August 25, 2007 – 5:35 pm
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A few years ago I attended an AHRI conference where I listened to a speaker talk about Australian Social Policy and how there were over 600,000 children in Australia who lived in a household with no employed parent and on welfare. The speaker then went on to speak about the impact of this to the child and the Australian economy. This presentation affected me in a couple of ways.
The first was that I wanted to personally try to make a difference; even if it was a small one, to show a child that life can be better and that they can choose how they can live their life. When I came home from the conference I spoke to my family about what we could do to make a difference in at least one child's life. We set on the path of becoming respite foster carers and for the last two and a half years have cared for two children for three days every month. This for us is very rewarding as we have seen the changes in behaviour and growth of these two children.
The second was a comment from another person in the crowd when we were walking out of the room which was, "What did this have to do with HR?" You may be thinking the same thing. Let me give you my perspective on why this has everything to do with HR and the organisation you are working for.
Research on welfare dependency in families shows there is an increased probability that children from homes receiving welfare will also be dependent on welfare. That means that these children are likely to become unemployed or work in unskilled jobs. These are children that if they had the right type of influences during their schooling years may become one of your prospective employees.
I find that when it comes to recruitment and talking to managers they are focussed on the people they want now and not in the future years. With shortages in the labour market, arising from demographic shifts and from a lack of people with the skills required for available jobs, HR has to start influencing management that they should also be thinking and influencing their prospective employees coming into the Market in the next five to ten years and beyond.
My thought is that organisations should start influencing from the early years of school. This could be achieved by providing a framework for the current employees to volunteer to mentor, tutor, talk to children about the work they do and the choices they made and basically becoming part of the school community. Organisations could provide scholarships for children or they could partner with not-for-profit organisations such as The Beacon Foundation, Barnardos or The Smith Family. There can be positive outcomes for organisations engaging in Corporate Social Responsibility programs particularly in increasing the Employer Brand. There would also be positives for the community and the economy such as having children leave high school with the confidence to make decisions regarding their future; either in further education, training or employment.
If you are interested in further reading on this subject, you might find the following material useful:
August 20, 2007 – 10:22 pm
In an earlier post Murph commented regarding confidence to ask for flexibility of working hours. She has seen too many part timers stall their careers as it is assumed that if you only want to work four days per week, you are not committed to the job.
Work/life balance is becoming increasingly important to employees; their reasons for this are dependent on what is happening in their life. For example, you could have someone who wishes to care for their aging parents, a divorced parent wanting to spend quality time with their children, someone who wants to study or even somebody who loves to go surfing when the surf is good. Each particular example would require a different flexible working approach.
With a growing skills shortage and the aging workforce, organisations are starting to see flexible working practices as a way to attract and retain their employees. Organisations are finding that introducing flexible working options provide the following advantages:
- Becoming an employer of choice and realising the employee value proposition
- Reduced absenteeism
- Reduced attrition
- Improved productivity
- Reduced stress levels and improved morale and commitment
- Potential for improved occupational health and safety records
These days flexible working practices are not only about part-time work. Organisations are offering various flexible working practices such as:
- Compressed working week
- Flexitime
- Job sharing
- Telework or home based work
- Rostered days off
- Shorter work days
- Phased retirement
- Paid maternity, paternity, grandparents, carers, volunteering, cultural, study and bereavement leave
- On site or near site childcare (I have been lucky to experience this and I visited my daughter during breaks)
- Sabbaticals
However, I have found that creating policies on flexible working practices is not enough. You need to also have a culture and systems which support flexible working practices. For example, there is no use having a home telecommuting policy if your IT systems do not support it.
Another issue is the unwritten ground rules, i.e. even though there is a policy on flexible working practices there is the culture of "that is not how things are done around here". I call this unwritten rule the 'presenteeism culture', i.e. managers and colleagues who believe they need to see you to believe you are working. For me this also highlights that there is very little trust within a team. Managers and colleagues should be focusing on performance and actually empowering their staff, not focusing on attendance and supervision.
Some sites you may find useful are:
This post extends my previous post Assholes in the Workplace.
Dr Babara Griffin, from the University of Western Sydney, has recently studied the impact of bad manners in the workplace. Dr Griffin used data from Hewitt Associates' Best Employer Survey of more than 54,000 employees from 179 organisations across Australia and New Zealand. From this data she found that one in five employees experience a significant incident of bad manners at work once a month.
Bullying has a large impact on employee engagement including whether an employee will stay in an organisation, will speak positively about the organisation and more importantly whether the employee will go that extra mile when needed. Bullying also causes psychological distress and poor physical health. Bullying not only impacts the person being bullied but other people who see this occurring in the workplace, as well as family and friends.
