The Postal Strike – Last in is not always first out.

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.

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Posted by Cary Cooper

Finding meaning in community

October 23, 2009

Gordon Brown has recently spoken about the importance of tackling antisocial behaviour in Britain.  Beyond the impact on the Prime Minister’s own political career, this is something which I think is a very important issue in its own right.  There have been a few stories in the news about this subject recently, but one that comes to mind is a scheme developed by Kent Police that involved implementing new neighbourhood task teams.  These teams work specifically on quickly tackling issues and instances of anti-social behaviour (vandalism, noise, theft etc) that are flagged up by the community.  The results show that this innovative intervention by Kent police has led to a fall in criminal offences of almost 20% – an impressive result.

This kind of community-based approach reminded me of, the perhaps old-fashioned sounding, concept of ‘civic virtues’ – the coming together of characteristics like responsibility, tolerance and altruism that promote group and social harmony.  These civic virtues or ‘citizenship behaviours’ are out there in most societies, but sometimes get overshadowed by more negative examples of antisocial behaviour and civil unrest.  In the past, broadly speaking, communities have helped people find meaning in their lives.  Being part of something larger than themselves provided positivity and support for many and this may now be something we miss in a society where it is common for people to know nothing of those who they live alongside – let alone share values with them.  Dennis Charney, an American psychologist, refers to one’s personal moral compass – what are your unbreakable beliefs and values that nothing can shatter?  The idea is that people who have something to hang on to and fall back upon in times of difficulty are more resilient than those who do not.

So do we have the basis of a win-win situation here?  Could being part of a community help to reduce crime while also improving the way we and our neighbours feel?  I think the Kent Police example raises something worth exploring much further.  Many researchers are busy looking at these very things in terms of the impact that citizenship, community and resilience can have on organisations and their staff. A resilient individual with a strong personal moral compass adapts better to change, copes more effectively with adversity and persists when things go wrong.  On top of this, organisations that promote civic virtues are much more likely to be enjoyable, productive places to work – leading to higher retention and lower sickness absence.  So maybe it’s time to lift our heads, to connect with the people and the wider community around us – both at home and at work – the results might be surprising!

To read more about Kent Police’s scheme go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/21/kent-police-crime-neighbourhood-teams

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Posted by Cary Cooper

Strive for better

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.

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Posted by Cary Cooper

Times are tough, but don’t forget development

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

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Posted by Cary Cooper

Bring back exercise for future generations

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.

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Posted by Cary Cooper

Join me – Free Webinar on Strategies to Reduce Stress and Increase Workforce Well-Being

October 14, 2009

Hi All

I’d  like to personally invite you all to participate in a free online Webinar I’ve been asked to present this week on Strategies to Reduce Stress and Increase Workforce Well-Being.  The Webinar is on tomorrow (Thursday 15th October) and you can take part from the comfort of your desks.

I’ll be covering the following in my Webinar;

  • What is stress? Stress vs. Business pressure: what are the differences?
  • What are the main ingredients and causes of organisational stress?
  • Primary, secondary and tertiary strategies to deal with organisational stress

Agenda: 

  • 15:15 – 15:20: Welcome and introduction to session
  • 15:20 – 16:00: Main Presentation
  • 16:00 – 16:15: Live Q&A session

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

I hope you can make it, see you there.  Cary

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Posted by Cary Cooper

It’s not just adults who need to be resilient!

October 12, 2009

We are in the grips of a recession.  An obvious statement, I know.  How can we forget?  We are reminded almost daily of it in the news.  The unemployment rate is at its highest for 14 years and some reports say it is set to rise.  But it’s the young people I’d like to focus on right now.  The young people who hope to enter into the job market in the coming years with their ambitions high and with dreams full of hope and optimism. 

All main political parties are now admitting that public spending cuts are inevitable.  With variations in emphasis between the parties, these spending cuts are likely to be across the board – including fewer university places and higher university fees.  So not only will it be more difficult to get into the job market for the recent graduates, it is likely to get even more difficult to get into university in the first place.  With fees increasing, higher education may even become out-of-reach for lower and middle-income families altogether.  If these pressures on young people weren’t enough, Britain’s secondary school children are some of the most ‘examined’ in the world. 

As my colleague, Ivan Robertson mentioned in a recent ‘guest blog’ there’s a lot that individuals and organisations can do to build resilience (in the psychological sense). Organisations who invest in the well-being and resilience of their employees are not only more successful but they should be applauded.  (I would say that, wouldn’t I?!  But as I often say, the research-base is there!)  But I wonder if there’s more that could be done to support our young people who face unique challenges at this point in our history and now need to be increasingly resilient, creative, flexible and open to alternative career paths.  

One approach I often advise businesses to consider comes from Charney’s Resilience Prescription (2007) and it can be applied as easily to students in school and young adults in university as it can to adults. It outlines the key building blocks of personal resilience:

1. Find a resilient role model, in a mentor or heroic figure. 
2. Develop a personal moral compass or firm set of beliefs.  This is not only about religion, but creating a clear set of goals that you believe in wholeheartedly.
3. Recognise and develop your ‘signature strengths’.  What are you / do you want to be known and recognised for?
4. Be optimistic. Optimism is strongly related to resilience, and, to some degree, it can be learned!
5. Develop ‘cognitive flexibility’ or the ability to think about events in a more helpful, resilient way.
6. Develop and train regularly in multiple areas.
7. Look after your physical condition – exercise and healthy eating are not only linked to positive physical well-being, but mental, too.
8. Develop active coping skills – these skills include making active use of social support networks

Reading through these, I am struck by how easily some of these things could be addressed in the school setting; giving children life-long coping skills to deal with life’s ongoing and increasing challenges and adversities.  Of course, some of these skills will already be fostered by good teachers, maybe without even knowing it.  Should more focus be put on this at the curriculum-level?  What are your thoughts?

