I was reading the paper quickly yesterday while microwaving my lunch when I came across this article and I thought it might be worthwhile sharing it. While the survey was only of around 800 people, there some concerning statistics in there. For instance, Graeme Cowan (Director of R U OK?) said “Work stress has become pervasive, with many feeling it on a daily basis”.

It made me think about the amount of hours we are doing and the kinds of things we deal with every day, and how stressful that can be if it is for prolonged periods of time. It’s just not sustainable.

So sitting in the HR hot seat- is there anything we can be doing about this?

It must be said that the individual must be responsible for taking a proactive approach to looking after themselves i.e. The business cannot force employees to eat properly, exercise and look after their mental wellbeing however they can encourage these activities (think wellbeing programs, Leaders role modelling the right behaviours, participation in R U OK?, EAP etc).

However with regards to serious depression, anxiety and even suicide you will read a lot about people looking for the signs or indicators in colleagues at work. Often if it were one of our friends, we would say something straight away, but at work its a little bit different. You feel like it might be the wrong thing to. Hopefully R U OK? At work will change this perception.

The article also says that survey participants “believe there is no one at work who cares about them as a person”, and this was interesting to me because it reminded me of one of the Gallup Organization’s 12 questions; “Do you have a best friend at work?”

Gallup’s employee engagement work is based on more than 30 years of in-depth behavioral economic research involving more than 17 million employees. This research has appeared in prestigious business and scientific publications, including the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Harvard Business Review, and in our bestselling books First, Break All the Rules and 12: The Elements of Great Managing. Through rigorous research, we have identified 12 core elements — the Q12 — that link powerfully to key business outcomes. These 12 statements emerged as those that best predict employee and workgroup performance.

The 12 statements are:

Do you know what is expected of you at work?
Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
At work, do your opinions seem to count?
Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
Do you have a best friend at work?
In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Source

So as a business, you might be using Gallup to monitor employee engagement, or another annual survey- but how else can you keep a regular check in on the wellbeing (and in particular mental health) of your people? Do your engagement surveys adequately capture this? How often do you run these and what do you do with the results?

As HR professionals, it’s hard not to have heard about employee engagement and the true impact it has on the success of of the business. While it may sound fluffy to some (yeah I think we still have a way to go in convincing some CFOs!), there is just so much research out there now that says if you don’t tap into the key drivers of employee engagement- you will lose them. And losing employees is losing money that your company could be spending on really awesome things.

Talent always has options, and it would be ignorant to say otherwise. You may pay well, but money isn’t everything and people have certainly remembered that recently in Australia.

It’s great to be able to offer two very lucky HR Club Sydney members a free ticket to an “Employee Engagement Bootcamp” facilitated by Employee Engagement Speaker, Trainer and Mentor, Kate Boorer on Thursday 24th March in Sydney CBD.

Kate has a Senior Finance background and some might say she’s on a bit of a mission to help HR pros like you, convince even the most cynical CFOs that this is something that will impact the bottom line and overall sustainability of the business.

In this workshop participants will:

1) Learn about the engine room of motivation framework that doesn’t involve money or external rewards; that is discover the 4 internal building blocks that ignites self driven motivation and engagement
2) Discover what floats your career boat-Step into a time machine and take a journey back through your past to uncover the patterns of motivation & engagement that have been present throughout your career. Then use it to build your very own engagement profile.
3) Master the tools to assess whether you are facing a motivation issue or a training issue when it comes to the performance of you and your people; and
4) Identify the reason why your people turn up to work every day- Learn you about the importance of Career Values, help you uncover your own and then understand how it impacts engagement every day.

Each participant will also walk away with a customised engagement profile and action plan to begin implementing so you and your organisation see results immediately!

To ensure maximum value is delivered to every participant, there will be a limited number of places available. This is to ensure every person can share individually with Kate throughout the day and receive customised strategies and advice.

If you would like to put your name in the ring for a free ticket, please leave your name and a contact email as a comment on this blog. Names will be drawn on 15th March, 2011. If you do happen to miss out or want to secure a ticket, you can also do so at this website for the discounted price of $99 for HR Club Sydney fans. Just use the discount code HRCLUBSYD.

