If you are serious about (a) treating your staff as adults; (b) making it easier for them to have a work-life balance and,  indeed,  a life away from the office and (c)  you really,  truly want to engage with them and make them feel that they’re supportive of the wider organisation:

 - then consider loosening the shackles on your IT policy. 

You know,  the policy which blocks approximately two thirds of the internet, making it impossible for anyone to do anything on the net in their own time,  such as at – radical thought – lunchtime.

Most lists of handy hints and tips on how to be more organised,  as either a working parent or just as a wage slave,  with or without children,  will these days suggest that you go on-line and do stuff. 

Pay your bills,  on-line.  Order your groceries,  on-line.  Book a hair appointment – on-line. 

Great: if you can GET on-line.

Of course,  I’m not suggesting that we’re on the payroll in order to spend the day surfing around chat rooms,  porn sites and other nefarious sections of the Net.

Or even on Facebook.  Or Twitter.  Or Linked-in.

No.

But equally,  there are sections of the working day (first thing in the morning,  ahead of the arrival of your colleagues,  or at lunchtime) when I think it would be valid to be able to do the odd personal thing at your computer,  given you’re sat there anyhow.  The fact that sites such as those for grocery deliveries, banking and the like are banned says to me that someone, somewhere has done a survey and made a conscious decision to block them,  along with the webmail sites,  the porn and so on.

 This to me is old-school, twentieth century,  thinking.  Firstly, it’s failing to acknowledge that,  these days,  a lot of people do live a lot of their lives on-line – and if they’re away from home, working for you,  for c. 60 hours per week if you include travelling time,  then it’s pretty difficult to do those things Monday to Friday.

Secondly, it’s not treating your staff  (especially the Gen Y crowd, who’ve never known a life without instant on-line access) as if they are the smart, skilled adults that you must have thought they were when you hired them. Instead, it’s treating them as if they’re cunning, work-shy net surfers who’d be on-line 24/7 if they only had the technical environment to make that possible.

 What you end up with too,  is possibly counter-productive.  You may think that you’re stopping the work-shy cubicle rats at your version of Veridian Dynamics from spending hours on Facebook,  but all you’re doing is creating a culture where people have their smart phones on “silent”,  do what they can on-line via apps but under their desks and where an illicitly plugged in BlackBerry, Nokia or iPhone charger is worth its weight in gold.

 Does that really spell “talent management” or “employee engagement” to you?

The woman who interviewed me last week has just made a donation to the “Because I Am A Girl” fundraising page.

How amazing!

Thank you so much.

• Women are being urged to test their fertility at the age of 30 –
• … but those who do become pregnant and take maternity leave face bullying; a situation blamed, as is so much at the moment, on the recession;
• The Fawcett Society’s most recent report (available as a free download) carries the title “Not Having It All” – and the more chilling sub-title “How motherhood reduces women’s pay and employment prospects” and tells us that, in a nutshell, pregnancy and motherhood makes women vulnerable to discrimination, pay disparities and an enhanced risk of unemployment.

So it’s hardly surprising that the always on the case Glass Hammer website has picked up on this and run an interesting and highly relevant story on professional women choosing to remain childless.

As the article points out: “Based on what we know, why would successful women continue choosing to have children if the detriments to their career are so unavoidable and widespread?”

With my global hat on, I can’t help thinking that if the situation is this bad in the UK and the USA, two countries which do at least have some level of protective legislation in place, then what must it be like elsewhere? The Fawcett Society is calling for new policy responses to reduce the impact of motherhood on a woman’s earnings. Four priority areas emerge from their report and, whilst the recommendations are primarily aimed at governments, I also think that smart, brave organisations could make substantive interventions around at least two of these four points.

1. Provide mothers with the support they need to return to jobs at their previous skills levels;
2. Enforce and extend the law to protect pregnant women and women on maternity leave;
3. Create substantially more part-time work in higher paid occupations;
4. Tackle the low pay that exists in sectors primarily employing women.

This reads to me as a classic case of women being damned if they do (have children) and damned if they don’t (have children, or try to, until later in life, on the basis that they will then be more established in their careers). What a suite of choices: either you have children when your body is most biologically geared up to do so, say in your mid-twenties but you press “pause” on your career. And that option, of course, is predicated on you a) knowing that you want children at that point in your life and b) having a relationship all lined up where that’s what he wants, too. For mid-twenties women (and men) at the moment, they may be so overburdened with student debt that the thought of “settling down” may be either a far flung concept or an impossible dream. I suspect that for many, it’s a look forward into their future which seems quite appealing at some point but doesn’t fall into the “right now” mindset.

