Twitter and Facebook as Agents of Revolution in Cairo, Tunis….and Your Workplace?

I was reading a piece by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the emerging situation in Egypt. After a brief intro he made the jump from Cairo to Silicon Valley, saying that without the invention of the microprocessor’s predecessor (the transistor) Egypt and Tunisia would not have happened. The chip has allowed for Twitter and Facebook, along with so much more, and these programs are the basis of communications for protesters on the streets.

Henninger makes the point that this is the end of what he calls “stability”, where governments can control their people via the control of information. Whereas a few people would gather in the past in Cairo to quietly chat over who had been arrested, now such information is blasted across the ether to everyone around the world. As he says “instability is the new status quo”.

From this, I got to thinking about work and engagement, and the effect of Twitter and Facebook there. If such things as happen in Cairo happen in the workplace, what will be the effect? Revolutions at work? Maybe yes, perhaps not so dramatic, but significant nonetheless. Here are the reasons:

–Social media are a very democratic form of communication. Anyone can get an account and anyone can tweet. Such democracy is very welcome to some companies (Google comes to mind with its constant feedback programs and surveys for workers there)…but in some workplaces it is the last thing they want! I’m not going to say that some companies are run like a police state…but some aren’t so far off either, with high levels of fear as the driver.  An ego-driven CEO will not tolerate democracy in his Kingdom! Heaven forbid that the peasants find a way to use Twitter to revolt! Yet revolt they will, if not on that company’s official intranet or corporate Twitter feed, then in other places over which the CEO and his communications staff have no control. As we see, voices want to be heard and they will be heard. Social media is their outlet.

–Social media are extremely engaging. That’s right, people love them so much they can hardly hold a normal conversation while holding a smart phone…(did someone say addictive? Let’s not go there this time, but you have a point). This engagement is the reason why most companies now reach out to social media users…to tap into this. So if Facebook and Twitter are opening us all up to communicating much more with each other and with the companies with which we do business, can we really go to work and experience something so radically different? Can we go from a heavily engaging experience outside work to something which feels like traveling back through time to the unconnected past? Trust me, as someone who has surveyed many people at work, many people do work under these conditions, even now. So the answer is that these organizations will survive in the dark ages for a while, but the pressure will build, as it built in Cairo and Tunis. This will require more than a shallow effort on the part of these organizations, but a fundamental shift to a level of workplace democracy and communication the likes of which many have never had.

So social media are a disruptive force indeed: not only do they allow for whole societies to try and grab freedom for themselves but they are also methods of engagement for the rest of us at a level which human history has never experienced. Organizations which do not reflect this level of engagement in how they treat their people will be Mubaraks of the working world….and like him, they will be hounded out of the marketplace.

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Is “High Morale” Always Good? For Whom? The Case of the LA Teachers.

I try to avoid even the appearance of being political on this blog, but I can’t resist telling you about what I read a couple of days ago and how it made me think about the subject here. Living in southern California I often read the “local rag”, the Los Angeles Times, and one morning recently there was a front page article about how the LA public school teachers had been forced by a court to give up some of the protection of their union contract and to accept that in the future, in some of the LA public schools (but not all), layoffs would no longer be based on seniority only. Anyone who knows that city and its teachers union (UTLA-United Teachers Los Angeles), knows that this is far, far from what they would have wanted, in fact something which they did fight tooth and nail against…..and lost.

Seniority is the basis of many union contracts, not just in the US but also in Europe and elsewhere. It is based on a reasonable premise: that those who have invested their careers somewhere should have some protection, especially if they are older and close to retirement, etc. The arguments in its favor are significant, when looked at on face value. However, there is a downside, and it is a big one: when layoffs occur based on only seniority, young, enthusiastic, often recently minted teachers, with all the new ideas which come from recent college courses and all the high morale and engagement which derive from not having had time to become jaded…and just from being young….these people are GONE! Left behind are those who have been there the longest, whose morale is lower simply because of the opposite effect of what I have described above (as if by gravity over time, morale sinks over the years, until right before retirement, then takes a leap as people realize, “another year and I’m FREE!”). Firing teachers under the LA (or nearly any teachers’) contract is difficult, to say the least, whether for a layoff or any other reason.  This means that less than competent individuals, those who have retired on the job years ago but still show up in the classroom every day, those whose students’ performance in math and reading had barely budged under their tutelage…those people are often not removed after the relatively short period of time which runs before they receive “tenure”. 

