Английский для менеджеров

One solution to this problem would, of course, be to structure large organisations into smaller units of a size that can act as a cohesive group. Bу allowing these groups to build reciprocal alliances with each other, larger organisations can be built up. However, merely having groups of, say, 150 will never of itself be a panacea to the problems of the organisation. Something else is needed; the people involved must be able to build direct personal relationships. To allow free flow of information, they have to be able to interact in a casual way. Maintaining too formal a structure of relationships inevitably inhibits the way a system works.

The importance of this was drawn to my attention a couple of years ago by a TV producer. The production unit for which she worked produced all the educational output for a particular TV station. Whether by chance or by design, it so happened that there were almost exactly 150 people in the unit. The whole process worked very smoothly as an organisation for many years until they were moved into purpose-built accommodation. Then, for no apparent reason, everything started to fall apart. The work seemed to be more difficult to do, not to say less satisfying.

It was some time before they worked out what the problem was. It turned out that, when the architects were designing the new building, they decided that the coffee room where everyone ate their sandwiches at lunch times was an unnecessary luxury and so dispensed with it. The logic seemed to be that if people were encouraged to eat their sandwiches at their desks, then they were more likely to get on with their work and less likely to idle time away. And with that, they inadvertently destroyed the intimate social networks that empowered the whole organisation. What had apparently been happening was that, as people gathered informally over their sandwiches in the coffee room, useful snippets of information were casually being exchanged. Someone had a problem they could not solve, and began to discuss it over lunch with a friend from another section. The friend knew just the person to ask. Or someone overhearing the conversation would have a suggestion, or would go away and happen to bump into someone who knew the answer a day or so later; a quick phone call and the problem was resolved. Or a casual comment sparked an idea for a new programme.

It was these kinds of chance encounter in the coffee room, idle chatter around the photocopier, that made the difference between a successful organisation and a less successful one.

From Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of language. by Robin Dunbar

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UNIT 5

Choosing the	A. Discuss this question: Do people change during their working
right candidate	lives? If so, How?
	B. Now read the article. What does it say about the question
	above?
	Find the answer as quickly as you can.

HOW TO SELECT BEST CANDIDATES - AND AVOID THE WORST

By Adrian Furnham

Investing thousands of pounds in the recruitment and training of each new graduate recruit may be just the beginning. Choosing the wrong candidate may leave an organization paying for years to come.

Few companies will have escaped all of the following failures: people who panic at the first sign of stress, those with long, impressive qualifications who seem incapable of learning, the unstable persons later discovered to be thief or worse.

Less dramatic, but just as much a problem is the person who simply does not come up to expectations, who never becomes a highflyer or even steady performer.

The first point to bear in mind at the recruitment stage is that people don't change. Intelligence levels decline modestly, but change little over their working life. The same is true of abilities, such as learning languages and handling numbers.

Most people like to think that personality can change, particularly the more negative features such as anxiety, low esteem, impulsiveness or a lack of emotional warmth.

But data collected over 50 years gives a clear message: still stable after all these years. Extroverts become slightly less extroverted, the acutely shy appear a little less so, but the fundamentals remain much the same. Personal crises can affect the way we cope with things: we might take up or drop drink, drugs, religion or relaxation techniques, which can have pretty dramatic effects. Skills can be improved, and new ones introduced, but at rather different rates. People can be groomed for a job. Just as politicians are carefully repackaged through dress, hairstyle and speech specialists, so people can be sent on training courses, diplomas or experimental weekends. But there is a cost to all this which may be more than price of the course. Better to select for what you actually see rather than attempt to change it.

From the Financial Times

B. Read the article again and answer these questions.

1.What types of failures do companies experience, according to the article?

2.What does a fine future behind them mean?

3.What advice does the article give to-managers?

D. In another part of the article (not included here), the writer suggests that selectors should look for three qualities:

a) intelligence and ability b) emotional stability c) conscientiousness.

1Do you agree? Explain your opinion.

2 Complete the table with the adjectives below. What other words can you add?

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	astute	bright	calm	clever	easygoing	hard-working	moody
	neurotic	punctual	quick-	reliable	responsible	sharp	slow
			tempered
1. Intelligence and ability			2. Emotional stability			3. Conscientiousness
bright			calm			reliable

Should employees appear on company accounts?

HUMAN CAPITAL

Gwen Coates discusses the difficulties involved in valuing a workforce

An overused phrase often heard from senior executives is, 'Our workers are our greatest asset'. In strictly financial terms, this is not true. With the exception of football players, employees are only recorded in annual report accounts as 'staff costs' -- a lump sum figure that, from a shareholder's point of view, does little other than reduce the profit figure.

