Susan's Blog  
(Occasional comments by Susan Seitel) 

August 26th

Trying to make your workplace more effective? Here are a few important findings.

We’ve just finished the new “Most Important Studies from 2005 to 2009.” It's 64 pages of results from research on 20 different workplace and workforce subjects. It has about 200 short summaries and now includes findings from 2009, some of which were pretty exciting if you’re in the business of trying to make your workplace more effective.  

Here are a few bottom-line results from studies that came in last year: 

• Employees who are happy with their work-life benefits work more than 20% harder and are a third more likely to stay with the organization.
• Those companies that helped their workers achieve good work-life balance enjoyed average net earnings per employee of 23% more per year than those that didn’t.
• Companies reporting the highest levels of racial diversity brought in nearly 15 times more sales revenue on average than those with the lowest levels.
• Having a higher percentage of women in senior management positions – up to the CEO level – is positively associated with better company performance.
• Taking a day off each week had a positive impact on productivity.
• More than 70% of U.S. workers polled agree: technology, like smart phones and laptops, have boosted their productivity; many say they’ve transformed their work-life balance.
• Just showing appreciation for employees can boost engagement levels by as much as 30%.
• Only 14% of disengaged workers think senior management is concerned about their employees; 77% of engaged workers believe they are.
• A pilot program found giving employees more flexibility and control over their schedules cut absenteeism and leave time.
• A three-year study documented the link between workplace culture and employees’ health, finding those who work in a supportive, flexible workplace are not only happier but healthier as well.
• A Swedish study found men who had said their bosses were bad had a 25% higher risk of a heart attack.
• A study compared workers who maintained close online connections with their boss and found they produced more than those who didn’t.
• One in five workers want so badly to work at least one day a week from home that they’d take a 5% pay cut to do so.

One thing we found interesting were the subjects that dropped by the wayside last year. There were none (that we noticed, at least) on corporate responsibility, nothing on eldercare or shiftwork, the value of EAPs or the payoff for onsite childcare. But there were certainly many on the joys of working virtually, and of course on increasing productivity. Click here to order the full report.

August 12th

Skills mismatch? That's a 25-year-old story

A USA Today article last week had an eerily familiar headline: "Skilled Labor Shortage Frustrates Employers." Said the article, "While there are currently five unemployed workers for every job opening, the government says there are 227,000 open manufacturing jobs, more than double the number a year ago. One hundred eighty-three thousand jobs have been created since December, the strongest seven-month streak in a decade. The jobs are hard to fill because they require people who are good at math, good with their hands and willing to work on a factory floor."

A quick Web search found other recent articles, including one in the Financial Times last February with this headline: "China's ‘Workshop of the World’ Suffers Acute Labor Shortages” and one the following month about India’s IT industries facing a similarly acute labor shortage.

It all sounded so familiar. Curious, I went to our archives (we stopped adding to them last December, but they date back to 1991) and put in the search words "skills and shortage." I got an amazing 54 matches that went back all the way, with at least one article every year describing skills shortages in a variety of industries.

Believe it or not, way back in January of 1991, a Wall Street Journal headline read "Skills mismatch, not labor shortage, is the problem." "In spite of layoffs and swelling ranks of unemployed," said the article, "a baffling predicament still affects many companies; they can’t find enough qualified workers. Even companies that have slashed thousands of jobs have hard-to-fill vacancies."

Try 1997, a year when unemployment stood at the lowest level in ten years. "The much-discussed shortage of skilled workers is entering a new phase," says Carol Ann Meares, policy analyst for the Department of Labor. No longer is it “just an inconvenience for businesses.”

How about 2006, when a survey of nearly 33,000 employers in 23 countries found 40% were having a hard time filling positions. The reasons: aging populations, low birth rates and – there it is again – a talent shortage. In 2008 another worldwide survey of nearly 43,000 employers shows the number having trouble filling positions down, but still high at 31%.

So it's obvious. Whether unemployment is sky high or at its lowest level in years, the skills shortage does seem to hang in there. If your company is having trouble finding the skills you need, here are three suggestions. 

Take a fresh new look at the qualifications you've decided you need for the jobs you're trying to fill. It may be that someone without advanced degrees can, with a little training and encouragement, do great work.

If you haven't already, invite your current employees to join in the recruiting effort.

