It does not take many seconds to realize who created Cyborg FREQ 5 first time you look at it. Mad Catz ‘first proprietary headset fits right into the family with the rest of the company’s clever and exciting products, where RAT gaming mice that 9 and R.A.T. has helped to put them on the map.

Good quality

Headset Cyborg F.R.E.Q. 5 is designed for gamers, and is an extremely durable product. The arms are of solid metal, and the details are covered in matte black plastic and soft pillows. On the inside of the cups we find 50 mm elements designed to pound out clear and good sound, while the outside is carefully designed with different ways to control both the speaker and the microphone.

This can take on and off as you please, and with an accompanying 3.5-millimeter jack cable you can connect your headset to your Smartphone and use it as a phone headset with microphone and everything.

Build quality of the headset is very little to fault. After we found out that we could improve the sound considerably by switching the audio mode, the sound was also a highlight of Mad Catz ‘new headset.

More annoyances

We failed, however, to overlook some of the shortcomings that irritated us from time to time. The braided cable will never remain stretched, and always has a tendency to curl into insoluble cable knots.

Volume wheel is inaccurate, and the lack of software makes it difficult to keep track of which of the three sound modes that are actually activated, and how it really is set up.

Beaten by its own product

Had the headset been lower priced, had not these things meant so much. But when Mad Catz has set the price at well over one thousand bugs, they have almost outdone themselves. Mad Catz’s Tritton behind after all, who make excellent headset with good sound quality. The previous headset we had built into the test, Tritton 720 +, have several choices when it comes to connectivity, better sound quality and are sold for about the same price. All in all it was a better product, with the same price tag as the Cyborg FREQ 5.

Matching Game Mouse

Are you however completely in love with Mad Catz ‘Cyborg aesthetics and want a headset that matches your RAT mouse, this headset is for you. Do you care, however, about the price and quality; you should rather go for a Tritton headset, which is still being made by Mad Catz or a headset from a different manufacturer.

+ Solid build quality
+ Matcher Mad Catz ‘other products
+ Comes with a separate cable for mobile use
+ Good Sound

- Animals
- Inaccurate volume wheel
- No way to know the sound mode you have enabled
- Cable curl and are quickly worn

Responsibility for training
The line managers are responsible for ensuring that their staff receive appropriate training, but many of them take a short-term view. They want to utilize their new graduate intake straight away. Apart from the compulsory induction training they are sometimes reluctant to spare them on courses, and are liable to cancel courses at short notice on account of a ‘higher priority’ business need. The managers are under such pressure for projects to be completed that formal training is often put off, being replaced by on-the-job lunchtime talks, use of videos in the learning centre, etc. The Training Manager would like to see managers not only accountable in theory for training but actually held accountable for it at their own performance appraisals. They are accountable if their product is late or receive commendation if it is on time or ahead of schedule, but this is not the case regarding the training they should have instigated.

Who is to be trained?
It is company policy that every employee should receive sufficient training to enable him to do his job properly and to develop his career. Inevitably priorities have to be decided. It is not financially possible to guarantee every employee, say, two weeks training per year; this would cost the division some $2.5 million. If, however, it was vital to the company that one person receive particular training, he would get it, even if it amounted to seven or eight weeks in the year. Where funds are limited, priority naturally has to go to areas of most importance to the business.

Work group training initiatives
The division has some trade union participation in the formulation of training policies. Earlier in the 1980s, the divisional management set up a ‘Career Development Working Party’ because of union pressure. Both parties agreed that there was a lack of forward planning for training and career development as technology and the company’s business strategy changed, and that this gave serious cause for concern. The Working Party has fifty per cent trade union membership, with a sector manager as chairman and the Training Manager, together with other representatives from the personnel function. The view of the manager and people in a sub-unit are investigated. The objectives are:

- To review career development and training procedures, suggest how they can be made effective and who will make the changes.
- To make recommendations and to propose implementation plans.
- To identify differences between the skills that development staff need now and additional skills they will need in the future.
- To identify current skill needs and propose training programs.

