The Gray Monk

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September 23, 2005

How cuddly is your attitude?

The latest round in the demoralisation and destruction of the British Fire and Rescue Services is well underway. The assessment of competence, the much trumpetted "benchmark" for promotion, has been downgraded to be only 10% of the assessment process. Something called "PQA's" now dominate the assessments - and it is on these that decisions are being made as to who should be promoted or appointed.

What, you may well ask, is a "PQA"? In this age of acronyms where no one actually speaks a complete sentence anymore without littering the converstaion with strings of acronyms no one else (or a very limited number of cogniscenti) understands, it stands for "Personal Qualities and Attributes" and is supposed to measure how receptive you are to working with people from different cultures, colours or sexual orientation. It is also intended to measure your "political" awareness and to gauge your sense of "community". It has nothing whatever to do with measuring how effective you would be as a manager of an emergency service, or of whether or not you actually know anything about it. A colleague who recently underwent this death of career, emerged saying that the whole thing seemed to be aimed at Politically Correct "Issues" and the perceptions of biase as seen by the interviewer. He found that all the questions were extremely subjective and was very distressed to be told at the end of the interview that he had not made the required level - but that he could expect feedback on his performance and development needs, wait for it - in December! Forty other candidates in lower ranks - sorry Roles - had a similar view when they emerged from this exercise, and surprise, surprise, the Service has now appointed several people from outside the profession to replace the uniformed types so patently unsuitable. And the HR Director involved was distressed and surprised by the level of antipathy she encountered when giving feedback!

This experience among colleagues is not unique, but some have learned how to play the game. Three who have also recently undergone this ordeal and succeeded in getting the posts they were after freely admit that they had researched the sources and trends from other people's experiences and spent the entire interview - an hour and a half in duration - shovelling bovine excrement. It obviously worked, in their opinion, primarily because the interviewers were not being objective but selectively subjective and heard only the things they wanted to hear, immediately moving on when they heard the "right" answer. Other colleagues have not been able to pull this off - and I suppose it speaks for itself that all the successful ones have spent several years actually teaching the "new" management techniques.

To make matters worse, the "assessment" is in several "parts" only one of which is a compulsory pass. You've guessed it, it's the one about culture and diversity. You can achieve or not achieve a "pass" in any of the other sections and still get through as long as you score 100% in the Culture and Diversity section. As an additional incentive, a "Not Ready" result - no one "Fails" - bars you from applying for or serving in an acting capacity in any role but the one you are in for two years. In that time you may not attend or undergo any other "Assessment Centre". So how is it run? Well, for a start, it certainly puts the applicant under pressure. The "Assessor" sits the candidate down, hands them a "Standard" list of questions (Developed and published by that extremely competent and efficient organisation called the Civil Service) and asks you to respond to the first question - then starts a stop watch and tells you that you have five minutes to answer verbally.

Your verbal answers are being written down by hand by another member of the panel - who, as they are not using shorhand and are trying to take your answers "verbatim" - keeps interupting your flow by asking you to slow down. Then you are criticised at the end for not completing your answer in the required time. The response to any protest is that it is a test of your communication skills! This is a test which works well for people who deal in meetings, in esoteric concepts and can blather away about "principles" and "strategies" for Africa, but it is a huge problem for those whose communication is usually on a practical level. It also bears no relation at all to how well someone will perform in an emergency situation, but creates a huge amount of stress and seems designed to exclude the technical people and promote the paper shufflers. The worst aspect is that it is a nationally imposed assessment process devised for office workers and now being used in a service which spends less than 20% of their working time "working" in offices!

So, next time you need a fire engine at your fire/road accident or other emergency, don't expect too much in the way of emergency action. The crew will have been demotivated to the point that they no longer care, and the person in charge will know all about how to empathise with your distress, make a cup of tea and perhaps offer you community fire safety advice and counselling, but not a lot about dealing with the emergency to hand.

And don't forget that we're going to be paying more for this service than we did for the crude, rough, tough and "elitist" service it is supposed to be "modernising". Time to invest in some fire equipment for your own use and protection methinks!

Posted by The Gray Monk at September 23, 2005 09:10 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Slim Jim at September 23, 2005 12:01 PM