• 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!

Unfortunately, and not unexpectedly, entries from the Canterbury region were non-existent this year however we’re really looking forward to seeing all the amazing initiatives and personal growth and development that has been undertaken in the region and entered in the 2012 Awards – the stories will be breath taking we’re sure.  There is always a silver lining to every cloud and we know that Christchurch will rise like the phoenix from the ashes, given time.

Plans are well underway for the black-tie National Awards Presentation Dinner which this year will be hosted by Attorney General, the Honourable Christopher Finlayson, at the Banquet Hall of the Beehive in Parliament Buildings in Wellington on 24 November.  Sheridan’s got everything in hand and we’re all looking forward to a wonderful evening – rumour has it that some organisations are making the most of the opportunity to use it as a Christmas function for their key clients and valued staff members.

There seems to be a lot of workplace Awards happening at the moment and quite a few are being celebrated around the same time as ours will be in November, so you’ll be spoiled for choice if you’re looking for a good night out during the ‘silly season’.  Which brings me to the point of this blog – what’s the real value of this sort of recognition?

Recently I attended a really good HRINZ Wellington Branch Special Interest Group session titled The Money or the Bag: The link between Remuneration and the Organisation’s Strategy, presented by Crispin Garden-Webster and Geoff Summers and attended by a strong audience of senior level HR practitioners.  During the session we broke into groups to discuss the topic in more detail and each group found themselves coming to the same conclusion – that recognition, appreciation and acknowledgement were all very high in the reward stakes for most (if not all) employees, yet usually cost employers very little to provide.  While money (salary and benefits) is important, purpose, autonomy and mastery played a bigger part in attracting and keeping good staff engaged.

We also discussed the notion that not all employees wanted to be acknowledged in the same way.  Some like to be acknowledged amid the fanfare, glitter and with mirror balls, while others were happier with a phone call from a senior manager or CEO thanking them for doing a great job.  The common denominator is that everyone likes to be appreciated for doing a good job – however the delivery can vary wildly from one personality type to another.  One size most definitely does not fit all!

So how does that work for people and organisations who enter awards?  Do they want to be put on a pedestal, stroked and worshipped – is that why they entered in the first place?  Or do they simply want to share the things they’ve discovered through their efforts that might help their fellow beings in their working or personal lives?  I strongly suspect it’s the latter but in order to get that recognition to enable them to pass on their achievements they often have to take some formal action, such as entering awards, to allow it to happen.  Becoming winners at whatever level is probably the last thing many of them expect when they enter – they’re often happy just to be able to tell their story to a ready and willing audience.

I don’t think that the people who attend the National Presentation Dinner (and for that matter any regional event where Award entries are acknowledged) do so to be wowed by being the first to hear who has won a particular category, or to support just those they know who have entered, but they come because they want to be part of something much bigger and are there to celebrate the efforts of a whole profession, regardless of who ends up taking home the trophy.

To support my theory consider this analogy.  My husband, Evan, is a total rugby nut and one of the ‘original’ All Blacks supporters, just like a large proportion of Kiwi blokes of his age and background.  He has been lucky to attend a reasonable number of games during the 2011 Rugby World Cup, though they’re not all ‘All Blacks’ games.

He fessed up the other night that he actually enjoys the games where the All Blacks aren’t playing more than where they are because he’s freed up to appreciate the skills and strategy of all the players on both sides of the match rather than feeling loyalty to just one team.  He said best of all was the fact that it didn’t matter who won as, in most cases, he had no allegiance to either team, and at the end of the game the winning team was usually decided by how well they played the game, so he could just enjoy the actual rugby played, without any emotional strings attached.

Having said that, he still has opinions about the quality of refereeing, and like many kiwis he supports the All Blacks and any team playing against Australia, but his real passion is for the game – the plain old-fashioned good quality rugby.

Isn’t that the same for the good quality HR that is delivered throughout our country’s workplaces?  We want to celebrate the value of it all, because let’s face it HR has come a long way over the last few years for a lot of people and organisations.  Having said that, there will be no ‘participation’ prizes at our awards ceremony – the winners will most definitely have done something pretty special.  No-one wins by default at HRINZ!

So will you be there to wave the flag for the profession at the National Presentation Dinner?  I certainly hope so.  It will mean a lot to us all.