The Working Party reported back and action plans were approved but could not be implemented immediately because of certain financial constraints. However, the proposals, particularly proposals encouraging self development, were incorporated into the divisional training strategy.
Quality circles have been introduced into the division. They do not usually address themselves to formal training but courses are arranged for quality circle leaders who decide they would like some training.

Type of training
As to be expected in a high technology company, the emphasis is placed on technical training. However, recently there has been an interesting change in the proportions of technical to development training in the division. Technical training used to be first priority and amounted to two-thirds of total training. As a result of a corporate decision that middle management should perform more efficiently, the proportion of management and personal skills training has been increased to almost half the total.

Re-training
Skill obsolescence in the light of technological advances is not a major problem in the division. Being mainly research and development, they are in an area of technology that is changing rapidly all the time and they are part of it. The main skill requirement of engineers and programmers is an ability to adapt and learn quickly. For electronic engineers their area of knowledge is computer design where the main changes are miniaturization and cheaper production. Programmers already have a good range of programming languages when they join the division. They can learn new programming languages quickly and they adapt to the more gradual systems software changes over the years. In both areas the actual knowledge required changes but the skills required remain the same.

In contrast, however, are computer service engineers who have experienced dramatic changes in their job skills, involving them in a very extensive re-profiling exercise. This need was thrown up by a company skills audit. A corporate team was sent into the division, they designed courses, carried them out and also trained the service engineering function to run the courses themselves. Each individual engineer was assessed in terms of abilities and suitability for available vacancies -some were successfully re-profiled, but older engineers with the biggest skills gap left the organization.

Sponsorship of further education
The company encourages individuals to undertake relevant courses of further education. It will sponsor and pay the fees for Open University courses, evening classes and part-time courses. A number of employees have been sponsored for a one-year M.Sc. course.

It is divisional policy to sponsor several students at any one time on their first degree course. A grant is paid for each academic term and the Training Manager arranges for the students to be employed in the division to gain work experience. Some of the students take up a job in the division on completion of their course if this is mutually agreeable.

Manpower requirements are arrived at by a joint process of ‘top-down’ modelling and ‘bottom-up’ plans and forecasts. On the one hand, manpower forecasts are derived from the corporate business plan and are circulated downwards for discussion; on the other hand, line managers are asked to estimate future needs and pass these estimates up through the hierarchy for collation and comment.

The ‘top-down’ modelling aspect
The company’s manpower plan starts off on a theoretical basis. Corporate Planning, with computer assistance, works out predictions of future company performance targets in areas such as orders, manufacturing, development, and profitability. Techniques used would vary from simple extrapolation (predicting the growth and decline of a single variable), through regression analysis (to establish the extent to which movements in the value of two or more variables are related), to complex econometric modelling (where an attempt would be made to establish a relationship between a number of variables affecting the business). This would give a picture of the business plans for the company, possibly taking a best, worst and middle view of the corporate future. An integral part of this picture would be a manpower projection. An initial calculation of manpower in this way has the advantage of not necessarily being constrained by past practices, which may need to change fairly radically in the future, particularly in a high technology industry.

The business plan indicates, on the basis of business assumptions, the performance targets and revenues. These are proactive in the sense that the company wants to achieve them. Costs are also predicted, including manpower costs. Given that the inflation scenario envisaged proves to be correct, manpower costs may be predicted to an accuracy of 0.3 per cent per year. This is worked out on the basis of predicted average pay cost per head – taking into account how basic salary costs, insurance contributions, pensions and overtime, etc., will rise in future years. The same calculations can also be used for working out the cost of a suggested principal annual salary increase of x per cent put up by the trade unions. A labor costs increase of this amount can be simulated to see what the effect would be on the company’s profitability. Bearing in mind the constraint that labor costs must not exceed forty per cent of revenue, in any given year the average number of people the Company can afford to employ can be calculated from projected revenue.

