Are your employees engaged?

The Sunday Times “Best Companies to Work For survey”, which has now canvassed over a million workers since 2000, has identified eight factors that foster workplace engagement.

The factor with the strongest correlation is Leadership: employees must have faith and trust in their senior management team to be engaged.

To do that leaders must gain their trust, live the values, and inspire the team.

Their 2009 survey revealed, in answer to the statement “I have great confidence in the leadership skills of the SMT”, there was a 54% difference between engaged and disengaged employees. In answer to the statement; “senior management truly live the values of this organisation”, there was a 51% difference.

In the top 10% of companies there was a massive 94% confidence rating that the leader ran the company on moral principles.  Would that figure be so high today in the depths of a recession?

Giving something Back (GSB) is one way of engaging employees. Organisations with a good track record of this get higher scores from staff for leadership, pride in their company, and personal well-being.

There does seem to be a rash of books and articles on the new leadership approach needed since the recession. And values and principles are high up among the key factors which is maybe why organisations turn to women when they are in a crisis as they appear to be more trusted as CEOs even though, or maybe because, they  seem more willing to criticise their organisations.

Updated since first published 02/04/2010

Do family firms have more loyal employees?

Having once worked for a family owned business I was intrigued by the headlines about family firms having happier or more satisfied employees than other forms of enterprise.

When I read more on the research carried out by Stanley Siebert, a professor of labour economics at the University of Birmingham, it seemed to be measuring loyalty – but perhaps loyal employees are happier and more satisfied.

Anyway the survey of 20,00 employees in over 2,000 companies found that 28% of employees strongly agreed that they felt loyal compared with 22% in other organisations and 26% felt they had job security compared with 20% elsewhere.

This is apparently statistically significant. So whilst the figures are higher for family firms it’s still not a very encouraging picture overall is it? And doesn’t it also mean that 62% didn’t feel very loyal and 74% felt they didn’t have job security? 

So the headlines could have read: “Fewer than 1/3 of employees in family firms feel loyal”. And why should this be?

According to the survey staff employed in family firms:

• have less job security and little protection from redundancies (only 7% of these companies have “no redundancy” policies)
• work almost a day longer (5.5 hours) each week than employees in the public and private sectors (who average just under 33 hours a week)
• aren’t paid any more than employees working elsewhere
• have no or little Trades Union support (only 3% membership compared with 33% in private sector and 50% in public sector)
• don’t receive much formal training (it’s mostly on-the-job)

Despite this the report claims that staff in family owned business are proud to say who they work for, feel more valued, are closer to the decision-making, and share the values of the company.

These companies are reported to have inclusive management practices and encourage the expectation of long-term employment (but don’t guarantee it – and job tenure is actually shorter than elsewhere).

Research at Warwick University demonstrated that happy workers are more productive so if companies can get employees better aligned with the company’s goals they will probably get more discretionary effort from them ie they will go the extra mile.

But note these are not your typical SMEs. The report was commissioned by the Unquoted Companies Group which includes companies such as Clarks shoes and JCB. Doubtless these are reputable companies but the group has lobbied parliament in the past opposing the growth of EU employment protection legislation and the working time directive.

Do you want a good work-life balance?

Then go and live in Denmark

That’s the place to work if you want to achieve work-life-balance (WLB) according to the OECD which has recently included it as a factor in its Better Life Initiative.

The OECD has used 3 indicators: the amount of time devoted to personal activities, the employment rate of women with children age 6 to 14, and the number of employees working over 50 hours a week. FYI research shows that 50 hours seems to be the point when work impacts on your health.

People working in Northern European countries seem to manage their work hours the best with extremely few (0.001%) regularly working over 50 hours.

Denmark is best for working mothers with 78% returning to the workforce when their children reach school age (Turkey is the worst on this indicator with only 24%).

Belgians, those monastic beer and chocolate lovers, have more time off per day on average – 16.61 hours – than anyone else.

The top 10 countries with the best work-life balance are:

1. Denmark
2. Norway
3. Netherlands
4. Finland
5. Belgium
6. Switzerland
7. Sweden
8. Germany
9. Portugal
10. France

Denmark has come top of the list in other surveys for having more people satisfied with life and Finland was voted the best country to live in although Australia came top in the OECD survey for where to live for a better quality of life overall.

You’ll notice the UK is not on this list and neither is the USA. The UK came 17th and the USA 23rd. Worst for WLB were Turkey, Mexico , and Japan (which interestingly has a word for “death by overworking”).

