What price a job?

The quarterly figures released by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month show that the number of people unemployed has risen to 2.53 million – an increase of 27,000. This is the highest level of unemployment in the UK since 1994.
In November, the Government announced that anyone without a job who refuses community work, the offer of a job, or fails to apply for a job if advised to do so, will lose their benefits. This could be for between three months to three years, depending on their intransigence.
Almost regardless of the political arguments, or indeed the state of the public purse, there seems to be something out of kilter with Government policies. This push to make it better to be in work than out of it, is beginning to force the employment relationship into a transactional frame. This appears to completely work against the McLeod report and Government exhortation to businesses to “engage” employees.
This edict for the unemployed seems to imply that they would be willing to go to work purely to earn sufficient money to live.
So will ANY job will do for more than two and a half million people, just so they can get some money - whether earning a wage or keeping their benefits? The majority of academic studies on employee well –being and engagement talk about a sense of connection with their organisation, some elements of control in their job. They talk a lot less about the wage. I think that those forced into taking jobs won’t feel any sense of control and indeed, if they are asked to work for nothing, won’t even feel any sense of satisfaction that they have something in their pocket at the end of the month.
As for engagement – I wonder if this would be possible with people forced into jobs over which they have little choice and where potential poverty is the main motivation for applying.

Face to face is dead - long live Facebook?

I was on Facebook recently and I saw a message trail which made me look twice.  Someone had posted an RIP for someone I knew.  As I looked, his sister had posted a comment, also his girlfriend and a number of his friends.  Strangely enough, it wasn’t that he had died that shocked me – although that was shocking enough.  It was the messages.

It’s difficult to find anything to say about death which in the light of mourning, isn’t trite or repetitive. But on Facebook, the messages acquired a new shallow quality that I found repulsive. 

I’ve no idea why messages about the death of a friend or relative should be different from those about the birth of a new baby.  After all, it’s a fast, easy to read, easy to write, update about something that has happened.  But nevertheless I found myself thinking how crass it was.

The death of someone you know is always shocking, expected or not. 

But death, thrust into Facebook posts of breakfast, travel plans, greetings to friends and party photographs, seems indecent in its starkness, as incongruous as someone shouting at prayers.

To my surprise, I find that lots of organisations appear to announce the deaths of employees via email, with noticeboards for people to write their thoughts and condolences.  In a large organisation, this might be rapid, expedient and – by giving employees an opportunity to express their feelings – humane.   HR and internal communication professionals believe that it helps for people to be able to post their thoughts, and that the family find it comforting.

Myself, I’m still not convinced that Facebook is the right place to announce a death.

Death brings us face to face (pardon the pun) with the inevitable. And facing our ultimate end doesn’t require a computer screen and type – it requires a soft voice and a warm, human hand.  It requires space and silence – but with company to reassure.  And a piece of electronics hasn’t yet been invented than can pass a tissue or give a hug. 

I worry that while social media was once heralded as something that could help shy and awkward teenagers connect with other teens, to help then gain confidence, it’s now had the effect of making face to face contact a highly risky thing.  While digital communication is as immediate as face to face – it’s also relatively anonymous. 

After all, face to face you don’t have time to think before making a response (as you do on Facebook) and your tone, face and body send messages as well as what you say.   But people KNOW you – you’re there in front of them.  If they don’t like what you say, they can punch you on the nose. If they like it, they can kiss you. Or something in between.  The response from Facebook is much more distant – they can unfollow you, even if they don’t want to make a response.  Or the argument is carried out online, potentially no less hurtful or vicious – just less immediate, less THERE.

I can see distance creeping in to relationships, even the closest ones.  I see relationships between people in the same house being conducted online, in the full view of friends and family, where instead of banging out their frustrations on a keyboard, they would be better served – as would their children – talking to one another. 

This is also played out in the workplace, where email is so much more prevalent for business communication than, say, picking up the phone or even walking to the other side of the office.

This is a little way from announcing that someone has died over the internet – but stems from the same issue, I think.  We’re forgetting how to communicate with one another, face to face.

I showed this blog to my partner – she pointed out the irony of using a blog to say this.  This irony is not lost on me….

why information = reduced stress

In December, I was walking from Kings Cross station to the British Library. As I walked up Euston Road, I also passed the long, snaking line of miserable people, pinched with cold, desperately waiting for a seat on Eurostar.

