Qinetiqette qits - can it be true? ~ Strategic Human Capital Management (HCM) Blog

Monday, 13 May 2013

Qinetiqette qits - can it be true?

Screen Shot 2013-05-10 at 06.17.31.png I don't get to spend anything like as much time as I would like to read other peoples' blogs. But one of those that I have paid a lot of attention to for several years though, and very often talk about at workshops to illustrate one reason why we need to give more attention to our employees and candidates, is Qinetiqette.

You might have seen that I blogged on this issue in relation to Glassdoor.com recently, but it's always worth remembering that employees don't need something like Glassdoor to express how they feel about things.

Qinetiqette has been a blog written by a disgruntled employee at QinetiQ for several years, providing a caustic insight at developments in the UK's former Defence Research Agency. Each post gets something like 30-70 comments, mainly from other disgruntled employees. (And actually the Glassdoor reviews for the company aren't great either.)

Will this have had an impact on Qinetiq's employee brand? - absolutely. Will it have had an impact on the main corporate brand? - yes, it will as well - despite the CEO's protestations - particularly as the blog comes third top in a Google search on the company.

Don't get me wrong - if I was the HRD at Qintetiq I would be immensely frustrated by the blog, particularly as I'm sure the reporting isn't always / often fair. But as an external commentator it's been a really interesting phenomena to observe.

So, it's also interesting (and good or bad depending on your perspective) so see that the blog may have come to an end. The last post (pictured above) was put up some time ago and asked for guest posts from other members of the company. Someone commented that this was the last desperate act of a site that has passed its sell-by date. Someone else suggested the author had been sacked. And as of this weekend the site has been taken down.

Is this the end of Qinetiqette? I hope at least that if it is, we'll see more author blogging on workplaces issues somewhere else. And if they'd like to come along to the ConnectingHR unconference and share some of their experiences and perspectives on less-than-Brave HR it'd be great to see them there.