I sat Meena down and asked her to explain exactly what had been happening.

Meena told me that over the last five months Bruce had had a number of meetings with her, and sometimes also with Guy who manages the buying team. Often during these meetings Bruce will swear at Meena and ask her what the ‘f’ing type of department she’s running.

Once they were discussing an issue where buying hadn’t brought enough of an item that marketing had run a campaign for. Meena had suggested that she had been told there was more stock than there was and Bruce started swearing at her that she needed to check these things and it was her fault.

In these meetings he often stood up and stood over her shouting at her. He also came into her office and wrote abusive things on her whiteboard then rubbed them off. He would also call her to meetings without any warning and ask her to present on something, then half way through will leave the room for 30 minutes. Meena doesn’t know if he’s coming back or not. If she leaves to find him later he will come and shout where is she, and if she stays he asks her what she is doing wasting time.

Meena feels she can’t win either way. She says that she gets upsets now about her job, dreads the meetings with Bruce and feels sick. She has lasted as long as she can because she knows Bruce is the MD’s golden boy.

After I’d taken all this down I check with Meena whether I can present this to the MD and reluctantly agrees.

So I book a meeting with him and let him read her statement.

He looks at me and says that Bruce is coming on a bit strong and he’ll have a chat to him, but that the behaviour gets results and he doesn’t consider it bullying.

What do I do now?

Post your advice as a comment below. In the February issue of the HumanResources magazine we’ll publish the best answers and see what Flora does.

• People go to sleep after lunch is served on daytime flights?  It’s 3pm and everyone around me are snoring their heads off.  Most of them can’t have been awake for more than nine hours.  I wonder if they nod off at their desks after lunch on a typical work day.
• Fellow passengers (usually male) wait until they get on the plane to strip off most of their clothes, empty their pockets or search through their carry-on bag for something they probably packed in their checked luggage.
• These passengers invariably sit near the front of the plane so they manage to hold everyone up as they block the aisles looking for stuff that they should have.
• The person sitting in the window seat next to you is usually one of the last to board and almost always has a weak bladder.
• The passenger who waits until the boarding queue is really long, manages to push their way in near the front and for some reason always has a problem with their boarding pass or passport which holds everyone else up.
• When you go to put your bag in the overhead locker the one allocated for your seat is full with other people’s excessive hand luggage.
• The rules about hand luggage size and number only apply to you and not to your fellow passengers.
• People wait until they’re the next to be screened by security before they empty their pockets (all fifteen of them), remember to remove their laptop from the case and still manage to set off the alert warnings when they eventually walk through.  Again it’s usually a male thing – sorry guys.
• I always get in the slowest immigration queue with the largest number of illegal aliens/asylum seekers or just people with lots of problems.  It doesn’t matter which queue I choose it always happens to me.
• Just as I’m about to be sent to the next available counter someone with special needs appears out of nowhere and gets priority over me.
• My suitcase is the one that falls off the baggage truck and either gets driven over or left on the tarmac for hours, is on top of the pile when it rains during unloading, or manages to mysteriously get dents in every corner between destinations.
• They run out of my food preference just as the trolley reaches me.
• They stop serving food just as they reach me due to turbulence.
• The people who seem to be queuing for the toilets are actually just having a wee leg stretch and chat to their fellow passengers in front of the toilets and by the time I figure they’re not actually queuing the seat-belt sign comes on and we have to return to our seats because of turbulence or in preparation for landing.

Am I alone in these experiences?  Do you have any other pet peeves to add?

This year HRINZ National President, Catherine Taylor, attended too – it’s important that the HRINZ President gets to attend at least one CIPD conference, and preferably at the beginning of their term as it can take a while to build all those relationships that are vital to an organisation as distant from the rest of the world as ours is.

Manchester in November can be pretty bleak but this year we arrived to a late heat wave with temperatures hitting 16 degrees for a few minutes some days and some watery sunshine – on one day we even had a day of clear blue skies with not a cloud in sight.  Now you’re probably wondering how we managed to see the sky given that we were there to work, but we planned our trip to arrive on the weekend to recover from the inevitable jetlag that comes with 26 hours of flying and 10 hours of killing time in transit lounges at various airports.

On Monday evening things got underway with a welcome reception for international delegates followed by a dinner for those from HR membership associations from around the world so that we could compare notes and talk in-depth about HR issues affecting each of our respective countries’ workplaces and memberships.  The conference started on Tuesday morning and ran for three days.

Catherine will cover HR highlights from the sessions we attended in her blog post and magazine article but I thought, as the CEO of HRINZ, I’d talk in my blog post about the operational differences I picked up between a large UK HR conference and exhibition and a small NZ conference and expo.  While it’s not about HR per se, there are some interesting ‘people’ observations to share.