So this is the basic dilemma, and it’s a difficult one: protecting older, more “senior” teachers, regardless of their performance, or doing something radically different and basing layoffs on performance only. What does the latter strategy achieve? It achieves something remarkable, something which the parents of some children in the LA schools woke up to and acted upon: laying off teachers based on performance puts the children first and not the teachers!

Yes that’s right, for all these years the teachers’ contract has been geared…surprise!….overwhelmingly towards the teachers, not the kids.  This has protected those teachers who cannot perform now and perhaps have never performed that well. It’s a revolution…but should not be…to suggest that the children being educated should be front and center. Its also a strong legal argument, especially when put forward in a civil rights context, and that is what happened in Los Angeles: the parents of children in poor performing schools essentially said to the court “we believe that laying off based on seniority is leaving us only with the longest tenured teachers, not the best ones, and as a result has deprived our children of the best teaching available to them”. The judge agreed and with a stroke of the pen, changed the system for many of the LA schools. Of course, the union was furious at having this “agreement” forced on them and vowed to appeal; it was quoted as saying that this will “demoralize” the longer-tenure teachers, since they will no longer be in a totally 100% secure job regardless of how they perform (try getting that deal in a normal enterprise!)

“Demoralize”:  I almost fell off my chair with the mis-use of this word. Yes the teachers will be upset at the loss of this deal, one which has been in place for decades and which is still in place throughout the US (although under attack for all the reasons we have discussed here in many other states). But “demoralized”? The people who are demoralized are the kids who are getting a sub-standard education from teachers whose continued employment by the LA Unified School District has only to do with the possession of a pulse, and nothing to do with their performance for those students.  Besides, think of what this move away from senority-based employment will do for the great performing teachers:  it will totally “re-moralize” them, the opposite effect of what decades of seniority-based employment practices have done.

I am not anti-union.  I grew up in England and studied management and business psychology in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Manchester.  I know about the gruesome conditions which workers endured and the way the unions grew to protect people from this explotation.  Under the best of conditions in the private sector, there is usually a balance of power between unions and management;  but in the public sector we have the additional need to consider the ”customers” being served by government entities, whose interests are sometimes far from front and center.   In this case the balance has been far too much in favor of the teachers and their union, and not on the children being educated, and the court is redressing that.  Indeed the situation is so serious that the court agreed that seniority-based practices actually deprived some children of their civil rights….and to top it all off the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), long the scourge of right wing rhetoric and usually painted as a loyal friend of the left, including unions, filed in favor of this lawsuit and the kids.

I feel for any teacher who is laid off in this difficult California financial climate.  But they have had a good ride, for decades. They have had bulletproof employment regardless of performance, fantastic (and far more generous than private sector) pensions. They have done very well. Now is the time for the students to benefit from this system, not just the teachers. This legal case is the first crack in the dyke which will bring the flood of better education to the children of Los Angeles….and hopefully elsewhere.  Listen to the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, as quoted in the same LA Times article:

“This year, if we are forced to lay off teachers, we will be forced to lay off some of the most effective, and keep some of the least effective……It’s not right. It’s not fair. And it’s not something we can allow to happen.”

This story is just beginning.  As with many things in the US, California often leads the way.  Maybe children in our public schools can look foward to their morale, and their performance, being raised as a result? 

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Employee Engagement’s Big Issues for 2011

It’s a New Year so time to take a fresh look at the state of engagement at work, employee/partner/associate engagement, whatever you might call it. How is this field doing and what are the big issues facing it and its practitioners? What challenges do we face moving forward? Has engagement met its potential in terms of acceptance by the larger organizational community and its leadership?

First of all, 2010 has brought more evidence of the importance of morale and engagement at work as more and more data are added to the extensive set which Cary Cooper and I detailed in our late 2009 book on the subject. No one should now be doubtful that engagement at work is not only a correlate of performance (customer satisfaction, productivity, profitability and even worker health) but more importantly, a driver of this. So this our starting point, the fact that worker engagement is mission critical.

