November 24, 2009
I promised in a post a few weeks back that I’d be inviting more guest bloggers to join me on my blog and I’m happy to welcome Dr Jill Flint-Taylor. Jill is a Director at my University spin off company Robertson Cooper and heads up the London office. Jill has a wealth of experience to share with you and specialises in the areas of leadership development, employee engagement and well‐being, as well as helping organisations to attract, retain and develop the best talent. I hope you enjoy her post and as always please comment if you find it interesting.
Thanks for joining me Jill!
Dr Jill Flint-Talyor
Social networks
I know what you’re thinking – yet another article on the proliferation of social networking sites on the internet! Well, I guess I do want to talk about the effect of sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo – but as part of the bigger picture of what social contacts can do for our personal well-being. Establishing and maintaining strong social relationships is one of the ways we can increase our ability to cope with stressful situations in a resilient way. This makes perfect sense – we know that “a problem shared is a problem halved”, and we also know that socialising with our friends can help us to take our minds off our worries.
But this raises a number of questions. Is it the case, for example, that people who are more extraverted are more resilient, because they have a larger social network? Does online social networking bring the same kind of benefits for our well-being as meeting up with our friends in person? What happens to our social networking – online and in person – when we’re under pressure? These apparently simple questions are really quite complex and I won’t claim to be able to do them justice here. But let’s have a quick look at each of them in turn.
Taking the question of extraversion and resilience, over the years a number of studies have found that people who are more outgoing, energetic and assertive tend to be more resilient. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the size of your social network that counts. The key to this aspect of resilience is more likely to lie in two important factors. Firstly, the strength of the relationships from which you draw your social support and secondly, how good you are at keeping contact when you are very busy or stressed.
The last point relates directly to the question of what happens to our social networks when we’re under pressure. The research on depression shows clearly that many people withdraw and focus inwards when severely depressed, even if they are normally friendly and sociable. In terms of resilience, this creates a circular problem – being depressed causes us to withdraw, which in turn has a detrimental effect on our ability to draw on the social support that could help us to come out of our depression. Something similar happens if we are stressed, and this effect is compounded if the stress is caused by overload at home or work, because time constraints make it even more difficult to keep up with our friends and colleagues.
So what about social networking online? Does it help that it’s easier to fit this into a busy day – making it possible for us to stay in touch with our close friends? Or do we become too reliant on “relationships” where most of our contact is with people we hardly know and where contact with our close friends becomes so superficial that they’re not there when we need them? This is a fascinating new area of research and I’d like to come back to it in more detail in a future blog. For now, I’d say that the use of social networking sites must be a good thing if it helps us keep in touch and make new friends in an increasingly busy and fragmented world. But as with all things, the key is a strong dose of common sense, and we need to make a conscious effort to keep the right balance between online contact and meeting up with our friends in person. There’s no question that a few very strong friendships are worth more in terms of meeting our needs for social support than a large number of “friends” who don’t know us well and have no reason to really care about us.
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Guest Blog Spots, Personal Resilience, Stress, Well-being, pressure | Tagged: Well-being, resilience, under pressure, Robertson Cooper, stressed, Jill Flint Talyor, social networking, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, social relationships | 
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Posted by Cary Cooper
November 20, 2009
Did you read about the battle that the CIPD Chief Executive became embroiled in with regard to her annual bonus this year? She found herself under considerable pressure, from both the media and the general public, to give it back. This reaction stemmed from a perception that it would be distasteful for a personnel expert to accept a large bonus in these economic times – despite hitting the goals and targets placed on her by the CIPD and, ultimately, its members.
As practitioners in the world of HR and Personnel, CIPD members understand and expect world class leadership from world class leaders – and it would be fair to say that their CEO is just that. However, to attract and retain this level of talent organisations like the CIPD have to pay market rates in terms of salaries and then set challenging goals to justify these levels of pay. World class leaders are not the norm, they don’t generally come fully formed and you can’t just churn them out of business schools: this level of experience is hard won over many years in different roles and across a range of difficult challenges.
The responsibility for setting salary levels, targets and associated bonus sits with the employer and is almost always initially negotiated at the time of employment. An agreement regarding bonus payments will certainly have been set out in her contract by the CIPD. Then, as an employee, she committed to these targets (and all the hard work it would take to achieve them) and understood that if they were not achieved no bonuses would be paid. However, a key motivational driver was that if the targets were hit then a bonus would be paid!!! I’m sure we would all feel pretty annoyed and disappointed if we were asked to give back a bonus we had agreed with our employer and worked hard for – even if the economic climate had changed since we signed the contract!