Names and numbers

Both countries call it a conference, unlike the US (congress) and Australia (convention) however it’s an exhibition in the UK but an expo at home.  They look pretty similar though, once you allow for the sheer scale of these things.  This year’s conference was smaller than usual with around 1300 delegates – Britain is still in the grips of workplace uncertainty and the effects of the recession and the Euro crisis are being widely felt – though past conferences have seen numbers hover around 3,000.

The US Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) conferences attract around 13,000 delegates, so with about 300 attending the average HRINZ conference scale does play a pretty big part in creating a different experience.  Their expos are much larger too and they promote quite different products and services to the HRINZ HR Expo but more about that later.

Registration

Registration on the day is managed using electronic kiosks – delegates print their own name tags and collect a conference bag off a stand – and help is available for those that need it if you don’t mind queuing.  Every time a delegate enters the expo hall or moves into the conference sessions’ areas the bar codes on their name tags are swiped with an electronic reader.

As delegates enter sessions they’re handed an A4 booklet which contains the speakers’ slides, some pages for note taking and an evaluation form.  Slides are not provided post-conference and the evaluation forms are completely manual, which must take forever to be entered into a spreadsheet before being analysed and reported on.

I’m told that this system is going to change as it’s fraught with difficulties, especially when speakers don’t supply slides or decide to change them on the day.  Not to mention the whole sustainability issue for the environment (and the cost of producing them).

Audience behaviour

Cell phone etiquette is the same in both countries and ignored equally, though with larger audiences the incidence occurs more of course.  The same can be said about delegates arriving late and leaving early.  When there is time for questions the number of statements made by some delegates still tends to outweigh the number of actual questions asked, and are nearly always prefaced with “Thanks for a really interesting session which I found incredibly valuable…” and then they go into a long convoluted story about an issue or experience that they’d like to share, but with no question in sight, or perhaps a patsy question.  When there is only limited time for questions this can be really annoying for the rest of the audience and you can almost hear mutterings of “Do it in your own time!”.

I think our audiences are far more direct in their questions.

Pitch

Pitch seems to be a perennial problem the world over – it’s almost impossible to please everyone in the audience as they all come from such different backgrounds and stages in their careers and some need transactional / operational information (usually in very specific detail with lots of graphs and charts) while others like me want to hear about the big picture stuff that is preferably fresh / new, or at least approached from a different angle.  And whatever is presented must be robust and credible and presented well, preferably with a bit of humour or quirkiness.

Top Speakers

Fortunately I always manage to attend a few sessions where the speaker is brilliant (usually in the concurrent sessions) and after the session while the speaker is packing up their notes I rush to the front of the room waving my business card and asking if they’d like to speak at the best little HR conference in the world.

I’m rarely turned down as almost everyone wants to come to New Zealand (I never mention how long it will take to get there or to recover from the jetlag at both ends as I don’t want to burst their bubbles), though it doesn’t always work out, usually because of their existing work commitments or unrealistic fee expectation.  Once they’ve been to New Zealand they tend to stay friends of HRINZ for life, or at least exchange the odd email for a few years.

International Delegates

One thing I love about the CIPD Conference, but which we could never do, is the fact that there are so many international delegates from all over the world.  CIPD creates an international lounge for us within the exhibition hall and it’s great for networking, using for meetings or just chilling in during some of the breaks.  They need to work on the quality of the coffee though…

Catering

Speaking of catering, there’s another huge difference between our events when it comes to lunches.  Delegates are provided with a hot lunch each day, which is set up rather like a large workplace canteen.  You line up with your plate and are given two options – with meat or without meat.  Their idea of ‘dietary requirements’ is addressed very simply – you’re either a carnivore or a vegetarian.  They don’t serve fish or chicken for those who like to eat white meat instead of red, and the meat is invariably mince.

We had cottage (shepherds) pie and carrots on day one, chilli con carne on rice on day two, and lasagne and salad on day three.  Vegetarians were offered the same meals but with vegetables replacing the mince.  The food was wholesome and tasty, portion sizes were predetermined by the serving staff, and energy levels kept high.  There were no desserts for those with a sweet tooth, but free lollies and chocolate abounded on the exhibitors stands for those needing a ‘white death’ fix.

As someone who gets involved with special dietary requirements when we hold HRINZ conferences, and knowing how much time and effort meeting everyone’s ‘special dietary needs’ can take, I was intrigued at how CIPD handled this.  So much so that on day two I asked one of the catering staff how they managed to cater for people with food allergies, intolerances and preferences.

