How your money is spent

Staff are the most important element in any organisation and it is important to treat them all fairly, equally and equitably.

If management send out the wrong messages, or act improperly, then the impact on staff motivation can be severe.

So how is it done in the Council?

A little bird reports the following series of events.....

• Senior employee sent home due to a serious breach of trust
• Disciplinary process starts
• Senior employee goes on the sick
• Senior employee has holiday in the sun (to recover their health, obviously)
• Senior employee gets offered early retirement, not quite in the terms they had been angling for, but nice enough thank you very much
• Employee leaves and disciplinary process lapses

The first 5 stages have concluded, and I think it only needs senior Councillors and the Chief Executive to sign this off for the final event to happen.

That is our money that is being used to send the message to staff that the way to get the early retirement you have been requesting is: do something that would get you the sack in a private business. Yes, and with an enhanced pension too.

There is, as always, a lot more to this than meets the eye, and you can visualise the fingers being pointed and the blame being shifted.

Where is Audit Scotland in all of this? I don't know, but I do know that I will be writing to them in due course.