Comment

With Patrick O'Brien

WITH BETWEEN 70 and 100 job cuts in prospect at IBERS, the team-building course the institute’s managers went on just over a year ago seems to have been more of a team-demolition event.

Perhaps the problem was that they never made it to Roffey Park, the upmarket management-training centre set in 40 acres of Sussex countryside. The seven had been booked in for the weekend of 3 January. Their bill would have been more than £4,000.

But then a winter improbability occurred. It snowed, ruling out travel to St Leonards. Snuffed out was the promise of fun-filled executive team-jogging, of team jacuzzis and team saunas and, weather permitting - which it didn’t – team-fuelled outdoor chess. Plus, of course, plenty of good advice on leadership, people-management, personal effectiveness and organisational development.

But these Penrhyncochian leaders declined to be thwarted.

Determined to procure their weekend of chumminess following the then recent IGER-Aberystwyth University merger, they set off instead for south Wales, where they settled in at the non-snowbound, five-star Celtic Manor Resort, a hotel, fine-dining and golfing complex in 1,400 acres of Usk Valley parkland. And where the bill came to £2,500.

The university spelt out the sorry tale. “Managers were due to take part in a team building course at Roffey Park”, I was told. “This was part of the change management programme agreed on merger. Due to snow, travel to Roffey Park was impossible. The managers convened at Celtic Manor instead. The staff from Roffey Park could not attend the meeting. Therefore the managers stayed at Celtic Manor for two full days. This resulted in a refund from Roffey Park in excess of £4,000.”

So why, I asked the IBERS director, Wayne Powell, and others in the institute and the university, had something rather less costly not been convened – such as a room or two at either the Gogerddan, Llanbadarn or Penglais campuses?

The answer: “The course was meant to be held at Roffey Park. It was reconvened at Celtic Manor in order for senior managers to gather away from Aberystwyth in order to fully concentrate on the agenda.”

So there we have it. Senior managers at Aberystwyth University’s Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences can’t concentrate properly unless they’re able to stretch out in five-star luxury.

Engaging intellectual top gear at one of Aberystwyth’s three-star hotels, much less within the rough edges of an Aberystwyth campus, would clearly be an impossibility. It looks like £2,500 well spent.

We should all be wringing our hands therefore about one particular repercussion – in addition, that is, to the loss of up to 100 jobs - of the institute’s projected £2.4m funding deficit in 2011-2012. If it means there’ll be no money to pay for managers to whisk themselves away for refresher team-building weekends in Sussex or the Usk Valley, it may turn out the only way to head off a descent into mediocre management will be to make a few more people redundant.