There didn’t seem to be any special bay with trays of personalised meals hovering and no-one seemed to be asking for anything special.  The chap I asked looked at me blankly, paused for a moment and then said “There’s a vegetarian option”.  I persisted and said “but what about people who can’t eat dairy / gluten / nuts / eggs etc?” to which he replied, “There’s a vegetarian option”.  I gave up at that point.

I wonder how they manage the complaints.  At our conferences as we spend almost as much time on sorting out dietary requests as we do putting the programme together.  Well a slight exaggeration but sometimes it feels like it, and it’s really soul destroying when those specially crafted meals aren’t even collected by the individuals who have requested them.

The exhibition

Because the exhibition hall in Manchester is huge (it’s held in the former railway station which has been beautifully restored) there is room to have stands from quite different suppliers to the ones we have room for in New Zealand.

There’s the usual EAP and counselling offerings, software providers and a range of tools and solutions on offer.  There are education providers (though I noticed less this time) and of course remuneration and recruitment organisations.

But the thing that really stood out for me this year was the sheer number of exhibitors offering incentives and rewards.  Child care facilities or programmes were a close second.  Alcoholics Anonymous had a stand too – that was a first for me, though there have been similar support agencies exhibiting in previous years.  The US SHRM expo I visited in 2006 was over represented with weight loss programmes (Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers mainly) probably to counter the Dunkin Donuts which were supplied at coffee breaks!

Dotted around the expo hall were spaces for cafes, face to face networking areas as well as social media networking, and even several seminar areas which exhibitors presented mini seminars at – all possible because of the sheer vastness of the venue.

Other ideas

I picked up a few pearls which include little things like providing a phone battery charging service and a proper coat check service to avoid coats being mixed up and taken by the wrong people.

And the CIPD use a neat little mini programme with sessions on one side and a map of the venue on the other – we’ll be adopting this to get around having to print conference handbooks which probably no-one reads anyway.

Overall I enjoyed the conference on several levels – it’s always good to feed your brain, to take a break and do something different for a few days, and to observe how others do things.  The networking is always good at these events, but the best thing is reminding people that New Zealand, despite its tiny population size and remoteness from the rest of the world, can hold its own in the area of doing pretty good HR and delivering small, but perfectly formed, conferences to a world standard.

In doing this we thought it would be really good to collect up people’s memories of what the Institute was like in years gone by.

If you have been a member of HRINZ for more than 20 years we’d love to hear from you. Please consider contributing to this blog. You could talk about what you remember from the old days, the biggest changes you’ve noticed, what you’ve gained from being a member – anything of relevance that you’d like to share would be great to receive. It will help us to preserve the history of our association for members in the future.
Please help us with this!

For most people working in Human Resources in the Canterbury region, and for those whose organisations have branches or responsibilities for people in Canterbury, the work continues with very long days rebuilding infrastructure, shattered lives, and a desperate sense of trying to get back to some semblance of normal, or business as usual.

But for a large group of people with excellent HR expertise and years of experience, knowledge and wisdom that have been providing consultancy and contracting services to Canterbury based organisations, things are very different.  Many have suddenly found themselves with contracts cancelled or delayed indefinitely, without the work they thought they’d be doing and there’s little chance of the situation changing in a hurry as organisations switch from planned growth and development pre-earthquake, to mere survival since 22 February.

As I see it, the risk for the Canterbury region as it gets on with the job of rebuilding the city and the economic centre of the South Island, is that there is a very strong likelihood that when the time comes they’ll find themselves without the intellectual expertise of these consultants because  many will have all left the area to find work elsewhere.  And who can blame them.

In a perfect world (and we certainly know that there is no such thing anymore) the over worked, exhausted HR champions who are currently holding it all together could be supported by the newly under-employed consultants and contractors who would make life so much easier for everyone.  As these two groups of people most likely don’t know each other someone needs to step in and provide a facilitation service.  Ideally that someone should be HRINZ, but as I mentioned in my last blog, we’re really not in a position to do so at the moment.  As we’re an organisation of volunteers would any of you care to put your hand up to help with this?  HRINZ can provide the means to do so; you just need to provide the willingness to make it happen.

It could take the form of a web-based database that HRINZ can create and manage on our website with a volunteer facilitator creating a simple matching or introduction register by collecting the needs of individual organisations and tracking down the expertise to deliver to these needs.  What a great way to help!

Gareth has been with HRINZ for just one month and previously he was farming and travelling.

