26th April 2012

Situation vacant. Engagement Champion at the FOS- a job for you?

Now I suspect this may just make you feel a little cross.

The FOS are looking to spend your money on recruiting a person with:

Enthusiasm, imagination and energy to get people clicking? We’re looking for an engagement champion who understands exactly what to do to make our people click. Someone who ...

•  has their finger on the pulse – and knows everyone from the post room to board room;
• thrives on organising events that bring people together – from team activities to corporate conferences;
•  is bursting with ideas on how to inspire colleagues to enjoy their work to the full;
• spends half of their life saying thank you and well done;
• wants to work for an organisation that makes a real difference.

We employ over 2,000 talented people in Canary Wharf. We believe they’ll give their best when they’re happy, valued and thanked for doing things well. We want you to inspire others with your positive energy and buzz – and help make us an even better place to work.

to be an “Engagement Champion”

If this is you, you’ll want to find out more by reading on ...

Now this is get a grip time. I cannot see it is ‘appropriate’ that an organisation like the FOS should spend its supposed very limited resources on employing an “Engagement Champion”.

Astonishingly, this new recruit will report to the “Head of Content and Engagement”, what sort of role is that? Salary by the way for this role is in the region of £30-40k pa plus benefits and a non-contributory money-purchase pension.

The FOS states that the role is to “to help our people feel that they want to come to work”!!!!!

Now I thought that was a basic aspirational requirement of any employee, with compensation of course, by way of salary and benefits-in this case.

What next for the staff at the FOS, red letter days, gym, sauna, bar, clowns, jugglers, street artists, fool, court jester, gentlemen’s club?

I am sure that IFAs will be pleased to know that at the FOS they “all get involved! The chief ombudsman writes cards to everyone who gets promoted and meets all new joiners. And when our lifts broke down recently in the morning, the whole executive team stopped what they were doing to help hand out croissants to people who faced a long walk up the stairs as they came into work”.

We are in a double dip recession, IFAs are struggling to pay ever increasing fees and levies and this organisation, who places great store in how nice and touchy feely the directors and staff are, now want to employ an “Engagement Champion”.

You really could not make this up, this is a non-job, the world has gone truly mad.

Will somebody, anybody, please put a stop to this nonsense now?

Thanks to Steven Farrall and Alan Lakey.

Regulation, Panacea Comment