The ‘bottom-up’ aspect
Each sub-unit consists of 120 people developing a particular high technology product. The sub-units are divided into segments containing approximately fifty people which are further divided into sectors consisting of up to twenty-five people.

The ‘bottom-up’ aspect is the other side of the planning process, going on in parallel with the company modelling. This process starts from the smallest work group, where a forecast of requirements is produced for the next year ahead, and a breakdown of the forecast into the main IT manpower categories required for achieving the business targets of the sub-unit.

The full-time employee forecast at the end of the current planning year has more or less to tie in with the consolidated company figure. The forecasts are made by the sub-units looking at the work schedules, estimating that they will need ‘x’ programmers, ‘y’ engineers, and ‘z’ team leaders. They would fill in the current total, a forecast of outflows and the inflows anticipated as necessary to compensate for outflows, to give the demand forecast figure for the sub-unit. They would then break their forecast figure down by the most significant manpower categories, showing anticipated outflows to meet their demand for a particular manpower category – the information being extracted from their own records.

The divisional forecast is produced by the Manpower Planning Manager using the sector/segment/sub-unit forecasts. Consultation and negotiation take place at each level regarding numbers and skill profiles.

Each sub-unit manager negotiates at divisional level for his or her share of the manpower allocation, while divisional executives negotiate at company level for their share of the company allocation against other divisions. Finally the sub-unit figures are agreed and consolidated into a divisional picture and the divisional pictures are merged into the company picture.

There is always a certain amount of conflict generated during the ‘top-down’ modelling and the ‘bottom-up’ process as sub-units within the division have to compete with each other for limited resources, and as the proposed figures are scrutinized and challenged at each level.

A Zen master asked his students a question which has always intrigued us as human resource management and IT specialists: ‘If a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody near to hear it fall, is there a noise?’. There is no single answer, but we learn more about ourselves and the environment around us if we allow the question to stir our thoughts. Maybe the question cannot be answered!

However, the question prompts us to think about the actions of listening and hearing. What are their connections with communication as one of the ways to improve utilization and productivity of human resources in the expanding IT environment? There is no guarantee that, once a management decision has been taken about change, written up in a report, circulated to and read by all concerned, it will lead to effective action. People listen to communications, but they do not always hear the message.

Understanding communication
Knowledge, information, and their effective use are the key factors which will lead to the competitive success of commercial organizations in the 1990s. Companies have specialists in information management, technical communications, human resource management, corporate relations, and all the various line management functions, each determined to communicate.

It is suggested by some of the researchers that managers spend eighty per cent of their time speaking, listening, and reading various types of communications. These communications are subject to misunderstanding due to the noise-distortion which is always present when two or more people attempt to communicate with each other. When two people face each other across a table, with or without a cracked mug leaking coffee, the possibilities for misunderstanding are legion.

A project leader praises the work of fellow members in the work group. A new member of the Information Center reads the advisory manual for helping the end-users to help themselves. A senior computer operator, standing next to a noisy high-speed output printer, attempts to give instructions to junior operational staff about controlling the equipment. The IT manager produces a written report which makes recommendations for new hardware and software required for the 1990s, and sends it to his CEO to gain top management support.

Each of these situations contains some form of interaction – the human resources are attempting to communicate with each other.

The process of communicating
There are a number of steps associated with human communications:

- A work group or an individual identifies information which has to be communicated to other work groups or another individual.
- The information has to be developed (encoded).
- A medium for transferring the information has to be selected. It may be a written report, a face-to-face discussion, or a sophisticated presentation using audiovisual aids.
- The receiving work group or individual has the task of converting (decoding) the medium to fit into their own ways of dealing with information.
- The receiving work group or individual responds by recognizing the need for agreeing or disagreeing with the information.
- The answer containing the information has to be developed (encoded).
- A decision has to be taken about the medium to be used.
- The original work group then has the task of converting (decoding) the medium to fit into their own ways of dealing with information.