Despite this strict financial view of human capital assets, few companies can now realistically be valued only in terms of their physical assets (factories, machines, etc.), and in most businesses, employees are a major influence on whether any profit is made. The experience, skills, knowledge and commitment of the workforce drive the business. So the overused phrase mentioned above is in fact true for most companies. Yet annual reports effectively ignore a company 's most important asset.

Annual reports are the principal guide to a company's value and performance, and are also subject to quite expensive and extensive scrutiny by accountancy firms. This omission of a proper valuation of human resources in business is being considered by the UK's largest accountancy body, the Institute-of Chartered Accountants. In June 2000, it published a report entitled Human Capital and Corporate Reputation: Setting the Boardroom Agenda, in which it tries to determine how human capital should be measured

– in other words, how a monetary value could be put on a "company's workforce. The Institute's starting point is that, although measuring 'intangibles' like human capital is a break with tradition, 'people are the key drivers of profitability'.

Geoff Armstrong, the director general of the Institute of Personnel Development, supports the view that people are the key drivers of profitability. He points out that with computer-based technology, competing companies can increasingly copy each other, and that it is people who make a company stand out from the crowd. Because you cannot write down in a manual all the skills, experience and knowledge of key employees, nor can you do a stock-take or nail them down, organisations can become very vulnerable. If people or groups of people are enticed away to do more interesting, exciting or better paid activities, organisations can be left bereft of critical skills and know-how.

The idea of valuing human capital is not entirely new. In 1998, the Accounting Standards Board, the body responsible for setting accounting rules, allowed football clubs to put sums paid for players on their balance sheets and write off the costs over the length of their contracts. However, this method of measuring human capital is likely to remain the exclusive preserve of top footballers, both because of the sums paid between clubs when they move, and the rigidity of their contracts compared to other professions. In most professions, it is a simple matter to leave an employer, and this makes it very difficult to attribute any realistic monetary value to an employee in a normal situation.

The Accounting Standards Board agrees the need for reform, but dismisses the idea of attempting to attribute some form of monetary value to a company's workforce.

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Chairman Sir David Tweedie states: 'What we are really trying to do is to decide what the future cash flows of the company are likely to be. To do this, there should be some form of measuring the 'drivers of value' in a company, which would allow comparison from year to year.

Because of these difficulties, the Institute of Chartered Accountants foresees a special section in a company's annual report that would attempt to assess and measure its human capital from year to year. This might involve some sort of qualitative technique for measuring issues such as training, retention, staff .satisfaction and working conditions

– not simply a record of how much an employer has spent on staff training, etc.

The Institute's report includes evidence from a number of major players in the business world. For example, John Coombe, the finance director of the chemical giant GlaxoWellcome, comments: The most recent accounts of my organisation show net assets of just over £3bn, yet its market value is many times that amount.' He goes on to suggest that the major elements of this 'value gap' are unrecognised assets such as human and 'reputational' capital, and that some way of bridging the gap between balance sheet net assets and stock market value would be an extremely useful expansion of shareholder information: 'Simply identifying unrecorded intangible assets and indicating their value would be a major step in the right direction.'

Recording the value of a firm's human capital more fully would benefit both a company's staff and its investors. By having to describe its human capital, a company would be forced to focus on staff welfare, performance and contentment. For investors, such a move would at least give the ability to ask better questions about how companies are producing value from their 'greatest asset.'

Gwen Coates is Chair of Examiners for AQA Business Studies and an editor of Business Review.

TEXT

1 Before you read, look at the title and subtitle.

1Which company is the article about?

2What does the company produce?

3What area of the company is the article about?

2 Scan the text quickly for information about llford and complete the following summary.

llford Ltd. is located in 1……………………and has a workforce of 2……………………. The company, which has (wo sister 3……………………………. in Europe, is part of 4………………….. which was bought in 5…………………………… by 6……………………. . llford manufactures 7……………………. .The company's head of human resources is called8…………………………………………. and it is his job to oversee9…………………., the company's new programme for 10………………..work practices, pay and conditions.

3Look again at the title of the article, Why is it a clever way of introducing the

text?

4Now read the text and summarise the main points under the following headings.

the thinking behind Impact

why Impact was necessary

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how Impact was developed

Impact's main features

the timetable for change

the impact of Impact

ILFORD PUTS PEOPLE INTO SHARP FOCUS

Fiona Thompson explains how the photographic materials company developed its personnel blueprint

Management is determined that nobody should be kept in the dark about changes which are being introduced at Ilford 's plant in Mobberley, Cheshire.

Impact, Ilford's programme for a comprehensive restructuring of work practices, pay and conditions, is now under way. And the company's aim - that none of Ilford Ltd's 1,400 employees should be left in the dark about the programme - has meant an exhaustive series of consultative meetings.

