The Ultimate Workplace

Hi, are you curious about the “ultimate workplace”? 

Each year Profit Magazine features the fastest growing workplaces. These are workplaces that know how to attract and retain employees and they use a variety of ways to do this, for example:

• flex time (not a new concept but a proven one)
• creative opportunities to innovate (and reward people for doing so)
• employ the 80/20 rule (this one borrowed from CQI?). This call centre business was concerned about employee burn-out (how nice) and so allowed employees to “spend20% of their time doing something different than their regular jobs…and it works…employee turnover dropped dramatically
• trust your employees to know what they need to learn and then help them out financially
• continually challenge employees so that they can develop new skills (have them learn and then teach someone else)
• have fun (seriously)
• hold a quarterly team building afternoon
• let them have pie (also know as giving employees a piece of the company)

The feature article was about Wellington West Holdings, Inc. in Winnipeg.

Every employee at Wellington West is offered a share in the company. Check them out at www.wellwest.ca

Their motto, “we remember it is better to be an owner than to be owned”.

The ultimate workplace indeed!!!

Cheers, Lesley

Terminating Employees — Worst Case Scenarios!

Well, I’ve heard it all. Yesterday I learned that the Fraser Health Authority in B. C. terminated a group of workers. 

So, big deal. People are terminated all the time.  Yes they are…but not in a group setting!

That’s right. The workers were all herded into a room and told that they no longer had jobs. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised what with all the terminations that are going on in health care right now.

Who has time to tell people one-on-one that they have lost their jobs?

When I hear these stories I wonder about the impact of the people who have to “soldier on”. Those employees who are “lucky” enough to hold onto their jobs. The ones that will now have to do “more with less”.

And what about the clients, patients, customers? What kind of service can they expect to receive?

And what about productivity? I know from experience that major restructuring and terminations  create fear and anxiety in those left behind. The rumour mill runs wild. People “circle the wagons” and focus on protecting themselves from a similar fate.

I would be interested in learning just exactly which values guide the Fraser Health Authority.  Respect doesn’t seem to be one of them.

David Noer wrote his classic book, Healing the Wounds, for a reason.

Organizations that fail to respond to the needs of people left behind leave themselves open to ongoing problems:

• hostility
• grief
• anxiety
• loss of innovation and creativity
• mistrust in the organization
• poor teamwork
• loss of management credibility
• poor quality services to customers
• loss of energy
• loss of spirit
• etc. etc. etc.

Try and have a good week! Lesley

 

Say You’re Sorry And Rebuild Trust In Your Workplace

HI there,  Why is it that Canadians are always saying “We’re sorry?” Where did this need to apologize come from? I have no idea but I did ask Google and discovered on online dialogue about this very subject. Could it be that we are just trying to be polite?

I’m sorry (whoops there I go again) if I’m belabouring the point but perhaps Canadians are on to something here.  Being able to apologize can go a long way toward having healthy relationships.

Given the amount of time most of us spend with other people every day, this should be a priority for everyone.

In fact  there seems to be a growing interest in the role that apology can play in creating a healthy, functional workplace.

This weekend I came across a new book called “Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, Restoring Trust” by Jon Kador.

If you check out Jon’s website you can also complete a quiz that tests your Apology Quotient or AQ. I barely passed the quiz and was told that I need to work on my apology skills. Hmmmm. I seem to be apologizing all the time–perhaps there’s something more?

When was the last time you told someone at work that you were sorry?

There are numerous reasons why it is important to apologize when you have done something wrong. Apart from the obvious strengthening of your relationships you may find there are other benefits.

This is especially true if you are in a leadership position. According to a study conducted by the Queen’s University School of Business in Kingston, Ontario,

“leaders who apologize consistently, when they have made mistakes, are seen to be more transformational, ethical, influential, trustworthy, caring and considerate.”

And if that is not a strong enough reason for leaders to apologize consider this,

“executives who apologize earn more than executives who never apologize”.

So what can we do? Well no matter who you are it is important to both know how to apologize and also to know how to accept an apology. Let’s start with how to go about apologizing effectively:

• Make in genuine
• Don’t justify your actions
• Make a commitment to change
• Choose your words carefully
• Be prepared for the unexpected

You can’t control how the other person will react but at least you will have done your part.

