Shifting sands: a changing working landscape?
24 Feb 2012 | Ben Moss and Sophie Armond
This is an abridged version of an article from Well-Being, Good Work and Society - Time for
Change, the annual report of the The Business Well-Being Network founded by
Robertson
Cooper.
Work is fundamental to a balanced and fulfilling life. Whether
you enjoy it in its own right or see it as a means to an end (e.g.
to feed and clothe your family or to send your kids to university)
few would disagree with this. So if we accept the central role it
plays in our lives and society, our willingness or reluctance to
get out of bed and go to work in the morning is hugely important.
The implications of how we feel about our work are numerous and far
reaching. It impacts on us as individuals, the success of the
organisation we're working for, the economy and our
communities.
As with everything else, our working landscape has continually
changed over the decades. But a number of factors have been
combining in recent years to signal the potential for a more
fundamental shift, causing many to pause and reconsider our
priorities - in government, business and individually. 2011 saw an
unprecedented focus on well-being, as David Cameron initiated the
development of a measure of national well-being. The government has
realised that it is no longer sufficient to rely solely on hard
productivity metrics like GDP as a measurement of the UK's success
and this has spurred activity to find a more holistic and
meaningful package of measures.
The riots in the summer of 2011 also sparked a national dialogue
about education, unemployment and the materialistic nature of our
society - the importance of opportunities, training, sense of
purpose (collective and individual) and community became acutely
apparent. And the success of our organisations obviously has a
vital role to play here. At the moment many organisations are
trying to consolidate their position and find their way in a new,
and often tougher, environment. Similarly, individuals are trying
to accept and adapt to a more insecure environment.
Well-Being at Work
The importance of measuring employee well-being, and the drivers
behind it, is well established. Its influence on business and
individual level outcomes has been repeatedly demonstrated and the
strategic importance of well-being is now broadly
accepted. The number of organisations implementing well-being
programmes is on the rise, but in many organisations the programmes
focus primarily on physical well-being. We don't want to
underestimate the importance of this, but to see fundamental and
sustainable impacts on performance, psychological well-being also
needs to be managed in an integrated and strategic manner. The
state of the art has now moved beyond stress management and
ensuring you are not taken to tribunal by staff. The model is much
more preventative, but more than that, it is about actually
realising the sustainable benefits of positive psychological
well-being.
Encouragingly, some leading organisations are starting to
realise these benefits and show how a real focus on well-being can
go hand-in-hand with commercial success, not to mention attracting
and retaining the best talent. Zappos, for example, has made employee
well-being their central goal, and company founder Tony Hseih has
started the Delivering Happiness movement to share their
message in the US. In companies like this, well-being is
comprehensively 'mainstreamed' in to a range of activities from
recruitment and induction to leadership development and employee
appraisals.
The economic climate since 2007 has also shone a spotlight on
new areas - for example the relationship between well-being,
engagement and resilience. As employees struggle to do more with
less, and risk a subsequent drop in morale, personal resilience has
been an increasingly desirable trait - and we've seen a greater
focus on training and development in this area.
Income and happiness
Over the years our incomes have increased, as has personal
borrowing, but this doesn't seem to have made us any happier. Eurobarometer surveys show that in fact, life
satisfaction has remained fairly constant since it was first
measured in 1973 - regardless of the state of the nation's economy.
Of course, we do need a certain level of financial security to meet
our basic needs, but higher incomes do not seem to bring relative
improvements in quality of life when you look at whole countries.
In fact, pay has less of a relative impact on happiness and
productivity than other factors such as working relationships and
control, as long as people perceive that they are fairly rewarded
for the work they do. We need to restructure our beliefs about the
relationship between money and happiness - and factor in the value
of family, friends, sense of community and meaningful work. As
others have started to say, maybe a life well-lived should be our
real goal.
Unfortunately there are those in organisations that still see
well-being as a 'nice to have', which gets axed as soon as times
get tough. They just do not fundamentally believe that this is as
important as, say, a focus on cost management or sales training.
But these things should not be seen as mutually exclusive. We don't
have to choose between happiness or money, employee well-being or
profit; it is possible to change the way we do business to include
a more human element, while also seeing financial returns on
investment in well-being.
Working life
As the type of work we do is changing, so is the composition of
organisations. In 1911, one in seven were managers or
professionals, almost 100 years later that figure was one in three.
As organisations, and indeed jobs, have grown and become more
complex the increasing layers of hierarchy have brought the need
for many more managers. This means that a large majority of workers
not only need to be good at their job, they also need the people
skills to bring the best out of others. While academically we know
a lot more about the impact of leaders and managers on their teams,
managerial skills and training still has some way to go.
Perhaps surprisingly, working hours have remained fairly
constant, which could be partly a result of legislation, but are
still high compared to other nations. And other sources suggest
that recorded working hours may not tell the whole story: according
to research from Aviva: "Workers are putting in a staggering
26 million extra hours in the workplace each day...six in ten
employees regularly work beyond their contracted hours, putting in
an average of 1.5 hours overtime a day. Nearly one in four claim
they work an extra 2-3 hours daily. 79% of these hours are unpaid,
which means workers are providing around £225 million worth of
'free' hours each day for employers."