Women are the winners at work

You’d have thought Guardian writers and readers would be pleased to learn that women had actually won the battle of the sexes at work according to an article in the Times (19/12/10).

The problem is the author of the article, Carol Hakim, a senior research fellow in sociology  at the London School of Economics is not necessarily seen as politically correct.

She was after all the author of the Erotic Report in which she suggested that women who lacked brains could always make up for it by using their Erotic Capital.This should come as no surprise as all the evidence is that more attractive people earn more anyway.

Now she is saying that women have won because they can make a choice whether to pursue their careers or settle down and have a family and passing tougher quality laws will not make any difference.

She says that many women in top jobs have only “nominal families” with whom they spend little time. Half of all women in senior positions are child-free and a lot more have only one child cared for by other people. A long article in the Times magazine (1/1/11) by Camilla Cavendish on extreme working with the title; “we don’t know how she does it – but they do” seems to bear this out.

“She” being one of the extreme workers, a partner with a well-known management consultancy, with a family of three putting in 100 hours a week across different time zones; “they” being the support team comprising parents, the handyman, a PA, and a nanny. And, in case you were wondering, her husband is a very senior civil servant.

In her new report – Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine – Hakim says: “Equal Opportunities policies have succeeded in giving women equal access in the labour market (but) people are confusing equal opportunities with equal outcomes and there is little popular support for the kind of social engineering being demanded by feminists and legislators”.

She believes that new government policies to promote equality are pointless and based on “feminist myths” and that maternity leave shouldn’t be extended as it makes female staff less attractive to employers. You can see why she is so unpopular with Harmanites and if you want to read a rant about this you should look up Tanya Gold’s article in the Guardian (8/1/11).

She’s also not happy with the idea of quotas for women on boards but neither is anyone else and the government aren’t going to pursue that anyway. There is still the issue of pay differentials but most of us would rather see an end to bankers’ bonuses and over-inflated pay at the top of the public sector.

Female CEOs are making a big impact in getting companies through the recession as employees seem to trust them more and think they are more understanding. But there is a price to pay for some women who try to have it all as there is evidence that women in senior roles are more prone to stress-related ill-health such as heart disease.

Updated 14 January 2011: The question of workplace rights and in particular maternity leave is centre stage at the moment.  Yesterday a long piece in the Times by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an American academic and motherhood campaigner, explained why she thought women were paying too high a price career-wise for extended maternity breaks. She would have shorter breaks to allow the mother to get back to work provided she had a support team described in the Cavendish article.

Today in the Times Jill Kirby, director of the Centre for Policy Studies which published Hakim’s report,  joined the fray with: “More maternity rights are bad for mothers”. Referring to both Hewlett’s piece and the report by Carol Hakim she points out that for too long it’s been assumed that with enough workplace rights motherhood need not affect women’s lives but that the latest evidence proves that is not true – what Hakim referred to as the “feminist myth”.

Hakim’s research shows that those countries with the shortest statutory maternity leave, such as America, have more women in top jobs than other OECD countries. And in Sweden, where mothers get 14 months of maternity leave, women are more often found in low paid public sector work.

In the UK 12 months maternity leave regardless of how long you have worked for a company and even if you are part-time is bound to make employers think twice of appointing a “womb in waiting”.  Employers can’t even ask questions about family plans lest they are accused of discrimination and government plans to change maternity leave to parental leave are unlikely to make any difference if 30 years’ experience of that in Sweden is anything to go by.

The last labour government’s legacy on equal opportunities, and the idea of protected characteristics and indirect discrimination, spear-headed by Harriet Harperson is to say the least not business-friendly. Women who want careers and a family have tough decisions to make but at least they have that choice now they have more than matched men in higher education and achieved equal pay in most economic sectors.

Impression Management

How we look is important. To some people it’s everything. In America 1 in 3 women think the way they look is more important for their self-esteem than intelligence or job performance. Students said they would rather marry an embezzler, a shop lifter, or a drug smuggler than someone who was obese. And 11% of them would abort a foetus if they knew it was  genetically disposed to obesity. No surprise then that fat women are 20% less likely to get ma … Read More

via Mike the Psych’s Blog with permission

Happiness and Productivity

Are happy workers more productive or are more productive workers happier?

This is a question that has exercised work and organisational psychologists for over 50 years. And there have been mixed results from workplace interventions. For example in Sweden – with a highly educated workforce doing repetitive work in the car industry – increasing job satisfaction reduced absenteeism but didn’t increase productivity.

