With climate change, youth unemployment and the increasing disparity between the rich and poor topping the list of social issues affecting organisations across the globe, the relationship between a company, its staff and the community has never been so important. But how can organisations make their people feel engaged and happy inside and outside the workplace whilst also working towards their business goals?
To get some answers, HR Magazine caught up with Lynda Gratton during the promotional tour of her new book The Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problems. A Professor of Management Practice at London Business School, a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and Advisor on Human Capital to the Government of Singapore, Gratton offered her insight into what organisations, and HR specifically, could be doing to bolster the emotional and intellectual capital of its employees whilst supporting the wider community.
A positive emotional cycle
According to Gratton, one of the key challenges for HR today is encouraging employees to be emotionally resilient and have the power to create a happy life both inside and outside of work. A large part of this, she explained, is ensuring that people have a healthy relationship between home and work, which is often referred to as the ‘work/life’ balance. Gratton prefers to call this the ‘emotional cycle’ in which the relationship between home and work can either build emotional capital or reduce it depending on the energy that is fuelling it.
She explained, “If home is negative and a reducing cycle, then you leave home feeling guilty and tired and you leave work feeling angry and frustrated. If it’s working positively, then you leave home feeling authentic and good about yourself and you leave work feeling that you have something to give home and how you make that work is a really important.” Gratton believes that the key to creating a positive emotional cycle is to look at how people work and what they do in order to explore ways to enhance staff engagement, productivity and enable a positive relationship between the home and the office.
Striking a balance
One solution, she suggests, if flexible working whereby staff are given the opportunity to manage their own time and find their own work/life balance. Whilst such a policy can be tricky for organisations to implement, especially in cultures such as Hong Kong where employees are often required to work additional hours behind their desks, Gratton pointed out that flexible working can be done. However, in order for it to work to the advantage of both employee and employer alike, companies must have clear regulations in place for employees to follow.
She used the example of British Telecommunications (BT), which has been experimenting with flexible working for more than a decade. When the company first introduced this concept into the organisation, productivity actually reduced as employees were unclear as to how to use work technology at home. Meanwhile, communications between teams began to break down due to a lack of face-to-face contact. It was only after employees learnt how to use the technology and follow the rules of flexible working that the company began to see productivity and staff engagement levels increase and time staff turnover decline.
On the flip side, Gratton pointed out Yahoo as an example, whereby the newly appointed CEO, perhaps in an attempt to make an impactful statement, scrapped the policy of flexible working bringing employees from their homes back into the office. She added, “Whatever policy an organisation introduces, it cannot be a free for all, but equally it must be fair and transparent and companies that make these processes transparent tend to have higher productivity.”
The world beyond work
Gratton believes that another key to tackling social issues is to give employees autonomy and meaningful work in relation to the external environment. One way that an organisation can build connections with the community is to allow its people to engage in work within the world beyond the workplace. She explained that one company that is championing this is the John Lewis Partnership, in which 91,000 of its permanent staff are also partners who own 42 John Lewis shops across the UK and share in the benefits and profits of the business.
The Partnership’s vision encourages employees to be a 'force for good' in the community by offering their time to support local, regional and national initiatives that help to build more vibrant, economically sustainable communities. “Such initiatives not only build emotional resilience and make people feel more ‘human’, they also enhance the relationship between employees and the organisations they work for leading to higher levels of staff engagement and satisfaction.” Gratton pointed out, however, that such anchoring in the community can only be achieved with senior management buy in, allowing HR to give employees the time and freedom to work beyond the office walls.
Setting boundaries
With mobile devices and evolving technologies becoming ever more prevalent in our daily working lives, it can become increasing difficult for employees to switch off and draw a healthy line between work and leisure. Gratton admits that many corporations have not been very good at managing this balance, although she sites Indian-based IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) as one that has attempted to tackle this issue by simplifying communications and asking its HR function to inform staff of new practices and ideas via a central blog rather than mass emailing.
Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN) is another organisation that is helping employees to set healthy boundaries between work and leisure time. The company has a corporate policy of no non-urgent emails during weekends or vacation leave as part of its LIFE-work Priority program aimed at allowing its staff, or rather Talents, to switch off outside of working hours. Firmly standing by its belief that personal health and family come before work, the company has also implemented a policy whereby one Friday per month is designated as ‘Early-off Friday’ where Talents must leave the office at 4pm, as well as half-day leave on the eve of festive holidays in order to allow more time to spend with friends and family on special occasions.
Gratton concluded, “It is the up to HR to frame the context and how things are done so they play an important role in setting an example of how people work within an organisation and this can be done. HR essentially has the power to help staff strike a healthy work/life balance, which is a big problem in many of today’s workplaces. It holds the key, therefore, to tackling some of the biggest issues facing today’s workforces.”
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
