Should auld acquaintances be forgot?

Many years ago, I worked at the same company as a woman called Irene; we started at the company on the same day and we kept in touch over the ten years that we both worked in the firm. Over that period, I watched as her career took an interesting turn and, by the end of the ten years, she was taking, on average, around about 80 to 100 days a year off sick.

It wasn’t that there was anything particularly wrong with Irene – she didn’t break her leg or anything; that 80 to 100 days each year was made up of the odd day or two here and there. Coughs, colds, sprains, migraines – there were always reasons for each absence and, over the months and years, they added up.

During her time at the company, Irene had a number of different managers, each of whom went through the same process. Initially, they would be crestfallen to find that Irene had been assigned to their team; then they would decide to resolve the problem and tackle it head-on; this would inevitably meet with failure and so they would give up, finally working to transfer her on to yet another unfortunate manager. Irene was not an easy woman to talk to – she was forthright, opinionated and generally older than the people managing her, so she found it easy to intimidate them. Some, less confident, managers would move from the first to the last step, skipping the middle stages entirely.

Eventually, Irene was given redundancy and received a cash payment, together with one month’s salary for every year she’d worked there. Everyone around her breathed a sigh of relief and made a little note to themselves that the consequence of continued poor behaviour is a large cash payout.

She never worked a full year over that ten-year period. Interestingly, though, Irene also participated in a local light operatic society: to the best of my knowledge, she never missed a rehearsal or a performance and I was reminded of Irene when I read this article. In particular, I was struck by the quote from Professor Cary Cooper: “if employers entrust their workers with flexible working, stress-related illness and sickness absence is lower and performance and productivity increases.”

What he’s talking about is an effort on behalf of employers to demonstrate the same flexibility and commitment they demand of their employees. While BA and its employees fight each other in the courts, politicians vilify bank employees and the country wonders whether it will still have a job in twelve months, perhaps Professor Cooper’s words point to a better way of working in the New Year. Perhaps one day, people like Irene – disengaged, unhappy, and reacting to being treated like a problem to be passed from pillar to post – will be treated differently. Perhaps an enlightened manager will one day tap the level of engagement she showed to her operatic society.

As the snow floats down outside and we prepare for the Christmas festivities that seems like a hopeful place to end 2009. We’re taking a break next week so we’ll see you again on New Year’s Day. If I could have one wish granted by Santa, it would be that, if you’ve enjoyed anything you’ve read this year on the blog, you to pass it on to just one other person who might like it.

In the meantime, have a very Merry Christmas.

Spinning plates

I just wanted to draw your attention to this excellent article concerning "information overload", a subject close to my heart in my studies on time/personal management. Having spent a day very recently with a group who complained they never got time to get their work done, while checking their BlackBerrys, iPhones and various other devices constantly throughout the day, it echoes my own thoughts on the subject perfectly!

Cause for hope

There are lots of drawbacks to the job I do – the endless travel and all the associated problems; long days and lonely nights in hotels, away from home; dealing with delegates who feel resentful or angry and seem to have forgotten their manners. As we reach the end of a difficult year, it’s easy for the negative things to stick in the mind, so it was good to be reminded of the upside of the job this week, which found me working with a bunch of graduate trainees from a large organisation on a corporate social responsibility workshop.

The idea was to give the graduates a project to do on day one of the workshop, have them carry out the project on day two and then review it on day three. It’s the third time I’ve run this workshop and previous projects have involved decorating community centres or building things. This time the task was even more daunting: the graduates had to go into a school and engage a group of 40 students (14 to 16 years old) on the issues surrounding electricity generation and supply and to conduct a debate about the “green” credentials of the electric car.

I’ve worked with graduates on development programmes before and, I must confess, my view of them is sometimes jaded. From some individuals on some programmes I’ve seen a sense of arrogance and entitlement that I find difficult. Not this time, though. What I encountered was a group of early twenty-somethings who were polite, engaging, thoughtful and fiercely intelligent. They worked together to achieve the project with a dedication, resilience and humour that I found quite inspiring. Not only that, the students they taught were polite, thoroughly engaged and grateful for all the work that had been put into the day. They were fascinated by the science they were being taught and had a surprisingly comprehensive grip of the issues surrounding electric cars.