Getting to know Gareth:

The achievement in my life I’m most proud of:

Climbing Thorong La Pass

The quote I live by is:

Love the open road and all that it suggests

One thing the rest of the team don’t know about me is:

I was in a Bollywood movie in Mumbai

The last book I read was:

Ken Follett – World without end

The one thing I miss about being a kid is:

Body to chair size ratio

Here are just some of my ‘take-away’ highlights (there will be lots more highlights from attendees in our October issue of the HumanResources magazine):

Roger Steare on How to Lead a Culture of Integrity:

-Workplaces focus too much on purpose rather than creating a sense of belonging. (We’re human beings, we like to belong)

- Cultural Integrity is when together we decide what rules to obey. (The less rules there are, then people take more responsibility – think of the town with no traffic signs.)

- To build a culture of integrity – stop and think about what is right (arrogance, greed and denial isn’t), talk about what’s right, unite on moral values and act fairly for the common good.

And check out the Dilbert cartoons on ethics here.

David Thompson on The Morning After the Night Before:

-          Does your work bring you closer to your personal goals?

-          Two questions to ask your team; what’s most important to you (eg having a mentor, a great boss, flexibility, meaningful work) and how are we doing at meeting them?

-          Be creative with your people – they don’t dream about spreadsheets, they don’t leave their heart at the door when they come to work.

Paul Kirkbridge on Challenges for the Next Decade and Beyond:

-          70% of people’s learning happens on the job and development is most powerful when there’s pressure, you’re making a difference, you have no experience and there’s a chance of failure.

The Gala Dinner and Party – wow, HR people know how to boogie; the dance floor was heaving with doctors, nurses, fire fighters, villains and super heroes all having a good time – whether they were ‘trusted or not’.

A big thank you to speakers, expo exhibitors (for some great networking), sponsors, delegates (more great networking) and the HRINZ team for another outstanding conference.

What was your conference highlight?

Post – HRINZ conference info:

- Photos of the HRINZ Conference, Expo,  Gala Dinner and welcome drinks can be viewed on our Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/hrinz and  here

- More photos and highlights will be published in the October issue of the HumanResources magazine.

- Speaker’s presentations will be available next week on the HRINZ website.

Bev can help members with most things: “But I prefer the big picture stuff.  I can bridge management and governance issues as I get to work in both and I understand how things work quite well at this level.”

Bev has been with HRINZ for 12 years, started in April 1998; “ My job changes with the new president every two years so it feels like it hasn’t been that long, fortunately.”

Getting to know Bev:

Before working at HRINZ I was at:

WISE Women Network

After HRINZ (of course), my next biggest passion is:

Writing and spending time with my family

The best advice I’ve ever received is:

“No, your bum doesn’t look big in that”, followed by “Those shoes look great, the colour is perfect on you.” Seriously though – “Don’t get sucked into other people’s drama”

My pet-hate is:

Mess.  Ask anyone.

Weekend mornings you’ll find me:

In the garden or in a cafe once I’d caught up on my sleep.

The achievements in my life I’m most proud of are:

Professionally – creating WISE Women Network and bringing HRINZ back from the brink.  Personally – producing a great son (as a teenage mum) and having a wonderful second marriage.

The quote I live by is:

It is better to be quiet and thought a fool than to open your mouth and leave no room for doubt.

Something the rest of the team doesn’t know about me is:

I have clairvoyant tendencies and can read minds.

If I were a super hero my special powers would be:

The means to wipe out greed and suffering from mankind.

The one thing I miss about being a kid is:

The innocence of most things, especially having to earn a living and pay a mortgage.  Being able to sleep for 10 or 12 hours without waking.

Keri has been with HRINZ for 2,052 days (as at August 2010).

Getting to know Keri:

Before working with HRINZ I was:

On my OE and travels through Africa

After HRINZ (of course), my next biggest passion is:

Cycling

The best advice I’ve ever received is:

Life is short, so feel the fear and do it anyway

My pet-hate is:

I dislike liars (or should that be creative ‘truth’ tellers)

Weekend mornings you’ll find me:

On my bike cycling around the Wellington Coast

The achievement in my life I’m most proud of is:

Buying my first house

Something the rest of the team don’t know about me is:

I once worked as a Christmas Elf at Wembley Stadium (and made a measly 30 quid)

If I were a super hero the special powers I would have:

The ability to read people’s minds

The one thing I miss about being a kid:

Friday School Lunches!  Mince pie and a jam donut.  Yum.  Healthy?  Heck no.

Lysa has been with HRINZ for 9 years (and counting!) and worked at Te Papa previously.

Getting to know Lysa:

The best advice I’ve ever received is:

You catch more bees with honey than you do with vinegar.

My pet hate is:

Waiting

On weekend mornings you’ll find me:

Hanging out with the kids

If I was a super hero my special powers would be:

Time travel.

The one thing I miss about childhood is:

Having mum cook every night. Now I’m the mum who cooks EVERY night.