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Posted by Cary Cooper

Guest Blog Spot – Was Gordon snubbed by Barack?

October 9, 2009

I’d like to welcome back a familiar face – Professor Ivan Robertson who’s kindly agreed to share his thoughts with us again.  Also over the next few months I’m going to be asking a few new faces to be joining me on my blog so watch this space!

Was Gordon snubbed by Barack?

Professor Ivan Robertson

Professor Ivan Robertson

The fact that Gordon Brown and Barack Obama didn’t have a face-to-face meeting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh hit the news headlines recently.  Instead, they apparently chatted as the made their way through a kitchen.  I heard a radio journalist commenting on this non-event and he made the point that at events like this journalists are always looking for the “snub” story – and, of course, because it’s impossible for the President of the USA to meet everyone there is always a story – and someone can always be made to look / feel snubbed.

This set me thinking about the kinds of thinking traps that people typically fall into.  There is a long list that we use in the resilience training programmes that my company Robertson Cooper regularly run: things like “mind reading” (you assume you know what other people are thinking, without checking) and “mental filter” (you pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively, so that your vision of reality becomes darkened).

Lots of people fall into these thinking traps on a day-to-day basis – if you have access to cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) they might be tackled – but for most of us, without special training, they can have a pretty damaging impact.  How much better would life feel if we were all aware of these traps and were equipped to avoid them?

Actually, Barack Obama did arrange for a one-to-one meeting with Gordon Brown, but it was done hastily and probably only because of the media interest in the original “snubbing” or to aid Labour’s election campaign back home…. or am I just mind reading and applying mental filters now?

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Posted by Cary Cooper

The anatomy of trust in the workplace

October 5, 2009

Recently I came across a research report published by the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM)– the Index of Leadership Trust 2009. This survey of 5,600 workers examined the level of trust people have in their managers and leaders across public and private sector organisations.  The research sought to measure the trustworthiness of leaders on six dimensions: their ability to do the job; demonstrating understanding; fairness; openness; integrity and consistency.

It was found that one in three workers have little or no trust in their senior managers and this was particularly true in the public sector.  In relation to CEOs, the main driver of trust was identified as ‘demonstrating the ability to do the job’ – probably because this inspires confidence in their workforce that they’re competent and capable of leading the organisation, driving it forward in line with their strategy and objectives.  Demonstrating personal integrity was the second strongest driver of employee trust in CEOs.  The importance of having a leader who acts honestly in line with a set of strong moral values was emphasised.  There’s a huge research base here – but it’s well worth reminding our leaders of this fact!

High turnover of leaders is common – at CEO level, but also in relation to line managers.  The effect this can have on trust was shown in the ILM study, but it will also have a broader impact on the well-being, motivation and engagement of the workforce.  We hear a lot these days about line managers coming in for the short term, making their mark by implementing changes and then moving on – not sticking around to follow through or pick up the pieces after things don’t work out.  The effect on the workforce is undeniable – unpredictability and change that is perceived as unnecessary never make for high levels of employee engagement and well-being.  Obviously, not all short-term managers behave in this manner, but it illustrates an important point.  As this report concluded – it’s important for leaders and managers to show that they’re in it for the long haul – that they’re doing things for the good of the organisation – and not just using the role as a stepping stone in their career.

We all want to trust and to feel trusted when we go to work. It’s a rich area for those who manage within organisations, HR professionals and business psychologists alike.  I’ve just touched on some of the findings here – if you found this interesting, do take a look at their research!

http://www.i-l-m.com/research-and-comment/6620.aspx

1 Comment | Engagement, Leadership, Management, Motivation, Well-being | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper

Do you know if you’re a positive thinker?

October 1, 2009

Years after the initial impact that Martin Seligman’s work had on positive psychology it continues to be relevant today; increasingly so in this challenging financial climate where uncertainty is the norm, and ‘more is required from less’.  In short, staying positive has never been so important.

Most of us are aware that having a positive attitude confers certain benefits – living longer, being more resilient, and having better relationships, to name a few – and that over time we develop deep-rooted, often unhelpful, patterns of behaviour which can be difficult to change.  However, I don’t think most people spend much time considering how positive their attitude actually is and that determines the ways in which they deal with everyday events.

For example, if you’re a largely optimistic person when bad things happen – you’re late for a meeting – you might chalk it up to terrible traffic or another external circumstance.  On the other hand, your more pessimistic friend might blame him/herself, seeing parallels with similar situations he/she has been in that have ended badly.  Conversely, when good things happen to your pessimistic friend – their presentation goes really well – he/she may well attribute it to luck or a receptive audience, whereas you might attribute your success to the fact were really well prepared and motivated to do a great job.

Some of this is determined by your personality, but in simple terms it pays to be an optimist and to develop good habits in terms of how you attribute success and failure.  Techniques born out of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can be a very useful aid to developing these habits – they help people to identify and challenge negative automatic thoughts and replace them with alternative, realistic and positive ways of thinking.  Whilst these techniques require a fair investment of time and effort, there are some great resources available, and I challenge you to look at your own thinking habits and how you can develop them.  These are skills that often pay dividends when times are tough.

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Posted by Cary Cooper

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