Lesley

Reducing Work-Life Conflict

Hi there,

The interet is a wonderful place indeed. Earlier today I was reading Alive Magazine when I came across an interesting statistic about workplace stress:

“83% of Canadians report stress related to employment, including workload, wages, and job security.”

Being the curious person that I am I decided to do a Google search to see if I could find out more details, which led me to the Canadian Mental Health Association site.

This is a great site with lots of links to articles and reports.

One report which caught my eye was called, “Reducing Work-Life Conflict: What Works? What Doesn’t?” It was written by Dr. Chris Higgins, Dr. Linda Duxbury and Sean Lyons and funded by Health Canada.

The report was based on research involving 31, 000 employees across Canada.

According to Linda Duxbury, “More and more workers are finding it difficult to balance the roles of employee, parent, spouse, and eldercare giver.” This work-life conflict is taking its toll on workers, families and employers.

One thing that isn’t mentioned here is that many of these people also do community or service work and without them our communities would be in trouble.

The report looks at the roles and responsibilities of employees and employers and paints are rather negative picture of large employers in Canada.

“The majority of Canada’s largest employers cannot be considered to be best practice employers: Only about half of the employees who participated in this study were highly committed to their employer, satisfied with their job, and viewed their organization as an above average place to work. One in three rated high levels of stress and one in four were thinking of leaving their jobs.”

The report focused on four areas:

• organizational interventions
• individual coping strategies
• family coping straties

How are you coping with work and family demands? What, if anything, is your organization doing to help you?

Lesley

Stress Is An Organizational Problem

Good morning to you all!

I haven’t written about stress in the workplace for awhile.  This week a colleague emailed me an article from www.working.com about the effects of stress on bosses in the workplace. But first let me digress!

A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Marci Cohen. At that time Marci was a leader with the Hospital Employees Union in B.C. and Marci was on a mission. She had the goal of helping thousands of health care employees (front line) fight workplace stress.

When I first met Marci she had just finished putting the final touches on a program called The Anti Stress Initiative which involved education & training of union employees and health care leaders.

What was unique about The Anti Stress Initiative was its strong emphasis on the need for organizational change.

At the time that Marci began working on The Anti Stress Initiative there was a growing awareness, backed by research, that dealing with workplace stress was as much the responsibility of the organization as it was of the individual worker.

Prior to that time it was widely believed that individuals were responsible for dealing with stress on their own.  

“The only way to really reduce toxic stress is to change the work and change the workplace.”  … the Workplace Anti-stress Guide

The Whitehall Study, a famous research project, was cited in the Anti-stress Guide.

What made the Whitehall Study famous was that it established a clear link between social hierarchy, stress, and health in the workplace. It tracked 18,000 male English civil servants (now there’s term that could use some updating) for two decades. Secretaries, filing clerks, senior managers and everyone in between took part in this study.

The main findings of The Whitehall Study were that

“the lower a worker’s position in the hierarchy, the greater his or her likelihood of suffering from angina, chronic bronchitis, heart and circulatory problems, and other stress-related conditions.”

Employees were at risk if they had jobs with high demands but little control over their work.

This can be explained in another way:

People are under a lot of stress when they have a high-strain job. A high-strain job is one where you face many demands and have little control and support.

A low-strain job is one where you face demands and have a good measure of control and support.

Guess what? People in low-strain jobs are less likely to suffer from the negative effects of chronic stress.

The Whitehall Study put managers in the low-strain category.

However, recently researchers at the University of Toronto have discovered that “being the boss can take its toll on health”.

More about this in the next post! Enjoy your weekend!                                    Lesley

Emotional Vampires in the Workplace!

Hi! I first heard the term “emotional vampires” a few years ago. At that time I had one of these vampires in my own life!

Now Judith Orloff, M.D. has written a book on the subject. The book is called, “Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life” and it is a New York Times bestseller.

Emotional vampires can be family members, friends or co-workers. 

According to Dr. Orloff the best defense, as always, is a good offense. In order to rid yourself of these emotional vampires you first must learn how to recognize them. Only then can you decide how to stop them from “feeding off you”.

There are five types of emotional vampires that you need to guard against:

The Narcissist – this person needs you to fulfill their needs. They are completely self-centered and will find any excuse to talk about themselves, seek compliments etc.