Of course, this CEO is free to choose whether or not to pay back any of her bonus. However, if the media, CIPD or its members are not happy with the outcome they should perhaps focus on the organisation’s talent management strategy, including the size of bonuses being written into contracts at the time of employment. Of course, the CIPD are not alone in needing to pay attention to this issue – hopefully many organisations will have learnt a valuable lesson of late and will start to agree reasonable bonuses that won’t break the bank!
Have you had similar experiences relating to bonuses in your organisation? I’d love to hear what you think.
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Leadership, Motivation, Recruitment and Selection, Talent, reward and recognition | Tagged: CIPD, Chief Executive, bonuses, world class leadership | 
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Posted by Cary Cooper
November 17, 2009
I was down in London recently to give a Robertson Cooper-sponsored webinar on the strategies organisations can use to reduce stress and increase workforce well-being. I picked up one of London’s remaining free newspapers and was struck by a curious, and timely, story on page eight….
The headline read: “I can’t trade now, my bracelet’s red”. Reading on, I was amazed to read that a leading electronic goods manufacturer (Philips) and traders at the global banking corporation ABN Amro have together come up with a ‘gizmo’ called the ‘Rationalizer’. The biofeedback system works by wearing an ‘EmoBracelet’ on the wrist which measures your pulse and sweat levels and sends messages to the ‘EmoBowl’, an electronic, pulsating ‘bowl’ sitting on your desk. When pulse and sweat levels reach a certain point, the EmoBowl turns red, indicating that stress is being experienced and that the trader would be wise to turn off his/her computer and stop trading. The thinking is that if the trader continues to trade, the decisions he/she makes might not be as rational as they could be.
At the moment, this is just a prototype and whether it is actually ever mass-produced and used across the Financial Services Sector remains to be seen. However, I do have reservations about the thinking behind such a device. As if using the word ‘emo’ in the title wasn’t bad enough, the idea that frazzled traders will actually heed the advice and stop trading because a machine tells them they’re stressed sounds slightly ludicrous to me. If The Bank of England can’t stop them, the regulator can’t stop them and Gordon Brown can’t stop them – can this gizmo? Does anyone else see a fundamental flaw in this idea?
On the other hand, I think there is definitely a place for biofeedback systems and the Rationalizer is not the first of its kind. The research into the physical responses to stress is well established and certainly these systems can help people to learn to recognise their own signs and control their reactions. But this device appears to muddle the thinking around the whole issue of pressure, stress, decision-making and motivation. I really can’t see traders closing down their computers when they’re notified that they’re ‘stressed’. The perception of stress results when we perceive that the pressures we are under are too much to handle. Stress is not just about our physiological reaction or the intellectual understanding we get when we’re told we’re stressed. Traders, by their very nature, are driven by the particular pressures and rewards of their jobs….especially the rewards. Often, they are willing to operate under the stresses and strains because they think that the risks are worth it. If we want to change traders’ behaviour when it comes to ‘risky trading’, it will take total paradigm shift and not an ‘EmoBracelet’.
(For the uninitiated, a webinar is a virtual seminar! It was recorded and you can ‘attend’ by visiting the following site: http://www.wtgwebinar.com/w_detail.asp?webid=63.)
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Stress, Well-being | Tagged: Financial Services Sector, Robertson Cooper, Stress, stressed, Well-being | 
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Posted by Cary Cooper
November 9, 2009
The 5th November was our annual National Stress Awareness Day, but this year the date will be remembered for the far-reaching and innovative NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) Guidelines on Mental Well-Being in the Workplace. Whilst NICE has in the past developed guidelines for alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking and the like as part of their public health remit, this is the first time it has focussed on how work can damage your health, particularly your mental health.
Their research estimated the cost of mental health issues to the UK economy at nearly 14 million days lost due to stress, absenteeism, presenteeism – all at a cost of around £28.3 billion. This equates to a cost of £1000 per employee for each individual employer! Prior to the recession we were the fourth leading economy in the world (the recession has meant a drop from that position) and even then we had fairly low per capita productivity levels. I believe this reflects the fact businesses have not been tackling the underlying sources of stress and depleted mental well-being.
The NICE Guidelines highlight the potentially negative effect of poor management, lack of autonomy experienced by many at work, long hours cultures and inflexible working arrangements – among a number of other issues. They calculated that if employers did regular health and well-being audits, trained and developed their managers more effectively and allowed more flexible working arrangements an average employer, of say 1000 employees, would save £250,000 a year as a minimum.
