#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

 The office Christmas party may be a great way to boost morale and reward staff for their efforts during the year but things can go wrong and if they do, the repercussions can extend beyond the obligatory hangover. Usual employment laws apply whether an office Christmas party takes place within working hours, out of hours and regardless of location. This is because it is likely to be considered to be an extension of the normal working environment. Therefore employers will remain liable for acts carried out by their employees which may cause offence to others, to the extent that they may be faced with claims of discrimination. These may arise from over exuberant behaviour bordering on harassment and may also include the activities of hired entertainers.

In The Rise of Emergent Organizations, Beth Comstock, Vice Chair at GE, provides some rules of thumb to guide organizational design for the emerging network era. It is wonderful to see a large corporation putting into practice the recommendations I, and many others, have been making on organizational design for more than a decade. I have taken five of these rules of thumb and annotated them with images from my last book in the perpetual beta series: Working in Perpetual Beta. With such an example set by GE, more organizations should be able to convince their executives that a serious redesign of how they work is essential. The alternative does not look good.