Obscene salary and bonus
Well hasn't this cat just got the cream! Ever heard of Jackie Orme? She’s the CEO of the CIPD (a charity). Her salary for 2009 was a whopping £405,000 which includes a £57,000 bonus! You don’t want to know about the pension arrangements – they’re obscene. (The average salary in the charity sector is a reasonable £57,264.)
What is really obscene is the stunning drop in revenues at the CIPD? The new CEO has managed to oversee an organisation in decline. Its commercial services income has dropped by several million and its operating profit halved (this means that the money covenanted to the charity has halved). At the same time salary costs have risen by 10%. (Interestingly the website breaks the law on presenting salary bands missing out the 100k-110k band (see p19)). Maybe Jackie hasn't read the CIPD report published this month called Transforming Public Pay and Pensions with its section on Ensuring reward practices are fit for purpose.
One rule for Orme, another for you
On top of this she has been slated for making 41 redundancies in April 2009 and implementing a pay and bonus freeze, while trousering her massive bonus. In effect she was paid this bonus to produce a report on the future of HR – not that difficult. I have yet to hear of one member that has actually read the damn thing. She was also open to the charge of commercial favouritism by purchasing her pet agency Bridge Partnership (they go way back to when she worked with them at Pepsico).
Inexperienced, unknown player
Way back it was predicted in Personnel Today that her lack of experience and business expertise would be handicap, “several senior HR figures have warned that her low profile and lack of wider business experience may prevent Orme from becoming the influential voice that the role demands”. The head of HR at EDF Energy stated at the time, "The fact that she’s an unknown player means you’ve got to question her credentials in terms of what she stands for”. So it has proved.
Steel, crisps and fizzy pop
So who is Jackie Orme? Well she spent her early career in the Welsh Steel industry, such a roaring success that there is, now, no steel industry in Wales. Then she was then HR Director for Walkers Crisps doing her bit for child nutrition, then Pepsico,well Pepsico UK and Ireland, that purveyor of copycat coke.
Fakery
She’s also a listed on the CIPD website as a Director of a real charity ‘Shelter’. Difference – that’s a real charity of a similar size, and the last accounts showed that the CEO earns less than a quarter of her salary. Weirdly, Shelter does not list her as a trustee, as she resigned from this post over a year ago on June 11 2009. Is she also claiming to be something she’s not?
Charity in name only
The problem here, is that the CIPD is a charity in name only. What charitable good does it really do? Run courses? Publish dull books? Produce second rate research? It’s also relatively small organisation. It has around 250 employees, many part time, so where’s the justification for these astronomical salaries. In the end Jackie Orme’s just another fake fatcat milking the system. I’m looking forward to the 2010 Annual Report – no doubt Jackie will have received some whopping reward while the organisation reports further decline.
28 comments:
Within seconds of posting this, CIPD is following me on Twitter. never took this interest in me before!
Thanks...just stopped my subscription! Not in my name!
A boycott is in order. It's a rip-off.
Observing and bringing it to light, wish many more people did this.
CIPD quickly altered false claim about her being a Director of Shelter on their website! Hucksters.
My renewal is coming up and I'm debating whether to renew, is it worth it just to have CIPD on your CV?
I don't get any other benefits?
Don't do it Adam - it's money straight into her pocket. And no the letters on the CV are worthless.
That's a lot of money. This isn't one of your winds ups is it? That's more than many surgeons get.
I joined cipd in the 90s and let it lapse and stopped paying the subs. I guess membership might be useful (maybe sort of mandatory?) for a job in HR, but I found it no use whatsoever in geting work in my field.
Still, they do roll out the odd cipd spokesperson to offer comment/quotes in the media occasionally - maybe that's why she's paid so much.
I guess there aren't any more like this, are there?
So extreme that it sounds like a wind up - but it isn't. There's another 14 earning over 60k and three above 140k (that's with one of the bands missing on the report - an illegal act).
Is shafting your members an illegal act?
Ms Orme axed me and 40 others without any warning last year despite saying there would be no redundancies.Some of us are struggling to pay our mortgages now - is Shelter still in operation?
She is utterly shameless. I thought Geoff Armstrong was a greedy, rapacious man, but she takes the biscuit (with the cream).
From the related LinkedIn thread:
"It would be interesting to see the actual goals of the CIPD to see how well the senior mgt are performing as a whole"
This would have been possible at one point. However to my recollection (as a former CIPD employee), a proposal to set transparent objectives for the wider senior management team was quietly dropped, a few months after it was first mooted!
Amazingly, Jackie's - quite unjustifiable - performance/reward ratio is actually relatively open, by CIPD senior management standards.