The theme, ‘HR to the Rescue’, was interesting in that when the programme was created back in December we’d chosen to focus on the recent demands placed on HR by several natural disasters that had struck New Zealand, but by the time we got to the conference in May we’d been beset by even more disasters, both here and in other parts of the Pacific Rim, with tragic consequences, so everything had changed quite dramatically.  It was still on the same theme but it just became much bigger.

Opening key note speaker, Hamish Wilson, did a great job of reminding the audience that for HR to achieve anything it had to be ready with systems and capabilities in place before called upon.  He took us through a large restructuring project he’d undertaken for Dutch Shell, and whilst the scale was completely mind boggling to our tiny work force, the point was made that the problems and issues are the same pretty much everywhere.

In scheduling the session order earlier in the year I had wondered if the audience would pick up on the link about identifying the need to be ready in order to help others – a bit like being told to put your own oxygen mask on first when going through the safety drill on a plane.  For those that might have missed it initially it certainly became apparent as the day wore on.

I attended a concurrent session at each opportunity – my only regret was that I couldn’t be in three places at once as the buzz around the venue during the breaks told me that things were going really well.  Later, the evaluations confirmed that every session was interesting, relevant and well received.  The content of some sessions had changed slightly between the programme going to print and the session being delivered and I’m guessing this was to accommodate the events that had occurred in the intervening period.

Derek Roger reminded us about the damage that rumination can do to our lives and while I’ve heard Derek speak several times before I could have listened to him for days – he has the most amazing ability to impart a really important message in a delightfully charming and amusing manner – I still have images in my mind of the startled cat cartoon he used to illustrate his point and it brings a smile to my lips whenever I think of it, as well as a reminder not to worry about things that might never happen.

Dave Wild followed Derek as closing key note speaker and I’m really glad that unconsciously I had got the order of sessions spot on.  Dave used a day to day example of how to extract innovation from potential disaster and come out on top.  I won’t go into what the example was but there could have been some very anxious moments had Derek not already pointed out how futile worrying would have been.  If I didn’t know better I could have assumed they’d colluded to prove a point.

As the day’s sessions of Nine to 9 was drawing to a close Vanessa Stoddart, GM HR at Air New Zealand was presented with the inaugural Honorary Fellowship of HRINZ – we couldn’t have ended the day’s proceedings on a more positive note.

Networking drinks were a welcome break from all the thinking and these were quickly followed by a relaxing and tasty dinner – made even more enjoyable by comedian Mark Wright entertaining us with his own style of humour, as well as a very insightful soliloquy of just what New Zealand and New Zealanders have achieved on the world stage.  It was very sobering in a funny sort of way.

The attendance numbers were a wee bit lower than we were expecting – we always want more people to benefit from the experience – but the quality of presentations and participation of those who did make the commitment to attend certainly made up for it.  Nine to 9 has positioned itself as a ‘boutique’ style event that shouldn’t be missed and especially caters for busy HR people.  Is there anyone working in HR who isn’t busy?

As you know we have quite a lot of new staff at HRINZ and they’re a great bunch – all very dedicated and excited to be getting on top of their new roles – but some of them are spending a huge amount of time phoning and emailing accounts departments of members’ organisations to get reference numbers for the payments we’re receiving because for some reason this vital information is being left off remittance advices.  With 4,000 members paying their annual fees along with a very large percentage of them also attending SIGs and other events on a regular basis, our accounts function is pretty big, especially at this time of the year.

HRINZ has individual membership but often there are multiple members working in an organisation where the employer is paying for the members to belong and/or attend HRINZ events.  We frequently receive payments from these organisations which cover many invoices but unless we’re told what invoices they relate to it is almost impossible for us to accurately reconcile the payments against the correct member’s ledger.  This results in some members being chased for payments that they’ve authorised and thought were paid.  If we can’t receipt the payments against the correct invoices the money paid gets put into a holding or suspense account until we can track down what it’s for.

HRINZ staff phone or email the accounts departments when remittance advices are missing but it’s amazing how hard it is to get a response from some of these people – very few return calls or respond to emails and in many situations when we do get hold of them and explain what is going on the problem continues in subsequent months as if the conversation never happened.  This must be affecting the productivity of lots of organisations and wasting a lot of resources – it certainly has that affect on our tiny one.

We had a discussion about it in our team meeting this week and came to the conclusion that the problem probably sits with HR anyway (sorry guys) as clearly there is a training issue here.