Clearly in all these steps in the communications process there is room for much misunderstanding, much less hearing the message. In the complex area of information technology there are many problems to be overcome when attempting to communicate ideas and strategies.

Why are some people better at communicating than others?
People judged to be good communicators are those who recognize the need to keep all information short and simple. Information must not exceed the capabilities of the receiving work group or individual.

The abilities of human resources to process new information are not infinite. If a work group or individual receives information containing too many ideas expressed in words, numbers, and visual aids, there comes a point when their systems for comprehension break down – the information is lost, never mind the message.

Work groups and individuals have to monitor their capabilities for communicating information. It is too easy not to be sensitive to the amount of information other work groups or individuals can accept. Recognizing overload is an essential quality for all those communicating ideas, especially those associated with change.

Good communicators always recognize the limitations of the medium being used to carry their messages. We ourselves, whilst preparing this publication, have been acutely aware of the limitations of book format as the medium for communicating the complex challenges and opportunities associated with managing people in the information technology environment. There is so much information to be encoded and decoded in the process of understanding the strategic implications of human resource management and information technology. In book format we are not able to monitor the transmission rate, or the level of noise which might develop in the lines of communication between ourselves and readers. We have no way of influencing the approach used by readers to access the information, knowledge and experience. Our only solution is to structure a logical approach to the topics, pass through a seemingly endless refining process before reaching the final manuscript, and hope that readers are not overloaded with too many ideas so that our essential messages are lost.

Communication is influenced by physical factors
Non-verbal communication can influence the utilization and productivity of human resources. Facial expressions and body movements can have as much impact as the written word. Carefully structured plans can be demolished by the manner and tone of voice used in discussions. We have numerous examples of IT projects which have failed due to the attitudes of project leaders, IT specialists and end-users. The skills were present, the time and finance allocated were adequate, the requirements were specified correctly, and yet the projects failed. Team members’ attitudes and behavior, expressed in body language and the physical state of their offices, lead to a collapse in the relationships between team members, end-users, and their managers. Everyone forgets that human resources do not respond always in a rational manner, and this can be passed on as negative communication through physical factors.

Organizational structure influences the quality of communication
When structuring a work group it is essential to consider the requirements for communication both within the work group and between work groups. To be effective, communications must be able to flow in many directions – the horizontal and vertical needs must be taken into account. Also it has to be recognized that formal and informal communication flows coexist within all organization structures.

An IT function consists of many sub-units, and there will be formal lines of communication between the sub-units. Certain sub-units will have close relationships with end-users, and in turn these will be supported by more formal communications. All these communication links build up into major networks which sustain the life of the organization.

Performance is linked to the quality and shape of these networks. There are a variety of network types, but most can be classified as either centralized or decentralized. The centralized networks are dependent upon one point through which all communications must flow, whilst the decentralized alternatives are based on many people interacting, there being no. single control point. Simple tasks can be supported by a centralized network; more complex tasks (involving many more people) require decentralized procedures. Implementing the wrong form of communications procedure for a work group and the surrounding organization will lead to poor utilization of human resources and low levels of productivity.

Never forget the power of informal communication
Every organization possesses an informal communication network – the grapevine. It is powerful and should not be overlooked. Like the formal communications network, a grapevine can work to support the objectives of the organization or it can destroy management’s best endeavors.

Research findings suggest that eighty per cent of the information carried in corporate grapevines is correct. But like all 80/20 rules, attention should be drawn to the twenty per cent. These are the communications which may well cause serious trouble – most human resource management specialists will confirm that incorrect rumors of reorganization and redundancy frequently float around in the grapevines.

Given the existence of the grapevines, positive information has to be put into them throughout the development and implementation of strategies for human resource management and information technology.