Staff Training

What is going wrong with the service industry? We will use the Department of Work and Pension's portal to the outside world, Job Centres, as an example.
 

Inadequate Training

In order to save the UK economy, the government decided to pay up to 85% of furloughed workers wage during the enforced lock-down in 2020. This cost the taxpayer significant amounts of money. The exact amount is irrelevant and using it in an argument only serves as a complaint. It is just counting. 

In order to fill the deficit once the curfew was relaxed, the government turned to the mentally unwell and the physically disabled, who had been deemed unfit to work, and told them that they are fit to work unless they can prove differently.

In the British courts, defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty, unless they have confessed to the charges. When the defendant presents as being a 'flight-risk' (escape) then their freedom is curtailed with bail conditions or even custody. They are still considered innocent, and even when remanded have greater freedom than convicted prisoners.

This distinction was not made for the non-working mentally unwell or physically disabled persons who were compelled to report to their job centres after the curfew was lifted. They were considered guilty (of being work-shy) unless proven innocent. However, the DWP will not allow the same illness to be used as a reason for not working if the DWP assessment has eliminated its validity.

Suddenly, there were more 'clients' attending Job Centres across the nation. This required more staff to be rapidly employed. This is where it went wrong. Job Centre staff must have a university degree of some kind. University degrees require a specific mode of thinking - Convergent Thinking. 

Convergent thinking is used when a solution or end result is sought. It is linear and works backwards from the desired goal. Much of how society works is based on convergent thinking. An example is a new housing development that must have a certain number of residential properties and the number of homes determines whether a shop is also built. The developer also has to provide open spaces where they actually want to build houses. The applied determination for the housing developer is to build houses and not parks and pretty places.

The new job centre staff, with little experience of people were suddenly faced with an influx of angry people who believed they are unfit to work (innocent in a court of law). They were angry and confrontational. Why should they be angry? This is why, and is something the government seems to have overlooked: The healthy people had a holiday and got to spend time with their families (some didn't want to, but we will address this in another example). They were effectively paid wages not to work. The long-term sick, however, were still sick and were also under curfew, yet they had no holiday from their mental or physical disabilities, and did not get a national wage to not work, and many had to suffer their now not-working relatives who were curfewed with them.

The government decided to make the long-term sick pay for the healthy workers' holidays. Most of the unwell did not realise this though. They were just indignant. Indignation stems from a lack of understanding. Here is where we come to the problem. Mentally unwell and physically disabled people, particularly those in pain, tend to use Divergent Thinking.

Divergent thinking is creative thinking, and tends not to have a solution as a goal. It can, however, be used in a plan to achieve a goal. Divergent thinking for the housing developer might engender the concept of building a lot of homes close together and build a park over the top. Divergent thinking would go further and consider the accumulated rain run-off from the park as a potentially viable source of energy.

Inexperienced Job Centre staff cannot fathom how a divergent thinker might come up with a solution to their own plight. Divergent ideas simply did not, and do not, fit in with a linear Government plan; a plan to extract tax from as any people as possible to retro-actively pay for the nation to have an extended holiday.

One idea that was put forward to the government was that job-seekers be allowed to 'try out' positions with businesses, on an unpaid volunteer basis, to see if they are a good fit. Remember, we are considering people with specific needs. This divergent thinking was vetoed. From a convergent thinker's perspective, when the goal is to get money to gratify a false need to have luxury, work is the solution. Take note of this, we will come back to it. 

The goal for a disabled person is to avoid further disablement, mental or physical. Luxury for these people is to be free from anxiety, PTSD, or pain; money doesn't do this. Work for them might not be the solution, unless it is on their terms, such as 'This is the ideal job for me; I can do this.' Work for people like this means a sense of achievement.

Let us now consider, the economic mess the world is in. And how if the wild idea of trying out different jobs on a voluntary basis until one job fits and is then fully paid would have solved an irksome problem. This is about national prosperity and global competition. If businesses were able to accept unpaid volunteers to find a good fit, a number of things would happen.

First, a series of unpaid volunteers would decrease the wage bill for the business, making the UK business competitive. Remember, we are not in the EU.

Second, the ideal person who can and wants to do the job will be found. This reduces absenteeism and productivity. making the UK business competitive.

Third, there will accrue a pool of people, who despite many trial periods, will not manage to be either accepted by a business as a paid worker or cannot manage to work. This splits into two camps.

The first camp includes those people who deliberately mess up their chances of attaining a paid position

The second camp includes a) people who are unable to work; and b) people who have the wrong approach. People in group 'b' are people who believe they have a right to luxury, and have taken this idea so far that they are 'above' some types of work. Modern UK schooling drives this attitude. A government source told Hegemo that the teams of Job Centre workers who deal specifically with young people feel they have to negate eighteen years of misaligned thinking in their clients.

Start-up businesses in the UK do not have an obligation to pay tax in the first year. They pay tax at the end of their second year of trading for the past two years. They get a boost of capital in the second year if they choose to gamble the amount they might have paid as tax for the first year. Any ideas why most businesses fail after the second year? They can't afford the tax bill with revenue from the third year, because interest and debilitating fines are accrued on the unpaid tax bill for the first two years. 

The Trump administration has put pressure on the UK government to disallow the sale of Chinese electric cars in the UK. The UK-US trade deal may rest on this. The UK economy is not strong enough to be brave because we have people who hate going to work on Mondays to jobs they despise.

The poor training of UK Job Centre staff is not indicative of their ability to help people find suitable work; it is responsible for a poor economy that denies that divergent thinkers have a place in society as problem-solvers.

Coming back to 'the goal is to get money to gratify a false need to have luxury, work is the solution'. What we must consider is the opportunity cost of working. One cost is not being able to lie in bed until one feels fully rested. Another cost is not being able to stay up until the small hours of the morning. These two states are considered to be luxuries to many people. Rich people can afford to do this. Here then, are two opposing routes to living a privileged life. Not working and having lots of money. 

Hegemo suggests using an Opportunity Cost Remuneration strategy. This however, requires understanding the Diminishing Margin of Utility and Discounted Utility, found in economics. The tricky part is placing a 'util' value on 'achievement'.