The related Linkedin discussion:
http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=106184&discussionID=22670628&goback=%2Eanh_106184
Hi would you mind posting the name of the group on Linked-In, please? As I'm not a member I get a 'can't access group' message. Thanks.
Well this is absolutely disgraceful - CIPD - moral compass, an oxymoron.
My membership renewal is due on 1 July and I have very reservations about continuing
The Group is Called 'CIPD Member' and last night the President of the CIPD made an appearance and posted her comments.
Thank you for posting such a thought-provoking and interesting article.
It does appear to have a lot of support and agreement over on the LinkedIn site.
Mark - they won't let me join the LinkedIn site, so I have no way of accessing that debate - could you give me some idea of what's happening there?
My own view is that the CIPD is now being run for the benefit of its top management team, not its members and that they have lost all moral authority on the issue of pay and rewards. The President is a 'pay' consultant, one of those widely criticised for pumping up the salaries and bonuses in the banks. The whole thing stinks.
On a related note, I see that Zenna Atkins, who you championed on this blog is to resign from Ofsted. She is to become chief executive of GEMS Education, "one of the world’s biggest profit-making independent school chains" (Daily Telegraph) Another kitten who's got the cream, it appears.
Great disclosure Donald, and reinforced by many. CIPD have an arrogance only enjoyed by monopolies and it is a shame we have no strong alternatives for all these disaffected 144k members who would take their 200 GBp per year to them ( 14m a year steady revenue ). There is a vast vacuum for a credible OD\HR institute that is not 90% personnel biased and self serving to senior staff. Credit to BAOL, ITOL, UK chapter of ASTD (well done Neville) and BILD for having a go though the monopoly needs a skillful opposition. I feel the one brave enough to take CIPD on will secure massive support, though they will have to do so on a major scale.
That's right - it's quite simply a monopoly and got greedy and lazy. The advantage that the ASTD has is it's focus on training and development. When training was lumped into HR in the CIPD (a merger) it all went downhill.
Yes. ITD were taken over for their strong cash position at the time and done to create the monopoly and subsequent arrogant behaviour. As a charity working for the industry and members it seems CIPD needs to take some of the ethical medicine it preaches in it's codes. The internal pay abuse is supported by the secretive, backhand deals they have just sealed with one open learning training provider to give them exclusivity on delivery of level 3 certificate programmes in L&D and HR in exchange for them buying THEIR flexible learning modules. This limits our options for buying these courses, disadvantages all the other loyal CIPD centrex, but more to the point abuses the monopoly position again by forcing commercially beneficial deals for CIPD to compensate for the poor overall performance across the institute. Desperation is leading to non competitive practice in the industry they are supposed to protect. Such action is destroying the small college/private centrex who have no other choices. Come back ITD!!
The ITD deal stank and its consequences were disastrous for L&D. You make a good point about the CIPD no longer serving its members but serving itself. It has gone far beyond simple greed into the corrupt monopolisation of the market.
Having just returned from an excellent two day IITT conference in London, it's clear that IITT are now leading the way or the L&D profession, having evolved in to a representative professional body for L&D practitioners in all sectors. I've long believed that CIPD had devalued the 'D' in their title, and it seems clear to me that the 'D' in CIPD is now very silent indeed.
Hi Donald
I really believe that in Business Private or Public we should all be prepared to stand up and be counted. I have, for more years than I care to admit, been active within CIPD.
In the last 3 years the Institute does indeed, as you suggest, appear to be run more as a 'Dictatorship'. I believe that several well regarded members have sought to challenge various matters and are being marginalised.
Issues such as salary and bonus, the Bridge Partnership, the lowering of entry requirements and the recent gaffs in the press.
The original blog article summarises things pretty well – If I were the CEO I would have been mad about this!! However the £400k lifestyle continues without moderation, lush BMW's free Dinners etc etc..
Her responses to CIPD folks appears to be curt and abrupt for a CEO - that is pretty rude in my eyes.
I do wonder if the wider membership and the media are aware about the growing dissatisfaction with her leadership and Pay.
I had my suspicions so typed into google CIPD membership is it worth it? WOW
I had to add my thoughts to this. I recently went through a qualification to expand my knowledge on HR. This sounds ok so far,but firstly i wasn't informed about the necessity of being a CIPD member to have my work signed off after shelling out nearly 1.5k. I stood my ground and didn't pay the fee for the first year only to find out that others did and had to pay again in July and they received nothing for it.
You may have thought that this was ludicrous, I did after hearing it mentioned within lecture 2 of the course, but then having to pay an additional £40 to go from student member to the actual title I paid for in the first place blew my head to pieces. There is literally nothing the CIPD offers that I can't find using Google. I even got told to use Google rather than their own search function. I don't get how these people are the professional body of HR when they offer nothing.
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