These are evidence-based guidelines, not some ‘touchy feely’ advice from ultra-liberal academics. We are entering an era when there will be fewer people at work, doing more and in circumstances of intrinsic job insecurity – it may well be time to fully embrace and ACTION the often heard HR mantra “the most valuable resource we have is our human resource”.
2 Comments | Leadership, Management, Stress, Well-being | Tagged: Absenteeism, Guidelines on Mental Well-Being in the Workplace, HR, National Institute for Clinical Excellence, National Stress Awareness Day, NICE, presenteeism, Public Health, Stress, Well-being, well-being audits | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
October 26, 2009
You would be hard pressed to find someone in the UK at the moment that is not aware of the national postal strikes; such is the widespread coverage in the press and the speed with which the story has moved. I recently read a short piece on how to survive the postal strike. It referred to the author’s experience of the last round of national postal strikes in 2007 and offered some practical tips.
The first tip was ‘don’t post the day before a strike’ – in one sense this may seem obvious, but there are good reasons for emphasising this advice. It seems that when these backlogs are processed, the top of the pile is dealt with first, so clearly that’s where you want your post to be. Post a day or two after the strike and it seems your mail will have a much better chance of getting through reasonably quickly.
Whether this tip proves to be true or not, it is a good example of how we all tend to manage our time – how we often put ourselves under unnecessary pressure by not managing it actively. For example, we have all been in the situation where we are working on something and someone interrupts us, or an email pops up. I dare say, in the main, the new piece of information does not need to be dealt with more urgently than what you are currently working on, but the temptation is often to respond immediately. If we continually adopt this approach, people will start to expect this from us, and our ‘to do’ list will start to grow and with it the pressure we put ourselves under.
At some point we have to take control of our time and create some rules for how we manage information – thinking about both ourselves and our customers and remembering that last in is not always first dealt with! The satisfaction you gain from getting long-standing (and probably more challenging) items off your ‘to do list’ can be the positive reinforcement you need to keep going.
Leave a Comment » | Management, pressure | Tagged: Postal Strikes, pressure | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
October 21, 2009
Recently, I was saddened to read of the 25th France Telecom worker to commit suicide in the past 18 months. The full circumstances behind such tragic events are undoubtedly complex, but some of the suicide victims left notes blaming working conditions, citing “overwork”, “stress” and “management by terror” as key reasons for their actions.
France Telecom was privatised in 1998, around the time of significant changes in the telecommunications industry, and the company continues to modernise in order to stay competitive in an increasingly global market. One reason why France Telecom may be having more trouble than most companies in cutting costs in response to the economic climate is that 65% of the 100,000 employees have civil-servant contracts, signed when the company was state-owned, and therefore have jobs for life. Unions say that there is pressure on many employees either to leave or to accept new working conditions and the stress of learning a new trade, often in a new city, has proved difficult for some workers to cope with. In the press, there are examples of engineers, traditionally employed to repair phone lines, being reassigned to work in call centres. Understandably, some are struggling with this change. There are parallels here in the UK, at a time when postal strikes over pay and modernisation are becoming increasingly common in an organisation that is struggling to compete in an open market.
As for the reaction from France Telecom, many press commentators were appalled at the company’s apparent apathetic response to the prevalence of suicide amongst its employees. A spokesperson from France Telecom is reported as saying that there is no real cause for concern because the company is ‘in-line’ with the national average for suicide rates (for France, in 2007, the number of suicides per 100,000 inhabitants was 16.3). If you need an example of the misuse of statistics, then this is surely one! To hide behind such grim statistics of a high “national average” is, to say the least, highly dubious. We should instead be asking whether the high suicide rate is because France Telecom did not implement sufficient preventative measures effectively in their organisations – and whether this is prevalent in other French organisations.
France Telecom remains a quarter owned by the French state. I am pleased to read that unions have called for a parliamentary debate on the suicides, and France Telecom does now appear to be responding to the situation. Reports say that employee transfers have been stopped; more physicians specialising in occupational medicine are being hired, as are more human relations staff; there will be help stations for employees in need of psychological assistance; there will also be an anonymous advice helpline for distressed employees; and managers will receive training in a bid to help them deal with employee depression when it occurs. This is a good start and hopefully their chosen approach will be successful. But looking ahead it’s crucial that they don’t settle for matching national averages in this area – they need to make a point of striving for better than the typical – in all related metrics, but especially in terms of suicide rates.
