"Spark staff get 5 days to consider new job contracts

Forums › Jobs › "Spark staff get 5 days to consider new job contracts - not long enough, says expert"

kingdragonfly

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#237712 14-Jun-2018 17:14

For perspective employees, Spark has a bad reputation.

They seem to have continuous turmoil through restructuring, going back to their initial formation.

This year I talked to a head hunter, who mentioned a Spark position. Here's my reaction.

Anyhow from Stuff from Tom Pullar-Strecker

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/104703350/spark-gives-staff-a-week-to-consider-new-job-contracts

"Spark staff get 5 days to consider new job contracts - not long enough, says expert"

New employment contracts are part of a wider rolling restructure at Spark that will see several hundred staff leave over an 18-month period.

"About 1900 Spark staff are being given five days to sign new employment contracts agreeing to new ways of working, or leave the company.

But employment law expert Max Whitehead said the staff appeared to have been given too little time to consider their options.

He believed they might be able to argue their old jobs still existed and they could not be forced out the door.

The new contracts have been prompted by Spark deciding last month to bring forward part of a wider structuring programme that is expected to see several hundred staff leave the company between June last year and this December."

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'That VDSL Cat'
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#2037660 14-Jun-2018 17:44

Sensational at best....

Agile and these roles have been in discussion for almost a year now.. May even be over i've lost track.

Personally the Agile movements affected my role heavily, this was months back. There was no risk of job security, insecurity sure... But alot of that is mental.

As we are coming to an end of the trails and preparation into actually moving to agile, it's honestly a seriously positive thing (for me atleast).

As noted in the article, the option for reduancy is there, some have taken that - and that's totally cool.

Agile in a massive cooperate is a big change..

i do believe agile is a way forward, things do need to break before they improve.

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Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

michaelmurfy

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#2037678 14-Jun-2018 18:02

hio77:

Agile in a massive cooperate is a big change..

The thing is. I work for a massive corporation (lets say, bigger than Spark) and we've just recently switched to "Modern Agile". Nobody had to sign new contracts for this change. It is simply poor form on Sparks side.

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myfullflavour

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#2037691 14-Jun-2018 18:29

Sparks way of getting rid of deadwood ?

Bung

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#2037702 14-Jun-2018 18:45

myfullflavour: Sparks way of getting rid of deadwood ?

Over 30 years of continuous change and there's still deadwood? Find out who's hiring it and sack them.

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#2037703 14-Jun-2018 18:53

Based on the experience of friends and associates who have worked for both of the big telcos and been through multiple rounds of restructuring (which happens every few years like clockwork), you couldn't get me through the door for an interview if you tried. The stress on families is just not worth it.

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alasta

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#2037865 14-Jun-2018 20:31

I have always wondered whether business cases for restructures like this take into account the economic consequences of losing experienced staff and their knowledge, plus the loss of productivity while people are distracted with the uncertainty. Add that to all the other costs associated with the change, and you would think that the bar would be very high in terms of the benefits that would need to be realised.

Does anyone ever get held accountable if the benefits of the restructure never come?

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blackjack17

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#2037869 14-Jun-2018 20:38

hio77:

Agile in a massive cooperate is a big change..

i do believe agile is a way forward, things do need to break before they improve.

What is Agile?

Google didn't help much

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kingdragonfly

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#2037873 14-Jun-2018 20:43

Best explained by "Weird Al" Yankovic

kingdragonfly

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#2037879 14-Jun-2018 20:51

https://www.aaron-gray.com/a-criticism-of-scrum/

Scrum fits nicely into the manager’s schedule, but not the maker’s schedule. Paul Graham coined the term in his classic piece about the difference between managers and makers in regards to time management.

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in… For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work. I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon…

If you’re a maker, don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

I don’t think meetings are evil, but they are very costly, particularly to makers. Most businesses and software teams need to have occasional meetings for various things, but Scrum prescribes even more, which exacerbates this issue. Between daily standup’s, sprint planning, sprint review, sprint retro, daily check-in’s, backlog grooming, product demos, company meetings, and technical trainings, its easy to have enough meetings each week to keep your makers in a perpetual state of meeting hangover.

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especially-scrum-are-terrible/

"Why 'Agile' and especially Scrum are terrible

Agility is a good thing, no doubt, and the Agile Manifesto isn’t unreasonable. Compared to a straw-man practice called “Waterfall”, Agile is notably superior. Yet, so much of Agile as-practiced is deeply harmful, and I don’t really think that the Agile/Waterfall dichotomy is useful in the first place.

There’s a variety of Agile, called Scrum, that I’ve seen actually kill a company. By 'kill', I don’t mean “the culture wasn’t as good afterward'. Rather, I mean that its stock dropped by almost 90 percent in less than two years."

1101

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#2038046 15-Jun-2018 09:31

lots of buzzwords
no mention of whats in the new contract and how that will adversly affect staff .

"While the new contracts don't alter aspects like people's pay and hours of work..."
So what the issue ?

5 days notice & sign up or get out is hardly ~good faith bargaining~ though . So is that legal ?
Sounds more like corporate bullying of employees .

gehenna

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#2038050 15-Jun-2018 09:38

Regardless of the reason behind the consultation, 5 days is not enough time to seek independent advice while juggling your own life commitments and still performing your existing work duties. I'd expect 10 working days at a bare minimum.

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MikeB4

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#2038060 15-Jun-2018 09:44

They really know how to be a good employer NOT. I don't understand why anyone would work there. Earlier this year my wife was asked to apply for a role there, her response is unprintable here.

Here is a crazy notion, lets give peace a chance.

Talkiet

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#2038066 15-Jun-2018 09:56

[completely personal, non official post, that does NOT represent any Spark views]

I'm not going to give a detailed response, and I'm not going to share my personal feelings on this. What I am going to say is that the VAST majority of comments on this here, and on Stuff, and in general, show the ignorance by most external people of how Spark has handled this.

It's a huge change yes, 1900ish people are being asked to sign new contracts, or take redundancy, yes. But none of this is a surprise - we've known about it for many months and the company has done a decent (not perfect) job of keeping the workers in the loop.

A great deal of the comments read as if the authors think we turned up to work one day and found a new contract on our desk with a note saying "Sign in 5 days or F&&k off".

The completely uninformed discussion is your right, but ironically, it's mostly wrong.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

sidefx

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#2038072 15-Jun-2018 10:09

michaelmurfy:

hio77:

Agile in a massive cooperate is a big change..

The thing is. I work for a massive corporation (lets say, bigger than Spark) and we've just recently switched to "Modern Agile". Nobody had to sign new contracts for this change. It is simply poor form on Sparks side.

This. Yeah, same - work for a large multinational, recently switched to agile, no new contracts... must admit though I didn't go back and look at whether anything in my contract might be affected by the switch. Can't see why it would though.

EDIT1: I think some of you are confusing agile approach to projects to an agile work environment...? Not really clear to me which Spark is moving to...?

EDIT2: Hmm, OK, reading further in the thread it sounds like there's a couple of things going on in Spark and the move to agile and new contracts\redundancies are perhaps not related...

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gehenna

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#2038073 15-Jun-2018 10:10

@talkiet fair enough if the media is missing the mark on accuracy. I still feel 5 days isn't a decent timeframe regardless of the transparency in the lead-up.

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