Having been an accounts clerk in a much earlier life I know that it is possible to do it better than it’s currently being done by many, and if it is done properly life becomes a lot easier for both parties.  The thing that concerns me is that what we are experiencing is probably also being experienced by lots of other organisations – we’re just the tip of the iceberg – so how much time do accounts staff really spend doing such menial, unproductive and unnecessary work across the country?  Working on the old concept that prevention is better than cure, why isn’t this issue tackled at the other end when people are being trained into a new role?  It’s not rocket science or is it?  Have we created such complex and convoluted systems and processes that it’s just too hard to add a simple reference number to a payment remittance notice?  Has online banking become a monster or simply made us lazy?

I know the staff at HRINZ would much rather be doing work that adds value to membership, so if there’s anything you can do to help sort this problem out for us at your end we’d be very grateful.  Then we could all get on with the fun stuff.

On the first day I attended a Graduate Careers Expo at University of Waikato that HRINZ was exhibiting at.  I hadn’t planned to go to Hamilton but at short notice one of the National Office staff couldn’t make it so I went in their place and I spent the day with Kelsi, our membership manager, and Jayne, our Auckland Branch events co-ordinator.  The plan was for the three of us to talk to aspiring HR practitioners and give them info on what being in HR involved, as well as how HRINZ, as their membership association, could help them along the way.  It went really well and our time at the expo just flew by, though I found myself doing other business for HRINZ and missed some of the action (Jayne became guest judge of talent for an adjacent exhibitor and Kelsi found herself moonlighting on the IT stand – all part of the expo experience apparently!).  One thing that was apparent was that there are some great HR grads who are really keen to get into HR roles but who are finding it a bit tricky as there are few opportunities being offered at the moment.

The expo was held in the Academy of Performing Arts building and the environment is beautiful – it took some self control not to just sit beside the lake in the sun and snooze like a lizard, especially after having to get up at the crack of dawn to catch a ‘red-eye’ flight.

That evening our trio attended a HRINZ Waikato Branch new members event with the local committee which was kindly hosted at a local business, The Effect.  It was very enjoyable drinking fine wine in the garden while we learned more about Hamilton’s newest HRINZ members, and all in a beautiful ‘art deco’ setting on a lovely barmy Waikato evening.  Hmmmm, maybe it wasn’t ‘work’ as we know it…

On the following day Kelsi and I arrived at the Wintec (Waikato Institute of Technology) Business School where Kelsi gave a formal talk to Brent Wood’s business students on HRINZ and how we can help them with their careers and then Brent, Kelsi and I answered a few questions on HR.  I found it interesting that the questions being asked hadn’t changed much over the years – the concerns about how to get a foot in the door for that first HR role seems to be a perennial one, but perhaps a little more difficult in the current tight job market.

Our session with the students was followed by a tour of the Wintec campus – what an impressive place.  I had last been there in about 1999 when many prefabs dotted the horizon.  They’ve now been replaced with an eclectic mix of beautiful historic buildings and stunningly crisp and creative new ones, where height, light and accessibility abounds, punctuated with courtyards of trees, shrubs and lawns.  The pride in the campus was apparent – no litter, graffiti or attitudes to be seen – and its proximity to the CBD of Hamilton is perfect.

Morning tea and lunch gave us a chance to talk to the key people involved in the development of human resources at Wintec and their generous hospitality was very well received by us too.  It was great being able to have a range of conversations about the future of HR and the issues faced by our emerging (and current) work force from a different angle, and really reassuring to see the dedication and commitment from the people who influence our next generation of practitioners and business leaders.

On reflection, I realised that I don’t have enough of these conversations, probably because I always seem to be busy, but I certainly plan to schedule more now that things are humming along back in the office.

It’s great to enjoy work to the extent that it doesn’t feel like work, and even nicer being able to get out of the office and into another space for a couple of days.  Now where’s my next destination…?

The old website was huge and it contained over 6,000 documents with most of them needing tweaking or updating in some way – some minor, some major – and there are some that we’ve deleted altogether and quite a few that have been archived in case we need them in the future.

I’ve learned a few lessons in doing this project and they just might be useful to others

1.       Unlike true love, a good website doesn’t last forever.  Divorce it if necessary – don’t keep it past its ‘use by’ date if its not meeting your needs and don’t get emotionally attached to it or you’ll never be able to part with it.

2.       Don’t introduce visitors to your best friend (other sites) and expect them to stay loyal to you.  If visitors are led astray by links that take them away from your site and there’s no way of finding their way back home to yours, you’ll probably lose them forever.

