state that I know Nancy – have done for years. Heck, we even sang in the same band many years ago. While I’m interested in her tale, I’m also fascinated by Tesco’s plight. With the explosion in social media, everyone has a voice. The task of protecting reputations is getting harder. The ‘little guy’ can take on the ‘big boys’. Nancy is proof of that.

'Meetings dumped = productivity pumped' by Michael.

2011-10-06T02:29:00.000-07:00

There was a really terrific article in the Sunday Telegraph business section a while back which argued that by eliminating meetings, workers like you or I, could boost our productivity.

The author, business management thinker Josh Kaufmann, laid out his argument citing the contents of a provocative book entitled Read this before our next meeting by Al Pittampalli.

The book says that meetings, “Kill our productivity, jeopardise our results and drain our souls.”

Meanwhile Kaufmann’s article says that a day packed with meetings is a day where there’s, “not enough time to create anything that requires any sort of sustained concentration.”

He then goes on to suggest ways to help businesses and employees to keep meetings sane and productive such as keeping project teams small and autonomous, scheduling critical work first and meetings last, and implementing what he calls ‘zero meeting mornings’.

All of these ideas are well thought out and crisply articulated plus they seem entirely sensible to me.

Except.

Except I’d go that little bit further than guru Josh or expert Al.

You see I think meetings are mostly time-wasting sessions where too many people gather (for whatever reason) to tell each other things they already know. Meetings create very little of value. In fact they provide a hindrance service that could be easily costed up and invoiced to UK plc, no danger. And for that reason, they should be banned like fox-hunting or Bombay duck.

No, that’s going too far obviously. But how about adhering to the following golden rules?

· No meetings to last more than 30 minutes
· No more than four people in a meeting
· Meetings can take place only on a day that’s got an ‘r’ in it. As per Oysters.

In truth, we don’t do many meetings at Fides because we kind of already get the ‘meetings are not so cool’ message. Still, maybe these guidelines would have a positive effect if they became ‘official’.

Think I’ll propose them at the next management meeting.....

'Me and The Sun – we’ve both just moved on,' by Michael

2011-09-27T02:26:00.000-07:00

We haven’t had a row or anything but I need to come clean and say that The Sun and I are no longer an item.

For years and years the ‘currant bun’ has been my daily newspaper of choice, keeping the number one spot just ahead of the Daily Telegraph. But things have changed. Wapping’s finest and I have grown apart and these days…well, it’s just me and the Torygraph in a state of subscription-sustained monogamy. So who did pull the plug on what was once a pretty lustful relationship? Why did I fall out of love with Britain’s biggest-selling daily? I mean, was it anything to do with hackgate for example? Hmmm, and to answer my own question – no I don’t think it was. I think it’s just a case of familiarity fatigue.

Simply the best

You see I’ve always loved everything about The Sun, from its beautiful - and much copied - written-style, its brilliantly clever headlines, fantastic editorial ideas, sense of humour, and even some of its political perspectives. And for me it’s columnists (such as Kelvin McKenzie) and critics (e.g. Ally Ross) always left their rivals eating dry dust when it came to great writing.

There’s lots more too. I always followed Claude Duval in Sun Racing, read ‘Striker’ every day and, while he was there, turned to Ian King’s Sun City page before anything else. But Kingy and Striker are a long time gone now and Kelvin had it away on his toes in the summer. Sadly. the paper doesn’t give me what it once did in terms of ‘must-reads’. So because I never really took to the Saturday version I stopped buying that first. Then the paper and I were apart from each other for a couple of weeks while I went on my hols and I suddenly realised I didn’t really miss my racy, red-topped, sauce-buddy so much after all. And that, as they say, was the beginning of the end.

Or is it the end?

Can I really throw away all those years of loyalty and companionship? What about the £15 holidays? What about ‘Stick it up your punter’ by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie – my favourite book ever, a fascinating and highly illuminating history of The Sun? Was it all for nothing? Maybe the reality is we’re on a break. Yeah that’s it, a break. It’s me, I just need to get the Telegraph er…‘out of my system’ for a bit and then I can go back. That is, if she’ll take me back.

My god what have I done?