The dignity of labour

Are you busy? Feel like you’ve got too much to do? If you do, it would seem that you’re not alone: I was struck by some recent statistics from the Corporate Leadership Council showing that the average job “footprint” (i.e., what someone is expected to do as part of their job) has increased by a third since the beginning of the recession. The Hay Group has found that two-thirds of workers say they are regularly putting in unpaid overtime, in order to cope with this increased footprint.

But, you might argue, these are hard times and we must all pull together and do our best; it’s all hands to the pumps. Companies and workers understand that and the extra effort people put in now in order to help keep their employers afloat is appreciated. Except it isn’t: in the same Hay survey, 63% of workers say their employers do not appreciate their extra effort and 57% feel they are treated like “disposable commodities”. Around fifty per cent say that their current level of work is unsustainable. What are the consequences of those statistics?

This is a familiar theme on the inspiredblog – it’s one that we’ve returned to a number of times over the months. Booker T Washington said “no race can prosper until it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem” and it’s true. At inspired, we strongly believe that all jobs contain and provide dignity. Work defines us and having spent some time in the past without a job, we know how corrosive it can be, how meaningless and empty the days can become, and the crippling effect it can have on self esteem. But, to quote Camus, “there is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted” and what we’re seeing increasingly is that work is not freely accepted; it’s forced on us. It doesn’t provide dignity, it provides anxiety and illness. Is it any wonder that absenteeism, disengagement and low level corporate crime are all increasing, at precisely the time we need people to stay and engage the most?

Have you ever heard anyone say that their employees are their company’s greatest asset? Next time you hear it, remind them that employees are people, not assets. We’re human beings, not “Human Resources.” Unless employers ensure their employees are treated like people – with care, with consideration, with respect – statistics like the ones quoted above will increase and I fear that this recession will get an awful lot worse before it gets better.

Business Maths

I was never particularly good at maths when I was at school and that inadequacy with figures has, I’m afraid, carried over into my adult life. The chances are, many of you could or would say the same. It’s socially easy to admit to difficulties with maths whereas it’s very difficult to admit to difficulties with reading. Perhaps that’s what explains some of the very questionable business maths that I heard from a group the other day.

Let’s begin by setting you a simple problem. You have a team of eight people, all of whom produce one widget per day. If you take away four people, how many widgets per day will the remaining four have to produce in order to maintain your total output of eight? The answer is, of course, two per day: even I could work that out.

However, there’s a problem. The current eight people don’t appear to be slacking. They all appear to be busy each day; they’re not sitting around drinking coffee and gossiping. One widget per day appears to be about right; in fact given that you used to have a team of 16 people producing eight widgets per day, the current productivity seems very good. So what do you do?

The answer to that, of course, is equally simple: you make the cuts anyway and drive the remaining four to work even harder, until they burn out or leave. It seems crazy – no, wait; it is crazy – but that’s exactly what the company was proposing to do. The group I was working with were resigned to taking on a whole lot of extra work on top of their existing responsibilities. When I asked them how they proposed to do that, someone muttered something about “discretionary time” but, in order to be discretionary, you have to have some choice in whether you give that time. They felt they didn’t; they had to work the extra hours, just to keep up with the job.

Oh, I understand that there are efficiency savings to be made. I understand that there might be synergies (and, unlike a lot of people who bandy that word about, I know what it means) but there is a bottom line. This bottom line isn’t on the accounts: it’s the baseline below which no-one can go. Everything you do takes time; there is nothing you do that you can do in an instant. You can be more efficient and look for ways of, perhaps, doing two things at once to speed things up, but there is a bottom line below which we cannot go. There is a point at which there are no more efficiencies; there are no more synergies. What then? Work harder is no longer the right answer...

Manager or Leader? Who cares...

I’ve been doing the rounds of potential clients this week, talking to them about employee engagement and in particular about how engaged employees, who are generally happier and healthier, also tend to be more productive. One of the interesting things to have come from the meetings is how often people shied away from using the word “management”, preferring to talk instead about leadership. It got me thinking: when did management become a dirty word?

It was the late, great Peter Drucker who coined the phrase “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things” – it’s an easy phrase to use and over the years it’s been used to denigrate the work of managers. Management has come to be equated with control, drudgery and the old-fashioned whilst leadership has become equated with vision, direction and the future. Management is dull whilst leadership is sexy.

