The chutzpah here, the unmitigated gall

As with so much of British life trying to manage a workforce has been taken over by the Lanyards. Whether to discipline, fire, retrain, a specific individual is now something to be managed within a complex of laws and procedures. At which point:

Workers are being left burnt out by “poorly executed” disciplinary investigations at work that cost the UK economy £28.5bn a year, public health doctors have said.

Badly handled disciplinary proceedings damage not just the staff involved but also their colleagues and the organisation that employs them, according to the UK Faculty of Public Health (FPH).

Poorly conducted or harsh workplace investigations into alleged misconduct cause such harm that they should be seen as a threat to public health like smoking or bad diet, the standard-setting body for public health specialists said.

Like smoking, eh?

And why is this?

However, the processes involved in many of those 1.7m actions are flawed because organisations put formal ways of pursuing them above their staff’s wellbeing, the faculty said.

So the law, and union agreements, and staff regulations mean that a formal process has to be followed so that no tripping over law, agreements or regulations is done. But having created this maze the creators of it, the Lanyards, look upon it and see it is not good. Strangely, the answer appears not to be razing the complexity which causes the formal process to be adopted. Funny that.

Not that we wholly want to become all Trumpian about this but there is a certain simplicity to being able to just say “You’re fired”, no?

Tim Worstall