March 31, 2008
Last week British Airways asked their staff to work through the night and past the end of their shifts in order to sort out the chaos caused by the various system failures that plagued the opening day of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. In crisis situations like this one, and more serious examples like 9/11 in the States and 7/7 here, we often see staff really stepping up to the mark and giving freely of their energy to help their organisation and its customers out. In this case, BA staff had to take abuse from customers and morale was reported to be dropping like a stone at the end of last week. But even in this context, many of them volunteered to work at the weekend to clear the backlogs of passenger luggage – that’s dedication!
But when the dust settles and the problem is solved, how do you say ‘thank you’ to your workforce for going well beyond the call of duty? I wonder what BA will do this week for the army of ground staff and call centre workers who gradually dug them out of their nightmare opening day scenario?
Of course, one option is simply to pay them a bonus. However, I suspect that it’s actually more of blended approach that’s required to get to a point where staff think that the effort they put in this time was worth it and, more importantly, where they would do the same thing next time.
Firstly, workers want to hear the top people in the company, including the CEO Willy Walsh, say thank you. And not just internally – publicly and explicitly in the media. One thing is for sure, he will get plenty of opportunity in the next few weeks. Secondly, they want their line manager to say thank you to them directly and in fact, BA should now be specifically directing their line managers to do this in the coming days.
Next, I think that the staff should expect to see some token of the company’s appreciation for their extra efforts. This could be a bonus payment, but there are other options as well: For example, what about offering them an extra day’s leave to be taken any time in the next 6 months so that it doesn’t bring operations to a halt. Yes, this would incur a cost to BA, but in the long run would that cost be greater or lesser than the cost of doing nothing?
And I think this is my point – it’s so easy for leaders and managers in these situations to focus on what’s just happened and think “Phew! We’re out of the woods now – let’s get back to business”. But this fails to acknowledge the contribution of huge numbers of dedicated people who have gone out of their way to solve an embarrassing problem which was mostly caused by poor management decisions in the first place.
The right mindset is more like “Our people were amazing this week and there will be a situation where we need them to be amazing again in the future – How do we make sure they’re willing to do this for us when the time comes?”
Do you have any views? Have you found interesting ways of thanking staff for extraordinary contributions? Please leave a comment.
No Comments » | 
Leadership, Management, Well-being, reward and recognition | Tagged: leaders, managers, reward, Staff morale | 
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Posted by Cary Cooper
March 28, 2008
Since my last post about the extent to which social networking and blogging are used in the HR community, I have been thinking more about this topic. I have scanned quite a few of the better known HR-related blogs and noticed one overwhelming trend that seems to apply to all of them: Blog readers hardly ever post comments.
There are obviously exceptions to this rule and I have been lucky enough to elicit a few comments myself – so ‘commentors’ you can ignore this post! But this got me thinking about readers’ motives for visiting blogs. The implication is that it’s very much an information gathering or learning exercise, rather than being driven by a desire to get involved in a debate with experts or with fellow blog readers. I’m very happy to be proved wrong (feel free to do this by immediately posting a comment!!!), but I’m sure that this is a fairly common pattern in the field of HR and beyond.
So it seems like there might be a somewhat vicarious army of HR blog readers out there – amassing interesting information in silence. Maybe once your voice is heard you move from being ‘blog reader’ to ‘blogger’ the experience is changed forever??
But from my own experience, I can only encourage you to take the plunge and become a fully fledged blogger. Sharing your views and reacting to other people’s opinions in a free flowing way can be genuinely rewarding and can lead to understanding and realisations that wouldn’t be possible if you were reading a book or newspaper.
End of diary………for now.
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: HR | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
March 25, 2008
I’m still just a novice blogger as I’ve only been doing this for a couple of months, but I have to say that it’s been a really interesting experience. I’ve been writing books and articles and commenting in the media for years, but self-publishing has given me a completely new perspective on things.
It’s also left me wondering about the extent to which HR professionals are using social media and web 2.0. This is your cue to write a comment and tell me the answer to this conundrum…..
But seriously, who in the HR community is getting value from reading, writing and contributing to blogs? Based on my own recent experience I have no doubt that there is a great deal of value to be gained from this medium, but I wonder if we did a survey of HR Directors how many would have ever read a blog, let alone written one? Maybe I’d be surprised; maybe someone should run the survey?
Or is it just the younger members of the HR profession who have grown up with the internet who see social networking as a legitimate and valuable tool for delivering their work objectives and developing as individuals? I certainly think they are the easiest group to convert, but do they feel empowered to use the technology during working hours?