The amount of snow in London, of course, was unprecedented – and certainly the transport network was caught unprepared. None of this was of interest to the queues of shivering tourists and business people, simply wanting to get to their destination. As I walked the long, long line, there were train staff keeping people on the pavement, and preventing people from jumping the queue – even on the second day, handing out coffee. The one thing that wasn’t being handed out was information.

Press coverage of the event showed travellers angry and upset that they had been left in the dark and that they felt abandoned.

So why might information have helped? Customer announcements would hardly have melted the snow, or taken the ice off the rails.

Information is necessary for people to make choices. In the case of these travellers, even a little information might have enabled them to decide to stay in the queue – or to stay in a hotel for the afternoon. And it’s not so much the depth of information, it’s about the sense of power that having the information gives. In situations of uncertainty, more information gives at least the option for more choices. Without it, people are caught in a dilemma made even more difficult because of a lack of rational data to help them move from one place to another – and in the case of Eurostar, this place was physical as well as emotional.

It struck me, working on a change programme after Christmas, that stress for employees is often because of the same problem - a lack of information. There are plenty of good reasons why management may keep information about their future plans from employees – further consultation is required, plans aren’t finalised, the markets require it.

But there are also plenty of bad reasons that management keep quiet about their plans. These include sins of omission - management not considering that it’s necessary, or not even recognising that it’s important, or history (this kind of information has never been released in previous change programmes). They also include the less forgivable reasons, for example, management cowardice, or a paternalistic attitude towards employees that implies that they can’t cope with the “truth”.

However, my experience is that by withholding information, management make employees into children by disenfranchising them from the choices they might have. For example, knowing truthfully that a reorganisation is going to result in headcount reductions – even if you don’t know how many and where - may enable people to make their own minds up about what they want. This might mean hunkering down for the wait, or starting to look for a job elsewhere, even start a new career. It will certainly mean discussions with family, partners and friends, and those discussions about what, and when, and how – all give people a sense of power and self-direction. It will also enable them to start finding the resources and support they need to take action – whatever that is.

My guess is that management don’t do this because they fear an exodus of their best people and that “business as usual” won’t be possible as people consider their options.

I have news for them – for anyone going through large scale change, business is anything but usual.

But the benefits could be considerable.

If management is prepared for this, this may not simply mean an exodus of the best people. It might mean a more adult, informed, and frank debate about the future. It might mean more prepared and resilient employees who feel they have some control and some choices. All of which are steps towards reducing the stress of the people caught in the middle of the change.

www.corporatemagnetism.com

the real pain of being out of your comfort zone

Late last year I decided I would return to a real love of mine, singing.

Now, I'm no Kiri te Kanawa, but I can (generally) hold a tune and have a decent range. Most of my previous forays onto the stage have been in musicals - the role of Rizzo in Grease was a highlight, but I've also done Madam Dubonnet in The Boyfriend and a variety of chorus parts in Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat - for example. I've sung jazz, and rock, and the idea of being on stage doesn't frighten me.

So far, so good. But this time, I wanted to do something a bit more serious, and more stretching. The choir I had in mind to join performed "classical choral pieces" - Elijah was first on the list, followed by The Messiah. So this was a significant change for me.

I'm not a scaredy-cat and I happily threw my hat into the ring, emailed and called to ask if I could come along. Please do, said the charming lady on the end of the phone. We do auditions at the end of the month, she added, where we'll test your voice to make sure you're in the right place in the choir and give you a sight reading test.

"Sight reading test?" I quavered.
"Oh yes, we do quite challenging work and we do need a reasonable level of sight reading to make sure you can keep up," was the brisk response.

"I see....." I trailed off.

I've never learnt to sight read and frankly, faced with a bunch of dots on a treble clef my brain goes to mush. Any sense of timing, tone - and any common sense, come to that - just evaporates and I become a wavering, weak and timid soul who squeaks, rather than sings.

This conversation took place in August - rehearsals for Elijah started in September, the concert was in November. Stiffening my spine, I immediately sent off for books from Amazon to help me learn to read music. When these didn't seem to help, I started to work with programmes on the internet which gave you the notes and then played the tune. When this didn't help and with start of rehearsals coming ever closer, I began music lessons. Two weeks to go before rehearsals began and I was having two or three lessons a week.

The choir lady had suggested that I come along to a couple of weeks' rehearsal before the audition, ("Just to see if you like us, dear") and in this time, I had an additional four lessons. And what a torment they were! My poor, beleaguered teacher spent much of the lesson passing me tissues to mop up my despair and soothing my fury that the information wouldn't go in. She gently told me that things would sink in, if only I would relax and go with my instinct.