Again this background, there are several issues which this field faces in 2011, and we will look at three of them here:

–Trends in Engagement: Are We Improving? Getting Worse?: depending on whom you talk to there might be good news or bad news. If you talk to Gallup, it would seem that engagement has not gone down during this Great Recession, which would seem incredible until you remember that this means that engagement of employed people has not gone down. Those who still have work perhaps feel so relieved that the downsizing machine has missed them, that that translates into some form of engagement. There are also some very well managed companies which have avoided layoffs by shortening the work week of those who work for them, and they indeed have benefited from stable engagement levels as a result. Some would suggest workers are now engaged only as long as the job market is bad, and they will then fly out of their jobs like out of a cannon, as soon as things turn around. Nonetheless, this is pretty good news and not as depressing as what we hear from others who collect data in this field, namely that both engagement and job satisfaction have suffered badly in the recession. The fact that these data do not agree is something we will cover in more detail next.

–Definition of Engagement: as strange as this may seem, the fact that trend data detailed above differ so much (Gallup has engagement flat while some have a minus 9% shift in the last year) means only one thing, and that is that they are defining engagement differently and this is reflected in their questionnaires used to collect this data. This is troubling for the industry and I have talked about it before, but it is still the case. The field is quite fragmented and each practitioner seems to have different definition of what engagement “is”. Can we imagine what would have happened in the physical sciences if someone said water was H2O and others said, no its HO2…? But in the social sciences we are used to disagreements in definition (witness the arguments about intelligence when it was a very inexact and fairly new concept), although this does not mitigate the problems which this brings to the field of engagement. Somehow and in some way we need an industry standard definition so that all can get on the same playing field and know that we are talking about, measuring and tracking the same thing.

–Professionalism of Practitioners: there has been an explosion in this field and it seems like everyone and his brother is now an employee engagement consultant. This is a bit like when your taxi driver gives you stock tips, and its time to pull back from the stock market. Maybe the field is a bit crowded and buyers of professional services in this area need to remember one of the few phrases I remember from my 5 years of English grammar school Latin: caveat emptor (buyer beware)! I am not saying that there are not great people in this field and I consider it very positive that many wish to help organizations improve in this area. However there is a two-part skill-set which is required to help an organization measure and/or improve worker engagement and morale. First a real professional in this field must have a knowledge of business issues derived from experience and learning in actual business settings, not just academic. Secondly, since engagement is about emotion and human behavior, it is essential to have a background in the social sciences, especially psychology, to really add value. I do not consider a background in communications sufficient, valuable yes but not sufficient for this. There have been too many times where I have seen great communications programs put together for the workforce which had a wonderful message but which in no way represented the way the organization culture really “lived”.

Hopefully 2011 will bring some improvements in these areas which will move engagement forward and into more and more organizations, where it should be. By most accounts the number of organizations which have ongoing and extensive worker engagement efforts is still quite low and I have never seen a number of more than 30% put forward for the US and the UK. The percentages in France, Germany and other European countries are lower even than this. This is pitifully low (given the huge benefits which accrue from it) and anything which can improve it is to be encouraged and welcomed. Part of the issue here is that some of the practitioners whom I have discussed above take a far, far too “touchy-feely” approach to the subject with prospective clients, which puts them off the subject.  As I discuss elsewhere here, morale and engagement are and should be focused on the ability of the organization to achieve its mission, and that is something any CEO can get behind given the overwhelming morale-performance connection to which this blog is dedicated. A second reason for low levels of engagement at work is that engaging workers means coming down off one’s high horse, letting go of ego-based behavior and fears, and some leaders find that hard, if not impossible, to do.  As I have pointed out, ego is probably the greatest destroyer of engagement at work.

So that is where I see this field as we begin 2011, and clearly there is lots to do.  The three areas I have discussed above would be a good start!

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Employee Engagement: Lets Stop Making It So “Touchy-Feely”!

