“The most critical challenge for any organization is to enlarge the circle of trust.” I found the following contributed by Deborah Mills-Scofield on the MIX website. Command-and-control systems reflect a deep mistrust of employees’ commitment and competence. They also tend to overemphasize sanctions as a way of forcing compliance. That’s why so many organizations are [...]
Engagement must be part of the fabric
I frequently rail against those who ask ‘where should engagement sit in the organisation?’ or those who see the route to engagement as simply a matter of internal PR. I was therefore delighted recently to find a company where engagement arose from a deep commitment to improve the customer experience, and an organisation design aimed [...]
Inequality in organisations – more evidence of harm
No less prominent a business figure than Richard Lambert, former CBI Director General, has joined the chorus of criticism against the ever-widening gap between top executive pay and that of the average worker. Writing in the Financial Times of 5 November 2011, he says ‘a continuing surge in top executive pay is damaging the interests [...]
Why the anti-capitalist protests have lessons for companies
A letter from Christopher Knee in the FT of 31 Oct 2011 caught my attention. He invokes the ‘fractal principle’ in asking whether the anti-capitalist protests at St Paul’s and elsewhere across the world have microeconomic lessons for our companies. I believe the answer is a resounding yes! Inequalities in communities, which are at the [...]
Can’t get enough employees, or can’t fire them quickly enough
Isn’t it ironic that within days of each other the Wall Street Journal headlined ‘Why Companies Aren’t Getting the Employees They Need’, and the British newspapers were reporting on Adrian Beecroft’s report, sponsored by 10 Downing Street, proposing to make it easier to fire people. The solution to both issues is to get employees more [...]
A new approach to corporate social responsibility
A NEW APPROACH TO CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is usually taken to mean actions by businesses that add value to their local communities, or indeed to society as a whole, as well as to their shareholders or owners. Advocates of CSR usually think in terms of companies funding, or helping to fund, [...]
Government sponsored taskforce on employee engagement
Almost two years ago, the Department for Business and Skills (BIS) published a report entitled ‘Engaging for Success’, by David McLeod and Nita Clarke. At the beginning of April there was a high-profile launch of a government-sponsored task force of some 30 government and big-company figures to ‘ensure that a range of practical opportunities are [...]
Employee engagement and entrepreneurship – do they require similar attitudes?
I see a similarity between the attitudes needed for entrepreneurial success and those relevant to people who are, or who are likely to become, highly engaged employees. Reams have been written about the characteristics of entrepreneurs. A typical list is: Are you determined? Are you financially responsible? Do you have management skills? Does your family [...]
Why aren’t great workplaces universal?
Writing in the ‘Best Workplaces’ supplement published with the FT on 20 May 2010, Will Hutton, Executive of The Work Foundation, muses why the ‘great place to work’ is not universal, given that it produces such good results for its companies. He writes: “One of the conundrums of the modern workplace is why ‘high performance’ [...]
Rise in City jobs leads to poaching fear (FT 4 May 2010)
According to Brian Groom, FT Business and Employment Editor , quoting research , by Astbury Marsden, the average number of qualified candidates for each new City job vacancy has halved from 5.7 a year ago to 2.7 in March He believes the jump in demand could prompt a return to the aggressive poaching of talented [...]