Sitting is the new smoking

Today's HR Magazine notes research by the British Heart Foundation showing that sitting for long periods of time can result in greater risk of type two diabetes and cardiovascular illnesses.

“The simple act of standing for even as little as two hours per day can increase muscle activity and have a significant impact on health and wellbeing."

It's something we discussed in depth at Fleming's Smart Workspaces Summit recently.

In fact I was so convinced by the discussions there that once I got home I bought my own sit-stand desk.

I looked at Varidesk which I would have placed on top of my existing desk in our home office but eventually bought a self-standing (or sitting) Bekant desk from IKEA which we've placed in our entrance hall.

I use it pretty much the whole working day now, never mind just 2 hours per day and definitely recommend these desks to you.

But then, I do think a lot what sit-standing is about is flexibility and putting more humanity into the workplace, not just wellbeing.  Plus standing is good, but it's not as good as actually moving around.

So these are my three main workspaces at home now - my sit-stand desk, my elliptical trainer in the garage and just outside the front door (our back garden gets a bit too shady by mid-morning.)

My own advice to organisations is to make all of these types of workspaces available to their staff too.  Including working from home as an option.

And as I've been posting, I think HR needs to involve itself in these areas of the workplace as well.


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Symposium Events: Wellbeing and Stress Summit

 

   Keeping with my recent employee engagement theme, yesterday morning I attended Symposium’s Wellbeing & Stress Summit.

We started with a engaging presentation from Gill Crowther, HR Director at Nominet UK.  Gill talked about using the Best Companies to Work For process to create love in their employees.  She wants to see ‘Nominet’ stamped through any of her employee’s flesh if she were to cut off their arm.

So Nominet are focusing on creating tough love through great conversations between their people managers and employees.  And by supporting their employees more broadly too.  For example Gill talked about an HR manager who wants to become a coach and how Nominet are supporting her while she sets up her own coaching business, as they still get great value from her whilst she sets this up over the next few years,

They’re also measuring love creation through their engagement survey.  And through other things eg I liked the example of some ex employees sending in thank you cards after some recent redundancies (not for their redundancy, but the way this was done).

Now I loved Gill’s attempt to create love – which I’ve posted on a few times, and will coming back to again soon.  But I do think it will probably require a bit more, and a deeper, focus than Gill described.

I’m also not quite sure about the arm thing (about cutting it off!, or expecting to see your company name there when you do).  I think we can (with difficulty) aim to create conditions where our people will love our organisations, but I just don’t think we can expect that old, traditional, formal, hierarchical, authority based love any more.

 

 

We also had a couple of good insights from BUPA, Simply Health and the CMI.  I particularly enjoyed Alistair Dornan’s session  reviewing some recent research from BUPA and elsewhere on health, wellbeing and engagement.

So there has actually been some good economic news as well, though it got a bit hidden between the Leveson Enquiry and the current wave of Bash the BBC-itis (ahem!), eg the ongoing fall un unemployment. There are a number of reasons for this – including more organisations ‘talent banking’ (keeping their surplus talent for further opportunities rather than jetisoning them for short-term cost savings) which I think is great news about how businesses are becoming more serious about HR – if it is true.

But Alistair suggests that organisations aren’t well prepared for the future.  That’s firstly because of the rapid change in work and jobs.  Eg that the top ten jobs in 2010 eg social media ones didn’t exist in at the turn of the century.  And eg the average graduate today will have had 14 jobs by the time they’re 35.

Secondly, it’s down to the difficulties – unemployment and poor management – experienced over the last few years.    The young and the over 50s have been hit disproportionately by the recession.  And the 50 year old employee with just a couple of different roles under their belt and who has been unemployed for a few years now isn’t going to engage in the same old way, or respond that easily to the 35 year old manager already onto their 15th job.

I’d agree - you’re never going to find your company name stamped through the flesh of these (or even just most) people, it just isn’t going to happen.  We need to find a different way to engage – and perhaps the basis for a different type of love?

 

Symposium Training is the training and workshops brand of Black and White Trading Ltd, one of the UK’s leading independent training providers for HR and related professions. With over 90 events a year, our conferences and seminars target delegates with interests in:
- HR Strategy & Practice
- Recruitment
- Health & Safety, Employee Well-being
- Pay & Benefits
- Employment Law
- Training & Development
- Diversity & Equality
- Employee Relations.

Symposium conferences typically feature 8-12 expert speakers per day, including professionals with first hand experience, academics, industry observers and other experts. Events generally provide strategic analysis of an issue and explore practical solutions for the workplace.