If my hunch that social networking only touches a fraction of HR professionals is correct, what are the barriers? Is it time? Is there a skill gap? Somehow I doubt it, but I do suspect that there is a mindset out there that says it’s not real work unless you’re writing a report or a policy. Or maybe it’s really all about marketing and HR blogs are not marketed effectively enough to be widely used? At the end of the day, we would all click on a link if we thought it would deliver information that was valuable to us.
As you can see, there are more questions than answers, but one thing I am sure about is that the more senior HR staff we can get modelling this behaviour, the sooner it will start to become a legitimate use of time and a real source of value for businesses.
1 Comment | Productivity, Uncategorized | Tagged: HR | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
March 20, 2008
Recently it was announced that doctors would be encouraged to issue ‘well notes’ instead of ‘sick notes’, to get people back to work even if they are only doing part or some aspect of their normal job.
The underlying principle is that the longer people are disengaged from work while on a sick note, the more difficult it is to re-integrate them back into the workplace. This might be a reasonable strategy for muscular skeletal disorders, where the doctor might have the expertise to determine what the patient is or is not ‘able to do’ in the workplace. However it is more problematic for stress-related or mental ill health sources of absence.
In terms of incapacity benefit the single biggest source (representing something like 40% of the total) is for mental ill health or stress at work. In this context, many doctors are incapable of determining what activities their patients are able or unable to perform. Also, most GPs will not know the work environment of their patients, or what their problems at work might be (i.e. an autocratic boss, a long hour’s culture, a mismatch between the needs of the individual and those of the specific job, etc).
For example, what if someone at work has been bullied over a period of time by their boss, and then goes off ill? The GP might feel this person could go back to work and is capable of doing X and Y, but being confronted by this bullying again might mean that they get worse and may end up off for a longer period of time after the initial re-entry period. The important point is that GPs have certain expertise but they may not necessarily understand the particular working environment of their patients and what the stimulus for the patients problem might be in the first place.
By the way, this may even apply to patients with backache problems as well, since some muscular skeletal problems are sometimes a presenting symptom for relationship or career-related problems at work, particularly when the doctor cannot find an organic cause.
No Comments » | Absenteeism, Engagement, Stress | Tagged: absence, mental illness, sick note, Stress, well note | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
March 17, 2008
I was recently interviewed by Anna Farmery for the Engaging Brand Pod-cast and before we spoke I had a look at her excellent blog. The first thing to say is that I highly recommend it - it was really interesting to see a marketing angle on the things I talk about so often as a organisational psychologist.
One of Anna’s recent posts (22/02/0 
was about over-confidence and how it can be damaging to think that you can control everything. This is an interesting area and you see this happening in all sorts of contexts in our ‘me’ society, including the entertainment industry, professional football and in the business arena. When people are constantly being told that they are brilliant and their results bear this out they can lose touch with reality and start to narrow their range of behaviours to those that have brought them success.
In business you often see successful people who over-use their strengths. A good example of this is a person whose confident behaviour has got them to a senior position, who makes the assumption that majoring on that confidence is always the right thing to do. In this sense, the person over-relies on a personal attribute or set of behaviours that is not always the most appropriate to draw on….and it won’t be long before what used to be a strength starts to look like an area for personal development.
The best leaders are aware of their natural style and the impact it has on those around them. They know when it works and when it’s best to try something different. There will still be plenty of occasions on which their natural style can flourish, but it’s supported by a broader and more adaptive set of leadership behaviours.
You can find out more about an approach that draws on these ideas called Leadership Impact on my University spin-off company’s website:
http://www.robertsoncooper.com/pages/todays-challenges/Leaders-Define-Organisations.aspx
http://www.robertsoncooper.com/Pages/Products/Leadership-Impact/Leadership-Impact.aspx
No Comments » | Leadership | Tagged: leaders, Over-confidence, personal development | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
March 14, 2008
Last week I appeared on the BBC’s Money Programme – which was entitled “Email is ruining my life!” Is email ruining your life? Or is that a difficult question because in some respects it makes things so much easier, but in others it makes things more stressful?
The stimulus for the show was startling new facts about the level of email usage in the UK and also the effects it is now having on both businesses and workers. For example, it is estimated that more than two million e-mails are sent every single minute in the UK – that’s almost three billion emails per day! When you think about the number of emailers across the world the total is almost inconceivable. This was certainly not a situation that the inventor of email, Ray Tomlinson, envisaged when he sent the first electronic message between two computers in 1971!!
