Often working in HR we see the very best and the very worst of things. We see people being rewarded for excellent achievement and also experience tremendous setbacks, stress and burnout. At the moment, you can’t escape from the tragedy that is happening around in the world. You will have been across the floods in Queensland and now other parts of Australia, but the floods in Brazil have now claimed more than 500 lives. So much devastation. How do you rebuild and even move on from these experiences?

According to Diane Coutu in her article “How resilience works” featured in the Harvard Business Review, resilient people possess three defining characteristics.

1) They coolly accept the harsh realities facing them
2) They find meaning in terrible times
3) They have an uncanny ability to improvise, making do with whatever’s at hand.

Sounds a lot like our Queenslanders at the moment doesn’t it?

I found this article interesting because not only is resilience important in times of crisis, but it’s an important tool that will help us get through life. It’s an important skill that you want your people (particularly your leaders to have) and the good news is that it can be learned.

Why is resilience so important?

Dean Becker (President and CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems) says that “More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.”

Facing down reality

When we talk about resilience or mention things like positive psychology in the business, expect to hear audible groans from people thinking “great, I’m wasting my time with this think positive crap when I’ve got a tonne of work to do”. They may have come across positive affirmations and believe that being resilient is about being an optimist.
Optimism is great, but it can be highly ineffective if it’s blind optimism- and that’s why facing down reality is key. There’s no point in saying that you are something you aren’t and or that something is going to happen when there is no chance. A down-to-earth view of reality is needed.
For instance, when an Admiral who was held prisoner and tortured by the Vietcong for eight years was asked “Who didn’t make it out of the camps?”; the Admiral replied “Oh, that’s easy. It was the optimists. They were the ones who said we were going to be out by Christmas. And then they said we’d be out by Easter and then out by Fourth of July and out by Thanksgiving, and then it was Christmas again…You know, I think they all died of broken hearts.’”

The search for meaning

This is about resisting the victim mentality, and making meaning of the experience. Only then will the lessons emerge. In finding meaning, people are able to move on from the present struggle and look to the future. It also makes the present situation become less overwhelming.
For instance Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor describes feeling “disgusted by just how trivial and meaningless his life had become” as he worried day to day about how he was going to work with the sadistic foreman and whether he should trade his last cigarette for a bowl of soup. He sought to find meaning and purpose in order to survive. He set himself a goal to use these experiences in the future and imagined himself giving a lecture after the war on the psychology of the concentration camp, to help outsiders understand what he had been through despite not knowing if he would survive.

Ritualized Ingenuity

Psychologists follow the lead of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in calling this skill bricolage. In the modern sense bricolage can be thought of as a kind of inventiveness, an ability to improvise a solution to a problem without proper or obvious tools of materials.

You may have heard stories about UPS which tells its employees to “get the job done. If that means they need to improvise, they improvise”. For example, UPS was able to start delivering parcels just one day after Hurricane Andrew devastated southeast Florida causing billions of damage.

People were living in their cars after homes were destroyed, yet UPS drivers and managers sorted packages at a diversion site and made deliveries to people no matter where they were. This gave people a sense of purpose or meaning amid the chaos.

In summary Coutu says that “resilient people and companies face reality with staunchness, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air”.

Are you launching a resilience program in 2011 or do you look to recruit resilient people in your business?

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?

In creating HR Club Sydney, I’ve been very fortunate to be able to meet a number of very amazing and passionate individuals. I also regularly get invited to events that are happening in Sydney, and am free to write my thoughts on these topics. After all, I don’t make any money from HR Club Sydney, I’m not reliant on boosting traffic to my site and I don’t get paid to say certain things. It’s great because I feel that gives me the ok to say when I think something or someone has done or is doing something cool.

With that said, the week before last I was invited to the Proteus Leadership Networking Breakfast where HR Club Sydney was fortunate enough to be given a table.