Now economists at Warwick University think they have the answer. The Sunday Times article; “Why happy people are the hardest workers” (11 July 2010) reported Professor Andrew Oswald as saying; “… human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity. Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings while negative emotions have the opposite effect”. (This is straight from the positive psychology handbook of course and as a psychologist I wonder why they didn’t just ask one of us).

The research team carried out a range of experiments and showed their subjects either a comedy film or a boring (placebo) film. The subjects who reported higher happiness levels after seeing the comedy film were 12% more productive whereas unhappy workers were 10% less productive.

However those subjects who watched the comedy film but did not report increased happiness were not more productive. So the increase in productivity was linked to an increase in happiness but not to just watching a comedy film.

A surprise finding was that those subjects who had experienced a death in the family in the last two years were 10% less productive. But subjects whose parents had divorced recently didn’t appear less happy or less productive. Perhaps with divorce being so common it’s  no longer seen as a negative life event.

They conclude that if happiness does bring increased productivity then HR departments and business managers should be paying more attention to the influence of emotions at work.

This is interesting but there are lots of questions. Some companies have tried to inject fun into work, for example call centres (often the modern equivalent of Victorian sweat shops) but I haven’t seen any evidence it does anything than temporarily alleviate boredom.

The fact that some subjects didn’t report increased happiness after seeing the film might be because they didn’t think the film was funny (it featured a well-known British comedian for a start) and humour is very subjective.

The subjects’ personality as measured by the Big 5 might have been a factor. Extraverts tend to be happier and more positive than Introverts and also respond better to incentives (the subjects were paid an attendance fee plus a performance fee depending on their output).

It also appears that the subjects were working individually rather than in teams. This reduces the element of “social loafing” and usually maximises the incentive effect but there is a strong social effect when working with friends or in teams, especially for more sociable types.

Anything that improves employee engagement (at an all-time low at the moment) is of interest to business leaders but I can’t help thinking that the more holistic approach adopted by companies like Sony Film is worth looking into. See “Rituals engage staff”.

Danger – Jealousy at work

Jealousy and envy are closely related but jealousy is usually when you wish you had something someone else has got eg a pay rise,or a plum project, and envy is when you haven’t got it and when you wish they hadn’t either.

Envy is about feeling inferior, being resentful, and wishing ill-will to others. It also tends to be more about being competitive.

Jealousy can also be aspirational or inspirational in encouraging you to better yourself so that you can also achieve what the other person has.

Research in USA by Professor Robert Vecchio suggests that 3 out of 4 people have witnessed jealousy at work and up to 50% of people have become involved in it in some way.

People who are more envious of others at work are more likely to be the ones who use “social loafing” (not pulling their weight) to even up the score. They are also more likely to be looking for other jobs.

People with a strong work ethic who are sensitive to work issues are more likely to get emotional about them as much as people with low self-esteem who think work is all about being competitive.

Generally woman are more likely to be jealous about social relationships; men to envy others in a competitive way.

Lack of consideration by supervisors can lead to jealousy and it is more likely to happen in a small office. People who work in large offices tend to assume that unequal treatment is because of bureaucratic inefficiency.

If you are the object of jealousy or envy:

• Focus on the good things in your job (count your blessings) to bolster your self-esteem
• Be humble – don’t flaunt your success
• Don’t get involved in the drama
• Help others to achieve and be as successful as you

There are also things organisations can do:

• Create more of a team culture
• Encourage cooperation rather than competition through incentives
• Encourage a more participative style of leadership – encouraging input
• Recruit emotionally mature people
• Use high achievers as role models, mentors or coaches

And the office romance? Jealousy about sex or romance is a 3-way relationship; the focus of your attention plus the rival, which can produce feelings of loss, distrust or betrayal. But that’s a different posting.

1 Minute Stress Management

Feeling stressed?

Stop what you are doing and stop thinking negative thoughts.

Or rather replace them with positive ones as your brain can’t not see that purple elephant I just told you not to think about.

Positive thoughts like I’m a great Mum, PA, Person, Cook, Manager  .. whatever.

If you are in a private space or can find a cubicle, do an instant rag doll relaxation ie tense yourself up as tight as you can all over your body, hold it for about 10 secs, then let it all hang out. Repeat a couple more times if necessary then stretch slowly and take a deep breath.

If you can visualise easily go to that warm beach or other relaxing get-away NOW. Remember the sun on your face, the sand beneath your feet or the smell of grass.

Finally use all your senses and have anchors which remind you of when you are not stressed. An anchor can be a favourite picture on your wall or in your purse; a favourite smell – vanilla, coffee, hand cream (massaging your palm and fingers can also help relaxation) – some people use bach flower remedies.