I have started to read the The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. There is an example in the book of one bully costing an organisation US$160000; 60% of recovery was deducted from his year-end bonus. The cost represented the time spent by others in dealing with the bully and assisting victims, counseling sessions, recruiting and inducting new people (due to attrition) and training. This amount could have been higher if a person being bullied decided to sue the organisation for psychological distress.
Imagine you have a number of bullies in your organisation... What this is costing and what is the impact on your employer brand?
In the book Bob Sutton suggests ten steps to enforcing the No Asshole Rule. These are:
- Say the rule, write it down and act on it.
- Assholes will hire other assholes therefore ensure you have civilized people interviewing.
- Get rid of assholes fast.
- Treat certified assholes as incompetent employees. Do not reward them if they are doing extraordinarily well but persistently bully others.
- Power breeds nastiness.
- Embrace the power-performance paradox but do everything you can do downplay and reduce status differences.
- Manage moments - not just practices, policies and systems.
- Model and teach constructive confrontation.
- Adopt the one asshole rule (apparently when there are rare occasions of bad behaviour it reminds people how not to behave).
- The bottom line - link big policies to small decencies.
So, what can you do? Ensure you have bullying and harassment policies, but more importantly ensure everyone in your organisation is expected and does walk the talk. If they don't then do something about it. Taking a stand against bullying requires strong leadership from everyone in the organisation from the CEO down.
August 2, 2007 – 10:10 pm
John P. Kotter is currently touring Australia talking about leadership and how to successfully manage change. I was lucky enough to attend his seminar this week in Canberra. His seminar was different to others that I have attended, in that he actually engaged the audience in his discussions rather than delivering a lecture. He did this by showing short video clips of leaders in organisations in different situations and then asked the audience for their input.
John Kotter has studied many organisations and the people who run them, particularly with respect to change management initiatives. He says that the organisations he has found that are successful in managing change initiatives have used the following eight steps:
- Establishing a sense of urgency
- Forming a powerful guiding coalition
- Creating a vision
- Communicating vision
- Empowering others to act
- Planning for and creating short term wins
- Consolidating improvements and producing still more change
- Institutionalizing new approaches
While at this seminar I bought a couple of books - Our Iceberg is Melting and The Heart of Change Field Guide.
Our Iceberg is Melting is a fable about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group penguins have lived on an iceberg for many years. Then one day one of the penguins discovers their home is threatened and almost no one listens to him. It goes into resistance to change and the type of leadership required to encourage change; particularly behavioural change. This book is full of colourful pictures of penguins (I like it already) and is easy and simple to read (it takes less than an hour) but carries a very strong message on change and what is required to ensure change occurs. You can find out more about this book at its website.
The Heart of Change Field Guide is a guide to assist people in developing questions, diagnostics and frameworks to planning change initiatives. It has a particular focus on using the eight steps listed above. You can find more about this book at the Heart of Change website.
I not only took away these books, but walked away convinced that for any change to happen successfully in an organisation you need the hearts of your employees. If you don't then you are doomed from the beginning and no great change management planning system is going to help you.
In the papers a few days ago there was the announcement that a government department sacked 11 staff for looking at pornography on their work computers and another 14 had resigned for abusing the department's internet use policy. The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) also noted that all staff were now banned from storing non-work-related photos and videos on their work computers. This department has just over 4000 employees and because less than half a per cent were stupid (and rightly deserved to be sacked) the remaining employees now also have to suffer.
If SMH are correct in the finding that all non-work related photos and videos on computers are banned, then I find this approach paternalistic. I wonder what impact this is having on those remaining employees who have been doing the right thing? In the places I have worked, some of my colleagues have screen savers which were pictures of their family, pets, favourite car, etc. This creates a personalised space for them in their work environment.
All Government Departments have acceptable use policies in place, as they should - use of these things at work should have appropriate limits. All Australian Public Service employees are bound by the APS Code of Conduct and the APS Values so they are aware of what they can and cannot do. I agree on the sacking and I think that is enough to send a message that the behaviour of abusing the department's resources is not acceptable; particularly in the case of pornography.
However I think the message to the rest of the honest remaining employees should have been one of thanking them for not abusing the system and that the organisation still trusts them. By banning the use of all non-work related photos, etc. it sends a message of mistrust. DDI has a whitepaper on Trust in the Workplace and how trust or lack of it can impact on business results.
If this happened in your organisation what do you think would occur?
