Why do so many of us feel that our job sucks? Why do we start a job full of optimism only to have our hopes and expectations shattered after only a few months.
As Judith explains, work can quickly become a depressing parallel dimension when aspirations are not met – aspirations that are bigger than the box a job forces you into. And with the human brain spending 75 per cent of its time in a dream state – thinking about the future and planning next steps - meeting aspirations is a critical if organizations ever hope to inspire creativity, innovation and engagement in their people.
What’s more, a sense of happiness and optimism works wonders for the body, mind and spirit. So understanding this – and understanding how to create environments where employees bring out the best in one another - is vital for the evolution of any business.
This week, Wayne talks to author, consultant and business executive, Larraine Segil, about inspiring innovation through alliances and partnerships – both internal and external.
Larraine is the cofounder of The Lared Group, an international management consulting firm specializing in business relationships. She also teaches executive education at The California Institute of Technology, (Caltech), where she has presented a two day program on ‘Global Alliances’ for the past 23 years.
With all the factors involved - productivity, decision making, team performance, the number of new customers, and damage control - getting a precise measurement can be a complex and daunting task. Knowing which measurement to use, and at what stage of the alliance life cycle, is critical.
If you are confused about “web 2.0″ and its impact on business, then this week’s Working Week will prove illuminating.
Wayne is joined by Richard Buck, CEO of Eluma, a technology company which leverages the best aspects of social networking in order to provide users with the ability to collaborate with their most trusted source of information - their peers.
As Richard explains, Web 2.0 is all about user contribution. Where Web 1.0 was all about pushing content out to an audience, Web 2.0 is all about that audience creating its own content and participating with others.
Why does it matter? Because tools that help people collaborate and share information will have huge commercial benefits. But at the same time, they challenge the way that organisations operate both internally and externally.
Women make up half the workforce in the developed world and more than half of those with tertiary education. They dominate consumer spending decisions. Yet at senior levels, you would be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed over the past fifty years. Women may hold the keys but men still control the locks.
Alison Maitland is a business writer and was a Financial Times journalist for 20 years. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, named as one of the top 40 women leading change in France, is a Paris-based management consultant who runs 20-First, a consultancy that helps organizations to become gender-bilingual. She also founded the European Professional Women’s Network more than a decade ago.
They join Wayne for this week’s Working Week to explain the compelling economic arguments for changing this state of affairs. As they tell Wayne, it isn’t a problem that just affects women. It’s a problem for the whole economy, particularly as organizations struggle to respond to the challenge of an ageing workforce and the demands of the next generation of knowledge workers.
Companies that really understand what motivates women in the workplace and the marketplace understand that men and women are not the same – and so they can’t be treated the same. Just as a company opening a satellite in a foreign country needs to learn its language and culture if it is to be successful, so organizations need to understand the different language, culture and attitudes of women.
Those employers who do optimize women’s talents will boost the bottom line – although taking action to achieve this will require sustained courage and conviction from today’s corporate leaders.
What is it about HR?. That’s the question Wayne ponders this week as he talk to Chris Seabourne, a former HR director who is now a partner with CTPartners, an international executive search firm.
One of the problems for HR departments, Chris says, is that it is so hard to measure the benefits of much of what HR does.
But business IS people – in fact the only difference between many organisations – their key competitive advantage – is the people they employ, which includes their CEO.
But while people ought to be kept at the top of a company’s agenda, the fact is that many of those who run large organisations simply aren’t turned on by “people issues”. Why? Because they usually got to the top thanks to their specialist business, technical or financial skills, not because of their people skills.
dChris’ advice to HR professionals is to ensure that they make the ‘process’ side of their role as efficient and lean as possible. Then they can address the more intangible aspects of HR such as managing performance and developing talent.
This week, Wayne talks to Deepika Bajaj, the founder and president of Invincibelle.com, about the changing role of women in the workplace.
Invincibelle is an organization that seeks to empower women to succeed in a multicultural world by creating a safe online community for women online and also organizing offline events.
Prior to founding Invincibelle, Deepika worked in Planning an Marketing positions in Fortune 500 companies. While she was there, she served on the boards of various professional organizations like NSHMBA (National society of Hispanic MBAs) and WIN (Women in Intel).
Deepika is currently working on her first book codenamed “Invincibelle Insights” that is based on blend of her experiences and more than 50 interviews of distinguished Invincibelle Guests - highly accomplished women who have succeeded in a multicultural world.
In this week’s podcast Wayne speaks to Jonathan Austin of Workplace Engagement Specialists, Best Companies, about how organisations can measure and improve their levels of workplace engagement.
To help companies do just that, Best Companies (who also compile the Sunday Times “Best Companies to Work For” list) launched its own accreditation scheme in 2006.
The accreditation acknowledges excellence in the workplace and focuses on workplace engagement as an integral component of an organisation`s success, growth, and the bottom line.
Wayne gets the low-down from Jonathan on what organisations need to be thinking about if they are series about how they retain and motivate their people
The Accreditation developed by Best Companies is based on a star rating system where one star is first class, two stars are outstanding, and three stars are extraordinary. Organisational successes have been defined using data from the 2008 Best Companies to Work For survey which involved surveying over 140,000 employees from 558 companies.
The Best Companies survey is designed to measure employee engagement and uses 66 questions to gain a comprehensive view of employee engagement across eight factors. Every company that goes for Best Companies Accreditation is given a Best Companies Index score (BCI). This score (on a scale of 1 to 1000) is defined from employees’ responses to the sixteen key questions within the Best Companies survey. ‘Star Status’ is determined by the ‘BCI’ score and the specific cut-off points for One, Two, and Three Star Accreditation remain constant year on year.
What does the year ahead hold for managers? That’s the question Wayne explores in the Working Week this week as he talks to Jo Causon from the UK-based Chartered Management Institute - the only chartered professional body in the country dedicated to management and leadership.
Amid economic uncertainty and with fear of rising business costs, inflation and household debt, Jo argues that managers need to be more empowering – encouraging everybody in the organization to contribute – which means being willing to open their minds and innovate.
This week, Wayne talks to roving Australian author, coach and educator, Bob Selden, about employee engagement and why smart employers realise that loyalty is a two-way street.
As we all become increasingly concerned about the disengagement gap, Bob argues that many organisations are suffering from a widely-held fallacy that paying people more salary and perks will gain their loyalty, when all it does is gain is their compliance.
But equally, despite the obvious impact an ineffective manager has on an organisation’s profitability, many still pay little attention to training and supporting supervisors and managers, particularly in their first managerial role.
Attracting and retaining good people is a perennial headache for employers, consuming time and resources as well as a considerable amount of emotional energy – particularly if a favoured candidate decides to reject your overtures and go elsewhere.
On the Working Week this week, Wayne talks to Paolo Moscuzza, an occupational psychologist and a Principal Consultant with the Business Psychology practice of UK-based ER Consultants, about the practical steps that organisations and recruiters can take to ensure that candidates chose them rather than someone else.
Among the things that employers often get wrong, Moscuzza says, are dragging the recruitment process out far too long – then wondering why a candidate has gone elsewhere – and burning their bridges by treating candidates as if they are doing them a huge favour by considering them at all.
And that’s before we even get onto the issue of retention – by which we mean rather more than sending your staff on the occasional training course in the name of “professional development”.
So if you feel your recruitment process is less effective than it might be and you retention stats could do with a boost, take 10 minutes out of your working week to listen to ours.
"The Working Week" is a weekly digest of news, blogs, and opinion from
the pages of www.management-issues.com. Each week, host Wayne Turmel will be joined by a special guest as he leads a spirited discussion on the issues that matter to people at work.
