November 30, 2009
Andy Murray went crashing out of the ATP World Finals at the O2 in London last week after Roger Federer suffered a surprise defeat at the hands of Juan Martin Del Potro. Nothing unusual you might think, but Murray sitting at home was tweeting the word ‘help’ because he didn’t know whether he was in or out. The tennis equivalent of goal difference was required to separate him and Del Potro to determine who should go through to the semi-finals, but the officials were struggling with the maths…..and for too long confusion reigned. Not good for the competitors, the crowd, the TV audience – and least of all the tennis tournament.
The media has been reporting that the reason for the incident was a lack of confidence on the part of the officials – that they were afraid to make a mistake with the result. This is an area that affects many people in the world of work. The paradox is that getting things right and not making mistakes is critical in so many walks of life, but when this goes too far and employees are not allowed to get anything wrong a culture of fear takes hold. The net effect is that more and more members of the workforce become risk averse in order to avoid making a mistake, so creativity is driven down and thinking becomes narrowed.
In a world where entrepreneurism is now almost universally applauded (even in the public sector), a fear of making mistakes and taking risks jars with the behaviours that most employers are looking for. In fact, research shows that most successful entrepreneurs have had at least one failed business before they succeed – so in this sense failure seems like a qualification for success. But it’s a complex area because when major incidents or crises happen everyone gets a shock. Things like the Baby Peter case in the social work arena and the credit crunch in the banking world have had a major impact on employees’ willingness to take risks. Sometimes where stupid risks were taken this can be healthy, but equally it can have a residual effect that changes and narrows employee behaviour in a negative way for years to come.
We may never know whether the tennis officials last night were frozen with fear at the thought of making a mistake or whether collectively they just didn’t have the mathematical ability to solve the problem. However, what is clear is that managers need to work hard to give their employees permission to take chances to achieve great results – to support them so that they know that if a mistake is made it will be handled in a way that means no one will be irreparably damaged. The alternative is legions of employees in thousands of organisations paralysed by fear and indecision – not to mention millions of disappointed tennis fans!
As the old 19th century proverb goes, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Leave a Comment » | 
Management, pressure | Tagged: Andy Murray, ATP World Finals, credit crunch, entrepreneurism, Juan Martin Del Potro, Public Sector, workforce | 
Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
November 26, 2009
For many different reasons there is a lot of interest in the retirement age – it affects both the way people feel about their lives and it affects the economy. There are at least two different meanings that are attached to the term “retirement age”. One refers to the age at which people can draw their state pension and another refers to the age at which employers are able to ‘require’ people to retire from work. A third meaning is about the age at which workers proactively choose to retire.
One reason for the current interest is the huge potential liability that is building up if the state has to cover a relatively early retirement age for a population that is living longer and longer. By some estimates, over 50% of children born now will live to be over 100 years old. At the current retirement age this will mean providing pensions to this group for over 35 years of retirement – a third of their lifetime! No economy could support this.
The government will be considering this issue right now and one question they will be asking will be ‘is retirement good for people or not?’ A few years ago I read about some research that examined this issue directly. The study looked at which groups were most psychologically healthy – people who had retired early; those who retired at the normal age; or those who were working after retirement age. The results showed that the healthiest groups were those who had retired early and those who were working after retirement age. These were strange results in a way – suggesting that both retiring early and carrying on working are better than retiring at the normal age! In fact, a closer look at the findings clears things up because people who retired early were only healthier if they had chosen to retire; similarly people working after retirement were only happier if they had no financial need to carry on working. It seems like control is an important factor when it comes to retirement.
Obviously the retirement age needs to increase from an economic perspective and there are no simple solutions, but according to these findings pushing older people out of the workforce before they are ready to go is not the answer. Allowing people to have the option to continue working after retirement age is desirable – this will allow people to improve their financial position and provides a sense of purpose. If they are financially sound they are more likely to be happy to carry on working and will require less in terms of support from the state. At the end of the day, this is a social and psychological issue as well as an economic one.
You can find the research in the British Journal of Psychology (2004), 95, 297–324
Leave a Comment » | Well-being, economy | Tagged: economy, pension, retirement age | Permalink
Posted by Cary Cooper
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.
Leave a Comment » | Guest Blog Spots, Personal Resilience, Stress, Well-being, pressure | Tagged: Bebo, Facebook, Jill Flint Talyor, MySpace, resilience, Robertson Cooper, social networking, social relationships, stressed, under pressure, Well-being | Permalink
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.
Leave a Comment » | Leadership, Motivation, Recruitment and Selection, Talent, reward and recognition | Tagged: bonuses, Chief Executive, CIPD, world class leadership | Permalink
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.)
2 Comments | Stress, Well-being | Tagged: Financial Services Sector, Robertson Cooper, Stress, stressed, Well-being | Permalink
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