I’ve been reading a lot lately about employee engagement as I get ready to write a new book on the subject. While there is a lot of great material out there, it seems to me there is also a focus on something which is not useful to this field: a tendency to make it a “touchy-feely” subject instead of a solid, data driven business essential. A lot of the reason for this is the fact that many practitioners who now work in this exploding field have backgrounds exclusively in the social sciences such as psychology or sociology, or they are communications specialists. Many have no direct business training and/or experience, and as a result their career paths and knowledge are very different from those in top management at most of our organizations.

The net result of this is a one sided approach to engagement which, while it emphasizes the human elements which are certainly there, neglects the fundamental reasons why anyone in top management would bother to move towards a more engaged workforce.

I’m talking about approaches which refer to engagement requiring “authenticity”, “compassion” and so on. I am as in favor of these things as anyone else, but if I am a tough CEO at the head of a company I need a lot more than this to go ahead with the steps necessary to maximize the engagement of my workforce. In the words of the political slogan from a past US election: “where’s the beef?” The beef is there of course, and its good stuff: worker engagement and its cousin high morale drive performance. Now that is something a CEO can get her teeth into.

Organizations of any kind, from a police force to a hospital or a mining company, exist to achieve a mission. Just as if you wanted to run the London Marathon, you would need to be in shape to do so, and engagement is a big part of the “shape” your organization is in. A great strategy is useless unless your culture is lined up and your workforce ready and willing to make it happen. Engagement is nothing less than mission critical. It’s not a nice, flowery “add on”, its something which one needs to focus on from Monday at 7am all week long, from the C suite to the shop floor to the home offices of the mobile-connected workers. In this hyper-competitive world where competitive advantage can be wiped out by a sudden shift in technology (ask the makers of CDs) and by ultra-low developing-country wages, engagement of one’s workforce provides an edge, something which organizations can leverage as they fight to survive and thrive. There’s nothing “touchy-feely” about this!

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David Bowles and Cary Cooper to Team Up Again on 2011 Macmillan Book Project

Macmillan has given the green light to a new book project from Professor Cary Cooper and myself, with research, interviews and writing to begin in January and publication slated before year end 2011.  In a follow-up to our late 2009 book for Macmillan which focused on employee morale/engagement and performance, Cary and I will look at how businesses and other organizations can create sustainable high employee and customer-engagement cultures, and we will explore the new paradigms which are needed after the near-death experience of the 2008-10 Great Recession.  As James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, recently said, Wall Street in particular needs to “change the perception that it’s the individual that is the hero”.

We have some important questions to ask and try to answer: 

–Can we afford to be brought to the brink every 20 years or so by people whose perspectives are both short term and ego-centric in the extreme?

–Have we gone too far with golden parachutes and outsize pay packages for leaders while others in the same organization toil under strict pay for performance plans? 

–Can the US sustain a CEO to average worker pay ratio of 300-400:1 while the rest of the world rarely goes above 25:1?  

–Doesn’t all this make nonsense of the mantra heard during bad times, the rallying cry from above: “we’re all this this together”? 

–Isn’t there a better way of doing things which, instead of pretending, truly does emphasize “we” instead of “me”, while still fully embracing and benefiting from the capitalist system which has been the source of so much increase in peoples’ living standards worldwide?

–Are some of these things the reasons why worker engagement levels are so very average…or below average… on a worldwide basis in major western economies like the US, UK and most of Europe? 

–Is it not imperative that in this time of global competition and emerging giants like India and China, we leverage all the advantages which we can, especially our management knowledge, to compete in this new world?

Cary and I will tap the minds of thought-leaders in business and consulting around the world, bringing in some of the best research and material from online communities, blogs, etc. as well as our own perspectives on this complex but crucial subject.  This is no idle speculation, how we do in this area…managing our organizations, our workforces…may end up deciding whether we can sustain our standard of living…or pass on something far less to future generations.

I am so happy to once again team up with my friend and colleague Cary Cooper on such an important book, a relationship which began for me 40 years ago as a student in his social psychology class at Southampton University (UK).  For those of you who do not know him, Cary was recently named one of the three most influential thinkers in industrial/organizational psychology worldwide, and has over 150 books and 400+ articles to his credit.  To learn more about him, please visit his blog here.  

I will keep you posted with more information on this book as it becomes available.