Asleep – Yeah right

Writing about http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8104519.stm

A linguistics professor was lecturing to her class one day. “In English,” she said, “A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah . . .right.”

Filed under: Joke, Language

Walking Down the Aisle

Furious Bride

A true story.

A relative of Himself is a vicar at a local church.

The church doors open.  The bride is ready.  The organ strikes up and plays:

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men
Feared by the bad, loved by the good
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood

Not, as requested, Everything I Do.

The bride had asked for the Robin Hood theme song.

Be careful Kath, Tracy & Shelley!

Filed under: Joke , Wedding

My Father’s Eyes are Blue – Coventry Literature Festival

Writing about – http://www.spaghettigazetti.com/2009/03/local-lad-done-good.html

Local poet Anthony Owen will be on his home turf when he appears at the Third Coventry International Festival Of Literature at the Belgrade Theatre in May. The Coventry Literature Festival is unique among UK literature festivals due to its focus on community events, with public writing workshops, children’s events and opportunities for local writers incorporated into the programme.

You can buy tickets and find out more on the Belgrade website:

Wednesday 13 May, 8pm.
Heaventree hosts the Festival’s opening night by inviting the editors of a number of poetry presses and magazine publishers to showcase their best new writers. Guests will include Horizon magazine, The Wolf magazine, Flarestack Press, Under The Radar and the Warwick Review.

This is an invaluable chance to research the diverse opportunities for publication offered by the UK poetry industry, gaining that knowledge of the terrain which is vital for new writers.

Tickets: £5.Thursday 14 May, 8pm.
The launch of My Father’s Eyes Were Blue by Coventry poet Antony Owen and Still This Need by Michael McKimm.

Antony Owen is a commercial manager from Allesley who writes poignant, unsettling poems, reminiscent in style of the Mersey Beats and their French forbears.

Tickets: £4.

 

Filed under: Advertising, Book, Books, Coventry, Warwick , Poetry

Charlotte G’s Malteser Cake

• Box or large bag of maltesers
• 12 crushed digestive biscuits
• 4oz (125g) margarine
• 1 tbsp syrup
• 6oz (175g) chocolate
• Topping – 11oz (325g) chocolate

1. Melt the margerine, syrup and chocolate
2. Add malesers and digestives
3. Press mixture into a tray/dish
4. Allow to cool
5. Topping – Melt the chocolate and cover the base
6. Allow to set in the fridge
7. Remove from fridge so that chocolate is not too hard, then slice.

A recipe to mark the start of my new hardcore diet!

Filed under: Food, Recipes, Work

Vote for Miss Essex

Vote Imogen Leaver for Miss Essex 2009

Vote for Imogen at http://www.missessex.org/vote_profile.php?id=10437&vote=yes

Filed under: Campaigning, Family

What’s a Physics?

Thanks to Daily Mash for providing this pastiche of our week in Ofqual Comms:

CONCERNS have been raised over the standard of science teaching after it emerged thousands of GCSE pupils could not tell the difference between a microscope and a frog.

Question Two: Which one is the frog and which one is the miocropscope?

 

Exam regulator Ofqual has demanded urgent action by ministers before a child suffers serious internal injuries from trying to drink a bag of carpet tacks.

Ofqual said the dumbing down of science teaching has led to children being awarded physics GCSEs for running head first into a wall, while the chemistry exam involves making a glass of Ribena without getting yourself or anyone else pregnant.

And according to Ofqual one child was awarded a ‘B’ grade after claiming that gravity was invented in 1994 by his Uncle Derek.

A spokesman said: “We risk creating a generation of adults who will not only lack vital 21st century skills, but who also risk electrocuting themselves while trying to release the tiny people trapped inside their television sets.”

Filed under: Branding, Comedy, Exams, PR, Press, Work

Social Capital & Knowledge Exchange: Blogging Inside the Enterprise

You may think I’ve been unusually quiet recently, but I’ve been diverting my energies into other channels, including a guest spot at Simply Communicate a site that collates advice, toolkits and templates covering every aspect of internal communication inside organisations.

