Conscious-Business.org.uk

A home for the Conscious Business community in the UK


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Thoughts on Managing Employees in a Conscious Business

The company I work for is in the business of producing software that automates employee performance appraisals and other talent management processes.

As such, I work every day with companies who are trying to improve the way they do performance appraisals. What often strikes me though is the fact that companies seem to have lost touch with “why” we even do performance appraisals. Many managers and companies do them primarily out of habit, to justify pay rises, or to document employee performance so they can legally support terminations. Some managers use them as a tool to wield power over their employees.

And I think these are the reasons why many employees, managers and companies are questioning their value.

To my mind, the reason any manager should conduct performance appraisals with their employees is because it’s their job. Now hear me out before you object too strongly.

A manager’s job is fundamentally to accomplish work through others. That is, a manager is supposed to:

  • give their employees direction and support for their tasks/accomplishments,
  • communicate and reinforce organisational priorities, values and goals,
  • give employees feedback and direction on their performance,
  • support employee development and career progression, and
  • recognise and reward employees’ accomplishments.

Put more simply, managers are supposed to help their employees and the company be their best, and succeed.

And that’s what good performance appraisals are supposed to do:

  • review the accomplishment of previously set and agreed to objectives,
  • review the demonstration of core and job-specific competencies,
  • identify and address areas needing development,
  • set objectives for the coming year,
  • align those objectives with the organisation’s goals/mission/vision/values, and
  • support career advancement and upskilling.

In so doing, we address most of our employees’ basic needs for engagement.

And it helps us provide a safe place for human development and growth. It supports increased transparency, communication and awareness. It helps frame individual performance, behaviours, values and needs in the context of a larger collective – the larger group of employees and stakeholders who form “the company”. It lets employees know what we as an organisation value, and helps them see how they can influence the organisation’s success, driving accountability. All of these are hallmarks of a conscious business.

Now for this to truly happen, a manager should really function more as a mirror, guide and coach for their employees; not an authority who judges and corrects. I think we all need others to help give us perspective on ourselves and our circumstances, to help challenge us and broaden our views, to help us take stock and set goals.

Performance appraisals really need to just be the culmination of an ongoing, two-way dialogue about expectations, performance and development. The whole process should ideally be collaborative and collegial.

It’s when we lose sight – or “consciousness” – of the basic role of the manager and the performance review that we often go off the rails. Managers and companies become concerned with forms and processes, ratings and rankings, etc. They forget that performance management isn’t really something you do once a year during the employee’s performance appraisal. It’s something
managers and employees do every day; and it’s really just good basic management.

Sean Conrad is a senior product analyst at Halogen Software, where he helps customers automate and improve their talent management processes. He is passionate about improving the way companies manage and develop their employees, and writes and speaks frequently on the topic.


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Beyond ROWE – VOWE?

The term ROWE – meaning Results Only Working Environment – seems to be pretty popular at the moment.

The idea, in case you haven’t come across, it is that employees are paid for results rather than the number of hours worked.

NixonMcInnes, a local company I work with, following in the footsteps of Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, implemented the idea of what they call “flexible working” many years ago.

Chouinard’s autobiography was entitled “Let My People Go Surfing” – that title should help you understand the philosophy.

Presenteeism: out, out, out.

What I like about ROWE is that it has been linked to employee engagement – employees who work this way seem to want to stay longer and they enjoy their work more.

And if you measure productivity – numbers of orders processed, for example, or even hours paid for by a client (billable hours) – rather than hours in the office you’ll see better results.

But I wonder if there is something better? I am sure the ROWE experts are on top of this, but this is it in my own words:

The number one principle of ROWE is that “people at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or the company’s money.”

But my question is: how do people know?

How do they know whether what they are doing is a waste of their time, the customer’s time or the company’s time?

In many large organisations when you join you inherit a whole load of ways of doing things (processes). These are based on an even bigger load of assumptions – visible and invisible – about what is important. Many of these assumptions were made in a time where things were different – they come from the past.