I got the opportunity to sit with some of my favourite HR Club Sydney people and it was fantastic to see so many cards being swapped and potential career opportunities being discussed.

I also wanted to write about the presentation because well I thought it was fantastic, and apologies it’s a wee bit later than I would have liked but I wanted to do it justice.

I attended this seminar at a time where I was thinking very much about leadership and what it means to be one. Within HR we know the difference between leadership and management, but it’s important to remember our friends in the business don’t always see it our way. This presentation hit the nail right on the head and I’m hoping many of us can use some of these ideas to create change in our organisations.

These are some of my key take outs (and you’ll probably be nodding your head or shouting hallelujah with me lol!).

Richard started off by talking about how people normally fall into management roles, rather than being selected for their people management skills. Familiar story particularly in areas of technical skills or ability. What happens then is that people with bad managers either leave or try to wait for them to leave. We all know about how employee engagement impacts upon people and the business- so why is it still happening?

I love the Peter Drucker quote that was used, “The only definition of a leader, is someone who has followers”.

It’s so true. Being Gen Y, I have often got the attitude from Managers that I should do exactly what they say because they are the Manager/Senior Executive/Partner/Director/Been here a really long time etc. And that’s not to say that being young means you can walk around doing what you like or thinking you know everything- but it begs the question: without people actually wholeheartedly following what you are doing, how effective are you as a leader anyway?

Richard also mentioned the work of Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones who are Europe’s leading experts on organisational culture, leadership and change.

They are past winners of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best article in the Harvard Business Review, entitled, “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?” The huge interest the article generated led to a five-year journey exploring authentic leadership and their book is the culmination of that research.

Just because you have the title or “authority” it doesn’t mean you will have people onboard. It’s not an entitlement- it’s a privilege to be a manager or a leader but some people these days just don’t get it. Some even believe that that is the way people should be treated because “they were treated that way” or “that’s how it is in X industry”.

4 words.

Doesn’t make it right.

Source

Richard talked about how autocratic leadership may have worked in the past, but that Gen Y just simply won’t put up with it. Will they complain? Probably not. They’ll just vote with their feet.

In looking at a definition of an autocratic leader, the wikipedia machine says that:

Under the autocratic leadership style, all decision-making powers are centralized in the leader, as with dictator leaders.
They do not entertain any suggestions or initiatives from subordinates. The autocratic management has been successful as it provides strong motivation to the manager. It permits quick decision-making, as only one person decides for the whole group and keeps each decision to himself until he feels it is needed to be shared with the rest of the group.

In the great words of Dr Phil “How’s that workin for ya?”

So now that we are all nodding our heads in unison, the real challenge is to get this message across to the decision makers of the business. Would love to get some discussion happening in this, and let’s keep it on topic. It’s not Gen Y versus Baby Boomers/Gen X etc.

It’s about leadership and what’s going to be effective.

Also- Richard was a fantastic speaker so check out his presentation here
Breakfast Followrship NSW

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.

I’m very pleased to announce our next HR Club Sydney Event which will be the third for 2010. It’s great to keep the ball rolling and with so many in attendance last time, I hope we can keep building the local HR Community. Save the date- 8th June- Level 5, 88 Phillip Street, Sydney.

One of the aims of HR Club Sydney was to provide a place where local HR people could meet in a casual environment and share experiences. Another aim for me was to provide access to some of the top HR resources available and provide it to people for free. It may be that you are early on in your HR career or you just don’t have the budget to attend all the conferences you’d like to. My hope is for people to be able to read and hear from others what the key takeouts were and start a discussion, or to provide you with the access to those speakers for free.

This is why I’m excited about this one. In case you don’t have the budget to attend HR Summit this year, I’ve managed to secure Muffy Churches from A.S.K Learning to present a case study around developing the learning roadmap for an award winning program they developed with Siemens Ltd. The award in question is actually the highest honours in the LearnX Asia Pacific Training Awards 2010 for Best Leadership Training Program. Very impressive!