The process is being overseen by the company's head of human resources, 'Frank Sharp. The changes in Impact echo those in other companies which have adopted the human resources title alongside an attempt to achieve fundamental changes in employment culture. These companies often want to move away from traditions of industrial relations conflict, and integrate the management of people into their strategy.

According to Sharp, the impetus for setting up Impact was an acknowledgement by the board a few years ago that the company was in a mature industry; that a substantial effort had been put into engineering, science and marketing in the previous 10 to 15 years; 'and we could not see how the business would further prosper and become more profitable unless we tackled the people side'. It was a radical move for Ilford which, until then, ' had not regarded personnel as contributing in any way to the strategic direction of the business'. Ilford, number one in sales in the world monochrome market, makes and sells photographic materials, chemicals and equipment It is part of Ilford Group, which has two other manufacturing plants, in France and Switzerland, and was bought by the large US paper company, International Paper, in 1989. The UK company traditionally operated along inflexible lines, with strict demarcation between the different unions and rigidly enforced differentials based of 43 grading bands.

Impact is nothing less than a complete overhaul of how Ilford's employees work, their pay and conditions. Impacts‘ three aims are:

To implement organisational change involving a move away from detailed job descriptions and a lot of different jobs to a number of core jobs with many fewer grades;

To devise specific training and development plans for each employee; and

To develop an improved pay and reward policy.

The consultative process to devise a framework for a reward policy was launched last April in workshops attended by all the shop stewards and departmental managers.

The managers then held a series of team meetings with never more than 15 employees at a time, to encourage maximum feedback. We started with a blank sheet of paper and said 'What would you like? '

And we literally got everything from turkeys at Christmas to 'deunionise' says Sharp. By the autumn, a nine-point framework was devised. Key elements of the reward policy, aimed at getting a simpler, fewer grades ,and the introduction of job evaluation, performance rewards and personal development discussions. The new grade structure will reduce the present 43 grades to between six and 12.

Each employee‘s job will be put into one of the new grades using a method of job evaluationalmost certainly the work profiling system of consultants Savile &

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Holdsworth –involving the employee. Each grade will have a negotiated base rate of pay to be determined by the market rate and Ilfords performance. The banding for each grade would be very wide to allow for performance payments agreed once a year between each employee and her/his boss. Getting to this stage has been a painstakingly slow business. Last April, it was intended that the new reward policy would be implemented on January 1, the normal date for pay increases.

But management had been 'too optimistic', Sharp acknowledges. 'Hindsight is a marvellous thing. In reality, to use a racing analogy, it was a 10-furlong race and the finishing point was to get everybody on board, understanding what the reward process was about. But while some departments started the race around the eighth furlong, others hadn't even saddled up the horse months later.'

But he does not see the delay as a failure. 'We had never gone through consultation before. The lesson we had learned is that if you are going to involve people, you must be prepared to accommodate their views and satisfy them before you move on, otherwise you risk failure."

The organisational change at Ilford - involving the move away from a lot of different jobs to a number of core jobs - is a third complete, says Sharp.

The change was sorely needed, particularly as Ilford has had the same structure in place for many years, despite having decreased from a multi-site organisation with 7,000 to 8,000 employees in the early to mid-1970s to a one-plant operation with 1,400 employees now.

In the scientific products department, for example, after detailed management-workforce discussions on what its new role should be and who should accept what responsibilities at what level, the consensus was that the department would actually function more effectively without supervisors.

Consequently the staff have taken on more responsibility and have been given the tools to carry out certain new tasks, like statistical process control.

The organisational changes, white providing much greater job satisfaction for some, inevitably leave some less happy as well. 'If a new role demanded more peoplemanagement skills, we didn't just take someone because they'd been there 20 years and done a good job. We tried to measure objectively through discussion and tests who had the 'best' skills.'

Some got bigger jobs, some moved sideways and others transferred to different roles elsewhere in the company.

In a small number of instances, this has meant salary decreases. Not surprisingly, there was union resistance. MSF, the technical and white-collar union representing the managers and scientists, accepted that some of its members' positions would change but wanted them to maintain their present grades, performance rates and income.

"We couldn't accept this as it wouldn't be seen as equitable by other people doing a bigger role,' says Sharp.

There was no question that the Impact proposals had to happen, according to Sharp. 'In the 1980s life for manufacturing companies became much more competitive. It will become even more so in this decade. We have got to ensure that the company can respond quickly and effectively.'

© The Financial Times

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UNIT 6

POLITICOS: A FIELD GUIDE

By Kelly Pate Dwyer

Every workplace has its share of good guys and bad, solo artists and team players. To get ahead – or even just survive – you need to know them all: the good eggs who can become your allies, and the bad apples to avoid (or occasionally placate). Here‘s a hand y guide to the 10 most common types of office politicians, with tips on how to manage them.

Office Politicos: A Field Guide

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