So it seems to me it is perfectly possibly that people in a results only work environment will continue to produce results – that is, be more ‘productive’ – but maybe they’ll be producing the wrong results? Results that don’t actually help the company fulfil its ‘Mission’. Results that don’t actually help anyone.

So here’s a simple alternative: VOWE – the value only work environment. The idea is to do only activities that add value to customers, colleagues, or other stakeholders.

This, of course, requires a clear understanding of what value is. That may seem difficult and off-putting.

But I think most people know what value is. They know what they value.

I value peace and quiet. I value the smile on my child’s face, showing me he is happy. I value a clean floor. I value a beautiful object. Or a bit of software that actually works and makes my life easy.

HR and OD people (and some CEOs) sometimes talk about ‘values’ as if they were something special, something that only the enlightened can hold on to.

But to me a ‘value’ is just what I value. I value honesty and openness. Those are my values.

So actually understanding value is easy for each of us – we know what we value. We know it when we see it, when we touch it, when we feel it.

We need to understand that others value things too – and that what you value may be different from what I value. Value is a perception – ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.

So in a Value Only Work Environment people understand this. And they dedicate their time not just to producing ‘results’ – but to making sure that everything they do gives value to others. Or to themselves.

Apparently when ROWE was introduced into Best Buy some resisters thought it was a wacky new age idea.

So in case anyone thinks VOWE is the same let me cut to the chase: how might you measure success in a business run on VOWE principles?

Simple: you measure profit. But you do need a new definition of profit.

Profit, by my own personal definition, is a measure of the value that your company gives to other people.

Give lots of value to people; and let them reward you with money (yes, money), loyalty and friendship.

Create a culture where employees gain lots of value and let them reward you with loyalty, ideas, and friendship.

I am perhaps being just a little provocative above. But I’d love to know what others think – and in particular, other ideas on what value really is, what profit really is, and whether it is better to work in a ROW, or a VOW environment?

JFPJ4X342354


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Relationships – how much do they really matter?

After reading the ‘Get Started’ page of this site I was struck by how much the point “providing a safe place for human development and growth” resonated with me.

It’s probably not surprising as I’ve spent the best part of my career in learning and development but what drew me in was the term ‘a safe place’ and I thought it would be interesting to explore this a little further.

I would argue that feeling safe is a fundamental condition for optimal learning and development as it allows individuals and teams to explore their potential and try different approaches without fear of reprisal.

One of the key roles for great mentors, coaches and teachers is to create a feeling of safety that allows others to step outside of their comfort zones and try something new in order to develop and grow.

Sometimes, I worry about the trend to continually justify and measure improvement at both the individual and organisational level as this measurement in itself can result in the safety net disappearing.

For example, I remember a French teacher from school who was a stern character and ruled her pupils through fear. At the beginning of each lesson she would pick on a student to stand up in front of the class and test them on the vocabulary homework she had set the week before. This fear of being publicly humiliated in front of your peers meant that most of the time we did our homework well and when it came to exam time she got her results with nearly all the class passing.

A good result you may think. But unfortunately I have spoken to my classmates over the years and she has left a dread for French in all of us and I don’t know of one of us that went on to study the subject at A level.

So, all in all, not much of a legacy for a teacher.

This memory, for me, reinforces the idea that building safe, trusting relationships is probably the most important part of encouraging development and leaving a great legacy for the future.

Claire is a learning and development professional and runs Hove-based Learning Consultancy Partnership.


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Joint responsibility

There’s a lot of talk these days about responsibility in business.

To me, this always boils down to individual responsibility – individuals taking responsibility for their own actions. Without that kind of personal responsibility, any talk of ethics or morality seems, to me, to be less than useful.

But what does personal responsibility actually mean – in practice, in the nitty gritty of working life, in a company, in a business, where we are by definition working with others? Where really we mean joint responsibility, responsibility for the “we”, as well as for ourselves.