What's most important (and currently not accounted for) is that
we measure the impact this has on people's lives. In some roles
long working hours are a well known aspect of the industry and not
of concern to employees, it might even be something they like about
their role. For others overtime means a boosted income, and in some
organisations staff rely on extra hours. Whether too many or too
few, it's when people are really troubled by their hours that
problems arise, but that is seldom measured by well-being and
employee engagement surveys.
Health
When pressure becomes unbearable and challenges insurmountable,
workers are at risk of stress. According to HSE statistics,
incidences of work related stress have remained fairly constant
over the past decade. However, this year for the first time stress
became the most common cause of long-term illness for manual
workers and it maintained its position as the leading cause of
absence for non-manual workers. Sometimes it can be easier to think
that if something isn't going up we don't need to do anything about
it, but this is not the case. The issue still cost 10.8 million
working days in 2010/11, not to mention the impact on individuals
and their families.
Of course physical health also has a part to play. Happily this
is an area companies are able to tackle more visibly, with
initiatives like the Global Corporate Challenge helping to
contribute to improvements in employees' habits.
Our relationship with work
Over the past century, right up to the present, employees have
been moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs with regards to their
relationship with work: starting with the need for employment to
deliver money for food, clothing and shelter; moving through to a
position that's healthy, safe and relatively secure; and then onto
Generations X and Y, who wanted something fulfilling. These
increasing expectations from employees have meant employers have
had to give greater consideration to the treatment of their
workforce - a good thing!
This has not just been 9 to 5 paid employment in the traditional
sense either as we have seen the rise of flexible and home working,
both of which have been based on a more trusting and dynamic
psychological contract than ever before. Another example is the way
in which voluntary work can bring an enormous sense of purpose and
feel good experience: indeed, studies have shown how the amount of
volunteering undertaken is a contributor to increased happiness.
This is an example of how greater 'mindfulness' rather than
material gain can contribute to our happiness.
A big part of the challenge is the acceptance that we are
unlikely to have one job or career (and certainly not one employer)
that defines our identity and self-image. Looking ahead we will all
need to be comfortable with the idea of career fluidity and
personal flexibility, in order to be able to deal with changing
responsibilities and movement across industries and sectors. We
each need to adapt to get a deep sense of purpose from doing a
variety of good work - some paid, some not; some short term and
some longer. Nor does it need to be a contribution that changes the
world. Making a difference in our communities can also be
enormously satisfying and in some cases the output will be more
tangible than the tasks we undertake at work.
In this new economy there is a risk that high levels of youth
unemployment coupled with an increasingly competitive job market of
highly educated people will allow employers to take advantage of
those setting out on their careers. There have been many tales of
long term unpaid internships in recent years. So we must make sure
that we don't slide back to a situation where people are so
grateful for work that they will tolerate anything. And companies
have to take the long-term view: a tempting, short-term cost saving
strategy will result in high staff turnover, a diluted talent pool
and lack of loyalty as the best people leave when better
opportunities come along.
What next
Well-Being is an enormous, multi-faceted topic that is starting
to drive some seismic changes in our working lives and non-working
lives. Keeping track of the impact of health, finance, education
and day-to-day working life on our well-being - and then taking
action to make improvement - is certainly a challenge for those in
positions of responsibility. Whether they are HR professionals,
CEOs, MPs or the Prime Minister the challenge is big, but we've
made huge progress; now we need to keep the momentum going and make
sure the benefits can be consistently and sustainably reaped by all
of us.
This is not just something for 'them' to do either, we must each
review our own priorities and take responsibility for our actions
and the environments we help to create, whether as an individual,
manager or well-being professional.
It will take a brave government to lead strongly on the
well-being/happiness agenda through these uncertain times - one
that aims to build a society that is defined as much by how good
and how resilient it feels as by what it has. Economically things
look like they will get worse before they get better - but it would
be a mistake to see this shift in culture and mindset as something
that could only be addressed in the good times. That would
perpetuate the myth that all things happiness and well-being are
luxuries that we address when all other basic needs are fulfilled
(i.e. our need for money).
Actually, this is about changing our goals - accepting that a
happy, well lived life is the aim and that money won't necessarily
guarantee that for us. These are the perfect times to start to make
the change - the evidence that the old ways weren't sustainable is
staring every single one of us in face. If we can't see it now,
maybe we never will. We need to take this as the impetus to make
the change, to start building a concept of what our new partners at
the Work Foundation refer to as Good Work and let the benefits of this flow
out into our societies and communities.
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About the authors
Ben Moss is the Managing Director of Robertson Cooper
Sophie Armond manages the Business Well-Being Network
This article is taken from Well-Being, Good Work and Society - Time for
Change
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