Or, option two, you forge ahead with your career, clear down the college debt, hopefully hook up with Mr Right in your early thirties and then hope to hell that you’ve got functioning ovaries, won’t get bullied when you announce your pregnancy news and that you still have something approaching a career to which you can return post-partum.

Not much of a choice, is it?

Anyway, my friend Lisanne, one of the many fabulous women in Cleo World, has just emailed me this article, entitled “The Get-Started-Now Guide to Becoming Self Employed”.

Here’s the opener:

“One of the best things I ever did was quit my day job and become self-employed. I’m so happy with it that I’m recommending it to everyone: my kids, my friends, my sisters.

One sister has already started her own fitness business and I’m strongly urging the other to go out on her own as well.

And while being your own boss can be scary and a little risky, it’s not as difficult as people think. You do have to be someone who loves his freedom, likes to be able to set his own schedule, likes to work on things he’s excited about.

I know, that’s a tall order.”

Thanks for making me smile, Lisanne; this article really did Cheer Me Up.

Difficult weeks.

Weeks in which nothing seems to go right … weeks in which one small thing blows up into something massive, weeks in which one small thing then turns into several huge things, weeks in which you end up feeling that you were solely put on this planet in order to deal with people who are depriving villages the world over of their idiot.

I’ve had one of those weeks, pretty much solely to do with all the admin associated with leaving my employer in a couple of weeks’ time. Firstly, I discovered that a colleague who has also left the organisation, but a couple of weeks ahead of me, was participating in what he described as “some really useful [employer funded] outplacement sessions”, where he received help with his CV plus tips on job hunting and interview techniques. Hurrah, I thought, that will be useful. But, when I enquired, I was told that said service was not available to me, due to being in a different division of the organisation. Given that said organisation is currently promoting a “One Firm” campaign wherein services and employee benefits are indeed available to all, irrespective of business unit, this didn’t sit well with me, so I challenged the “Not Available To You” feedback and a full and frank exchange of views ensued.

Days passed, the world turned, willows wept … and I received an attachment outlining the details of the three months (hurrah!) of outplacement support to which I am now, apparently, entitled.

Just as my blood pressure had returned to an acceptable level from this particular episode, I received a phone call from the data monkeys who monitor holiday take up and deployment. Now, I normally receive 25 days leave per year; but said monkeys claimed that, in 2008, my holiday usage had run as follows:

Allowance: 25 days
Taken: 25 days
Also taken: 17 days

Totalling: 42 days

(I wish! When would I have had the time, or even the inclination, to take 42 days of holiday, given that I was also away from home on business for just over 100 nights in 2008?).

We then commenced 2009, with a new allocation of 25 days, except that my tally looked like this:

Allowance: 25 days
Less: 17 days from 2008
Totalling: 8 days apparently “available”

Oblivious to any of this, I had proceeded to have the audacity to take 13 days of holiday so far this year, meaning that I now apparently “owe” the company 5 days, for which they were proposing to charge me, i.e. deduct the cost of said days from my final leaving salary.

Further full and frank exchanges ensued, which resulted in them “writing off” what was unhelpfully dubbed, in Monkey Speak, the “2008 data anomaly” and us then (more Monkey Speak) “re-balancing” the 2009 schedule. Just as I was thinking that I had escaped without quite losing the will to live, it transpired that they had somehow managed to merge my holiday record with that of someone with a completely different name – hence the cock-ups (or whatever phrase of a similar meaning is used in Monkey Speak: “Irretrievable Data Error” or some such, I expect).

Perhaps all of this is a Higher Power’s way of assisting me to separate from the company and forcing me to not mourn the organisation following our abrupt divorce?

But we continue. And mentioning people who’ve had a bad week, what are our thoughts on this Hillary Clinton “Don’t Mention My Husband!!!” debacle? Here’s a link to the YouTube footage, from which I both conclude and observe that:

- Mrs Clinton is a charm-free individual when caught off-guard and not in receipt of a script;
- She has obviously been asked to be a mouthpiece for Bill’s views a few too many times in the past and this was the one question which tipped her over and into the abyss;
- Surely the US’s Secretary of State ought to be able to cope with unexpected questions with a little more grace? She is meant to be the face of the USA overseas and, as such, a little more gifted in the diplomatic arts.
- That is one horrible outfit – so HRC was obviously lacking the stylist as well as the speechwriter on the day in question.

Like I said: a bad week.