The Victim – this person will wear you down with their “poor me” attitude. Believe me they can be extremely annoying and exhausting to be around. The victim won’t take responsibility (probably has no insight) for their behavior and believe that the world is against them. 

The Controller – this person will try to control you and tell you want to do and how to feel. They can dominate and suffocate you.

The Criticizer – this person will put themselves down and everyone else as well. Nothing is right with the world and they are happy to tell you about how awful everything is.

The Splitter – this vampire sees people in black and white. Unconsciously they turn people against each other.

Interestingly, according to Dr. Orloff we attract these lovely people into our lives when we are vulnerable and unhappy. AND the danger is that we can turn into vampires ourselves if we are not careful.

So, read the book and watch for the vampires in your workplace.                      Lesley

Using Emotional Intelligence to Heal the Workplace

Hi there!  How are you this week? I’m good and I’ve been thinking about how important emotional Intelligence (EQ) is in the workplace.

How important EQ is to creating and maintaining a healthy workplace. 

I keep reading about how important EQ is for effective leadership. YES it is!

I also keep reading about how important EQ is for career success (getting the job you want).

What I’ve not read much about is the relationship of EQ and healthy workplaces.

EQ was first made popular by Daniel Goleman. Daniel Goleman has written a number of excellent books on the subject and I would recommend that you read Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence if you are not familiar with his work.

If you read Working with Emotional Intelligence you’ll discover that the person responsible for first identifying the need for EQ skills at work was David McClelland.

Basically EQ skills fall into the following categories:

• self-awareness (knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses, values, leadership style, communication style etc.)
• self-regulation (managing one’s internal states–anger, fear, frustration etc.)
• motivation (persistence, taking initiative etc.)
• empathy (understanding others, developing others etc.)
• social skills (influence, communication, conflict management, collaboration, team building etc.)

We all have to take responsibility for making improvements in the places we work. If we see someone being mistreated we need to speak up. If we know of someone who is acting unethically we need to “blow the whistle”. If we are not happy with the way our colleagues treat us we have to stand up to them. If people don’t pull their weight we need to raise the issue with them, the team and the boss.

What we need in order to “take responsibility” is to use our EQ skills.

Some organizations are now attempting to hire people with these skills. But organizations also need to help people develop these skills if they don’t have them. 

In fact, this might be the best investment they make!

What if everyone in the organization that you work in had good relationship-building interpersonal skills? What about your team? Sometimes the best teams are the ones in which everyone has the skills to work together–EQ skills.

What if everyone took responsibility for creating an organization that was healthy and productive? Maybe I’m naive but I think that a shift is taking place. Remember the book The Tipping Point?

Well, there is a growing emphasis on EQ and on leadership.

There is an explosion of people stepping up and stepping into leadership roles–in their work, in their communities, in their places of workship, in their schools and around the world.

I believe that we have the power to improve our workplaces but only if we all take some responsibility.

Cheers,

Lesley

Psychologically Healthy Workplaces Are Vital!

Hi there, what’s on my radar this week? Raising awareness about  psychologically healthy workplaces. 

In the Vancouver Sun newspaper, Jennifer Newman and Darryl Grigg write about  about the need to create psychologically healthy workplaces even in times of recession. Especially when organizations are going through tough economic times.

They quote Dr. David Ballard, executive director for corporate relations and business strategy at the American Psychological Association,

“The goal of creating a psychologically healthy workplace is to optimize outcomes for employees and employers.”

Optimizing outcomes might be the overall goal of creating psychologically healthy workplaces but it doesn’t seem to go far enough in explaining WHY psychologically healthy workplaces are so important.  

Let’s look at this another way. What are the dangers of NOT creating a  healthy workplace?

Here are some startling facts:

• The Centers for Disease Control have declared workplace violence to be at epidemic levels.
• The U.S. Department of Justice proclaimed the workplace to be the most dangerous place to be in America.
• One in four workers are attacked, threatened, or harassed every year.
• Homicide is the leading cause of on-the-job death for women and the second leading cause of death for me.

Quite frankly I was shocked when I read these statistics in the 2009 edition of The New Manager’s Tool Kit by Don and Sheryl Grimme.

