This is from a press release issued by HM Revenue & Customs today, no doubt to puff Lin Homer's damehood:
This is from a press release issued by the Public Accounts Committee in November:
Now someone is not telling the truth here.
And I suggest, very strongly, that it is HMRC.
If they want a new year's resolution I suggest being honest would be a good place to start.
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As a long-time employee of HMRC I’m appalled that Lin Homer has been given an honour. Staff morale is at an all-time low; many of us feel we are failing those we are meant to serve (the public), and that the senior leadership team are utterly out of touch with reality. Not helped by Homer getting a £20k bonus last year whilst the rest of us were lucky to see a 1% pay rise (sour grapes? Too right!). All I (and many others) want to do is leave as soon as we possibly can.
Jebson
I hear your sentiments far too often
Hence my outrage at Homer’s ‘honour’
Richard
It is a sad and sobering fact that the succinct description of current organisational life in HMRC provided by Jebson here is not an outlier but the norm.
The out of touch with reality senior management mindset, which permeates all the way down to the lowest level management grades; the low staff morale which drives an increasing desire by the majority to reach a point where they can get out at the earliest opportunity; and the poor level of service created and lack of integration by the simplistic silo/stove pipe organisational processes driven by unit targets; are replicated in just about any corporate organisation you can identify. Whether it’s the private, public or third/voluntary sector the template is the same.
The point of organisation is to realise the potential for achieving outcomes which are greater than the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, MMT (Modern Management Theory), driven as it is by the economically illiterate neo-liberal doctrine, has produced hollowed out organisations in which outcomes are actually less than the sum of the parts. Everything is quantitative and quality has been eliminated in favour of simple minded spreadsheets at unit level with no understanding of how the selfish maximisation target driven activity of one unit impacts on another leading to multiple negative feedback loops.
Deep down the numpties know they are naked and out of their depth. What really pisses them off is the fact that they know the staff can see this. As a consequence any verbal or social media observation which does not fit the toadying agenda sends them into epic fits of dummy spitting and rattle throwing. This produces a level of spitefulness which seeks to identify and severely punish any comment or observation which they deem negative.
Ridicule seems to be the only antidote as reasoned rationale argument has no effect on these zealots.
That rings very true
Spot on. I left HMRC a year ago and people were regularly punished with poor performance markings if their “behaviours” were judged to be “non-corporate” -regardless of how expert or skilled they were in the technical areas of tax (i.e the job they were being paid to do), basically if you raised any dissent about how the Department was being run you were penalised.
Which is absurd
No organisation survives if only staffed by yes people
What I see is a management culture whereby certain people are paid very well to say and do the most stupid things and pass it off as intelligent and sensible work.
Not only that, the politicians you obey will obviously look after you by giving you more work elsewhere when you’ve wrought havoc and mention you in the new year’s honours list as well.
I see little groups of these people on my early morning train into work. Their conversations are dominated by the price of their assets and how they are going to spend their money.
very well-expressed Dave-teaching tried to turn me into a yes man so I left 15 years ago. I still hear from Teachers how low morale is. I recently spoke to an old colleague who has left the profession to become a taxi driver and feel she got out just in time before total collapse – how terrible. Our working lives should be the most rewarding years of our lives and so many experience it as a blight.
Old codgers description of the appraisement system is spot on although it only reveals part of the process.
The template used is the Gaussian distribution bell curve and the way it is used is bizarre because the performance outcomes at every team level are based not on objective performances against meaningful set job criteria but are instead made to fit the bell curve. This states that at any one time only a set number of staff can be performing at each performance level and special levelling meetings are held to ensure that the performance markings are made to fit the predetermined outcomes.
This means that not only are a certain number of staff deemed to be performing below standard at all times it also results in individuals having to take a hit for the team by taking their turn to be on a PIP (Performance Improvement Programme) which undermines confidence and distracts from doing the job.
Utterly bizarre
Almost callous in its lack of humanity
“Utterly bizarre
Almost callous in its lack of humanity”
If only that was all it is.
The theme song of all corporate organisations (sic) comes courtesy of the Average White Band ‘Lets go round again.’
This is because:
a) once you get to about tier 3 management and above the tendency is to run everything as though it is some kind of personal fiefdom.
b) what might best be described as the Pol Pot style of management in which no one hangs around for very long because they are all too busy pursuing short term goals to advance their careers.
As a consequence you get this constant reorganisation, a long never ending Year Zero reinvention of the wheel, as someone new comes in with supposedly new ideas which in actual fact were the way you did things three reorganisations ago. By the time the ideas of whichever numptie it happens to be at the time go tits up they have long gone.
This produces insufficient stability to enable meaningful effectiveness.
Fat chance of that for the next 4-5 years!
More like ‘more of the same’ to me.
As others have noted, the same processes can be seen in every public service and with the same results. To my mind this is deliberate policy and has been imposed in series, starting with the weakest sectors ( social work was first) where the numbers were small and the professional ethic less well developed: and moving to more established areas once the techniques and the rhetoric were honed. Teachers were an early (and ongoing) target, but by now we see the process applied to doctors. With conscious and entrenched professional values and support from the public, it is possible doctors can defend the health service successfully, as other professions cannot: but it is by no means certain
One of the failures of the Trades Unions and Professional bodies has been their inability to see the same strategy applied across the board and to unite to challenge it. Rather each group, subject to the same ideological centralisation and policy, has behaved as if the problem were unique to its field. Yet listening to public sector workers in many departments you hear the same experience and the same demoralisation, for the same reasons. One size fits all, and the narrative pursued is single.
Agreed
I know you will shoot me down in flames for talking like a neo-liberal, but it does suggest that state-run institutions can be pretty inefficient sometimes. Political interference can be a powerful negative force.
Of course
Neoliberal states set out to achieve this goal
The private sector has ditched the bell curve performance rating nonsense and some forward thinking organisations are scrapping annual objective setting etc all together. The state is always behind the curve in these things it seems
I hated everything about formal appraisals
They were a disaster for relationships and delivered almost all no useful benefits