I think it boils down to three simple things:

  • Taking responsibility for my contribution – to the project, to the business, whatever.
  • Taking responsibility for the help and support I give to others in my team, in my business, around me. I can make a major difference by helping others succeed in whatever they aim to do.
  • Taking responsibility for making sure that all our aims are reasonably aligned.

It is easy to ignore the last one, and assume it is someone else’s problem – the CEO’s, for example. But if we all individually take on the responsibility for working together well as a group, I think our chances of success are much better.

That’s three areas of responsibility, not one.

If you think you are already great at all three, try this simple test: give yourself a score from 1-10 on how you currently perform in your role, in your organisation.

Be honest. Look for any signs of blaming or undermining – this may, of course, be unconscious too – in each of the three areas.

  • How fully do you take responsibility for your own actions, for gaining the results you wish to achieve?
  • How fully do you support and help others in achieving theirs? Do you really know what their goals and aims are, for example? Do you help, or sometimes, even inadvertently, get in the way?
  • And how well do you ensure that the whole group of which you are part works well? Do you sometimes, again perhaps without meaning to, undermine? Do you know that alignment is missing but fail to do or say anything about it?

Now think about how you would like your scores to be, from now on.


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Conscious Business Conversations that Enable Change

What are the important characteristics of a Conscious Business?  In July about 20 of us met in Brighton to discuss this and to develop ideas of how organisations, particularly those that are small and medium-sized, can practically become more conscious and to use this awareness to improve what they do and to share experience with others.

For large companies there are many audit tools, quality systems and awards to choose from.  From personal experience I know that they can be worthwhile, but they can be very time consuming, bureaucratic and take valuable resource out of the company.  They can have complex ways to examine and put a number on what people do in organisations (ie what people value and how they work with each other to bring about change).  Paradoxically the very act of putting a number on these interactions eclipses the essential quality of those interactions they seek to shine a light on.  The aim of the workshop was to develop something straightforward and meaningful that small and medium-sized organisations could use.

The general features were agreed, a Conscious Business is: respectful, transparent, is fair, is involved in its  community, is authentic, is humble, learns, makes a profit, is ethical, is honest, pays tax and is aware mindful of the full  impact it has.  All of these are important, but without context of what actually happens in practice they can lack meaning.

At the workshop these were further refined into the following distinct themes.

  • Conscious about Profit
  • Social Value
  • Transparency
  • Fairness
  • Have Generosity

In order to bring these themes to life in a practical way we worked on: 1) concrete and everyday examples: 2) what are the two or three question areas that bring these themes to life.  These now feature in our Changing Conscious Business Conversations Tool. There are no metrics or scoring mechanisms in the Tool.  The focus is on having conversations.  These are conversations that relate to what people do in their organisation and how they relate to their environment, suppliers and customers.  Meaningful conversations, particularly with people who you wouldn’t normally speak with, enable people to notice what has not been noticed before and to understand their importance.  A few conversations and a page or two of notes can form the basis of an action plan to bring about change.  These notes and the action plan can also form the basis of further conversations with other Conscious Businesses with the aim of sharing what works and avoiding what doesn’t.  It helps to raise the consciousness of conscious business within the community.

The tool can be found following the hyperlink here.

If you are inspired to use this in your organisation we would very much like to fear from you – what went well, what could be improved, and most importantly the difference it made.


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Conscious Business Embodied – Part II

This post is by Mark Walsh of conscious business training providers Integration Training.

This is Part II of my blog post on embodiment and conscious and integral business.

I ended the previous post with a question: “So, how does all this relate to the body?”

Well, the disconnection from values in business is directly related to disconnection from ourselves – disembodiment. We live in a dissociated world where people are cut-off from themselves and lacking the body awareness necessary for effective health, emotional intelligence, leadership and relationships of all kinds. Disembodiment – living from the tie up – disconnects us from ourselves (including what is good for us and our ethics), others, and the planet.