Also see HRreview - a news and information resource for human resources and related professionals. Updated news items are posted daily and there are regular updates to the features and analysis section, looking in depth at topical HR issues. HRreview’s website is supported by a weekly email newsletter (please register to subscribe).

 

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London 2012 – inspiring a generation?

 

   So after all the road closures, public sector strikes, G4S recruitment problems and Mitt Romney’s international ‘charm offensive ‘ – or offensive charm perhaps - London put on a hell of a show on Friday.

Then on Saturday I was at the Olympic Park for Team GB in the women’s handball which was an amazing day too. That was partly about the handball which I hadn’t seen before and is a great sport in which we’re showing some early potential (we need to change the goalie though). But for me it was mainly about the atmosphere at the park where there was a great buzz and everyone seemed happy and friendly, which is an increasingly rare experience these days. I thought the volunteers made a great contribution to this, being friendly themselves, offering to take photos and clearly being keen to help out when they could.

If we manage to keep this up, the rest of the two weeks should be fantastic too.

There’s still the legacy of course. And that’s going to be even harder to deliver – and there are some disconcerting signs that we won’t manage it (see Mr Romneyshambles, I can say this, you can’t).

Any legacy will be partly about the infrastructure, and I hope West Ham are finally successful in taking over the stadium after the events. But being based in West London rather than the East I’m not clear about the potential for the rest of the site.

And the legacy is partly about people, hence the games’ tagline, ‘Inspiring a Generation’. And that’s probably going to be much harder to do – certainly more demanding that handing on the torch to a group of young athletes which was the one bit of the opening ceremony I did find a bit naff.

From an HCM perspective, it’s about increasing engagement (in society – yes, in business – we’ll still have to see), and probably health and wellness too. This is something the Olympics could definitely make a difference too – particularly with around 30% of children aged 2 to 15 (in England) being classified as overweight or obese. (See Mitt I could have talked about the US here, but I’ll choose not to do that).

It’s something else I was talking to people about at Monster Buzz where I to think Gareth Jones made the point that there was nothing overt being done to encourage young people to engage in sport (and I did look under my seat in the handball for something but there wasn’t anything there).

But perhaps we don’t need this – eg with the current upsurge in cycling to get around the extra traffic in London, plus all the interest in Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish, Sir Chris Hoy and Lizzie Armitstead, we shouldn’t need any more promotion to get more people on their bikes.

And it’s early days so far, but from the way my daughters have been playing with their Olympic footballs on way back and since we got home, I think we’ve got it about right.

 

 

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Happy Employees?

 

   Right, sorry about that – two weeks away from blogging.  I’m not sure why really though I have been feeling a bit less buzzy than normal.  For example I found myself in a particularly morose mood at the Monster Buzz event last week.  Perhaps it was the questions I was asked but I seemed to spend a lot more time talking about why talent management isn’t working very well rather than why it’s so important (although we did still come to the collective conclusion that talent management IS more important than talent acquisition, so that’s one positive outcome recently).  Although perhaps of course this is one reason why it is so important?

It doesn’t seem to be just me that’s low on enthusiasm.  One of the surveys I mentioned at Monster Buzz was Towers Watson’s Global Workforce study suggesting that that a quarter of UK workers feel stuck in their roles and three quarters say that their ability to advance in their career has either got worse or stayed the same compared to a year ago.  (I think it was at this point that one of my fellow panellists suggested they were surprised in what I was saying and hadn’t realised how bad things had become.)

Then, there’s the CIPD’s Employee Outlook which suggests that only a third of workers trust their senior leaders and more than half display signs of having adopted a ‘not bothered’ attitude to their work.

Like me, the CIPD also put this down to poor talent management:

“At the CIPD we are curious as to why so many feel this way,
particularly given the business and personal benefits reported
in the survey of when people are actively engaged at work.

There are a number of pointers in the research as to why people
might be feeling this way – and these mainly relate to how
people are managed. While satisfaction with immediate
managers is generally strong, there are continuous issues around
a lack of personal development – including coaching on the job,
discussing learning and development and giving feedback on
performance. Perceptions of leaders also need to improve, with
views on leaders’ consultation being particularly poor and trust
and confidence in leaders falling further this quarter.”

 

The one piece of good news I suppose is that people are at least more engaged in work than they are without it – shows in this week’s National Wellbeing survey (Happiness Index) results that whilst 20% of UK workers rated their life satisfaction below 7 out of 10, this increased to 45% in the unemployed.  That’s not saying much though is it, surely we should be aiming for more?