Over the years, due in part to this pejorative meaning, perfectly good managers have tried to behave in the way they believe leaders behave. They have focussed, with the encouragement of their organisations, on “the vision thing”: on setting direction, laying down targets and key performance indicators and then measuring their teams against their progress towards these targets. Somewhere, over that period, the human side of being a manager has slipped away.

The CIPD say that a manager’s key duty is to “play a pivotal role in terms of implementing and enacting HR policies and practices”. Not once in their factsheet about the duties of a manager does it talk about the need for managers to have good personal relationships with the people in their teams; to like them, to care about them, to get on with them. Nothing about encouraging and fostering good relationships within the team. Nothing, in other words, about all the things that go towards making the workplace more than a place of drudgery.

Leader or manager? It’s irrelevant, a false dichotomy. You can be a manager without being a leader and a leader without being a manager. Rather than worrying about what to call people, let’s focus instead on bringing the human dimension back to the workplace and realise that there’s more to being both a manager or leader than just focussing on the numbers.

Killing the goose

You've probably heard Aesop’s fable of the goose that laid the golden egg: a poor farmer finds that his goose lays solid gold eggs, producing a new gold egg every day. The farmer becomes very rich but also very greedy and decides that he doesn't want to wait for an egg a day - he wants all of the eggs, right now. So he takes an axe, lops off the goose's head, reaches down its neck to get the eggs and finds... nothing but goose guts! Next day, what does he find next to the goose? Nothing: the farmer has killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

I've told that story to hundreds of people and we can all chuckle at the farmer's greed and stupidity. When I ask people what they would do if they were the farmer, they say they would take care of it, on the basis that if they take care of it, it will continue to produce the eggs. We can see the stupidity of doing anything else - like, for instance, treating it badly or not feeding it enough. Yet businesses all over the country are in danger of doing just that – they're actively considering trying to kill, or at least injure, the goose that lays their golden eggs. Why is this so?

The primary "goose" for all businesses is its employees. Without employees, businesses cannot produce their golden eggs – their products, their services, their profits. It's easy to forget, when looking at spreadsheet and company accounts, that employees are people. So often, businesses trumpet the line that people are their greatest asset but where, in their accounts, are employees listed? In the liabilities column - assets are things like plant, machinery, buildings. While they say people are their greatest asset, they treat them as a liability, as their biggest cost and costs are there to be cut.

Employees, like the goose in Aesop’s fable, need looking after in order to perform at their best. This includes ongoing investment in them as people, providing them with ongoing training and development, and a sense that the company sees a long-term future with them. When businesses face tough times, such as now, it's only natural that they look for opportunities to reduce their spend and save money in some way. While no one knows when the current credit crunch will end, everyone knows one thing - it will eventually end. The question for businesses is what shape they will be in when it does. Treating your employees as expendable things – opportunities to cut costs, luxuries to have only when you can afford them – won't help them compete in a global market; it won't help them give of their best to your business.

If you treat people as expendable things, they will inevitably withdraw their commitment, passion and enthusiasm. After all – don't you do the same when you're treated like a thing and not like a human being? They might do what you tell them but will they do it well? Will they do just what you tell them and nothing more? Will they effectively retire on the job, each day doing as little as possible just to get through another day? And in order to compete with and beat your competition, don't you need them to be volunteering their best efforts, their commitment, passion and enthusiasm?

There's no doubt that the current economic climate is tough, but ultimately it is a short-term situation. Taking a short-term view in your approach to it might give you short-term benefits but won't pay off longer term. Smart farmers know that starving your goose might save you money in the short term but it won't help you get more golden eggs in the long term.

Engaging

Those of you who are regular readers will know that we here at inspired have been working on an Employee Engagement workshop over the last six months or so. We ran our first batch of workshops last year and they were very well received - there's a new round beginning soon and you can find details here. If you know someone who might be interested, please do forward the link on.

As well as the MacLeod Report, on which the "Engaging for Success" workshop was based, the CIPD have recently conducted their own survey into employee engagement and you can download it here. I was particularly struck by their assertion that "the extent to which employees find meaning in their work has a substantial impact on how they feel about their working life in general. Employees who believe that their work is important and that they can make a difference have much more positive perceptions about their work and their work environment."

I've talked about this a number of times, in particular in this post, and it's great to have it reconfirmed. I feel strongly about the subject and it almost feels like there's some momentum building. Perhaps this will be the year when employers move away from the old-fashioned industrial-age model of management and begin to truly engage with their workers.