Every now and again I come across something a bit different, and share it because I think people will be interested. You may have read about this in HC Magazine or even heard the reviews from our sister club, HR Club Newcastle.

I think most of us in HR are interested in employee engagement and value services like Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) for the support that they can provide people during difficult times.

Current research shows the extent of financial ill health in the Australian community is significant – 70% of Australian couples experience conflict over money, 86% of individuals saying they should know more about personal finance than what they do, and 95% say they experience difficulties with managing money.

Financial stress leads to significant mental, emotional and physical costs to the individual, and in turn, the organisations they are a part of.

This is one way to look at it. Another is to look at a benefit that you could provide for your employees that could mean much, much more than a pay rise or bonus- and this is what interested me. I was first introduced to Innergi when I was working at a law firm, and spoke to a lot of employees in their 30s who were earning extremely good money but weren’t doing anything useful with it. This is a tool that could help employees get in control of their finances and value the total reward package you offer them.

Intrigued?

On Wednesday 1st December, Matt Linnert will share a light hearted look at the serious challenge of raising financial wellbeing in Australia, including an overview of the strategies which leading organisations are using today and are predicted to use in the near future.

The event will be held in the Oak Room, at Swissotel Sydney, Level 8, 68 Market Street, Sydney. There will be a light breakfast served from 7.15am (yum!) and the presentation starts at 7.40am sharp so you can head off to start your day.

Registration is essential so please register via the eventbrite link. It’s a good way to meet and network with others in the HR Community

Hey there! Apologies for the hiatus. The last few weeks have been busy and full of awesome. You may have noticed I’ve just taken up a contract at Lion Nathan National Foods and I am having the best time working there. I intend to chat a bit about why it is so awesome a bit later, but it is fitting that today’s post is about ‘Dream Employers’.

A little while back you may remember a post asking you to participate in the Dream Employers Survey. Well kiddies, the results are in. Get your copy here.

To be honest, there weren’t too many surprises there. No matter what sort of engagement model you follow, they usually involve one of two of the following components; having your people say great things about you as an employer to family and friends, allowing people to be empowered to do their jobs, and engaging people to do something that has an impact on other people or a purpose.

For instance, the report states that “word of mouth is an extremely powerful tool to promote positive messages to the market (Reichheld, 2003)” and Coca Cola Amatil is cited as an example where people learn about the culture through word of mouth because people are so passionate about the brands and the company. This is why their employee referral program is so successful.

Google says that “talented people are attracted to Google because we empower them to change the world” and Disney says that what they do for a living makes people happy and that has a huge impact of their employees. People also want to work for a brand or culture they can be proud of, or that is fun and makes them happy. There’s no doubt Virgin does this well as Branson says “Our people need to be 100% proud of where they work and believe in what they do everyday”.

I’d argue that ‘generous pay and trendy products or services’ hasn’t been enough to make an employer stand out as a desirable place to work for a little while now. Herzberg’s hygiene factors taught us about that a number of years ago. Perhaps employers still aren’t getting the message.

I guess one thing that is highlighted in the report is the benefit in having AND delivering upon an employee value proposition (EVP). Now while this may sound fluffy to the business, if held accountable an EVP can hold a vital key in talent attraction and retention.

So I guess my Friday question to you is- do you have an employee value proposition and if yes, what is it and how do you ensure that you deliver upon that promise to your people?

Today we have a guest post from JoelyRighteous (my better half) who works in the media industry. If nothing else, this post shows he has been listening to all the HR crap I talk about when I get home. Alternatively, it does also illustrate again that people are just not going to hang around and put up with sub-par work environments that are disengaging.

It seems to me that businesses have lost a bit of that discerning nature that makes them the long term successes they want to be.

Every decision should be made for the good of the company. This is a fact of business and often the key factor that can make the difference between a mediocre leader and a great one. Where the difficulty lies is that a lot of people only think of the good of the company as ensuring that their monthly/quarterly/yearly profits are as high as possible and that in the public eye there are sweeping positive reviews, but there is so much more to it than that. It is inevitable that there will be some level of negative sentiment about a business, be it from past employees, a negative event that occurred or a current employee that has had a bad day and is having a vent. The issue is with seeing all of this as a completely negative thing that is to be controlled. People expect employees to have bad days, nobody is happy all the time, work is stressful and at times depressing. This is the way things are in even the best of companies.

