There’s nothing like a disengaged Australian workforce to cause post traumatic stress

Employees come in all shapes and sizes but mainly fall into three categories when it comes to their levels of engagement with their employer and their job.

You have the engaged ones who are just what an employer needs – co-operative, committed, loyal and hopefully don’t ask for too high a salary. They’re just a delight to have around – they tend to be innovative, and confident enough to make decisions on their own, are creative and just love their boss. Their fellow workers tend to be stimulated by their enthusiasm which leads to higher productivity. They have a profound connection to their employer and understand the value of the company brand and all it stands for. They value the experience they are gaining from being employed.

Then you have the somewhat disengaged ones who are only in it for the money and are biding their time until a better opportunity comes their way. Often semi-comatose, they do what they’re told but not much more. They don’t smile or laugh much and tend to go home on the dot. They put in minimal effort, keep quiet most of the time, even with their fellow employees, and don’t go out of their way to do a better job. They can have a chip on their shoulder, believing they are in the wrong job or in the wrong industry.

Then at the bottom of the pile are the actively disengaged employees. These are the ones you wish weren’t your employees. They represent the ‘cancer spreading through the organisation’ or the ‘one bad apple’. They tend to display a negative attitude to most things, cause internal rifts and disrupt harmony. These employees undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish. They are keen to complain and criticise and take delight when others follow suit. Fellow employees tend to go out of their way to avoid them.

A typical breakdown of a workforce would comprise:

• 25 - 30% engaged employees
• 55 - 60% somewhat disengaged employees
• 15% or less actively disengaged employees

Even though it has been calculated that most organisations only experience ‘active disengagement’ in around 15% or less of their workforces, the effects can be very disproportionate and go beyond workforce disruption right to the bottom line.

Gallup’s five year study of employee beliefs and actions determined that disengaged employees were costing US businesses US$300 billion annually in lower productivity and performance.

The Gallup Management Journal’s semi-annual Employee Engagement Index reports that 29% of US employees are ‘actively engaged’, 54% ‘not engaged’, while 17% ‘are ‘actively disengaged’.

Actively disengaged employees are often the most difficult problems to fix or eliminate. They rarely want to change and tend to sabotage management’s efforts to confront the situation. This is where the superstar from HR comes to the rescue. Sometimes, however, they go willingly, feeling relieved that ‘finally it’s all over’ and they have been released.

There is no getting away from the fact that workplace relationships are personal. Employees need to relate well with others to foster an harmonious working environment. Any disruption to the dynamics that support these relationships will have far-reaching consequences. Disengagement must be identified quickly before it has time to take hold and multiply. When was the last time you engaged an employee engagement survey?



Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au

What is flexible working, what’s in it for the employer and who’s doing it?

Organisations must adapt to economic and cultural change by embracing more flexible working practices or risk losing the new war for talent. Fifty percent of employers surveyed who had flexible practices in place admitted these were borne out of the GFC where flexibility in terms of shortened working week and other necessary trade-offs with employees were implemented as a survival strategy to retain employees whilst necessarily reducing their salary levels.

Our recent survey of business leaders in Australia and New Zealand, conducted with The Rubicor Group also sought to uncover the current extent of flexible working practices already in place across the business communities of both Australia and New Zealand. We were interested in understanding the perceived benefits and challenges that flexibility brings into the workplace and whether flexible arrangements are now an integral part of the employee value proposition employers are presenting to the external candidate market as well as their internal employee audience.

Does successful flexible working really mean boosted productivity and improved staff morale, as many claim?

The findings below reveal a powerful argument in support of this.
The findings below seem to support this notion.
The sentiment observed in our survey responses seems to say so.

• Only 2% of the surveyed audience felt that there were no positive business benefits gained from introducing flexible work practices
• 86% of the businesses surveyed now provide some form of flexible working initiatives
• 84% felt flexibility would create higher levels of retention
• 75% of respondents agreed that flexible work practices would have a positive benefit in attracting quality staff
• 74% also felt employee morale would increase
• 70% of all respondents believed that employee engagement would improve
• 64% felt they would reduce absenteeism in the workplace

It seems then that flexible working can deliver significant benefits for both employer and employee. There appears however to be little awareness of how to fully harness this via the EVP and employer brand, with 57% of respondents admitting that these benefits were NOT regularly discussed with applying candidates.

