April 09, 2008

Human Resources 'Fully Resourced'

Another milestone was reached by our university last week with the news that, following the latest round of appointments, there was now one human resources manager available for every member of academic staff.

"This is an exciting breakthrough," declared Louise Bimpson, our Corporate Director of Human Resources (formerly the Personnel Officer). "Only last week, a survey by Coventry University revealed that university academic staff had the worst perceptions of their managers of any employment sector. What better way could there be to resolve this unsatisfactory situation than by drastically increasing the overall number of managers who can provide management training?"

She went on to tell our reporter Keith Ponting (29) that this latest increase in human resources meant that all academic staff could at last be liberated from their "traditional obsessive concern with teaching and research" and be free to develop their leadership andperformance-management skills, as well as their capacity to harness their endeavours to the strategic goals of the university going forward.

Asked by our reporter if there was any reliable evidence that the employment of ever-larger numbers of human resources staff had done anything whatsoever to improve the performance of individual universities, Ms Bimpson said that "the HR revolution still had a long way to go". "But," she added, "always remember that the Tower of Babel wasn't built in a day."

From: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But it only took one day to destroy Babel, right?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said...

Perhaps that tells us something about paper tigers :)