Here is a taster:

Internal blogging can give us:

• The ability to get to know our colleagues as people and individuals encouraging give and take.
• An easier way of building networks of like-minded or useful people.
• An easy way to find out what colleagues are working on (and joining the dots with our own work).
• An easier way of finding out what people extracurricular interests and skills are (and harnessing them).
• The ability to scan the internal environment, take a reading of the organisation’s mood, and spot and pre-empt issues.
• An easy way to get a rounded sounding on ideas and test out theories or approaches – both by yourself by beginning to articulate ideas for the first time, and with others as a community of interest which helps to test and build the idea.

Read the full article.

Filed under: Blogging, Blogging About Blogs, Engagement, Higher Education, Internal Communications, Internet, Warwick , OU, Unipart

Twitter: is it too limited?

This is a bookmark to Mat Mannion’s post:

Twitter is not fit for (my) purpose(s)

following this twitter conversation (as best as I can recreate it):

@mathewjm Having this sort of interaction 140 characters at a time is sub-optimal, for example!!! 5:50 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to mathewjm

@mathewjm Or is it that people see a service and try and use it for something slightly different, and that’s when it doesn’t work? 5:48 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to mathewjm

@caseyleaver Which is what separating work and play would prevent, of course. The problem is getting people to start when they don’t get it. 5:47 AM Jan 20th from TweetDeck in reply to caseyleaver

@mathewjm & @steverumsby That’s what I mean. Ideally colleagues could get to know each other as rounded people and :. work better together. 5:41 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to mathewjm

@steverumsby When I’m not so lazy Mainly, it needs tags but nobody can be arsed (and multi-accounts is NOT the answer) 5:10 AM Jan 20th from Twabber in reply to steverumsby

@steverumsby Whether I am here or not doesn’t change the fact that Twitter is fundamentally flawed 5:07 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to steverumsby

@mathewjm I’m not sure. I’d love to feature microblogging as part of a staff profile/directory effort. “Casey is (working on)…” 4:57 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to mathewjm

@steverumsby I know that – but lots of people don’t. Plus I am geekily committed to what I do for a living. 4:55 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to steverumsby

@caseyleaver Unfortunately there’s no way around it, think Twitter will die off when people realise they don’t care what celebs are doing 4:51 AM Jan 20th from web in reply to caseyleaver

Worrying about how to use social media when people want to distinguish between work and play. Maybe Yammer is the answer? 4:45 AM Jan 20th from web

Filed under: Blogging, Engagement, Internal Communications, Internet, Social Media, Web Geekery

Chromatic Menu Planning

Writing about http://theschooloflife.typepad.com/the_school_of_life/2008/12/a-nine-course-chromatic-culinary-feast-.html

I have been challenged on Facebook by Ellie Clewlow at Intersecting Sets to think about this.

I’m going to try and do so without referring to Tessa Kiros’s Apples for Jam which is themed in colour chapters.

Filed under: Books, Day Dreaming, Food, Friends, Hobby

Cabinet Office Employee Engagement Kit

Writing about http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/iam/engagement.asp

The Cabinet Office has put together an amazing pack on an approach on Employee Engagement (complete with survey).  The contents of this post, which is a draft of a paper that I am putting together for our Management Committee, is shamelessly stolen from the pack.

I should also add here (adhering to the Principles for Participation Online) that I work for Ofqual, the Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator, which, until Parliament passes the Children, Skills and Learning Bill, is part of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

A programme of work is underway in the Civil Service to develop a cross-government approach to employee engagement. This paper proposes that Ofqual uses the Civil Service framework for measuring and increasing employee engagement. The framework includes a cost-effective staff survey. Adopting the common approach means that we can benchmark ourselves against similar organisation including QCA who are also considering using the scheme.

• Engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year; the disengaged take 6.19 ¹
• 70% of engaged employees indicate that they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs, while only 17% on non-engaged employees say the same. ²
• Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the organisation than the disengaged. ³
• 78% of engaged UK workers would recommend their company’s products or services, versus 13& of disengaged.⁴
• 78% of highly engaged workers in the UK public sector say they can make an impact on public services delivery or customer service, versus only 29% of the disengaged. In 2006 Towers Perrin surveyed 3,000 public sector workers in the UK. ⁴

 

Employees agreeing that:	Disengaged	Moderately Engaged	Highly Engaged
I can impact the quality of our work product	29%	56%	84%
I can impact costs related to my job/unit	10%	21%	43%
I can impact the overall efficiency of the organisation	11%	30%	68%

 Being engaged is more than just being satisfied or motivated. It is having a sense of personal attachment to your work and organisation which means that you want it to succeed. Increasing engagement is achieved by making changes that positively impact on how employees think and feel about their experience of work.

Key Drivers

The key drivers of employee engagement differ between organisations but they tend to fall into the following areas of policy or practice:

1. Vision and direction – creating and communicating a clear and motivating picture of the future for employees
2. Career development – opportunities for professional and personal development and advancement.
3. Recognition – acknowledging the importance of the role each individual plays and thanking people for superior effort and performance.
4. Line management – enabling managers to be advocates of the organisation and their staff.
5. Work itself and environment – creating absorbing roles and suitable and effective work spaces.
6. Organisational effectiveness and ethics – promoting competence, efficiency, innovation and openness in everyday operations.
7. Employee involvement and autonomy – making use of employee expertise and opinion in operating and managing the business.
8. Work-life balance – allowing flexibility in working arrangements to enable employees to meet personal commitments.
9. Reward – valuing employees through a total reward package of pay and a range of other benefits.
10. Information flow and internal communication – enabling easy exchange of information across the organisation and ensuring that internal communication is regular, consistent and targeted.
11. Resources – providing employees with sufficient and suitable resources for their tasks and objectives.
12. Corporate image and reputation – being aware of stakeholder views of the organisation and maintaining a good public standing.

Critical Success Factors

The breadth of factors that could drive, either positively or negatively, engagement levels across the organisation are wide and responsibility lies across several functions, but there are a number of critical success factors:

1. Meaningful performance goals – organisational outcomes linked to employee actions
2. Building commitment and confidence – securing senior leaders’ buy-in and supporting managers to confidently involve and support their teams
3. Leading by example – willingness among senior leaders to invest time and effort in demonstrating a personal commitment to the approach and do things differently if necessary
4. Measurement-driven decisions – using robust quantitative data to decide where effort will have the most value, evaluate progress against goals and evolve the approach.
5. Thinking ‘global’ – considering all business decisions in the context of their impact on people and performance across the whole organisation
6. Employee involvement – providing opportunities for staff to contribute ideas and feedback to improve the approach, and for leaders and managers to gain insight into the needs and motivations of employees.
7. Clear accountability – defining roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for employee engagement between leaders, line managers, corporate functions and peer group networks.
8. Effective communication – regular, tailored communication to explain the benefits of the approach, acknowledge challenges, recognise the efforts of employees and update on progress.

Process

 

Taken from the Cabinet Office’s Employee Engagement in the Civil Service document (http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/iam/engagement.asp)

Although measurement is at the heart of the approach this programme is more than a staff survey. Aligning the process to the business planning and performance review can mean that information on what engages employees can be used to inform business strategies.

Recommendations

 

That OMG considers (a) adopting this approach to co-ordinating decision-making on issues related to staff, and (b) committing to improving the drivers of employee engagement. 

 

1 Gallup, 2003, cited in Melcrum, Employee Engagement: How to Build a High Performance Workforce, 2005.

2 Right Management, Measuring True Employee Engagement, 2006.

3 Corporate Leadership Council (Corporate Executive Board), Driving Performance and Retention through Employee Engagement, 2004.

^{4 Towers Perrin, Executive Briefing: Engagement in the Public Sector, 2007.}

Filed under: Engagement, Excellence, Internal Communications, Work