Setting KPIs

One of the things I’ve been doing lately at work has been setting KPIs (key performance indicators, for those readers lucky enough not to have to keep up with corporate jargon).
Coincidentally, this TED talk appeared in my itunes podcast feed:
Basically, Pink says that if you are asking someone to do something that requires creative (as [...]

Read Full Post »

Flexible work

I went to a love in at work recently – 60 or 70 senior people from my part of our organisation. One of the topics was how to improve the proportion of senior women (as an aside, I found it pretty amusing that all the men at my table were shocked by the statistics – [...]

Read Full Post »

Wildfire

Wildfire scarcely seems an adequate term for what happened over the weekend in Victoria.  To give a sense of the intensity, many cars are unidentifiable, because the numbers on the engine blocks have melted. This article compares the temperature in the worst of the fires to the Dresden firestorms.
John Quiggin has done his usual wonderful [...]

Read Full Post »

Car privileges

In most big Sydney CBD companies, a car space is a sign that you’ve made it. In my company, and the last company I worked for, the most senior executives are entitled to a car space. They are allocated strictly by rank, and neither the cost, nor the Fringe Benefits Tax that the company has [...]

Read Full Post »

Yes we can

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
That got a cheer from the 30 or [...]

Read Full Post »

It’s Carnival Time!

Those Hoydens lauredhel and tigtog are always looking for ways to enliven the feminist blogosphere. Welcome to the latest instalment of  one of their great ideas - the sixth downunder feminist blog carnival.

My feminist posts are often about the workplace, so that’s the main theme of this carnival. I’m invoking my host’s privilege to give you an old [...]

Read Full Post »

Women’s glacial progress melted away

Today the EOWA released the results of their annual women in leadership census.
Sadly, the apposite headline is “Women’s glacial progress melted away”.
The census is pretty simple – someone reads the annual reports of the top 200 listed Australian companies, and counts the proportion of women on the senior executive teams (ie CEO plus his/her direct [...]

Read Full Post »

Paid Maternity Leave

The campaign for paid maternity leave in Australia has gotten renewed vigour following the recent change of government. The government has asked the Productivity Commission to enquire into what should be done.
And there are a lot of blog posts about it. Joshua Gans has written a series from an economic point of view, which culminates [...]

Read Full Post »

Minority

In my professional life, I get quite involved in industry forums (fora?). Today, for me, was quite a big day. I had set up a workshop for my peers around the industry – roughly one per company, plus a few guest speakers - to discuss a professional issue. All up, there were around 30 of us. [...]

Read Full Post »

Work and life – some statistics

This week Beaton Consulting released a study on work life balance. Beaton’s main game is as advisors to professional services firms (law firms, accounting firms, etc). Every year they do a mammoth survey of those firms’ clients, to find out who is the best in each category. As a sideline, they tack on a few questions at [...]

Read Full Post »