RIGHT RATE FOR THE JOB
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• Your article entitled "The Headhunters" (CM 26 November), bemoaning the fact that good quality staff are hard to find and salaries are spiralling, portrays transport industry employers rather like a row of beetles lying on their backs thrashing their legs in the air and blaming everybody else for their predicament.
I am confident that the employers featured in the article deserve better press, or at least a more rational image.
The transport sector, including own account, has, according to our own surveys, traditionally paid below-average rates to its managers, and in my opinion has trained its managers even less than the disgraceful national average. What then would you expect to happen when this industry sector goes through an unprecedented period of concentrated management attention, evaluation, and growth, mainly led by innovations in retailing? As so often happens, the transport industry picks up the tab for a combination of problems that, to be fair, it wasn't prepared for.
Suddenly it comes as a shock: we need more managers, we need better managers, and to recruit and retain them we need to pay competitively with other industries, and provide job satisfaction in good measure. But let's focus some light rather than heat on the subject.
Our own company statistics would not support the assertion that a manager earning £12,000 in 1985 (the lower rate then), should be paid £20,000 today for the same job: the January 1988 figure would be more like 215,455. Managers of medium-sized contract distribution depots are now being recruited at £20,000, but let's not assume they are the same people.
From the resourcing end of the business, I find it extraordinary that managers should expect ambitious development plans to go ahead without people to run them, or expect not to have to invest money in their provision. Why should BRS be expected to supply the rest of its competitors with trained staff? Why, for that matter, should the parcels sector do any more than train people to meet what they see to be their own objectives? If contract distribution companies need managers, they are themselves in the best position to do something about it.
As a recruitment consultant practising in this sector for 10 years, I regard blaming recruitment agencies for inflating the values placed on managers, to be a colourful illustration of those employers' understanding of the changes taking place in our industry, and a rather narrow-minded portrayal of the attitude they bring to bear on solving their own problems. Just as we apply a policy of free enterprise in business, managers should also have the right — and practical means — to further their careers to the best of their abilities and to receive a fair remuneration.
Where are the answers in all this? If they were easy to find and implement there would be no problems. Clearly each company has to find its own solution to the skills shortage according to its needs and its means. In the past, most companies have been unwilling to invest in their own future, preferring to live off the efforts of others. We now see where that short-term thinking has led, and today organisations are being forced to find the means to invest in good mana gers through good salary levels and management training.
With training, the problem will become one of priming the pump that has lain idle for so long, and implementing training programmes which will show a real pay-back in the time available. Training schemes specifically for the distribution industry have existed for a number of years and they are commercially available to those who wish to invest wisely and avoid expensive disappointments. Robert A Wileman, Director, TPL Management Resourcing