The day of the audition, I hadn't slept well and I didn't eat all day. I felt physically sick, and arrived, a good 20 minutes early, for my ordeal. By this time, I'd talked myself both in and out of choir membership, forgetting one fairly important thing - I actually have a good voice, and I can sing.

I fluffed the sight reading - not dreadfully, but I fluffed what your average six-year old learning the recorder would play after a glance. The conductor suggested gently that I ought to continue with the lessons - and then accepted me as a second soprano. I was shaking by the time I left the hall. In mid November, I was with the choir, singing my first classical concert as a second soprano.

This post is not about my success - it's about my suffering. This was a very different environment for me - serious music, the focus completely on the voice, where skills were expected and in which I was poorly-tutored. I felt ill for a good week before the audition and a sort of stunned relief for a couple of days afterwards. I was, classically - out of my comfort zone.

As a communicator and trainer, I often have people in front of me who are being exhorted to "do something different", and I'm there to help them. My involvement is often to demonstrate how easy it is to do something different and that all you need is faith, and to buckle down.

Having sweated for at least six weeks to try and grasp even the basics of sight reading, I now have a pretty clear idea of how "being out of your comfort zone" doesn't just affect you mentally, it can also affect you physically. My confidence plummeted and my appetite waned, I didn't sleep, and I felt nauseous. Is this, I wondered, how people feel at work when they're asked to change what they do, who they do it with, and learn new skills into the bargain?

And this was something that I really wanted to do - imagine how it would feel if you were being put through this anguish for something you disagreed with, but needed to do to keep your job. Reflecting on this experience, I hope I'm now a little more patient and understanding with employees who, as a result of organisational change, are being asked - or forced - to do their jobs in unfamiliar ways. My "tick list" of change now reads:

• try not to set timescales - they make people nervous and nervousness does nothing to improve learning capability
• be patient - can you truthfully expect people who've behaved in certain ways for ten, 15, even 20 years to do things differently in a matter of months?
• some people (me included) learn best from other people - reading books or e-learning may not produce results, increases frustration and knocks confidence
• the impact of trying to change is mental AND physical - what's in place in your organisation to help with this?
• people who lead training, change agents and leaders of the change programme - they've had time to reach a level of equilibrium. The people in front of them, worried about their role, their competence and their rapidly diminishing confidence probably have not. Cut them some slack and recognise that any resistance may not be to inconvenience you. It's because they didn't sleep last night and they may feel sick to their stomach.

Finally, not being able to demonstrate a particular skill may not matter. I can't sight read (very well, yet) - but I can sing. I find my own ways of keeping up with the rest of the choir, listening to music files for my part from the internet, and learning it by rote. If the criteria for acceptance for my choir was just the sight reading, I wouldn't be writing this. But the conductor had the end result in mind.

It's a shame that more organisations don't think like this.

Alongside the other 40,000 people spending time in the Christmas markets in Cologne, I was on the hunt for Christmas tree baubles. Looking at the pretty wooden painted figures, it struck me that we return, time and time again to a Christmas which isn't now. Victorian, the fifties, Edwardian, - anything in fact, which isn't now. Even those who couldn't have been around in the fifties are yearning towards a dream of Christmas which might never have existed anyway.

We base our dreams on Hollywood, Bing and White Christmas, impossibly glamorous women in gowns, elegant men in tuxedos and wonder why we always feel slightly cheated when the reality arrives. We seek the tinsel and glitter or the rich red and dull gold of the baubles which adorn the tree, hoping they will weave some sort of magic around our deeply domestic lives. This magic might include making tetchy six year olds and ancient relatives disappear, being slender enough not to care about overeating or snoring after lunch, and having partners who look like Bryan Ferry or Lauren Bacall.

It may also mean having enough rooms for quiet and peaceful reading, enough talent for songs and music and a grand piano, bright sunshine and clean snow for exercise and fun.

Instead, we are crammed together at the table, sitting two deep in front of the tv with the central heating too high, making everyone fractious and irritable. The kids forget their manners, parents and in-laws bicker over ownership of the kitchen, and the Big Day descends into a marathon of bitten lips and iron politeness. We're so enamoured of a celluloid version of Christmas that the reality of miserable, ill-considered presents, screaming, over-tired children and over-rich cooking is simply unpalatable.

We've been brainwashed by Nigela, Delia, and Heston that it's possible to look glorious, have the perfect table decorations, cook like an angel and talk sensibly to visitors at the same time without breaking sweat. Most of the time we fail miserably and then never fail to compare our best imagined selves with the people we'd like to be, like those people in the films.