We know that work-life balance is increasingly on the radar for employees and candidates. We also know work-life balance is a key driver of job satisfaction for generations X and Y, and increasingly the Boomers. We can then suggest with confidence that flexibility and work-life balance then are an integral part of the EVP and as such represent a significant element of any employer brand. It is not without reason that the adoption of flexible practices is widely supported by HR practitioners.

Work-life balance keeps individuals healthy, stimulated in all areas of their life, and more likely to stay and contribute productively to their employer’s vision.

It is getting harder for employers to ignore that there are more flexible working models and more technology to support them than ever before. Employers must mind-shift away from needing to see an employee in a seat to fostering a ‘results-oriented’ environment.

The key words here are ‘trust’ and ‘empowerment’. If you don’t trust your employees and are not a manager who works hard to empower employees, then you will struggle to make such a scenario work and will likely be left behind. We are witnessing more remote and flexible working than ever before. Business sectors that have fiercely resisted the model, such as the legal sector are finally succumbing to employee pressure in order to retain and attract in a very competitive field – they are not alone.

Many office policies relating to Flexibility are not formalised (statistic) which could represent a ticking-time-bomb for employers. Employers beware – when rules and favours are not applied with equity across a workforce – if this occurs then previously settled employees may well become disengaged or even move on.

Healthy Internal Communications

• Over 43% of managers surveyed said their teams were unaware or only partly aware of the current flexible benefits available to them

There is a clear communications gap here between having the benefits available and making employees aware of them, even when these benefits have been specifically designed to keep them in the business! – this communication gap is hurting many employers who do not have a robust EVP, have poor internal communications and no effective employer brand to recruit to.

The most desired flexible practices suggested by survey participants included: Childcare support, Sabbatical, Job share/Flexi-time and Technology support.

The strongest perceived or expected problems/difficulties outlined by survey participants included: Supply and support resourcing, No trust from leaders and managers, Potential fragmentation of teams and Expense.

Sample response (see below)

To access the Flexible Workplace Survey – March 2010  report document click here.



Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au

Are disengaged employees holding you back?

The GFC and its resulting job losses have, on one hand released an array of available talent to the market, and on the other hand have fostered many cases of disengagement within the workplace. Shaken by the dismissal of their colleagues, disillusioned by their own frozen-careers or exhausted through delivering ‘more for less’, many employees are fed up with worry and sleepless nights - many blame their leaders and expect them to ‘put it right’.

Disengaged employees are not good for business. Consider some of the ways they can negatively impact your organisation’s bottom line:

• a lack of focus – not delivering close to 100% effort
• distracted – product and service deficiencies result
• bad influence – a negative effect on co-workers
• undermine – leader’s vision and authority
• leave – or cause others to leave
• inappropriate uses of company time – job seeking, time wasting, clock-watching
• lack of focus – company initiatives don’t gain traction
• increased absenteeism
• employee morale falls across the organisation
• employee productivity falls
• no creative or innovative input
• no real drive or incentive to go the extra mile

What causes employee disengagement?

• burnout due to long working hours and lack of recognition in return
• inadequate training, career mentoring, feedback and support
• broken promises
• lack of empowerment
• favouritism/inconsistency
• ineffective leadership
• inflexibility
• an inappropriate environment
• a brand with which no one wishes to be associated
• mis-trust and or micro-management
• career opportunities absent or minimal
• individual contributions not acknowledged
• poor team spirit
• poor internal communication particularly during the GFC when redundancies, changes in work patterns and budget cutbacks were occurring
• Inability to compete with remuneration levels offered by alternative employers (talent competition)

Actively disengaged employees can cost employers thousands, if not millions of dollars. Gallup estimates that the decreased productivity and performance fostered by actively disengaged employees’ costs U.S. businesses around $300 BILLION annually!

Ignore disengaged and actively disengaged employees at your peril!

Employers should make every attempt to find out who’s motivated and who’s not, who’s engaged and behind the leader’s vision and who’s going through the motions. Who’s there for the long-term and what keeps them bound to the company. Who’s contributing, who’s a passenger and who’s a company assassin?

Discover what people most ‘like’ about working for your organisation, what they actively ‘dislike’ and what you need to do to engage, motivate and retain them.