The body is where emotions, connections to others and ethics happen. The body is the substrate of these “things”, which are not things but embodied experiences and parts of ourselves.

Values (and morality if we want to be old-fashioned) aren’t lofty theoretical concepts but full-bodied “yum!” or “yuck!” responses. Remember the last time your values where strongly expressed or compromised – what happened in your fundamental “operating system” (the body)? Even remembering can become a visceral act.

The body is not just a “brain taxi” and the reduction of the body to something mechanical is a sad loss indeed. When I talk about the body I’m not so interested in someone’s physical shape, size or attractiveness but how they live in and as bodies.

The body is the how of life and the how of business. Our stance is our stance towards life, how we move is how we move in business.

Working with stress management, leadership and team building in the corporate world I see time and time again that when people get in touch with the embodied reality of being fully human their behaviour changes. This is not always comfortable and it does lead to greater health and happiness, improved relationships and effectiveness. With embodiment comes a renewed interested self-care, authentic considerate relationships and ethical action that contributes to the world. These things are actually one and the same.

By being more conscious of our bodies – or of ourselves as embodied, to be more accurate – we make our business more conscious. The two cannot be separated and I believe that trying to be more conscious in business simply from a dry, cognitive, theoretical point of view will not succeed.

As one of my teachers likes or say, “Knowledge is only a rumour until it is
in the body”. Change must be visceral or it is no change at all.

Some Things to Consider

  • How often are you “in your body” at work? – What is the potential cost of this?
  • What are you practicing in your way of being? If your posture now was recorded and projected on the sky for the world to see what would it be saying?
  • How can you “change the climate” of your current embodiment?

Mark Walsh leads conscious business training providers Integration Training – based in Brighton, London and Birmingham UK. Specialising in working with emotions, the body and spirituality at work they help organisations get more done without going insane (time and stress management), coordinate action more effectively (team building and communication training) and help leaders build impact, influence and presence (leadership training). Clients include Unilever, The Sierra Leonian Army and the University of Sussex.

He is the most followed trainer on Twitter and Youtube and has the Google no.2 ranked management training blog. Offline, Mark dances, meditates and practices martial arts.

His ambition is to help make it OK to be a human being at work.


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Conscious Business Embodied – Part I

This post is by Mark Walsh of conscious business training providers Integration Training.

The world has a problem, business is psychopathic, and this is strongly related to how we relate to our bodies. This is a bold statement to open with so I’d better first clarify that I don’t mean that all business people are amoral axe-murderers – I am a business trainer myself and know many compassionate people working in the field – the problem is that work and “life”, including values and emotions, have been split.

Let’s take the fact that most businesses are essentially dictatorships, yet as a society we value democracy. That’s odd when you step back and think about it.

Or that many people feel that you should be a nice guy at home, but not take the very values that make them human to work as “it’s business”. “Businesslike” is now a synonym for disregarding emotions, relationships and the values that are at the core of our shared humanity.

“Work” is defined as that which is not fun, connecting or good.

Structurally, a limited notion of shareholder “value” (i.e. short-term profit for a few) means that businesses are required by law to behave amorally and in the US corporations are given the status of people to protect them from the interests of real humans. We work “for” a company but not for ourselves or for the world.

This is all a bit odd, and more than a bit terrible with personal stress and ill-health, damaged relationships and an increasingly unjust and environmentally damaged world being the result. From heart-attacks to global warming it is literally killing us.

Happily, there is a movement towards a more integrated world, where business is aligned with what people care about and has more than one bottom-line.

Emotional intelligence was one of the things that kick-started this, in my opinion.

Once it was realised that emotions are a critical part of management, three times more likely to predict career success than IQ (source: CIPD) they started to be taught in business. Mindfulness, systems theory and spiritual intelligence have all played their part and a new view of what work is emerging.

The “multiple bottom line” model where people, planet and profit are all considered of value is becoming popular in the conscious business or conscious capitalism movement.