All of which leaves us perfectly miserable.

This is not the way it should be. Forget Grace Kelly and Danny Kaye, even Harry and Sally. Embrace Aunty Elsie, cousin Michael and the in laws and love that they are deeply, irrevocably uncool. Forgive them unaired clothes, bad aftershave, or lily of the valley perfume from 1972. Bypass dreadful haircuts, unsuitable clothing, indecent necklines and plain bad taste.

Bear in mind this is just one day. One day in 365 others. People will not turn into pillars of salt if the roast potatoes are burnt, the stuffing soggy or the trifle sloppy. They won't be talking for months if the tree isn't just so, the crackers filled with knick-nacks from Liberty, or if the festive garland is rather drunkenly uneven. They won't be mentally scarred if they've read the book you bought them already, or downloaded months ago the album you queued in the rain for. Or if the colour of the sweater isn't right.

If we were a bit more relaxed around Christmas, then we might be a bit kinder to others. Which might mean a bit more of the magic we had been looking for in the baubles. But for real.

Wishing you a stress-free Christmas and a gentle New Year.

a prize runner bean

During one golden autumn afternoon, I went to a friend's allotment to see her and give some support to the allotment association's open day. At this small, local event, there were prizes for (amongst other marvels) the longest bean, biggest marrow, best dahlia, not to mention a raft of awards for scones, jam, chutney and Victoria sponge cake.

My friend managed two second prizes, one for her scones and one for jam and was thrilled. Her prize - two pieces of card with "Second" on them, and the life changing sum of 76 pence in prize money.

It struck me that although the monetary prize wouldn't pay for a ride on a London bus, the amount of effort put in to competing had been significant - my friend had baked twenty scones before selecting five of the best to put into the competition. And her delight at coming second was palpable - together with a will to enter next year and to up her baking and jam making game.

And as I chomped my way through the equally delicious but unchosen scones, clotted cream and home made jam, I thought how wonderful if such effort could be put into the workplace by employees.

Not that employees' prizes should be this size, you understand; high falutin' management consultants might have you believe that employees will work for very little for the right encouragement. The (cynical) view of engagement is about getting employees to do more, for less, a form of managerial power which doesn't actually need the manager present. For me, however, without fair pay, you don't have a start point.

So what DOES motivate individuals to do so much for so little? To spend hours baking, months growing, years cultivating?

I believe the keys are to do with making your own decisions about how you achieve something, having a clear idea of what success looks like (a perfect scone with a first prize label?) and being able to see how what you do, links to the final outcome.

None of this is new, of course. Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Model developed in the late 1970s indicates that job satisfaction comes from precisely these elements. So why in work do we constantly forget it?

In the workplace, we divorce people from the final outcomes of their jobs, box them into processes so they only see a part of the whole, we tell them how to do things and put silos into organisations so that people fight for their little piece of "job land" rather than working together.

On the allotment, there were tales of produce shared, advice given and taken, seeds and plants donated. The common goal of growing fruit, vegetables and flowers seemed to encourage sharing so that people could all experience success. Not everyone chose to enter into the prize giving and were simply happy to contribute to others' triumph.

I recognise that the workplace is a far cry from a North London allotment. But growing that kind of commitment, that sort of knowledge sharing, cultivating that strain of passion - now that would be worth a prize.

oh, get a sense of humour...

"I could be in touch with my 'gay' side. I mean, I don't, and never have, owned a leather cap, but I did once have a moustache (and the fact that I can claim I only grew it for a bet, doesn't exactly help)."

This was a post from a friend of mine on Facebook, who thought he might be "going gay" because he had Dancing Queen by Abba in his head. In the ensuing posts, I asked if we could be a bit less stereotypical and was told by another Facebook post to "take a joke... its thursday...".

Now, I've never been particularly politically correct, but being told to amend my perfectly good sense of humour by someone who's clearly in the majority (white, heterosexual and middle class) irked me somewhat.

It's all too easy to explain away racist, homophobic and sexist views as attempts at humour; this makes anyone who objects into a "poor sport" or someone who can't have a laugh. Instead of being someone who may have a legitimate gripe with certain views or how they're expressed, people are categorised suddenly into prudes, swots or the type of individuals who hang round the beer at parties and wear crimpelene.

In this instance, being accused of suffering from a sense of humour failure actually MADE me have one. I wonder how many other people believe that it's everyone else that fails to see the funny side when it's their own prejudices which should be the butt of the joke?