What we are seeing at the moment is companies rushing to control this output through monitoring of employees online activity and then taking action off the back of it the problem with this is that it is in no way a cost efficient use of anybodies time. If employees are complaining en-mass a standard level of brand monitoring throughout social channels should pick this up, there is no need to monitor employees specifically. Furthermore the way in which businesses are treating employees that do complain is counter-productive, in fact if an employee that is typically happy complains online they are just as likely to promote the business through the same channel when they have a good day. If there are high levels of complaints occurring from employees throughout the business, or even from within particular business teams the issue is not that people are complaining, it is that they are unhappy at work. This, whether businesses like it or not is a management/leadership issue.

If businesses put the same amount of time, effort and money into leadership training, employee reward and recognition programs and talent development that they put into attempting to control their employees online behaviour they would not only see the amount of negative sentiment from employees fade, they would additionally be left with a more engaged and productive workforce. This is the largest issue with businesses rushing to get on board the latest trend, they are not thinking about the long term cost associated with this behaviour. When you lose an employee t it costs the business on average a minimum of 2x their salary to recruit, train and replace the employee. Add to this the damage and cost of having dis-engaged employees to begin with and what you are left with is an extremely detrimental cost to the business, so instead of punishing and restricting the expression of employees who will only feel further unhappy about their situation knowing that work is now encroaching on their personal space, businesses should look internally at employee engagement (there are a multitude of providers who run assessments around this) and figuring out how they can improve the workplace for everyone. Hypothetically speaking you could be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars saved annually in turnover and productivity.

It’s just smart business.

Joel is an Online Account Manager at PHD Media, who is deeply passionate about developing strategic digital communication solutions that allow brands to connect and trade with consumers. He is currently studying a business degree and his outside interests include music, consumer psychology, technology and single malt scotch. Originally posted here.

Last week I attended the HR Summit which with the public holiday made it an extraordinarily short week for me being in a new role. In any case, I did want to share a few gems with everyone who perhaps couldn’t attend.

The HR Summit claims to be Australasia’s leading event for the HR industry. It was spread across two days, and was located at the fantastic Luna Park (gorgeous views). We heard from speakers from some of Australia’s leading companies as well as being able to roam through the industry expo.

Photo Source
The first speaker I really enjoyed was Simone Shugg who is the Director of People and Performance at Carnival Australia. Formed in 2004, Carnival Australia is a division of Carnival Corp, and claims to be the backbone of the cruise industry in this region with the P&O Cruises brand sailing from Australia for 78 years. They represent six of the international cruise brands in the local market including P&O Cruises, P&O World Voyages, Cunard, Princess Cruises, Costa Cruises and Seabourn.

Simone acknowledged that as HR professionals we know that there is a direct link between engagement, productivity and then bottom line in a business. However she now believes that it is definitely on the main business agenda in terms of priorities in achieving organizational objectives.

She then spoke of a great deal of change that had occurred in the organisation including the appointment of a new CEO. With all this rapid growth things had become very disjointed and disconnected, and they were still doing things as if they were operating on a much smaller scale (communications methods for example).

The new CEO (an ex HR exec) obviously with her background had an inherent knowledge that people were really important for business success, and this was a key message that she really drove across the leadership team.

One of the first things they did was to measure employee engagement. They engaged Hewitt, and the overall score achieved was 48%. This puts them in the indifferent category.

This sent a very clear message to the executive team, and key people centric initiatives were then put into the leadership teams KPI’s for that year.

After participating in the Hewitt employee engagement survey, the data allows you to focus on a number of keys areas to make improvements. On this basis they created an action plan and got it signed off.

They went back to their employees and communicated to them that it was also their responsibility to make it a great place to work. They needed top down support but also bottom up support too. They conducted focus groups for over four months, putting a lot of effort into making sure they were effective and facilitated by the right people.