Perhaps the Olympics is going to help, but even if the games do manage to ‘inspire a generation’, this doesn’t mean they’re are going to have much impact on people’s attitude within employment…

I’ll be considering this issue over the next couple of weeks…

 

 

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Making meetings more exciting?

 

    There was some interesting research out a few weeks ago from Epson and CEBR suggesting that the average UK office worker wastes 2 hours and 39 minutes in meetings every week.

• £26 billion: the amount lost from UK economy through time wasted in meetings in 2011
• 2 hours 39 minutes: the number of hours workers feel are wasted in meetings during an average week
• 49 minutes: the number of wasted minutes in meetings not made up for later
• 10 hours or over: the amount of time one in five senior managers and directors say they spend in meetings per week
• 11 minutes: the average amount of time it takes for people’s attention to drift in a meeting.

 

Nothing too surprising about any of this, other than perhaps how low some of them are (people concentrate in meetings for 11 minutes at a stretch – really???).

Anyway, I’ve got an article in Management Today providing some suggestions for dealing with this problem.  The last one’s my favourite!

• Dispense with chairs
• Get social
• Opting out
• Avoid technology blunders
• Water cooler culture
• Be bold with timings
• Get creative with locations
• Weapons of mass distraction
• Use professional facilitation
• Better biscuits

 

There’s a bit more detail on Management Today.

 

Picture credit: Crowne Plaza lays fresh grass carpets

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Beyond Engagement - part 2: Wellbeing

 

   The other recent piece of news relating to engagement and the role of the UK government supported Employee Engagement Taskforce was last week’s report from the National Wellbeing Taskforce and the Office for National Statistics.

The Taskforce was set up by David Cameron to create a Happiness Index that would balance the existing measure of GDP.  However the focus is actually a lot more than happiness. This is partly because the taskforce believes happiness is intangible whereas wellbeing is “measurable in the same way our economy is” (I’m not sure that’s true).

But it’s also because happiness is seen as more short-term as well as a bit gimmicky:

“Wellbeing and happiness are not the same thing, although they are sometimes used interchangeably. What we are interested in is overall wellbeing, which the Government has described as a positive physical, social and mental state. It’s not about feeling happy for a few minutes at having won £10 on the lottery or buying a new pair of shoes. It’s about building a sense of long-term wellbeing in individuals and communities that improves quality of life for all citizens across the UK.”

 

The shift echoes that of Martin Seligman, one of the originators of the field of happiness within the school of positive psychology who’s new book about wellbeing, Flourish, also seeks to move the debate on from happiness which “essentially measures cheerful mood, so it isn’t entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than happiology”.

I also much prefer the concept of wellness or wellbeing to that of engagement (also see my comments in part 1 of this post):

• Firstly wellness is much more of a two-way, shared sort of concept (“It is essential that the set of measures of well-being is relevant and well-based in what matters to people, both as individuals and for the UK as a whole”).
• Secondly, the language is more natural and therefore compelling.
• Thirdly it’s a broader term, incorporating a number of different elements of human capital.

 

I like the Seligman describes this last point: “Wellbeing theory denies that the topic of positive psychology is a real thing; rather the topic is a construct – wellbeing – which in turn has several measurable elements, each a real thing, each contributing to wellbeing, but none defining wellbeing.”

A good example of these different elements is provided by Gallup Healthways Well-being Index (pictured).

The government also seems to have understood this point about wellness being a construct. The taskforce are defining wellbeing as consisting of these five themes: health; good connections with friends and family; job satisfaction and economic security; present and future conditions of the environment; and education and training.

Also, rather than trying to create a single index, the intent is to report (in July 2012) on eight different aspects of wellbeing. The first four of these are satisfaction; happiness; anxiety and meaning which will be measured through these questions in the government’s Integrated Household Survey:

• How satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
• How happy did you feel yesterday?
• How anxious did you feel yesterday?
• To what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

 

The taskforce is still working on how it is going to measure four other areas of wellbeing: childhood; economy and inequality; health and work/life balance.

I think organisation’s could learn a lot from this research, for example by extending surveys from engagement to something broader, two-way and more compelling – possibly the concept of wellbeing, and by reporting on these different aspects rather than just one overall index alone.

 

Technorati Tags: Office National Statistics,Wellbeing,Wellness,Happiness,Engagement,Martin Seligman,Flourish

 

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