Online employee survey – why you need one now…

Looking at the employee profiles below – doesn’t it make sense to understand the prevailing employee sentiment and levels of engagement within your organisation?

HI offers:

• Free Employer Branding presentation (EmployerBrandGuidanceSystem 2010)
• Free Brand clinic – find out how your brand is performing

Our all-staff surveys probe general levels of engagement and employee perceptions of the value proposition across 12 key areas which comprise the employee experience.

Our surveys will:

• Identify strengths and weaknesses within your existing employment framework
• Indicate ways in which improvements might be made
• Solicit anonymous quantitative input from employees
• Allow comparison/alignment between employee groups
• Provide insight into the levels of sentiment within the workforce

Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au

Vale recruitment advertising

Australian recruiters and employer branding companies like Heywood Innovation were shocked at the news this week that national recruitment advertising firm TMP Worldwide has collapsed into administration with the closure of five offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, despite winning four gongs at Fairfax’s Employment Marketing Awards only a few months ago.

This presents sobering insight to the state of the recruitment sector throughout 2009. Despite a seemingly dramatic pick up for many recruiting firms in the opening months of 2010, the strain of prolonged low advertising activity throughout 2009 proved too much. Previously Monster Inc before its purchase in 2006 and subsequent renaming, TMP Worldwide was a major supplier of recruitment advertising services to governments around Australia.

Most of us will appreciate that if there are only a few job vacancies available there isn’t much call for recruitment advertising. It makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that here in Australia our experience has been that the downturn also caused companies to clamp down on their employer branding activities. This in my estimation has contributed significantly to the rapid turnaround in recruitment activities in these last few months. Employee engagement has fallen off the radar for more than 12 months. Consequently the ‘itchy feet’ syndrome is affecting many employees, causing their employers to start feeling the pain of departing talent. This ‘knock on’ effect with employers is predicted to become one of the key contributors to the SWD ‘Second Wave Downturn’ the doomsayers are preaching will hit us at the end of the year and continue into 2011. We sincerely hope not.

More sobering is the realisation that the future prospects for print media are, like the Australian drought, looking pretty dry. “I’ll have $10 for online media to win, and a cold beer mate”.



Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au

Talented females shunned

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been saying some profound stuff on the subject of talented females failing to break into senior management roles or onto company boards.

Its recently released Corporate Gender Gap report was the result of surveying 600 human resources professionals across 16 industries in 20 countries.

The US has the highest percentage of female employees at 52% followed closely by Spain then Canada, while India is dragging its heels at only 23%. Shame on you India. This suggests that not many organisations are fully committed to gender equality. The average number of women achieving CEO level across the 600 companies was less than 5%.

Legislation in Norway now ensures 40% of a public company board is female. A major step forward. How many other countries would be game to follow suit? Would male-dominated boards and senior management have something to say on the subject I wonder?



Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au

20 key problems that manifest with a disengaged workforce

We meet with many HR professionals at our workshops and in our ‘front line’ activities helping organisations deal with employer branding-related challenges – particularly those that are a direct result of disengaged employees. The challenges faced by these HR professionals are so prevalent that we thought it would be useful to record them. Here they are – challenges from organisations both large and small:

• Employee morale falls across the organisation
• Employee productivity falls
• Employee turnover increases
• Increased absenteeism
• Poor attitude results in dissatisfied customers
• Product defect rate increases
• Lack of focus on business objectives
• Lack of direction – becomes hard to move forward as a team
• Work in silos – become individual and defensive
• Change initiatives don’t gain traction
• High levels of workplace stress, affects relationships and quality of work
• Infighting and point scoring
• Poor brand representation
• Job seeking and inappropriate use of organisation’s time
• Leaders viewed with apathy and skeptism
• Ghost interviews
• Cliques form – long termers v newbies
• Diminishing loyalty to the organisation
• Employees not reliable
• Negative world of mouth and malicious gossip – inside and out

Any of these problems can have a detrimental effect on your organisation’s bottom line and should be identified quickly before they have a chance to take hold.



Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au

How attractive an employer will you be in 2010?

Whether you are fishing for talent, positioning yourself to engage an elusive individual, or aiming to retain and nurture the best of your catch, employer brand is the bait, which will tempt potential employees and arouse and retain their interest.

Your employer brand represents your position in the market – the perception of your employment experience in the minds of employees and candidates – it communicates the fullness (or lack thereof) of your offer – what makes you unique and compelling as an employer and why.