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.

Working to live - part two

I wrote a few weeks ago about the problems faced by France Telecom and the increase in the suicide rate amongst its workers (you can find the entry here). I can’t claim any credit (much as I’d like to) but the Schumpeter column in The Economist picked up on this story recently and added some worrying statistics to the mix.

America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics has calculated that work related suicides increased by 28% between 2007 and 2008. Think about that for a moment: the number of people who were so unhappy with their work that the only way out was for them to kill themselves increased by more than a quarter in the space of one year – and, in the words of the article, “suicide is only the tip of an iceberg of work-related unhappiness.”

The Centre for Work-Life Policy has found that between June 2007 and December 2008, the number of people who said they were loyal to their employers dropped from 95% to 39%. The number of people who said they trusted their employers fell from 79% to 22%. In other words, if the statistics are to be believed, 75% of people don’t trust their employers and 60% are disloyal or, at best, neutral. It seems that, increasingly, employees are finding themselves trapped in jobs they dislike for employers they distrust.

Unusually for The Economist, the article is deafening in its silence on what should be done about this. Telling managers to think more carefully about what they say or advising workers that longer term demographic trends mean they’ll have the upper hand eventually is, frankly, fatuous. Something has to change and it has to change now.

Much of this unhappiness comes from the drive for efficiency, which I’ve labelled previously as the drive to achieve more with less. This in itself stems from the work of Frederick Taylor, who believed that work could be studied scientifically in order to find the most efficient way of working. In his words, “through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation... faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.”

There are two things that I’d like to point out: firstly, Taylor uses the word enforce (or variations of it), five times in two sentences. I don’t think that enforcement is a helpful or effective way of gaining co-operation. Secondly, Taylor – one of the first if not the first management consultant, the father of scientific management and the man whose theories permeate almost every part of business today – was a bit of a fraud.

I’ll be developing these ideas further over the coming weeks in a series of articles that challenge some of the sacred cows of business and I’d love to know your opinion; please do sign up, post comments and get involved in the debate.

Employee Engagement

For those of you who have been asking, details of the forthcoming Employee Engagement workshops are now "officially" on the web here. I'm very excited about this project and looking forward to getting them up and running. It's a key value for me to improve the way in which companies work with their employees and this is a big step in the right direction. Please feel free to forward the link on to every employer you know!

The ribbon is fraying...

There was a fascinating report on the BBC website yesterday about India’s second biggest airline, Jet Airlines. As a result of hundreds of pilots calling in “sick” at the same time, the airline had to cancel 120 flights, stranding thousands of customers. The “sickness” continued for a second straight day yesterday (9th September) with the number of flights cancelled increased to over 200. As I’ve been working on the employee engagement workshop I've mentioned previously, it came as a timely reminder of what can happen when employees disengage.

This dispute arose after the sacking of two pilots for (it is alleged) their participation in setting up a new pilots’ union but Jet has a history of, shall we say, fractious employee relations having sacked 1900 staff last year, only to call them back to work 48 hours later after a change of heart. Relations between the two sides currently seem somewhat acrimonious, with the chairman of the airline describing the pilots as behaving like “terrorists” and holding out the prospect of closing the airline down entirely.

When I talked about this previously, I described engagement as a continuum and it seems to me that, as employees disengage from their employer they begin to engage with something else. In the case of the Indian airline pilots, they seem to have engaged with a sense of their own solidarity and self-worth, with representatives of the pilots claiming that they “want their voice back in the company”.

The thing that people want most is to be listened to and understood; if we feel ignored, we tend to take whatever action we can to ensure that someone pays attention to us. On the face of it, the Jet Airlines dispute stems from the pilots not feeling a part of the company and being denied any other way of expressing their views. In the current economic climate, this dispute is the last thing the airline needs but it goes to show that employees who disengage from their employer can, potentially, bring a large company to its knees.

A colleague once described organisations to me as “a bunch of volunteers held together with a ribbon” – it's a beautiful image and I’ve never forgotten it. It perfectly describes the fact that no force keeps those volunteers together and at any point they can scatter into as many directions as there are people.

(By the way, for those of you who’ve asked, the first of the employee engagement workshops (“Engaging for Success – enhancing performance through employee engagement”) will be on 20th October in Bristol, with subsequent sessions on 29th October in London and 25 November in Manchester. I’ll post more details – venues and so forth – as soon as I have confirmation.)