Give your company's culture a shot in the arm. Pull together a representative task force (including a marketing representative) and put them to work with the goal of creating a culture that's so inviting that no one will want to leave, and skilled employees will be lining up at the door. 

Click here to comment! (Your comments come to us by e-mail).

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August 5th 2010

The future of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network

It would be hard to find a friend of work-life who didn't know and love Judi Casey, currently director of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network. That Network, which is losing its funding, has been investigating possibilities for a future that could not only make a difference, but would have enough support to keep it going. It looks like Judi may have found that future.

"Open access" may be just the ticket. Here's her recent blog about it, reproduced with her permission.

"While current users value the Network’s products and services and want it to continue, the earned income potential is not enough to cover operating costs. Therefore, the Network has had to consider fundamental changes to its business model. We examined many alternatives and fortunately, technology now makes possible an alternative model that would provide many of the benefits of the current Network at much lower cost. Within the broader academic community, there is increasing momentum behind “open access,” or efforts to make high quality peer-reviewed scholarship freely available on the internet. Transitioning to an open access model appears to be the solution to our continued existence.

For example, open access repositories can provide full text academic content for free to end users and most traditional journal publishers now allow open access archiving of articles into repositories. Increasingly, funders and institutions are requiring open access archiving of scholarship, which in turn is raising awareness in the research community about open access. More information about open access is available here and here.

Our survey found that a significant percentage of academic respondents expressed a high likelihood of participating in aspects of an Open Access Network (OAN). When we tested this idea in focus groups, participants responded positively, providing specific ideas for tailoring the technology to the needs of work-family scholars. Therefore, the proposal to the Sloan Foundation for the “Next Generation Sloan Network” will include an OAN that uses technology to shift content generation to the community of work-family scholars and away from a paid staff.

In addition to a repository for articles, books and reports, the proposed OAN can include other features such as a news tagging system, a document download center (with currently available Network resources such as the Encyclopedia, Policy Briefing Series, and Fact Sheets), a Working Papers series and the Who’s Who in Work and Family database. If funded, this open access model will require the building of a new website platform. During the development of the new website, you will continue to have access to the Sloan Network resources that you currently enjoy.

The proposal to the Sloan Foundation will be submitted later this summer and funding, if approved, would start next fall. Other aspects of the next generation Network included in the proposal are the development of a membership network and a possible move to another academic institution with a leading work-family scholar as well as a cadre of work-family researchers. Of course, nothing is definite until the transition funding is secured. Please stay tuned to learn more about the evolution of the Sloan Network and the exciting new features that it will provide for the work-family community."

Click here to comment! (Your comments come to us by e-mail).

In a recent article, Peter Cappelli points out that two studies comparing online training with classroom training disagree on which has better outcomes. A closer look finds the one that's slightly negative may be comparing apples with bananas, and it offers a good lesson about online training.

Does training work as well when it’s delivered on a computer? Cappelli recalls one study commissioned last year by the U.S. Department of Education that reviewed the evidence and found the answer was a strong yes! It not only works as well, it does a better job. The study, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies concluded that “Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.” It said online learning appeared to be an effective option for both undergraduates, graduate students and professionals in a wide range of academic and professional studies.

To present the other side of the coin, Cappelli reports on another study – a new one, called Is it Live or is it Internet? Experimental  Estimates of the Effects of Online Instruction on Student Learning.

This study found “modest evidence” that live-only instruction dominated internet instruction.

But whoa. In this one, students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same.

In other words, the “online learning” experiment consisted of students watching a taped lecture. No interactivity, no exercises, no characters. We e-mailed study author David Figlio to make sure. His response: 

“This is exactly correct. We are comparing live vs. Internet delivery of a traditional lecture-based course, albeit one with some Internet ancillaries. We have not seen an experiment of this type yet that studies the relative efficacy of the more immersive Internet-based courses of the type that you develop; our study is best thought of as a test of the cost-saving scaling up of traditional lectures being increasingly practiced by budget-crunched colleges and universities.”

We all know that some learners do better in a live setting. For companies that have a workforce full of gregarious young people, we suggest giving employees a choice and offering our e-courses on workplace flexibility in a classroom setting to those who prefer it, with two people to a laptop and lively discussions after each section.