There is no one definition of what conscious business is but it may involve a focus on higher purpose, considering stakeholders of all kinds, leadership and a culture of respectful and transparent communication.

Here’s a short video introduction to conscious and integral ways of doing business if you’re new to the concept. There are also conferences in the US and a meet-up in Brighton if you’re local.

To me, and borrowing from philosopher Ken Wilber, conscious business has an “I” (happiness and growth at work), “we” (good relationships) and “it” (it not only gets the job done, but gets it done better than unconscious – a.k.a. “stupid, effective and evil” business).

Personally, running a conscious business is about health and growth – my business is my main practice, having relationships that match my values and doing something effectively in the world. So I don’t go to work to make money, I make money to learn, have fun, connect and make the world a better place.

So, how does all this relate to the body? I’ll cover that in part II.

Mark Walsh leads conscious business training providers Integration Training – based in Brighton, London and Birmingham UK. Specialising in working with emotions, the body and spirituality at work they help organisations get more done without going insane (time and stress management), coordinate action more effectively (team building and communication training) and help leaders build impact, influence and presence (leadership training). Clients include Unilever, The Sierra Leonian Army and the University of Sussex.

He is the most followed trainer on Twitter and Youtube and has the Google no.2 ranked management training blog. Offline, Mark dances, meditates and practices martial arts.

His ambition is to help make it OK to be a human being at work.



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Hard, Harder, Hardest

Inspired by a good post by Steve Hearsum about Stephen Covey’s recent book, I felt the need to post my own personal comment.

Apparently Covey’s “…most recent book – The 3rd Alternative – is an articulation of how “soft stuff is the new hard stuff”. So says Douglas R. Covant in an introduction to an extract from the book on Strategy & Business:

In my 35-year corporate journey and my 60-year life journey, I have consistently found that the thorniest problems I face each day are soft stuff — problems of intention, understanding, communication, and interpersonal effectiveness — not hard stuff such as return on investment and other quantitative challenges…..The soft stuff will forever be the hard stuff, but leveraging 3rd Alternative thinking can make the soft stuff significantly easier to resolve productively.”

As a long time Covey fan and careful re-reader of his work this doesn’t seem to me to be such a big shift in Covey’s thinking. But I’d join with him in wanting to re-label the “soft” as the hard.

It is an unfortunate twist of fate I think that we call the “soft” stuff that because it is anything but.

ROI and other quantitative things are hard too, of course. If you think anything else you are kidding yourself.

But I’d go even further. There’s one bit of the so-called soft stuff that is even harder.

That is understanding that our own development is the real key to growth.

Not the ‘soft skills’ required to get other people to do things (which is, sadly, how many managers understand ‘soft skills’). But our own self-understanding and awareness.

So, how about a complete re-categorisation of all things to do with (conscious) business:

* hard – ROI and other quantitative things
* harder – ‘people skills’
* hardest – one’s own personal development and a relationship of growth with oneself


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Evidence for Conscious Business

Some people would argue that if you need evidence that being more conscious at work is a good thing, you’ll never be persuaded. But there’s also an argument that hard evidence helps – to give confidence and encouragement to those that need it.

So here’s a selection of facts and figures I have put together.

It covers the value of employee engagement, clear purpose, innovation and good leadership. It shows these are what investors look for, and that they are good for a business generally. There is a PDF version here if you prefer to print and read (or send to your ebook).

Investing in  leadership skills:

About 80% of professionals who analyse companies for investors – including investment bankers and executives at private equity companies and hedge funds – say they would place a valuation premium on a company with a particularly effective senior leadership team. And the same percentage said they would discount a valuation if they thought a company’s leadership was ineffective. Analysts and investment professionals placed an average premium of 15.7% on particularly effective leadership, and an average 19.8% discount on companies with leadership that was deemed ineffective.