I’m conscious that last paragraph contains a great many adjectives but I make no apology for trying to convey how impressive both groups were – if you believe everything you see in the media, it’s tempting to believe that the “youth of today” are nothing but feral, hoody-wearing hooligans. It was fascinating to watch the next two generations engaging with each other and discussing the future of the planet they’re inheriting and exploring practical ways in which to clean up the mess that previous generations have made. The whole workshop made me feel guilty and old but, above all, very optimistic about the future.

Christmas bonus

What are we to make of the furore surrounding the bankers’ bonus saga? Bankers have had a bad time of it recently – mostly at the hands of politicians (who are, no doubt, very glad to have something to detract from their own expenses scandal) and at the hands of the media, who are only too happy to find someone to blame for the economic mess in which we find ourselves. RBS have found themselves particularly in the firing line. There was the fuss about Fred Goodwin and Harriet Harman’s ridiculous comment about his pension failing in "the court of public opinion" and now they wish to pay bonuses totalling £1.5bn, which has sparked rumours of government action in this week’s pre-budget statement.

The ever informative and reliable Robert Peston is forecasting a super-tax on bankers’ bonuses, which is an interesting development. If it does happen – and we’ll find out in a few days – it may well be a sign that the court of public opinion has indeed handed in a verdict. A super-tax will not clear the country’s debt; even at rates of 80% to 90%, the total raised will only be a couple of hundred million pounds – no small amount, clearly, but insignificant compared to the overall debt. The tax will purely be a punitive measure and possibly, if we’re to be cynical, a grab for popularity.

Let me be clear: some of you reading this may well be bankers and I make no comment on whether you deserve a bonus. I’m not even going to comment on whether bonuses are an effective way of motivating individuals. What I find fascinating is that we’re seeing played out, on a grand scale, the principle of reciprocity. There is a perception, rightly or wrongly, that “bankers” have brought about the current economic crises: people have lost their jobs, businesses have closed down. There is a further perception that, having been “bailed out” by the public, bankers are now taking advantage and being unfairly rewarded for what they’ve done.

The key word there is “unfairly” – reciprocity demands that any exchange be perceived as fair by both parties. If it isn’t, then the party on the losing end will take action – even at their own expense – to punish the party seen to be winning. The City of London, despite recent events, has been a source of income for this country for hundreds of years. In the coming weeks, it’ll be interesting to see how far society is prepared to go to punish this income generator in the search for reciprocity.

Do you have the time?

What is time? If you’re struggling to answer that question, you’re not alone. It’s something that we think about all the time but it’s almost impossible to describe what time is. This isn’t a new struggle – in the fifth century, St Augustine wrote, “what then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Often, about the only thing we do know about time is that we don’t have enough of it.

It’s a faulty paradigm, of course: we treat time as if it was a commodity, which it clearly isn’t. If we don’t have enough of something that we want, we’ll generally go and get some more but you can’t do that with time. It’s not possible to pop down to Tesco and pick up an extra half an hour. So we often look for time management systems to provide that “extra” time – some new process, some new diary, some clever system to give us the time we need. But what do we find? All time management advice is fundamentally the same, regardless of how it’s dressed up, and I’d be willing to bet that you already know most of it.

Time management is a myth; there’s nothing we can do to time to give ourselves a 61-minute hour or a 25-hour day. It’s not time we should be managing: it’s ourselves. I was working with a group recently, talking about time, and one of the delegates was in training for an Ironman triathlon competition. He estimated that he spent about 24 hours a week in training and one of the other delegates barked with laughter and derision at this, boldly claiming that, as a working mother of two children, she couldn’t possibly do something like that because she didn’t have enough time. Of course, what we discovered after a little questioning, was that she spent around 30 hours a week watching television.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have the time to train for a triathlon – it just wasn’t as important to her as watching TV. Time management, at its heart, is self-management: it’s about the choices we make on how to spend our time and every choice we make has consequences. Recent studies have shown that the average Facebook user spends about 70 hours on the site per year – three whole days. The biggest users spend a full week. Users of social networking sites estimate that they spend around 40 minutes a week, at work, on the sites – at a cost to the economy of about £1.4bn a year. Most eBay bids and sales are made during the hours of 9am to 5pm. I guarantee that most of these people “don’t have enough time”, either.

I’m not criticising television or Facebook or Twitter or any other website – I watch TV and use social networking sites like most other people. But the fact is, we have all the time we’re ever going to get: we’re never going to get any more. We have the same 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year as Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama or any other significant achiever you could mention. What it comes down to, at heart, is the choices we make on how to spend that time. Choose wisely.