I get a lot of surveys sent my way in the course of a week. Most of them aren’t all that surprising or newsworthy. This one was different.
Here’s the headline that grabbed my attention: More than half of all employers have fired workers either for e-mail or Internet abuse, according to the 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey from the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute. It went on to list these other highlights from the study:
• 66 percent of employers are monitoring Internet connections.
• 45 percent of employers are tracking content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard.
• Another 43 percent store and review computer files.
• Of the 43 percent of companies that monitor e-mail, 73 percent use technology tools to automatically monitor e-mail and 40 percent assign an individual to manually read and review e-mail.
But then I looked at the fine print—the breakdown of how they did the survey. “Of the 304 U.S. companies that participated,” the press release announcing the study noted, “27 percent represent companies employing 100 or fewer workers, 101–500 employees (27 percent), 501–1,000 (12 percent), 1,001–2,500 (12 percent), 2,501–5,000 (10 percent) and 5,001 or more (12 percent).”
To put this another way, 54 percent of the companies surveyed—the very businesses doing all the monitoring—have fewer than 500 employees. This skews the study, in my view, because all the small companies I’ve worked for were a lot more obsessed with how workers were spending their time than the larger ones were.
In other words, the monitoring of employees and what they are doing on the computer may not really be increasing. It may be that this study just over-reports what is going on at small companies, while under-reporting what goes on at the bigger ones. It reminds me of the remark usually attributed to Disraeli but often repeated by Mark Twain: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Here are some survey results guaranteed to get people talking: Although organizations believe workplace diversity is important, only 30 percent can define what diversity is.
This is the classic business dilemma—can you prove that your initiative is producing results? Are you willing to invest time and resources to demonstrate it? It’s probably why diversity efforts haven’t been more successful. If the business case for diversity could be more accurately measured and quantified, more organizations would not only embrace it, but would zero in and make diversity a bottom-line priority.
The SHRM workforce diversity study made this same point. When both HR professionals and diversity practitioners were asked an open-ended question about changes that could help foster greater diversity in the workplace, both groups had the same top response: a greater emphasis on the relationship between diversity and business results.
One contributor to the survey, Frank McCloskey, vice president of diversity at Georgia Power, had some pretty strong words about this. “The field is stuck, with little innovation in how we are tracking diversity,” he said. “There is lack of discipline and understanding of what diversity means beyond race and gender or how success is being defined, or not being defined, by most corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives.”
Anyone who dares to say that there’s a lack of strong, measurable business metrics for diversity efforts usually gets taken to task for it. But I can’t recall anyone actually producing something that showed the connection between diversity and bottom-line business results.
I wish they would. Maybe if someone did, diversity could become more of a strategic business practice and less of an elusive goal that, for most organizations, always seems just out of our reach.
Here’s another view on stress in the workplace: A Miami Herald story titled “Stress is a threat to workers and companies.” I was stuck by a couple of points made in the story:
• “Today, earning a living has become so competitive that even in toxic workplaces, staffers believe their identities remain tied to their jobs,” the story said. “The resulting threat to companies is not just higher absenteeism from stress-related illness, but that those who do show up underperform, lose focus easily or argue with co-workers.”
• “Consider this: One-third of Americans live with extreme stress and 48 percent believe their stress has increased over the past five years. For 75 percent of Americans, money and work were the top stressors, according to American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey.”
• “Even worse, a new study found the suicide rate among 45- to 54-year-olds (people in their prime working years) shot up 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied, far outpacing changes in nearly every other age group. At the same time, the use of antidepressants among U.S. workers continues to soar.”
It’s a sobering story and just another reminder of how workplace stress is out of control in many organizations and threatening to erode productivity and, ultimately, profitability.
And one more thing from the Herald story: “Work-life balance no longer is a luxury,” says psychologist Ken Siegel. “If you lose your job you better have a great social network.” This is a point I made here earlier this week. Siegel also made another suggestion: Become self-aware. “Don’t go into a state of denial things will get better, that your industry will recover, because it encourages you to become passive.”
What is it about stress in the workplace these days? Is it really getting worse, or are we just more aware that it’s around and are better at identifying the telltale signs? I’d love to hear your opinion about it—either posted here or sent to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com.
