December 23, 2005


Far be it from me ...

JOURNALISTS AND media outlets in Germany look set for a bad time ahead - and the UK industry may not be far behind.

According to Lucia Cockroft, writing in The Guardian's Office Hours supplement, an IT company in Germany has changed its contracts of employment to stop staff moaning and whingeing.

A top executive is quoted as saying they brought in a 'two moans and you're out' rule because morose individuals were undermining morale and productivity.

The 'Doctrine of Smoke and Fire' suggests that executives usually provide their employees with more than enough reasons to complain, usually without even trying. Similarly, organisations are rare where individuals can succeed in spite of, not because of, their managements. So, apart from anything else, blame for both moaning and its consequences is probably entirely, and unfairly, misplaced. (What's new there, then?)

What makes this worse for the media is, that - if the UK is a true indicator of the professional temperament - journalists must be close to the top when it comes to moaning and groaning.

Let someone spend 10 year battling for a prestigious, apparently glamorous job with a leading broadcasting organisation, mentioning no names of course, and within days they're whining abilities will have soared. It's almost as if more time is set aside during inductions for complaining than about learning where to find the ladies, gents and fire exits.

Personnel standards
According to Ms Cockroft, a survey for Personnel Today magazine found that 82 per cent of HR professionals said they considered office whingers more difficult to deal with than bullies, liars and worriers. Perhaps that's why personnel management in the media is so poor too?

That concern aside, perhaps more worrying still is the impact such contracts could have in anywhere where deadlines are short; if an employee is shown the door after just two moans, then it wouldn't be unrealistic to expect the first evictions within seconds, not minutes, of the start of the first early-morning shift.

Is there a journalist in the world who isn't grumpy at 5am? Who moans about the time it takes for a computer to boot? A kettle to boil? The studio heating? The dairy list left by the previous shift?

Every radio and television station would be off the air before the first news bulletin could be produced and no evening papers would ever hit the streets.

What is even more depressing is the thought that some, newspaper managements especially, could do this deliberately, using the approach as an excuse to close titles they no longer considered sufficiently commercial.

Now, what happens if we start to moan about that, I wonder?

Office Hours, The Guardian, December 19, 2005