What do you think you're doing?

When I was a child, one of the phrases I heard most often from my parents – usually in response to some sickening crash or disaster that I’d caused – was “what do you think you’re doing?” All these years later and that phrase still has a great deal of resonance for me and I like to ask it regularly, of others and myself. I’m often surprised to find that they – and sometimes I – don’t actually know. Sometimes there’s a difference between what I think I’m doing and what I’m actually doing but that’s a discussion for another week.

As I sat down to write this week’s blog entry, that phrase came back to me. Back in August last year, when I started this blog, I wrote that beginning something was easy but continuing was difficult. Since then, I think I’ve done pretty well – there’s been an average of a blog post a week, I have a handful of (intelligent, sophisticated, attractive) followers and sometimes people write to let me know that they’ve agreed with what I’ve written. But still that question keeps echoing in my mind: when it comes to this blog, what do I think I’m doing? It’s become even louder since I started a marketing campaign for inspired, trying to find new clients and new work: what do I think I’m doing?

Once I’d started asking the question I found that I didn’t have a convincing answer – not consciously, at least. Re-reading the blog, however, a pattern began to emerge and a realisation dawned on me. What do I think I’m doing? I’m simply trying to change the way we all – each one of us – think about work.

I’ve written before that I’ve seen too many people who’ve mistaken their job for a hostage situation. People for whom Monday morning – and sometimes even Sunday evening – is the low point of their week. People who can’t wait for the weekend – or even retirement – so they can do what they really want. People who are being ground down and used up by their employers and employers who know this is what they’re doing but can’t think of any other way to be.

Carrying on the way we are simply isn’t an option anymore: if the last couple of years have taught us anything – and that’s an open question – it’s that our current approach to work is unsustainable. We have to find a new and better way. I believe work – whatever that work is – can be inspiring. I believe work can provide dignity and fulfilment, can provide opportunities for creativity and service and links to a higher, more engaging purpose. I believe work should enhance life, not make it miserable. I believe all of this is possible and achievable, for everyone, and that’s what I’m trying to achieve – that’s what I think I’m doing.

It’ll take effort but the reward will be worth it. Who’s with me?

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.

Coincidence?

A few months ago, I wrote about the spate of suicides that occurred amongst employees of France Telecom. Since 2008, 46 France Telecom employees have committed suicide, following a downsizing programme that resulted in the loss of 20,000 jobs. The situation is complex and investigations – in both Paris and Besançon, in eastern France – are ongoing, so we can't draw any definitive conclusions. However, an apparently similar situation has come to light in Longhua, China, at the Foxconn electronics construction factory. So far, around a dozen workers at the factory – reports vary, making exact numbers difficult to rely on – have killed themselves this year. In response, Foxconn have increased salaries, brought in Buddhist monks and installed 1.5m square meters of safety netting.

Context is everything: the Foxconn factory employs nearly half a million workers and the number of suicides is not – in statistical terms – remarkable; suicides tend to happen in clusters and the average suicide rate in China is around 13 per 100,000 people. It is true that some workers at the plant have blamed a culture of bullying and harassment from managers but others have dismissed that idea. No one knows for sure what is causing the suicides but Foxconn is interesting, not just in the light of the France Telecom case but also because it constructs some of the worlds most in-demand consumer electronics. If you’re reading this on an iPhone or an iPad, the chances are it was built in the Foxconn factory in question.

As yet, there are no answers from either case and we may never know what caused the suicides – each of the 60 people who chose to end their lives may have done so for entirely separate and unconnected reasons. Each one is an individual tragedy and deserves both our sympathy and empathy. But this is the second time, since the beginning of the financial crisis, that two such suicide clusters have come to light within two separate employers. Is the financial crisis, with its attendant increase of pressure on employees, in some way connected to this? As the saying goes, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence…” For Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, three times meant enemy action; we’ll have to watch for a third cluster before we can judge whether there is something here about which we, as a wider society, need to worry.

We've had a facelift

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we were in the process of overhauling the inspired Consulting website. Well, the good news is that the work is done and the new website is up and running. You can take a look by clicking on the inspired logo and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the new look.

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...