[Deloitte 2012 How TMT Companies Win The Confidence of Investors]

Stock market performance and shareholder return in relation to conscious business:

Firms of Endearment study – over 10 year period companies that broadly  follow conscious aims outperformed the S&P 100 by ratio of 9:1

[Raj Sisodia, Bentley University]

Stock market performance and shareholder return:

Motivated employees are 52 to 127 percent more productive than those who have average motivation. Companies that have an employee recognition strategy double the return to shareholders compared with those that don’t. 40% of the variability in corporate financial performance comes down to employees sense of fulfillment in the workplace.”

[Richard Barrett, ‘Liberating the Corporate Soul’ – TBD original source]

Growing interest by investors in sustainability, climate change, social factors:

Investors increasingly believe that social and environmental conditions in society can have a direct impact on the business operations of a company and its long-term viability.

In 2011, average support for environmental and social shareholder resolutions topped 20% for the first time, according to research by Institutional Shareholder Services. That’s up from 18.1% in 2010 and 16.3% in 2009.

[Sabine Vollmer  – senior editor – CGMA Magazine March 2012]

 Including more stakeholders improves financial performance:

Despite the drop in performance seen in 2011, companies that are owned by their employees have outperformed FTSE All-Share companies by on average 12% each year.  Over successive three-year periods they have outperformed by 37% and over successive five-year periods by 71%.

[The Employee Ownership Index]

 Transparency:

280 CEOs were surveyed for the report spanning 21 countries. Three-quarters of the CEOs recognised the need for measuring non-financial value. Meanwhile, 76% think the current reporting system places excessive emphasis on financial data. 87% viewed transparency as an opportunity, and 13% viewed it as a threat. The question among many CEOs is how much transparency is too much.

[Research Commissioned by  AICPA and CIMA (the major UK Accounting Bodies) and carried out by Oxford Economics (2012)]

Employee disengagement is expensive and destructive:

In recent years, employee loyalty has plummeted. Here are just a few sobering statistics that may surprise you:

  • Only 30% of today’s employees reported that they were engaged (loyal and productive)
  • 54% reported they were passively disengaged (going through the motions)
  • 16% reported they were actively disengaged (badmouthing the employer, sniping from the sidelines

[Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty, Mattanie Press, October 2005, By Tim Rutledge]

Congruence and authenticity at work:

In a field experiment carried out in a large business process outsourcing company, it was found that when socialization/induction focused on personal identity (i.e. emphasizing newcomers’ unique perspectives and strengths and authentic expression) it led to significantly greater customer satisfaction and greater employee retention after six months, compared to (a)when socialization focused on organizational identity (i.e. emphasizing pride from organizational affiliation) and (b)when it focussed on the organization’s traditional approach which focused primarily on skills training.

[Breaking Them In or Revealing Their Best? Reframing Socialization around Newcomer Self-Expression By Francesca Gina (Associate Professor in the Negotiations, Organizations, and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School)]
Encouraging newcomers to be themselves rather than adapt to the company culture]

Purpose impacts profit:

A  strong, strategically coherent and well communicated corporate purpose is associated with upto 17% better financial performance

[IMD/Burson Marsteller Corporate Purpose Impact Study 2010. The study is based on research into 213 European companies from 10 industries.]

Employee engagement:

88% of highly engaged employees believe that they can positively impact the quality of their organization’s products;  only 38% of disengaged employees think so

[Towers Perrin 2008]

Only 4% of UK workers exhibit the highest level of engagement with their work.

[Corporate Leadership Council]

Purpose and brand:

40% of a company’s reputation is determined by its purpose and 60% by its performance.

[Burson Marsteller/Penn, Schoer and Berland 2008.]

Lack of employee engagement costs companies re staff turnover, accidents and theft:

Gallup in 2006 examined 23,910 business units and compared top quartile and bottom quartile financial performance with engagement scores.  They found that: Those with engagement scores in the bottom quartile averaged 31–51 per cent more employee turnover, 51 per cent more inventory shrinkage and 62 per cent more accidents. Those with engagement scores in the top quartile averaged 12 per cent higher customer advocacy, 18 per cent higher productivity and 12 per cent higher profitability.