The focus for the organization was to find solutions. Sounds like a great deal of intense work for the company but it appears to have paid off. Here are two of the things I liked:

1) People wanted better communication, particularly from leaders. Things were moving quickly, they were expanding in size and people were losing trust. People were feeling disconnected with the rapid pace of change, and they hadn’t changed the way they were communicated with staff in 10-15 years. They couldn’t rely on informal communication methods anymore.
The solution was to hire an internal comms manager which now allows them to communicate with staff via a new intranet platform, and share media like photos and videos with those external to the business using social media sites like facebook and youtube.

2) People felt disconnected from the CEO. There was no visibility of her in the business. Obviously she is an incredibly busy woman but Simone explains, when you talk to her she is very down to earth, very engaging and inspirational. People just weren’t getting the opportunity to see it.

The solution was to hold a CEO lunch each month with a different theme such as people who had been with the company for ten years, or perhaps people who have just started. The idea is to have an informal lunch and ask any questions of the CEO that you might not ordinarily get to ask. Also, the person who asks toughest question gets a bottle of wine!

Simone says this approach was hugely successful and last year over 20% of the workforce got to have lunch with the CEO.

Pretty cool I love hearing other people’s stories at conferences.

Another fantastic piece of work from Chris Ferdinandi in the United States- I just had to share this. Subscribe to his blog today for fresh ideas about HR.

In case you haven’t heard of Destination Talent by Phillip Tusing, it’s a blog which professes to cover “Musings, riffs, rants and insights on everything talent”.

Phillip is an experienced Australian Recruiter, but has worked in a number of different roles over the last nine year including analyst and marketing manager. Currently he consults to recruitment firms, job boards and talent solutions providers.

On his site you’ll find Job Board reports, reports on understanding the source of talent in Australia and hot off the press today: Understanding the behaviour and intention of executives in Australia.

Destination Talent is well worth subscribing to so you get the latest in the area of talent sourcing delivered straight to your inbox or reader. If you don’t have the time to go through the report, at least check out a few of the key findings.

Happy Monday Reading!

Inspired by the folks at #Trulondon I thought I might try my hand at some more video content even though I hate watching myself on camera. I seriously didn’t realize the weird way I talk (has everyone else noticed this?? LOL).

Anyways, if you can’t view you tube at work the upshot is that I’ve been getting my nerd on and upgrading some bits of the site so I can make it easier for you to look at my stuff and connect with others. You can now subscribe via email to have all the posts delivered effortlessly to you inbox or delivered to the reader of your choice. I hope you are impressed because I even did some html coding. Yeah. Gees, what have I become?

Next some details about the next HR Club Sydney Event coming up on 8th April. Then some flashy music I was able to put in using Windows Movie Maker

Have an awesome weekend!

I’m very please to announce our second HR Club Sydney networking event for 2010; Employee Engagement – are we on the same page?

As per our other events, it’s an opportunity for you to come along and meet other people within the Sydney HR Community. Remember, let’s practice our networking skills- not just turn up to an event, listen and go home. It’s important to bounce ideas off other people and see what other people are doing

In April, we have James Wright from RedBalloon talking on the subject of employee engagement.

Changing people’s behaviour and motivating them to lift their discretionary effort is hard work and James has spent his whole career doing it. First designing personal development programs for hard to reach and underprivileged kids in some of the poorest regions of the UK, then a variety of roles in marketing, product development and operational development.

As Account Director at RedBalloon, James works with corporations seeking behavioural changes in their employees that result in higher engagement, increased productivity and healthier bottom lines.

James and his team at RedBalloon practice what they preach and their work has been highly regarded by industry bodies as a result. RedBalloon has been awarded a number of accolades including Hewitt Best Employer in January 2010.

SESSION DETAILS:

To be competitive in this economic climate you need to have a focused team of engaged employees who love their work and what their organisation stands for. What are the five things that RedBalloon has done to deliver an employee engagement score of over 90% two years in a row as awarded by international human capital experts Hewitt Associates (the nation’s average is 55%)?

Learning outcomes:
• How to form an attachment, emotional and rational, between your employees and your brand
• How to create a culture of recognition and fun in your workplace
• How to get your team talking about you as a great place to work
• The number one driver of engagement – no matter what the generation

Each attendee who registers via the event on LinkedIn will have RedBalloon Corporate Pack waiting for them on the night, so be sure to register!

I look forward to seeing you there.