Pig whistling

I’ve been working with some groups recently on a personal impact workshop. It’s been a fun experience and they’ve been good groups, open and ready to take on all the stuff we threw at them. On one of the workshops I encountered a delegate who was newly promoted into quite a senior role. As a facilitator, you begin to get a bit of a sixth sense about delegates; the quality of some just strikes you and this was one of those cases. She was bright, articulate and smart – the fact that she’d just been promoted into a big role clearly spoke volumes about her abilities and her organisation clearly had confidence in her. The one thing she lacked was confidence in herself.

She was role-playing, with an actor, a scenario involving her manager: she wanted his support (by which she meant his reassurance that she was doing a good job) but he wasn’t giving it. It wasn’t that he was a bad person or unsupportive – he’d recommended her for the promotion, after all – but he was totally unable to understand or deal with the emotional needs she was describing. The other people in the group, watching her role-play, suggested that she shock her manager in some way, to force him to change his approach and give her the support she needed – the most common suggestion was for her to burst into tears. I know they were motivated by good intentions but I couldn’t help saying I thought that was a bad idea.

I was reminded of an old saying: never try to teach a pig to whistle – it never works and it annoys the pig. The fact is there was nothing particularly wrong with the manager. Of course, perhaps she – and I – might prefer it if he was a little more in tune with the emotional needs of his staff but as he was in his mid-fifties, that was unlikely to change and wasn’t the problem, anyway. The problem was that she had perfectly reasonable needs which she insisted that he meet, despite his obvious inability to do so.

My advice to her was to use her manager for the things he was good at – his technical expertise and his practical guidance on the job she was being expected to do – and to stop banging her head against a wall, expecting him to do something he was clearly incapable of doing. Better, instead, for her to focus on getting those emotional needs met elsewhere – perhaps through a coach or a mentor.

It sounds like I’m blaming her and letting her manager “off the hook” in some way but I’m not. We deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be; sometimes people don’t do what we want or don’t give us what we want. No one can change another person any more than someone else can change us – they have to want to change and sometimes they don’t want to or feel they can’t. In that case, as Victor Frankl wrote, when we cannot change our circumstances, we are forced to change ourselves.

Speed

Like many people, I’ve been keeping an eye on the television over the past few days, keeping up with the ongoing political situation here in the UK. The thing that’s struck me most is the number of presenters who have been camped out in all weathers, reporting from outside various locations, waiting for something to happen. Exactly why it was necessary to drag these presenters blinking into the sunlight from their warm and cosy studios, I’m not entirely sure but I suspect it has a lot to do with our culture’s current obsession with speed.

Aside from giving the spurious impression that the news they are conveying is somehow more accurate because they are “on the scene”, the main reason for having presenters in Downing Street or outside the cabinet offices is so that they can capture events, as they happen. Sky, for one, makes great play of being the first to bring what is now referred to as “breaking” news as does BBC Radio 5 Live.

But what does speed give us? In all but a very few instances, speed or immediacy adds little: it tells us what has happened but the focus on immediacy means we don’t understand why it happened, or the consequences of what has happened. It’s symptomatic of our broader desire now to get things done quickly. Mobile phones are with us all the time and we’re expected to be available almost 24 hours a day. Email is all but instantaneous so some people assume that the reply should be, too, and I’ve written before about the pressure for ever increasing efficiency – for which, again, read speed.

Where in all of this instant reaction is the opportunity to stop and think? Where is the opportunity to consider, to reflect, to weigh up alternatives? How many mistakes might be avoided, how many ideas might be improved, how many decisions might be better, simply by avoiding this pressure and slowing down? I’ve spent this week with a great bunch of people, all of whom report being under so much pressure that they are at near breaking point. It’s not that they’re inefficient, or poor at their jobs, or unintelligent – they’re just struggling to keep up with the relentless pace of the jobs they do. The only way they stand any chance of keeping up is to react instantly, constantly spending time in Quadrant One, slowly but surely burning out.

It takes courage to take a stand against this tide and I hope, during the course of this week, I was able to give them something that might help. It’s a situation that I’m facing with delegates more and more often, though, and seems to be a trend which is only going one way. It’s like we’re all speeding along a motorway: we’re unsure of where we are or where we’re going, certain only that we’re making such good progress we don’t have time to check the map.