[Gallup in 2006]

Employee engagement and earnings per share:

A second Gallup study of the same year of earnings per share (EPS) growth of 89 organisations found that the EPS growth rate of organisations with engagement scores in the top quartile was 2.6 times that of organisations with below-average engagement scores

[Gallup in 2006]

Employee engagement and innovation:

Gallup indicate that higher levels of engagement are strongly related to higher levels of innovation.

Fifty-nine per cent of engaged employees say that their job brings out their most creative ideas against only three per cent of disengaged employees. This finding was echoed in research for the Chartered Management Institute in 2007 which found a significant association and influence between employee engagement and innovation.  Based on survey findings from approximately 1,500 managers throughout the UK, where respondents identified the prevailing management style of their organisation as innovative, 92 per cent of managers felt proud to work there

[Gallup/Chartered Management Institute in 2007]

Employee engagement and illness:

Engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year; the disengaged take 6.19.

[The Macleod Report commissioned by BIS 2009]

The CBI reports that absence due to sickness costs the UK economy £13.4 bn a year.

[CBI]

Employee engagement and interfacing with clients/customers:

70 per cent of engaged employees indicate they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs; only 17 per cent of non-engaged employees say the same.

[The Macleod Report commissioned by BIS 2009]

Employee engagement and retention:

Engaged employees are 87 per cent less likely to leave the organisation than the disengaged.

[The Macleod Report commissioned by BIS 2009]

The cost of poor employee retention:

The cost of high turnover among disengaged employees is significant; some estimates put the cost of replacing each employee at equal to annual salary.

[The Macleod Report commissioned by BIS 2009]

Employees as ambassadors and relation to NPS (Net Promoter Score):

Engaged employees advocate their company ororganisation – 67 per cent against only three per cent of the disengaged. Seventy-eight per cent would recommend their company’s products or services, against 13 percent of the disengaged.

[Gallup 2003]

Employee engagement and change/flexibility:

Engagement  and involvement are critical in managing change at work; according to Price waterhouse Coopers (PwC), nine out of ten of the key barriers to the success of change programmes are people related; only 24 per cent of private sector employees believe change is well managed in their organisations (15 per cent in the public sector) according to Ipsos MORI.

[Price waterhouse Coopers (PwC) and Ipsos MORI]

The need for employee engagement and conscious business more widely in UK:

Gallup suggest that in 2008 the cost of disengagement to the economy was between £59.4 billion and £64.7 billion.

[Gallup (2008)]

The importance investing in everyone, not just leadership:

The IES/Work Foundation report ‘People and the Bottom Line’ found that if organisations increased investment in a range of good workplace practices which relate to engagement by just ten per cent, they would increase profits by £1,500 per employee per year

[The IES/Work Foundation report ‘People and the Bottom Line’]

Towers Perrin in their 2008 Global Workforce Study of employee views found that the top driver of engagement was senior management demonstrating a sincere interest in employee well-being.

[Towers Perrin in their 2008 Global Workforce Study]

Evidence is not the problem, there is so much of it:

The case for employee engagement – there are so many more research findings in the Macleod Report

[commissioned by the Department for Business (BIS) 2009.]

Consciousness is a rare commodity:

Only 10% of Managers take “Purposeful Action” (a powerful combination of focus and energy).  Meanwhile 30% of managers procrastinate, 20% show detached behaviour and 40% exhibit distracted behaviour.

[Sumantra Ghoshal and Heike Bruch]

Pretending to engage employees doesn’t work:

If employees conclude that a manager is just trying to win points by paying lip service to consulting them — and has no intention of acting on their advice — they are likely to stop offering input and, worse, act out their frustration by clashing with their colleagues.