Efficiency

The idea of efficiency has been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been doing some diagnostic work with a local authority in Scotland and their biggest challenge is the dramatic reduction in their budgets for next year. Their focus is on finding “efficiency savings” – continuing to provide the same (or better) services with less money and fewer resources. As I was writing this article, McKinsey suggested that the NHS should lose 130,000 jobs to save money while the government has responded that the necessary savings can be made through greater efficiency. It got me thinking: what is this thing we call efficiency?

Efficiency is, essentially, the ratio of output to input. It’s based on the idea that it is possible to reduce input whilst increasing output: in a business context, this usually means increasing outputs such as benefit and profits whilst reducing inputs such as effort and expenditure. Efficiency begins with having a very clear and sharp focus on what outputs are expected of you and gearing all of your activities towards that output. The less clear the expected or desired output, the less efficient the system is likely to be. Everyone in the system – and this is especially important in a complex system like an organisation – has to be aware of the desired outputs and then needs to have the autonomy to gear their efforts towards that output.

As organisations face increasing limitations on their resources (the forced reduction of their inputs) whilst stakeholders demand greater profits or provision of services (the forced increase of their outputs) they are driven to strive for greater efficiencies. While it may be a straightforward thing to set clear, unambiguous output targets for an organisation (or a division or team or individual) it’s vital to remember the system that has to produce those outputs is not a machine. It’s a collection of people and people are, largely, inefficient.

I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense but it’s a fact that we’re not geared to doing things in the most efficient way, all the time. We have our own quirks and foibles, our own ways of doing things, we have preferences, we do things through habit, and use our emotions and feelings to make decisions, rather than proceeding in a logical, rational, efficient manner. All of these things must have a knock-on impact on the quest for efficiency in business.

There’s conflict here as business seeks ever-greater efficiency from a system that, fundamentally, cannot deliver it. The trick, it seems to me, is to reach a balance between the efficiency needs of the organisation and the human needs of the people who populate the organisation. Great organisations will find that balance and thrive but there will also come a point where further efficiency savings are no longer possible because of the human needs and limitations of the people. What then?

Employee Engagement

This week, I’ve been working at home, writing a workshop on employee engagement based around the recently released MacLeod report. As I’ve been researching the topic – and there’s a lot of information out there about it – two things have struck me.

Firstly, to create an environment within which employees can feel engaged is not that difficult. If you give people meaningful work to do, reward them fairly and genuinely care about their wellbeing as they do that work, most people will engage with their job. Of course, many employers don’t provide meaningful work – or even meaning for their employees’ work; they have small budgets and try to skimp on salaries in order to maximise profits; many see their employees as human “resources” rather than human beings. Under those circumstances, getting your employees engaged is going to be tricky, no matter how many great workshops you attend.

The second thing that struck me was that engagement isn’t a binary thing. It’s not that I’m either engaged or else I’m disengaged; I might be highly engaged on some days in some activities but less engaged in other activities on other days. My level of engagement on a day-to-day basis may depend on my mood, on what’s happening outside of work or a hundred other things.

You can imagine it as a continuum. At one end of the scale are the people who are highly engaged with their work – creative, excited to come to work, more than happy to volunteer their best efforts to their tasks, to make suggestions, improvements and so on. These are the people you really want to keep and to keep engaged. At the other end are the people who, essentially, do the opposite – they hate their work, do anything to get out of it, maybe even deliberately sabotage what they’re doing in order to “get back” at their employer for some reason. With these people, you’re lucky if they leave – the danger is that if they’re allowed to continue behaving the way they do, they might continue to stay. Either way, attitude is contagious and both groups will proselytise and try to recruit for their cause.

Of course, these are extremes and most of us, as I mentioned before, will move about on the continuum from day to day or activity to activity but will generally have a “baseline” level of engagement from which we don’t stray too much. What’s interesting is that research indicates that most employees’ “baseline” tends towards the latter of these two examples.

What to do about it? Well, as I said, I’m writing a workshop for employers, so we could sit and wait for our employer to do something about it, to create a better atmosphere to engage us. Maybe some employers will, when they recognise that they need the goodwill of their employees and that it can’t be bought but must be earned. Alternatively, we can consciously try to move our “baseline” up the scale for ourselves – either by engaging more with the work we do or finding other work which engages us more. As someone once said, “ask not what your employer can do for you…” Something like that, anyway.