3.       A website is a bit like a garden – left for too long without weeding and pruning it will become an impenetrable jungle which will need chainsaws and machetes to fix it (and it’s a great place for nasty creepy crawlies to hide in).

4.       Do your homework.  Find out what your stakeholders want/expect in a website and give it to them (we gathered up lots of comments and suggestions before we started and managed to accommodate nearly all of them).  Check out similar websites too, but don’t try to copy them – keep yours individual and edgy.

5.       Don’t embark on a rebuild until you have enough time to devote to it – it needs to be done ‘in the flow’ without lots of interruptions or delays otherwise you’ll get lost and it will take longer (this happened to me a bit on our journey but fortunately our website genies knew where things were at throughout the entire process and guided me back on track).

6.       We all know about the boiled frog syndrome – a dysfunctional website doesn’t happen overnight, it creeps up on you over quite a long period of time and you don’t usually see it happening.  If you start hearing grumbles or your traffic logs start slipping take a long hard look at your site, preferably without your rose tinted specs.  I was guilty of this too as the four years since we’d last touched it (and even then it was just a quickie facelift) had absolutely flown by.

7.       Make sure you have a really good policy for how it is updated and managed, with strict protocols (rules even) around file names, permissions, grammar, spelling and style etc, and schedule regular audits by an independent pair of eyes.

8.       It’s great to be able to manage your own content but best if just one very competent person is the ‘Guardian of the Site’ to ensure it doesn’t get messed up, or worse neglected.  Use an advisory group if necessary to ensure your site doesn’t become the local rubbish dump.

9.       Allocate enough dosh to create what you need.  Invariably website rebuilds go over budget as most of us can’t remember just how much info our websites contain (or don’t contain), and few of us properly scope the project in the first place.  If you’ve ever built a house, done renovations or gone on an overseas holiday you’ll know what I mean.

10.   Talk to the people who are responsible for supplying different parts of website content for your organisation and make sure you know what they need and give it to them, but without compromising the design, structure/architecture and navigation.  Don’t let the loudest voice call the shots either.

11.   Ask your website users what they think of the new site and if the majority of them have a problem then you’ll need to fix it.  But beware of knockers – you’ll never please everyone and it’s likely that your critics will have their own agenda anyway.

12.   Remember to promote your site widely, but get it going properly first – broken links and slow-to-load sites will do more harm than good.  A good website genie will give advice on the use of key words to use to maximise search engine optimisation – make sure you follow it.  “Welcome to our website…” won’t help your ranking in search engines either, even if you do want to welcome visitors to your place.

13.   Celebrate your success!  It’s a big job which brings immense satisfaction when it’s finished.  Remember to thank everyone who has played a part in rebuilding it and be proud of it.  Goodness knows it will be out of date soon enough, so enjoy it while you can.

14.   Schedule the next rebuild while you think of it – by the time it comes around you’ll be ready for it.

I’d like to acknowledge all the wonderful people who played a part in rebuilding our website – I won’t name you as you know who you are and I’d hate to leave anyone out, but from the bottom of my heart, a huge THANK YOU!!!

If you’d like to tell us what you think of our baby, please comment below.  We’d love to hear from you.  Honest.

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!

After a period of minimal staff turnover for the last three or four years, five of my team of 12 have moved on (or are about to move on) to other things – namely overseas trips, new career challenges, a change of pace, and relocating to a new city.  With the HRINZ Board nearing the end of a two-year long governance review the timing of these changes at National Office couldn’t be better to enable the changes we need to make to go forward –  our needs will definitely be different under the new governance model  that has been mooted.

I’ve been working at HRINZ for more years than I care to admit to, though loving almost every minute of them; however my job changes when my boss changes – HRINZ elects a new National President every two years – and this keeps me fresh and stops me from becoming bored or stale.  Catherine Taylor, GM HR at Kiwi Bank, has just taken up the reins as National President and I’m really looking forward to working with Catherine to implement some of the big projects we’ve been working on (along with others on the HRINZ Board) over the last few years.  I’m not going to go into any detail now about what these projects might be – you’ll just have to ‘watch this space’ and read my future blogs, but I believe we’re about to enter a new phase as New Zealand emerges from a particularly tough two or three years of recession.  The recent tragic Christchurch earthquakes will undoubtedly affect the whole country, so it’s difficult to second guess how things will be in the future, but I’m trying to see a glass half full of hope and optimism, rather than one half empty with pain and suffering.