Certainly there are many reasons why there is so much violence in the workplace. The world we live in is increasingly more violent. People are anxious, angry, stressed and frightened.

Add to this mix leaders, managers and/or coworkers who are bullies and you have “set the stage” for workplace violence.

On the one hand you have people who are unstable or on the verge of breaking down and one the other hand you have workplaces that are toxic.

And what happens when violence occurs at work? Who is to blame?

Here’s some more interesting stats:

• former employees cause only 3% of workplace attacks
• current employees are responsible for 20%
• bosses are responsible for 7% of all physical workplace violence
• customers/clients/strangers are responsible for 44% (WOW)

What can an organization or company do to prevent workplace violence? The first thing is to learn about it.

The second, and perhaps more important, is to create a workplace culture that respects EVERYONE–workers, bosses, customers. In fact, if employees are NOT treated with respect they will probably not treat their customers with respect either.

There are numerous ways to create psychologically healthy workplaces–some I have discussed in earlier posts.

Have a great week and Happy Thanksgiving to all you Canadians out there.

Lesley

Susan Anton Blames City of Vancouver Workers for 60 Million Dollar Deficit

Hi, I don’t usually write posts about “current events” but after hearing Councillor Susan Anton on the radio this morning I’ve decided to make an exception.

The City of Vancouver has a 60 million dollar budget overrun and when asked how this could have happened Susan Anton’s first response was to blame the unionized workers at the City of Vancouver.

Doesn’t Ms. Anton know that she is in a leadership position? Give me a break.

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of treating employees with fairness, compassion and respect.

This morning, on the drive into work, I heard Susan Anton being interviewed on the radio. She told reporters that the reason that the City of Vancouver has a huge budget overrun is because the unionized city workers received a big pay raise in 2007.

The first thing that she came up with was blaming the workers.

Which leads me to ask the question, “Why was Susan Anton so quick to blame the front-line workers this morning?” Seems like a good way to deflect blame from Council and the organization’s upper management.

…not very helpful and in the long run…off the cuff comments like this from someone in Susan’s positon can be very harmful to the organization’s culture.

In the long run this kind of thoughtless attack on workers will end up costing the City of Vancouver even more money.

Susan…here’s some thoughts about leadership…

Transcendent Leadership  is the sum of the following:

•  Leadership of Others
• Leadership of the Organization
• Leadership of Community &
• Leadership of Self

If you plan on a career in politics, or anywhere else for that matter, you might want to focus on the latter.

Cheers,

Lesley

Values At Work And The Triple Bottom Line

Hi!

Last week I touched on the need for organizations to become more values-driven. Values-driven organizations operate based on the following fundamental human values:

• fairness
• compassion
• respect
• reverence for nature

Increasingly businesses that “live” these values are also more profitable. It’s a win-win situation but becoming a values-driven organization is not always easy. Fortunately there are organizations and other resources available to help.

I came across the book “Values-driven Business” by Ben Cohen and Mal Warwick. This book is part of a serious of books published by the Social Venture Network. 

The Social Venture Network is about promoting the concept of values-based business. SVN’s model includes the following “five dimensions of values-based business”:

• Employees
• Suppliers
• Customers
• Community
• Environment

This is an expanded version of the 3 P’s of Socially Responsible Business: People, Planet and Profits.

Chapter Three of  the book Values-driven Business is titled “First Thing First: Your Employees.

“The most valuable asset any company possesses is its intellectual capital, which is the accumulated knowledge of its workforce as well as its management.”

The authors describe six reasons for treating employees well and paying them a “living wage”:

1. Employees will find their work more satisfying and be more productive.
2. The costs of high employee turnover are as great or greater than the cost of a decent compensation package.
3. Low-paying jobs attract only those who can’t find work elsewhere.
4. Employees who are paid low wages will often be forced to take second jobs. These employees are more likely to come to work exhausted and have added health problems.
5. Poorly paid employees are more likely to steal from the company they work for.
6. Low wages tend to result in poor morale, poor customer service and low productivity.

One interesting note…not-for-profit organizations which have traditionally been values-driven are now being encouraged to become more “business like” and for-profit organizations are being encouraged to become more like not-for-profits in the way they do business.

Cheers, Lesley