Yes, there are upsides to email, but there are also costs – both in terms of productivity and stress. The BBC reported that one FTSE firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year and another recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress.
When I was asked to comment as part of the BBC programme, the point I made was that e-mail can be a major source of employee anxiety and that we need to give employees support to help them use it in a balanced, effective way.
It isn’t just the number of e-mails that fly around, but also the fact that they are often badly written and misused that causes the problems. Emails can be a very lazy form of communication that provides us with a potential ‘get-out’ to avoid those awkward one-to-one conversations. The fact is that some conversations just have to be face-to-face and some things simply can’t be conveyed via the relatively sterile medium of email.
Imagine the difference between how a request to work at the weekend on a key project would be received if it was transmitted by email compared with a personal approach. In the case of the latter the manager gets the opportunity to show appreciation and how important it is to the firm through all manner of social cues. With email, it’s an impersonal request relayed by a machine. Result – the manager abdicates responsibility and employee feels put upon, stressed out and de-motivated.
Work culture is now 24/7 - mobile phones, Blackberry’s and e-mail all mean that many of us are ‘on call’ all the time. But we have to make good personal decisions about how we use these tools. At the same time, employers can help by being clear about their expectations and not taking advantage of the unprecedented level of connectivity that is now possible.
Click here for the link to the full article on the BBC – including tips for managing email more effectively. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7281707.stm
2 Comments | Productivity, Stress, Well-being | Tagged: de-motivation, Productivity, Stress | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
March 10, 2008
Just a short post today…but with a big download. After I posted my last blog entry, I mentioned it to my colleague Professor Ivan Robertson. He told me that in his capacity as Managing Director at Robertson Cooper Limited he wrote a paper at the end of 2007 on a similar subject - namely, how to impact the bottom-line by improving staff engagement and well-being.
So, the purpose of this post is to share the paper with you. The paper is called ‘Improving organisational outcomes by making people feel good’ and you can download it here. white-paper-final.doc
For more information about Ivan’s work at Robertson Cooper go to www.robertsoncooper.com
1 Comment | Absenteeism, Engagement, Leadership, Management, Personal Resilience, Productivity, Stress, Well-being | Tagged: improving well-being, Productivity, recognition, reward, Stress, Well-being, workforce sustainability | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
March 9, 2008
In my last post I talked about the blend of reward and recognition that really works for employees. Shortly afterwards I came across some survey results reported by Personnel Today which indicated the areas that HR Directors will be prioritising in the coming year. The study of 2,033 employers, by recruitment firm Manpower, found that increasing workforce productivity was the top HR priority for 2008, moving it up the agenda from fourth place in 2007.
I guess this isn’t that surprising given the uncertain nature of the economy and also the current climate where getting more results for less money has become a mantra - a way of working life even. But it worries me because it raises the question of how sustainable this approach is ever likely to be. Last week I was talking about the importance of making workplaces motivating and energising in relation to attracting and retaining the best staff. Another way of looking at this is that you can design sustainable success and competitive advantage into your business. But if you keep increasing the pressure in an effort to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of the workforce it won’t be long before the wheels come off.
Sometimes you have to take a step back to look for the right source of competitive advantage. By getting the balance of challenge and support right and creating a culture of well-being you can, in fact, still improve productivity. This might sound woolly or unrealistic or just a crazy way to come at the problem, but the research backs it up. Work by Harter, Schmidt and Hayes has shown that well-being and engagement are very definitely associated with improving productivity.
Data from nearly 8,000 separate business units in 36 companies were analysed and the results clearly showed that engagement/well-being was linked to business unit performance - predicting not just productivity but also customer satisfaction, profitability, employee turnover and sickness absence levels. Using a sample of business units this large offers conclusive evidence that if you provide a sense of well-being and engagement to staff the positive outcomes will follow.
Another survey reported by Personnel Today in the same article informs us that 75% of the136 HR directors recently surveyed by Northgate HR also reported that employee productivity was the top HR concern. But workforce morale and reward & recognition strategies were not very far behind. Based on the Harter et al research evidence it seems that employers could make significant progress on all of these fronts just by getting well-being right - but I wonder what proportion the HR Directors responding to these surveys have actually invested in business-wide well-being improvement programmes?
For anyone who wants to seek out the research, the reference is below:
Harter, Schmidt and Hayes, (2002). Business unit level outcomes between employee satisfaction, employee engagement and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 268-279.
1 Comment | Engagement, Productivity, Well-being, reward and recognition | Tagged: improving well-being, Productivity, recognition, reward, Stress, Well-being, workforce sustainability | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