So in one minute:

• STOP negative thoughts,
• Replace with Positive self-talk.
• Tense and relax, stretch and breathe.
• Visualise that special place.
• Reinforce with anchors you have chosen to reinforce feelings of well-being.

And if you aren’t sure if you are stressed or not read this 10ways-Stressed-SG&A

Stress can be a killer for women in high pressure jobs

We are all aware of how stressful work can be at times. Contrary to popular belief not all of it is caused by the deliberate actions of others but usually because of the way we interpret events. Something that is stressful for one person may not be for someone else. Stress can be caused inadvertently by someone lacking social or management skills, and increasingly rudeness at work is being identified as a major cause.

Common sense tells us that rudeness can affect our mood but it also affects our performance, our problem solving ability, and our willingness to work in a collaborative way – and research shows that even witnessing rudeness can create these adverse outcomes and damage the working climate especially in teams that need to collaborate.

Bullying is another source of stress and it might be on the increase again, fuelled by insecurity because of the recession. It also seems that whilst the majority of bullies are men women bullies can be more persistent. There also seem to be gender differences. I’ve found in my work and research that women are more likely to bully using personal attacks whereas men bully under the pretext of performance management.

Now new research has shown that women in high pressure jobs run twice the normal risk of developing heart problems as a direct result of work-related stress. Those reporting work pressure to an excessive degree are also at an increased risk of developing ischaemic heart disease.

The research, published in the Journal of Occupational Health and Environmental Medicine, was based on a 5-year study of over 12,000 Danish nurses aged between 45 and 64. Whilst the link between stress and heart disease is well-established this is one of the first studies on women.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/may/05/women-heart-attack-stress

Stressed workers often resort to unhealthy ways of coping such as smoking, eating comfort food, or drinking, which can lead to them becoming overweight and creates a vicious circle. In a study carried out by the author amongst NHS employees nurses had the highest sickness absence rates and also smoked the most. Managers on the other hand rarely took time off but drank more!

A research team at Ohio State University has been studying the effects of stress on health for the last 30 years (psycho-neuro-immunology) and have shown that chronic stress can lead to cardiovascular disease, cancer. stroke, osteoporosis and diabetes. The culprit is stress-induced chronic inflammation as a result of the immune system being in a constant  state of high alert. This in turn wears you down and makes your body less able to fight infections and diseases, heal wounds, and develop antibodies. On a less dramatic level it explains why you can’t shake off that cold or persistent cold-sore when you are stressed.

And the latest research shows that children with difficult childhoods, eg through being abused, are especially susceptible to the physical effects of chronic stress and that their immune systems may learn a hyperactive response to stress which kicks in again when they are facing stressful events as an adult.

The good news is that becoming adept at yoga does lower your stress response.

Updated 2 May 2011: Women with high job strain have a 40% increased risk of cardiovascular (CV) disease compared to those with low job strain, according to research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2010. They defined job strain, a form of psychological stress, as having a demanding job, little or no decision-making authority or opportunities to use you creative or individual skills. Their findings were based on a sample of over 17,000 healthy women who participated in the Women’s Health Study. Primarily white health professionals with an average age of 57, they were tracked for 10 years whilst they provided information about job strain and job insecurity.

Job insecurity was associated with risk factors for CV disease such as high blood pressure, increased cholesterol, and excess body weight but not directly associated with heart attacks, strokes and CV death.

The higher CV risks for those who reported high job strain included heart attacks, ischemic strokes, coronary bypass surgery, balloon angioplasty, or death.

The findings that women in jobs with high demand and low control are at risk echo UK research on Civil Servants (The Whitehall studies). The first Whitehall Study compared mortality of people in the highly stratified environment of the British Civil Service over a 10 year period starting in 1967. It showed that among British civil servants, mortality was 3 times higher among those in the lower grade when compared to the higher grade. The more senior one was in the employment hierarchy, the longer one might expect to live compared to people in lower employment grades. It also found higher mortality rates due to all causes but specifically coronary heart disease for men in the lower employment grade when compared to men in higher grades.

Twenty years later, the Whitehall II study, a longitudinal, prospective cohort study of 10,308 women and men, all of whom were employed in the London offices of the British Civil Service at the time they were recruited to the study in 1985, documented a similar gradient in morbidity in women as well as men.  The studies revealed this social gradient for a range of different diseases: heart disease, some cancers, chronic lung disease, gastrointestinal disease, depression, suicide, sickness absence, back pain and general feelings of ill-health.