Employee hours

One of Dub’s latests post about time and labour (down here it is now not labor 🙂 ) management systems got me thinking and there is another factor to the benefits listed. Health and Safety.

If you industry is anything other than very basic knowledge management work then actual hours worked by you employees is an important but often over looked measure. In any manufacturing, medical, law enforcement or heavy industry the number of hours put in my employees has a direct relationship to injuries. The more hours on site the higher the chances of accident.

Even your average office worker will start to make very silly mistakes once they have been working too many hours. Statistics show that after about 17 hours without sleep your work is a bit like your blood alcohol level was at 0.05, once you hit 20 hours it is something like 0.10 and only goes down hill from there.

Let’s not forget work life balance and the other really bad things that start to happen when employees work too long, unplanned absences turnover etc.

Now going back to technology. Through effective implementation of timekeeping systems you are able to aggregate data and see areas where too many hours are being worked. I know many will think that white collar workers do not want to be tracked or enter their time so how can this be done. Most swipe card security systems will these days provide reports or interfaces that will take data into a data warehouse for further analysis.

Resume written

Over the last three days I have been away at one of our mine sites, during the evenings I finished the resume. I have decided I will put it on ResumeWiki, not just because I am interested in the feedback but I also believe in the tool and feel it needs more participation. Later today I hope to find some time, difficult when you have been out of the office for 6 out of the last 10 days, and post it.

The daily dump!

Sorry for the blunt title but I could not resist, I hope it does not destroy my reputation too much.

My wife found this interesting news article on ABC News about a programmer who prefers his new role picking up doggy do over programming. There is also a really interesting message on the whole off shoring issue and how manual trade roles will always exist, unless of course we create androids to do the work.

Writing my resume

Over the last couple of weeks I have been putting together my resume, which should be easy considering I last used in October last year but it is proving a slightly complex task.

Firstly, the time in my current role has been very limited (3 months as of yesterday) and now with the takeover in full swing many long term projects have been delayed for obvious reasons.

Secondly, each time you add something you need to remove something else otherwise the document will end up being 100’s of pages, again adding to the complexity what do you remove.

Finally I have decided to add a new section at the top as a short profile/biography of who I am and why someone would want to hire me. I have written bio’s before for speaking engagements but it is not the same as these are never read in total by the chair of the session. I am also trying to determine how much of my online activities to include.

I am looking at maybe throwing it up onto ResumeWiki for a bit of advice as well.

Time for a break, off the to park to kick the footy with Ben and one of his friends, maybe I will be inspired!

SAP integration with Outlook

As this story from IT Toolbox says why did it take so long for SAP to have meaningful integration with Outlook?

If you use Outlook a lot you will be able to get access the SAP HR information. This is a fantastic step. Full appointment, taks lists, email, contact and other Outlook data will have linkages with SAP. Without too much information I can only assume training calenders, leave schedules, and workflow tasks etc will be available in Outlook.

New Theme

Since moving to WordPress I have been amazed at the ease of use, as a content management system I am very happy with it. I have also been blown away by the number of themes available to download and use. Today I have loaded a new theme called Relaxation by John Wrana I like it a lot it has clean lines neutral colours and generally a professional look.

If you have an opinion let me know, oh and be prepared for some other changes :-).

Annoying terms

Via ContingentWorkforce.Org

Digital Home Canada has an article on the most annoying workplace terms and phrases.

In reading the list and the full article I might be an annoying person to work with. Oh well I might do some value-added thinking outside of the box to develop a win-win customer centric solution that has alignment with my core competency and develop synergies and incremental benefits that focus on accountability management with generation X so that at the end of the day I can develop metrics on how to redeploy people, however given this is a paradigm shift I will take it offline not to bore you all.

ePortfolios and Resumes the crossover

Lousie, from BlueSkyResumes wrote about a client of hers who is having trouble remembering the different projects that they have worked on. The upshot of this is it is very difficult to write a truly reflective resume.

While a lot of the discussions to date on ePortfolio’s have been focused on the educational aspects I see another more valuable, longer term usage. An ePortfolio can also be a place for someone to develop a history of what they have achieved during their working career. As long as it is an semi-unstructured tool almost anything could be collected as any point in time. Thus providing inputs into the resume preparation process when required. If written clearly the ePortfolio might even form a portion of the resume. The ePortfolio would need to have the ability yo have private thoughts and notes, similar to WordPress’s Private Post feature.