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Chicago cop sues for overtime on BlackBerry

Posted by ianprice on Thu, 05/08/2010 - 16:18
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I spotted this article in the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this week. A "superstar" cop has sued over two years of overtime on his BlackBerry. An arbitrator specilaising in employee relations describes the BlackBerry issue as an "uncharted, undefined area" for many employers.

The irony of this is that sustained email checking via BlackBerry is not great from either employee or employer perspectives: if anything, it reduces productivity, is detrimental to work-life balance and crowds out deep thinking.

I expect we will see more of this in the US with the UK following suit a couple of years from now....

 

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The Activity Illusion with Ian Price

A blog by ianprice

I am an organisational behaviour specialist and author of The Activity Illusion. Formerly a corporate man, I have switched careers and was recently awarded a MSc in Occupational Psychology at Birkbeck College. Part of the reason I did this is because I was finding it increasingly hard to find work I could enjoy in corporate life. Everyone I worked with was frantically busy and yet so little was being achieved; this appeared to me to be the case the more senior the manager. I worked with people who were "too busy" to perform the basic functions of leadership - too busy to have team meetings, too busy to delegate, too busy to give feedback.

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Editor's Welcome

 

Hello! I'm a great believer in the power of stories, whether they be folk tales, novels, films or TV dramas.
 
They have a wonderful ability to get complex moral or social issues over to us in a palatable, easy-to-understand way and can provide many lessons if only we care to look just a little bit below the surface.
 
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Hence our decision to start up a Review slot on the site to look at those everyday stories that are all around us from an HR perspective.

Although we've been publishing book reviews (take a look at our Book Club list of suggested possible non-fiction works for evaluation here) for some time, you may also have noticed that we've been running a weekly home page blog on The Apprentice courtesy of The Chemistry Group for a while now.

And Pauline Wood, managing director at specialist retail headhunter, court & spark consulting, was likewise kind enough to write our first film review on the Headhunters movie.

But the big question is, why don't you give it a go yourself? There's a world of choice out there and I, like the rest of the community, would love to hear your thoughts and insights.

So next time you watch a movie, see a TV drama or read a novel that you think has an HR message worth sharing, send your review to me at cath.everett@siftmedia.co.uk or post it directly to our blogs section at www.hrzone.co.uk/blogs.

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Cath Everett
HRZone Editor 
 
 
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