Leave a Comment » | Stress, pressure | Tagged: France Telecom, pressure, Stress, suicide rate | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
October 19, 2009
I was reading recently about the difficulties schools have been having in terms of recruiting Head Teachers for vacant posts. The problem has arisen mostly as a result of a ‘demographic bulge’ which has meant a generation of Heads reached retirement age at the same time, while teachers on the level below are unwilling or unable to fill the gap. There are a number of factors that have further complicated things, including the increasingly heavy workload for Heads, senior staff retiring / leaving teaching before they take headship and a lack of leadership training which means that teachers often do not feel adequately prepared to step up.
Several suggestions have been made to overcome the problem, including introducing managers and directors that are not from teaching backgrounds. More recently, it has been suggested that leadership of schools be federated to save costs, although this is not an idea that was warmly received by the Association of School and College Leaders, who felt that reducing and spreading leadership teams across several sites cannot deliver an adequate level of leadership within schools. While this problem remains unresolved the spectre of a range of negative consequences looms over pupils and more junior teachers alike.
Whether any of these suggestions are implemented remains to be seen, but I can’t help but wonder is if this ‘succession gap’ situation will also be seen in other industries. The recession has caused a recruitment freeze in many large organisations as they bid to reduce costs, while the potential fate a ‘lost generation’ of young people who are struggling to find employment has been well-documented in the media. This is obviously causing immediate difficulty for our young unemployed, but there could be bigger problems in store further down the line as current managers retire and nobody is suitably positioned to follow behind.
A related risk that may compound the problem is that management and leadership development programmes are often the first things to be cut in a financial crisis. This means that not only will the numbers be lacking, but those who are available may not be ready to step up. Organisations may believe they are saving money now – the public sector to claw back government deficits and the private sector focusing on profits for shareholders, but these strategies may not prove cost effective in the long run. When the economy improves and things starts to move quickly again some organisations may struggle to keep up, as their leaders and managers lack the training and experience to make the right decisions – in effect, they will find that a level of management is ‘missing’.
So while the current problem of head teachers is debated, I think it is important for other sectors to continue to prepare and invest in their staff – especially now that the end of the current troubles may be visible on the horizon.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7463433.stm
Leave a Comment » | Leadership, Management, Public Sector | Tagged: Association of School and College, Head Teachers, leadership training, management and leadership development programmes, recession | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
October 16, 2009
Lately I’ve been worrying that we really are storing up a problem for the future unless we find a way of helping children to take more regular exercise. Just this week the British Heart Foundation reported that only one in eight young people is getting the recommended 60 minutes of physical activity a day. This is based on a survey they did in July and August, involving over 1,000 8-15 year olds. This is a new problem – anyone who has tried to keep a toddler still for more than 30 seconds knows that a young child is a study in perpetual motion! Children have been naturally active throughout the millennia, so what is the current lifestyle in the developed world doing to change this and how we can move things back to the way they have always been?
I’m particularly concerned about this from the perspective of the latest research on physical exercise and psychological well-being. The connection between the two has now been shown to be so strong that some people are calling exercise “the magic bullet” for treating stress and improving how we feel about ourselves and our world.
Exercise is one of the most sure-fire ways of lifting your mood – for a number of reasons. Some of these relate to feeling better about ourselves and making new social contacts. Then there is the automatic release of feel-good chemicals in the brain triggered by physical exercise and the effect that has on psychological well-being. When a threatening situation increases the amount of adrenalin in our body, physical exercise helps us to use this up so that it doesn’t turn into stress. What’s more, people who take regular exercise report lower depression scores than those who don’t .
So it’s vitally important that we think about the long-term implications of lack of exercise for the mental well-being of future generations. Mental well-being is high on the agenda these days: Foresight (which I’ve featured here before), BIS’s engagement report, Dame Carol Black and the Boorman review have raise the public’s awareness in general. Of these, Foresight was the one that really focused on childhood and the needs of children in this respect and we must not lose sight of its recommendations: http://www.foresight.gov.uk/OurWork/ActiveProjects/Mental%20Capital/Welcome.asp
And to finish, here are a couple of fun ideas – and the kind of thing I think we need to see more of. One of my colleagues was in Singapore recently. The government there is trying hard to encourage everyone to take more exercise, but there isn’t a lot of outdoor space in Singapore. So they’ve built amazing curving wooden walkways across the city from one park to another, and families are using the walkways to exercise and socialise at the same time. Also while in Singapore my colleague spotted thousands of people gathering outside her hotel in preparation for a marathon. She wondered what route they would be taking, but all was revealed when she was told it was a vertical marathon – they ran up the stairs of her hotel, all 73 stories of South East Asia’s tallest hotel! We need to think outside the box and make exercise for the young the norm again.
2 Comments | Stress, Well-being | Tagged: British Heart Foundation, Exercise, Foresight, psychological well-being, Stress | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