But for those employees who have a full plate and precious little time to spend in the classroom, or for companies that want excellent outcomes with the least expenditure, nothing beats online training. As Cappelli says, it’s “a beautiful idea. We can invest in superior material and delivery, put it up on the Web and spread the costs across lots and lots of users. People can use it when they need it. They don't have to wait for a training session to be held, they don't have to travel to a central location and, if they're really busy, they can do it on their own time. Costs go down, while training effectiveness goes up through better content and timely delivery.”

The first study, while positive about online learning, points out that it's not just the medium that makes it superior; the online and classroom courses they compared differed in many ways.

To be successful, online learning has to be more than just a classroom lecture on tape.

Click here to comment! (Your comments come to us by e-mail).

(And click here to learn more about our online courses.)

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July 8, 2010 

Trying to get more work out of fewer people?

For some, the recession is coming to an end. Hopefully you’re ramping up, getting ready to bring more people onboard. But if you’re still trying to squeeze more work out of workers who may be tired, frustrated and disengaged, we have a great idea. It promises to put new life into employees and increase their output by as much as 20%. And it may not cost anything, depending on how you do it.

This is the perfect time to introduce telecommuting to people you may never even have thought of as possibilities for telework. 

Here are a few abbreviated tips for beginners and intermediates. (If you’d like more information, please click here to take our telework course for managers.)  

Start with a pilot.

We believe in the “better to ask forgiveness” philosophy, but only you can know whether you need permission to do this, and from whom you might need it. If you do, tell your manager that your goal will be to test whether what you’ve been reading about telecommuting is true; would it increase productivity, re-engage workers and have hidden benefits for the organization?  

Once you have the go-ahead, put the word out that you’re looking for volunteers for a three-month telework pilot. 

Create a proposal form that includes which days they’ll work remotely (two per week is a good way to start), which of their tasks they can do from home and what they see as the benefits to the organization. It should include their business goals and objectives, any changes they anticipate will impact the organization and how they’ll handle them, and how they’ll communicate with you and the rest of the staff on their remote days.  

What support will they need from the office? What equipment will they need? (No budget? You may have to choose only those who have their own equipment). And what suggestions do they have for how the arrangement will be evaluated? 

When it’s time to choose your volunteers, look for those whose job outcomes can be measured and who have at least a couple of day’s worth of tasks that can be done without face-to-face contact. (If you can’t find at least five or six, this might be a good time for a little work redesign, trading tasks with others, getting rid of tasks that are outdated, etc.) 

As much as possible, choose those who have demonstrated the ability to work independently and who keep their promises. And of course they’ll need a safe place to work, with sufficient electrical capacity.

The devil may be in the details

Once you’ve chosen your teleworkers, make sure you know the schedule they’ve chosen and the tasks they’ll be taking on, and be clear that those tasks have measurable outcomes, asking for each, “How will we know when this is done and whether it was done successfully?” (To measure some tasks, you may have to actually ask customers or co-workers to complete regular short scorecard surveys.)

How often will you meet with them? How will you get them when you need them (you may find that’s easier than when they were supposed to be at their desks in the office). And how will their colleagues and customers maintain contact? How often will they return messages?

Some teleworkers report feeling isolated, but that’s unlikely to happen with just two days out of the office. And one reason for failure is the teleworker’s inability to stick to a schedule. While one of the benefits of working from home is the freedom to stop work in the middle of a day and transfer a child from school to another activity, for instance, it’s important to create a plan and stick to it. Suggest they plan their office hours the night before and put a sign on their home office door that says “do not disturb.”

How will you know whether your program succeeds?

 Set goals of your own and decide how you’ll measure results. In addition to increased productivity, do you want your workers to be more satisfied? Engaged? Committed? If you have enough participants you might try an anonymous before/after survey. If there are too few to ensure anonymity, wait until the pilot concludes and then ask the right questions – i.e. “Rate your opinion of the impact that working from home had on your ----- ” (fill in the blank) allowing them to choose a number from 1 to 10, with 1 being great negative impact and 10 being great positive impact.

Oh, and before your pilot begins, broach the subject of what results will mean. What percentage of positive answers will you need in order to call it a success? What will success mean? Think about what you’d like to see happen. Another pilot? Training offered for managers and staff? Telework becoming a regular offering? Shift to a focus on results? Company wide flexibility?

Consider this: this pilot could be the beginning of a workplace transformed. For more information about telework training for managers and staff, click here.

Click here to comment!

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