Like many others, I am concerned to the point of alarm by the scientists’ warnings about our planet, and worried about the lack of international accord and serious commitment to act. So I try to heed the advice to save energy at home. I turn off unwanted lights and look at where I can install low energy bulbs. I am uncomfortable when I fail to turn off the video recorder and TV, leaving them on standby. I have installed cavity wall insulation and the recommended level of loft insulation. I wear jumpers and keep the thermostat turned down.
However, the media focus on all of us domestic energy users does I believe distract attention from the rampant energy waste in the business and public sectors (and, yes, the offices of the press themselves).
At work, I visit many different company offices, and they almost all endowed with excellent natural lighting, to the extent that on sunny days, the blinds are pulled down to reduce the glare and the heat. Yet the office lights stay on all day, every day. Recently, on a quiet day in the office with the sun flooding in and almost everyone else out, I thought I might take the radical step of turning the lights off. I couldn’t even find a switch.
Every office I see these days has scores of computers, screens, printers, scanners, photocopiers, coffee machines, shredders and so on which remain powered on for the 120 hours a week they are not in use, as well as the 50 hours that they might be used. None has any instruction from the employer as to turning off when not in use. Indeed, at one office I worked in recently, I was specifically instructed not to turn the PC power off, so that central IT could if it needed install software upgrades over the network overnight.
Where I have been working recently, we use laptops which plug into a docking station at the desk. There is no way to turn off the docking station except by crawling under the desk to find the plug, so this runs permanently on standby. Do companies consider these factors when deciding which manufacturer’s laptops to acquire? Of course not, it doesn’t even register.
And what about heating (and air conditioning)? I doubt if many offices are insulated to the degree that my home is. Consider also if you will the retail park warehouse - a vast open space, expensive to heat (but heat it they must, or the Shops, Offices and Railway Premises Act will enable the staff to walk out), and often an uninsulated metal shell of a building.
Of course, in summer, if it is hot in my house I open the windows. In an office, the heat builds up thanks to the sunshine - the Greenhouse effect again - even with blinds pulled down, so more power is fed into the air conditioning, which as always results in too hot and too cold spots in different parts of the building. In an office, you can never open a window.
Local authorities are not much better. Do we really need comprehensively lit back streets at 3am? Do we need traffic lights at pedestrian crossings throughout the night?
Things are no better when it comes to transport. My own car I try to use more sparingly, and attempt to drive in a way to reduce fuel consumption. Yet I see no real attempt by industry to reduce fuel consumption or journeys, unless they perceive a competitive advantage, or publicity in some kind of ‘green gesture’. I am now more aware of the impact of taking flights to go on holiday, and so probably fly less than I did. But business trips continue as they always did – the only constraint I ever hear of is in terms of the costs.
I try to travel for work more by public transport than by car these days. But the government has made it much harder here than in other countries I have worked: here, public transport is painfully expensive, there is no co-ordination between companies, and local bus services are frankly useless – infrequent, expensive, unreliable, and poor route coverage. Can it be right for the environment that use of a car is not only much more convenient, but also much cheaper than public transport?
Recently I have been using the trains from Paddington, mostly the commuter trains rather than the intercity, but it is noticeable that both are diesel driven, not electric. When I observe the massive amounts of exhaust these trains produce, I realise that these too use a lot of energy. But more concerning for those who live alongside the railway must be the diesel smoke they produce: some of these trains, especially when starting away from a station, produce prodigious amounts of smoke. If these were road vehicles, I doubt whether they would pass an MOT. Furthermore, why is it that a train typically waits in Paddington for at least 15 minutes, and sometimes for much longer, but still the engines are kept running the whole time? Is it so hard to start them up again?
It is time that Government started to give a real lead. There are many ways they could really kick off energy consciousness, but the lack of action smacks of business demands being more important than the environment.
They could set real thermal insulation building standards for new commercial premises as well as homes to be more ‘carbon neutral’, instead of weak guidelines. They could encourage micro-generation with incentives for solar panels and turbines for both commercial and domestic buildings, as they have started to in Germany and elsewhere. And they could make a real attempt to discourage fuel use by the road and air sectors of industry. But action in these areas is likely to be incremental and cautious.
The Government also argues that our country cannot take steps in isolation which reduce our international competitiveness – but isn’t that exactly the kind of selfless restraint they are encouraging us to take as individual citizens?
However, companies can themselves start to take action. Let's see businesses develop energy policies and provide guidelines to staff to minimise the rampant energy waste that goes on in every business in the land today.
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business. Show all posts
Monday, 15 March 2010
Monday, 10 August 2009
Management by Targets
There's been quite a lot in the news over the past year about the management styles of the banks that led them to reward the wrong behaviour and drive them to the brink of insolvency. That started me thinking about the way that management style has changed in the past three decades I have been working.
When I began work in the seventies, the office environment was quite different. There were no office computers for a start (the only ones used by business were in large rooms tended like temple gods by priests and priestesses behind locked doors, and used only for applications with high returns given the then astronomical cost of computer power). There were in relative terms large numbers of secretarial staff, as all documents needed to be typed. Businesses communicated by phone, letter and occasionally by telex.