It is a hugely undervalued business tool with impact far beyond the placing of a few recruitment adverts, with a reach all the way to your organisation’s bottom line. It removes the risks of poorly performing job ads and lofty recruitment campaigns by focussing your messaging and visualisation around the strongest components of your Employee Value Proposition (EVP).

Employer branding is not about visualising the optimum aspired messaging to get candidates to knock on your door. It is a considered end-to-end process that looks within – it delves into the hearts and minds of the people inside your company (and occasionally outside). It identifies the very reality of your employment experience and markets the most positive, compelling or unique aspects of this experience. It also provides the possibility for very real improvements and alignment of the employment experience with the promises made and the aspired value proposition.

Careful consideration of your EVP will tell you where improvements must be made to more fully engage your employees, or be ultra-competitive on attraction. It will highlight where you are not competitive and cannot hope to win the minds of candidates, and where you are leading the field and need to shout louder.

Changing times can be unsettling for employees. They can quickly lose faith in their employer’s strengths and vision for the future – particularly if communications are scarce and fail to resonate with them.

It is only a matter of time before talent and skill shortages re-ignite the ‘war for talent’ and employers’ priorities once again become focussed on attraction and retention in a candidate tight market place. With many skill sets projected to be once again in high-demand the way for employers to combat this is two fold:

1. Assess your EVP - is it competitive, is it still relevant and engaging post-downturn and will it hold onto and motivate your people in recovery times when they expect to see some reward and payback?
2. Develop a standout employer brand to communicate and differentiate the offer.

Sourcing in 2010 is projected to become increasingly competitive and fraught with complications such as:

• Candidate and skill shortages destined to return
• A significant exodus of employees who have been ‘sitting tight’ during the downturn
• Increasingly disengaged employees undermining the leader’s vision, fragmenting company culture and detracting from operational efficiency
• Short tenures - with 70% of employees looking to change jobs within two years (good news for recruitment firms)
• A growing trend towards demands for flexible work practices
• Ageing workforce and problems associated with mixed demographics, desires and perceptions

Australia presently leads the way in employer branding investment, suggesting that many employers are already aware and on board with the advantages to be derived. Candidate perceptions can be influenced with well crafted messages and images. When they find out however that the promises made in the job adverts were merely ‘ink on paper’, all faith in the integrity of the employer disappears and the search for an honest employer with a ‘real’ opportunity begins anew. For those organisations willing to embrace best practice and change - maximising the EVP and employer brand will bring huge rewards well in excess of the dollar investment made.

Having a well-conceived employer brand will enable you to:

• Inspire and engage with your employees – improving morale and increasing retention
• Develop and communicate your Employee Value Proposition
• Cascade the leader’s vision and the organisation’s values
• Increase referrals and ‘word of mouth’ promotion – underpins successful marketing and advertising activity
• Achieve competitive positioning in the minds of target audiences and candidates
• Deliver measurable returns on marketing and sourcing $ invested
• Facilitate planned workforce and organisational development
• Attract and retain ‘right-fit’ talent, improving business efficiency and reducing staff turnover
• Increase referrals and pro-active candidate applications – less reliance on advertising
• Be positioned as a preferred employment destination – employer of choice status
• Communicate more effectively
• Achieve competitive positioning in the minds of candidates
• Fill ‘hard to fit’ positions – attract specific skill-sets
• Align your present employer brand with your aspired one
• Create high visibility campaigns that engage with candidates and employees

Benefits of a highly engaged and retained workforce:

• Better customer engagement and satisfaction
• Improved morale and heightened loyalty – employees ‘living the brand’ and ‘sharing the vision’
• Facilitates growth and promotion from within – investment in personal development and training provides a $ return
• Leader’s vision is understood and embraced
• Advances skills and knowledge transfer – promotes knowledge sharing within the company
• Retains skills, experience and IP
• Collaborative work environment – improved morale, inspiration, passion
• Generates brand ambassadors – encourages positive word of mouth promotion
• Aligned on behaviours and common sense of purpose – unified identity as an employer
• Reduced employee turnover provides significant cost savings
• Improved efficiency and profitability

Now is the time to oil the employer branding wheels and leave your competitors in the slow lane.



Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
tony@heywood.com.au
www.heywood.com.au