Layoffs used to be something workers had to handle on their own. But, as with most things in the modern workplace, even the old way of losing your job has a new twist.
“Like so many other personal experiences transformed by the Internet, getting canned need no longer be endured in quiet, isolating shame,” according to a story in today’s Los Angeles Times. “Technology is allowing people to turn a traditionally private trauma into a quasi-public event, drawing quick moral support and even job referrals,” the Times reports. “ ‘This is something that used to be shared over the dinner table. Now the whole world can watch and participate,’ technology forecaster Paul Saffo said.”
The gist of the story is this: Workers who get laid off these days are increasingly taking a very public approach to their plight, plugging friends and colleagues into what they are going through with online tools such as Twitter. This is an online service “that notifies your friends, by mobile phone, instant message, e-mail or on the Twitter Web site, what you are doing at any given moment. These messages of 140 characters or less, called tweets, are sent to anyone who subscribes to or follows your Twitter stream.”
The Times story follows Ryan Kuder, a senior marketing manager at Yahoo, who was one of 1,100 employees laid off last week. As the story puts it, “Self-broadcasting what is usually a private experience gave Kuder more than 15 minutes of Internet fame. It gave him solace, and, more important, job leads. The San Jose husband and father of two was flooded with ‘positive tweets’ offering support as well as connections via social networking services such as Facebook and LinkedIn.”
“At least three of my e-mails this morning contained admissions that the writers simply didn’t know how to network or that they didn’t think they knew anyone who could help them find a job,” Stafford writes. “In their worried job hunts lies a warning to others: It’s no longer enough to sit at your desk and do your job well. Someday, perhaps through no fault of your own, you may not have that desk anymore—and it’s vital that you know people outside that job.”
I would take this one step further: With layoffs seemingly on the rise everywhere, often with little rhyme, reason or logical business purpose, having a fallback plan just in case something does happen is essential. That’s true for employees at all levels, from worker bees to midlevel managers to senior supervisors. Hoping for the best is a good way to live, but planning for the worst is the best way to survive.
Well, of course, there were a lot of tough, stressful jobs as recently as the first half of the 20th century. But if you have been awake for the last 10 years, you know that while the physical side may have gotten better, there’s still a lot
of stress to deal with in the modern workplace.
Nearly half of U.S. employers (48 percent) say that the stress of working long hours is affecting business performance, but only 5 percent of businesses are really doing anything about it.
Another 32 percent say that employee stress from trying to balance their work and home life is hurting the business.
More than a quarter of employers (29 percent) feel that widespread use of technology, such as cell phones and BlackBerrys, is a huge business stressor, but only 6 percent are taking action to confront the issue.
“Many companies don’t appear to appreciate how stress is affecting their business,” said Shelly Wolff, national practice director of health and productivity at Watson Wyatt. “Too much stress from heavy demands, poorly defined priorities and little on-the-job flexibility can add to health issues. By leaving stress unaddressed, employers invite an increase in unscheduled time off, absence rates and health care costs—all of which hurt a company’s bottom line.”
The study also found that stress has an impact on employee retention. It’s the most frequently cited reason given by American workers for why they would leave a company. There’s also a huge disconnect between how workers feel and how employers think they feel. Approximately 40 percent of respondents say stress is one of their top three reasons for leaving a job, according to the report. Employers, however, fail to list stress among the top five reasons they think workers leave their jobs. Instead, they cite insufficient pay, lack of career development and poor supervisor
relationships.
This isn’t just workers whining. Modern life is highly stressful, and modern technology plays a huge part in that. The balancing act is tricky and difficult for most people, even on a good day. And although a lot of progress has been made in the work/life arena, too many companies just aren’t very flexible or understanding when it comes to helping workers cope with life.
The study also had one more interesting wrinkle. Throwing money at this problem probably won’t make it go away.
“Pay alone is not enough to retain and engage today’s workers,” said Laura Sejen, global director of strategic rewards at Watson Wyatt. “To remain competitive, companies need to understand fully what causes employees to join or leave and what causes them to be productive if they stay.”
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