[When Employees Stop Talking and Start Fighting: The Detrimental Effects of Pseudo Voice in Organizations, Gerdien de Vries, Karen A. Jehn and Bart W. Terwel, Journal of Business Ethics, 2012, Volume 105, Number 2,  Pages 221-230]


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Conscious HR Part 2

Following on from Conscious HR part 1 of a few days ago, where I explained that Conscious HR is not a one size fits all and is open to individual interpretation, here are some more examples and ideas which hopefully give a feeling of what I am trying to convey. As before, please consider this as thought provoking rather than didactic. Please feel free to challenge me and reprovoke my thoughts!

 Retention

  • Happy colleagues are more likely to stay. Measure the wellbeing of your colleagues with regular anonymous polls – maintain a wellbeing index  that gives an immediate snapshot of what your colleagues are feeling – if it starts to slip, act quickly!
  • Incorporate regular two-way progress checks with each colleague – keep it informal but honest, exploring concerns on an open basis. Whatever you do, don’t go down the archaic annual appraisal route – that is simply too painful and too slow for all concerned.
  • Learning and Development is a cornerstone of  CB – agree group and individual goals and methods which reflect the needs of the organisation and its members. Be realistic and ensure there are checks and counterbalances.
  • Be proactive –  don’t simply apply the letter of the law. I remember an incident at my workplace some 20 years ago –  Paul lost his cool and stormed off site – the classic response in those days was to consider that as gross misconduct and terminate the contract of employment without notice. Instead, I took his manager around to Paul’s house – Paul was eating fish and chips and had cooled down! I offered him the option of returning to work and apologising to his colleagues which he took and ended up staying within the business for another 15 years. We all learned lessons from that which helped us in the longer term.

Redeployment

  • Think of the termination of a contract of employment as a redeployment, regardless of the reason behind it – the colleague in question will be seeking to work elsewhere if not retiring and I feel it is the responsibility of the organisation to help that person successfully redeploy.
  • Sometimes, certain people do not flourish in certain organisations – this can be for any number of reasons. Try to work together to understand why something isn’t working and then fix it. If  the fix is not possible then agree a way forward.

For example, someone may simply have a dream of wanting to work in an entirely different field to the organisation’s area of activity – if the individual has contributed well in the past, why not help them to achieve that goal by talking initiatives such as gradually releasing and even funding them to retrain in other sphere?

  • There will be occasions when a colleague and an organisation are at odds with each other and a recourse to employment law is mooted. Try to avoid this if at all possible but if unable to do so, remain fair, human and always prepared to pick up the telephone to talk – don’t hide behind convoluted documents.

 I am often asked to help in what would be termed ‘tricky’ situations – technically, I am acting on behalf of the organisation but I make it clear from the outset that I will only do what is fair for both parties. During that process I regularly interface with lawyers – regrettably, very few of them on either side of the fence really understand that it is possible in essence to act for both parties in a dispute. (My personal view is that most lawyers are conditioned to be constricted by the law and to apply it robotically and expensively without regard to the human situation in hand – hands up for Conscious Law anyone?!).

I will always encourage an organisation to be more generous than the law dictates – surely it is far better to support the colleague financially than to pay a lawyer a similar or greater amount for applying the law with pressure to avoid such a non-statutory payment?

The irony is in that in order to communicate honestly and to be generous, one has to make initial moves that some employment advisors can try to present in a hostile light – my advice is not to allow fear of the law prevent one from trying to do the right thing.

The key is that at the end of redeployment process, both the organisation and the colleague have parted with a degree of amicability and good feeling, even if both have had to compromise.

Summary

These are just ideas and tips on elements of Conscious HR – some of many ways to make the workplace and the people in it happy, healthy and profitable.

Toolkits anyone?

In a recent meeting of people keen on the principles of CB, I did sense that commencing and travelling the journey can be challenging from a simply practical perspective.

Do you think there would be interest in some  ‘toolkits’ which assist this process? I am visualising some checklists and flow diagrams which provoke thought and simplify action.

This is something that  a group of  us are thinking about creating over the coming months for use in our consultancy lives – would be good to know if there is any interest!