The management environment for staff was different too. Staff expected to change jobs less often. The emphasis was in doing well, and employers encouraged staff to improve - there was much focus on training, development of individual capability in the right directions for the business, and getting staff to the point where promotion could be envisaged.
Staff performance assessment consequentially was more qualitative than quantitative. This had the drawback that assessment was more subjective, but usually there were enough people involved in the review processes that there was little scope for personality clashes to spoil a person's career. What we didn't have were individual targets (sales personnel excepted), but I don't think that made us any less committed to do well. We did have bonuses, usually related in some way to company performance, and relatively modest in scale compared with today's incentives.
Today of course every member of staff in all the companies in which I've recently worked have individual targets, and often large bonuses, based largely on achievement of their own personal targets. These targets are by their nature short term, and so increasingly are corporate objectives - show revenue and profit growth not just this year, but this quarter or even month, and we'll worry about next year when we get there.
The results are predictable. Managers drive their reports rather than lead them, often with unpleasant "macho management" (at least the real bullies of old are now curbed by modern employment law). Staff work in stressed conditions, focus single-mindedly on their targets even when it becomes clear these are not in the company’s interests (the company being powerless to change them once committed), and matters of true good performance and development of capabilities are lost. How many staff in, or aspiring to, management grades work the contracted number of hours per day or week? Many routinely work up to a couple of hours a day extra, with getting in a bit early, cutting lunch hour, and leaving an hour or more late - and this is not paid overtime.
It certainly riles me to go into a staff assessment interview, and have a discussion on the lines of:
"You didn't achieve your targets."
"No, but they became less important due to x and y, and I couldn't achieve them. I think I am good at my job, don't you?"
"That's not for me to say: you didn't achieve your targets."
This inability to recognise competence unless it is measurable - and only targets are measured - is one of the reasons why I've focused more and more on contract work than employment, where you are judged on performance and "results" (in a general sense) and not on targets.
There are of course some notable advances in modern management methods. In particular I would note the improved way that women are treated nowadays, which in most of the offices I've worked in recently is genuinely on an equal footing with men.
However there is no getting away from the fact that target based staff management rather than competence based rewards does seem to me to be a doubtful improvement - one the victims of the excesses of the city traders and bankers might well agree with.
When I began work in the seventies, the office environment was quite different. There were no office computers for a start (the only ones used by business were in large rooms tended like temple gods by priests and priestesses behind locked doors, and used only for applications with high returns given the then astronomical cost of computer power). There were in relative terms large numbers of secretarial staff, as all documents needed to be typed. Businesses communicated by phone, letter and occasionally by telex.
The management environment for staff was different too. Staff expected to change jobs less often. The emphasis was in doing well, and employers encouraged staff to improve - there was much focus on training, development of individual capability in the right directions for the business, and getting staff to the point where promotion could be envisaged.
Staff performance assessment consequentially was more qualitative than quantitative. This had the drawback that assessment was more subjective, but usually there were enough people involved in the review processes that there was little scope for personality clashes to spoil a person's career. What we didn't have were individual targets (sales personnel excepted), but I don't think that made us any less committed to do well. We did have bonuses, usually related in some way to company performance, and relatively modest in scale compared with today's incentives.
Today of course every member of staff in all the companies in which I've recently worked have individual targets, and often large bonuses, based largely on achievement of their own personal targets. These targets are by their nature short term, and so increasingly are corporate objectives - show revenue and profit growth not just this year, but this quarter or even month, and we'll worry about next year when we get there.
The results are predictable. Managers drive their reports rather than lead them, often with unpleasant "macho management" (at least the real bullies of old are now curbed by modern employment law). Staff work in stressed conditions, focus single-mindedly on their targets even when it becomes clear these are not in the company’s interests (the company being powerless to change them once committed), and matters of true good performance and development of capabilities are lost. How many staff in, or aspiring to, management grades work the contracted number of hours per day or week? Many routinely work up to a couple of hours a day extra, with getting in a bit early, cutting lunch hour, and leaving an hour or more late - and this is not paid overtime.
It certainly riles me to go into a staff assessment interview, and have a discussion on the lines of:
"You didn't achieve your targets."
"No, but they became less important due to x and y, and I couldn't achieve them. I think I am good at my job, don't you?"
"That's not for me to say: you didn't achieve your targets."
This inability to recognise competence unless it is measurable - and only targets are measured - is one of the reasons why I've focused more and more on contract work than employment, where you are judged on performance and "results" (in a general sense) and not on targets.
There are of course some notable advances in modern management methods. In particular I would note the improved way that women are treated nowadays, which in most of the offices I've worked in recently is genuinely on an equal footing with men.
However there is no getting away from the fact that target based staff management rather than competence based rewards does seem to me to be a doubtful improvement - one the victims of the excesses of the city traders and bankers might well agree with.
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