Why should you attend?

Well there will be information shared on the training needs identified, key objectives of the program and how this complete approach provided a long term solution, as well as addressing cultural transformation around people management.

The second half of the presentation will be an interactive session of a simulated training rollout. Muffy will take you inside a sample roadmap and experience two key training moments along that timeline; such as live leadership training activities including: a) Experimentation with the Coaching Model “GROW”, and b) The adaptation of conversation to various personality styles.

The session will be fun and highly interactive and can be used as an example as a model for developing your own internal learning strategies and roadmaps.

Learning Points

• See how a major transformational strategy map can grow organically from one key internal pain point.
• Understand the importance of aligning learning initiatives to business goals and getting buy-in from stakeholders at all levels.
• Move inside the strategy map to experience a critical learning piece.

Muffy Churches Biography (GM, Performance Skills – A.S.K Learning)

Muffy Churches Bio

Muffy is the principle developer, designer and facilitator of A.S.K Learning’s performance skills courses and employee development programs. She combines over 15 years of soft skills training, executive coaching and facilitation across three continents.

She is renowned for her preparation, enthusiasm and the ability to provide the linkage between conceptual models and practical business outcomes for participants and their companies. Muffy’s energetic style and ability to involve all participants in the training journey has delivered outstanding results for an array of blue-chip organisations such as Qantas, Dell, Canon, Siemens, Westpac, Telstra, Bayer and AMEX to name but a few.

A special shout out goes to Jane Copeland for this one, as she’s helped me out with organizing another great speaker for HR Club Sydney (for free!).  To find out more about award winning L&D strategies that are working, for global companies such as Dell, Siemens, Canon, Commonwealth Bank, Toyata and HP you should connect with Jane via LinkedIn. Even if you don’t have the need now, its good to keep up-to-date with what’s going on that space.

Finally, if you have a speaker that you think HR Club Sydney would benefit from, don’t hesitate to contact me. Although I understand everyone works for a business, the idea is to share information and learnings through things like a case study- not a hard sell for your product so please keep this balance in mind if you have a suggestion for a speaker.

Otherwise- I hope to see you there!

Welcome back everyone. I hope you enjoyed a lovely break away from work (I didn’t even take my laptop home or switch on my blackberry) and spent some time with friends and family.

It was great. I had lunch with my family on Friday, I took my little sister to Luna Park and then had a Guitar Hero Party on Saturday night which was totally off the hook. It was great to be in the company of people that make me happy.

Previously I’ve posted about the need to eat well, get enough sleep and exercise in relation to mental health and general wellbeing. I’d like to take that a little bit further today and talk about developing resilient leaders at work.

So what is resilience anyway?

n.

The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune; buoyancy.
The property of a material that enables it to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed; elasticity. (source)

Read more here

The Resilience Institute talks about both Organisational Resilience and Individual Resilience.

A Resilient organisation is one which realises its own potential through nurturing the the ability of those working within it to:

• Bounce back from adversity
• Thrive on challenge
• Explore and reach their own full potential
• Have a positive impact on others

For an individual, Resilience is the ultimate set of life skills. Resilience Training is the journey towards knowledge and mastery of the body, heart, mind and spirit. With practice resilience becomes intuitive.

A resilient person learns how to:

• Remain calm and engaged under pressure
• Skilfully promote health and vitality
• Align and master emotions and mind
• Develop leadership and influence skills
• Live with meaning, purpose and exuberance

So already there are some of you thinking, yeah well that would be amazing but we can’t even get our employees to do performance reviews and is it HR’s job anyway?

Well each Business Partner’s role varies from organisation to organisation, but I don’t really limit things to what I think should or shouldn’t fall into my job category- I just try and focus on things that I think will make the biggest impact.

I think that having resilient employees like the ones described above would make my job in HR a lot easier and dramatically impact upon business results.

Have you done anything to assist employees in becoming more resilient?

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.