The Snitch

Companies often adopt flexible workforce practices in order to better manage their people and teams more effectively, says Lynne Ng, regional director for Adecco South East Asia.

For instance, for companies with cyclical needs (such as warehousing, sales and promotions), having a complementary workforce helps manage work more effectively without being saddled with headcount costs.

Implementing such practices also allows for companies to retain talent (such as young mothers) who might otherwise quit working altogether.

Learn more about workforce flexibility in this four-minute video as Ng lists out its pros and cons.

With longer working hours, emails that demand for your attention (even if you are out of the office), busy executives walk a fine line between juggling the demands of the home and the workplace.

“But having a meaningful career doesn’t mean sacrificing your personal life,” says LesValene Ngion, director of product development at SIM Professional Development.

Ngion shares a five-step-plan on how can you manage better this ordeal between work and family commitments:

Step 1: Get real

To begin, make a list of Work Time and Personal Time needs.  Quantify and qualify how much time is needed in each category. Then conduct a personal audit of your work-life using a simple SWOT (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis and access the results. Where do the  gaps between your current work time, personal time,and lifestyle commitments?

Step 2: Purpose driven

What is  your values and purpose in work and life? Reflect, analyse, and list down three to five items and focus on them. Stress and frustration may result if these values and purposes are not met. But remember, perseverance is needed to keep the balance!

Step 3: Goal oriented

As goals are seen as the end result from perseverance, setting them at an attainable level would help you keep focused and refrain from getting overly ambitious. Discuss these goals with people for additional morale support. Write down your goals in your PDA calendar’s ‘to-do’ list and set reminders about them on a weekly basis.

Step 4: Adaptability

It takes conscious effort and determination to obtain work-life balance as it calls for long term changes to your lifestyle. Compromises and sacrifices are inevitable. Sometimes, you’ll just have to say  “No” without having to feel guilty about it.

If you find adaptability a trouble, please relook back to Step 2.

Step 5: Evaluation

Since the continuous effort of evaluation is necessary to maintain work-life harmony, sustaining it is an even greater challenge.

Restart the five-step plan if bump into any major decision your work-life journey.

Ngion believes that work-life balance is obtainable. All you have to do is to choose, focus, evaluate to adapt, then keep moving!

Best in class

With the results of Hewitt Associate’s Best Employers Survey released two days ago, I thought it would be interesting to see what HR policies and initiatives some of these companies have in place that made them a top employer.

McDonalds:

• Seeing the value in mature workers
• Investing in employer training

FedEx:

• Making employees the face of the brand
• Ensuring a fair and equitable workplace for all employees
• Acts of corporate social responsibility
• A belief in investing in women employees

Marriott Hotels:

• Ensuring line managers are trained properly
• A mutual respect among colleagues and a fun environment for all
• Ensuring a rigorous selection process to select the right expatriate for the assignment

Ritz-Carlton Hotel:

• Proactively taking steps to safeguard jobs during a recession
• Understanding the value of employee diversity

And as employer branding becomes even more important during this downturn, what steps is your company taking to become an employer of choice? Or has your company put aside employer branding to focus on other pressing issues?

I’ve got sex on my mind.

I’ll explain.  I just came back from  a very interesting roundtable lunch hosted by ipac financial planning. The topic revolved around gender in the workplace and had keynote speaker Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, author of Why Women Mean Business. (Plug: I did a video interview with Avivah on Wednesday and will post it later next week on this blog!)

As discussions go, Wittenberg-Cox talked about more female graduates coming out of schools these days, how women are now becoming consumers that businesses want to target, and how it all translates to the workplace and positions of leadership.

We also talked about maternity and paternity leave (remember that the proposal to add more paternity leave days was struck down by the government last year) and how governments such as Sweden have made it such that either parent can stay home with the child.   One participant then brought up a personal anecdote about how his company gives fathers five days of childcare leave, and yet as a father of two, he has never taken utilised any of those days before.

The argument against sexist workplaces has long been documented.  When a workplace subscribes or favours a certain gender construct, whether it is believing that women tend to be more family-orientated compared to male employees or that male employees are better at operations roles and women are  better  for  support functions, the company inevitably suffers from a lack of diversity,  poor employee retention rates, a lack of women talent, a smaller hiring and talent pool, yada yada yada.

You might think that it’s solely a women’s issue, but workplaces that favour a certain gender construct will hurt male employees too.

If the company culture has built up a gender construct by promoting certain gender traits, employees of either sex that do not abide by the norm will find it hard to succeed.

For instance, if the company has a very gung-ho, alpha male type culture where the men are supposed drinking after work at the pub on Fridays, what if there are male employees who don’t want to go drinking? How does this affect them?

And as in the case of the participant today, while the idea of men taking five days of leave to look after their children was all fine and dandy on policy. But if nobody else was taking those days off,  this would send a organisational message that it’s not okay for men to take those days off — because that’s just not what men do at work.

So really, sexist workplaces with reinforced gender stereotypes isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s a gender issue.

Even robots deserve some funtime.

Ever felt like the king of the world whenever you’ve successfully completed a particularly tough PC game? Well, if you can channel the same excitement into your work, soon enough you can be king of your office too.

Whenever you hit a problem at work, sometimes the best way to learn or solve the complication is to start treating it like a game. Playing, it seems, makes you feel better at your job, which naturally inspires you to be more productive at work.

Rubbish, you say? Hardly so. Even if Maslow forgot to list it in his hierarchy of basic physiological needs, playing is as essential to our health as sleep or food is. So says Stuart Brown, author of the new book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul.

Playing is actually nature’s version of troubleshooting for us. When we play, the problems we face would somehow filter through the unconscious mind and work themselves out. Just don’t be afraid of trying stuff out and to see what works. Learn from any mistakes and do it differently next time.

Playing also makes you feel alive which helps when you are back at work. Try spending a few hours doing something you love over the weekend, it can make you feel new again.

“If adults can begin to reminisce about their happiest and most memorable moments,” says Brown. “They can capture the emotion and visual memories of those moments and begin to connect again to what truly excites them in life.”

Going through this process, he adds, may also encourage someone to give serious consideration to move to another job that makes them happier or reignite their current life with elements that once brought them joy.

What’s more, with the recession upon us, there is also the worry of performing badly and getting laid off. Playing would then give you the “emotional distance to rally” as an individual or a team.

In his book, Brown cites a CEO who held an employee meeting to talk about a recent bad financial quarter. After the CEO bravely took the blame for the company’s performance, he informed everyone that there was a toy dart gun with foam darts under every seat. They were all invited to take shots at him.

The CEO then went on to explain how they, as a company, were going to turn things around. Firing the toy guns had made everyone felt better and that things might not be as bad as it seems. In a way, it inspired them to figure out ways to fix the problems.

Go on then, start playing at work today. It might just make your day.

Via USNews

If you come in to work and check your emails immediately, you’re doing it all wrong. According to a American Management Association survey in 2007, an average employee spends about 25% of his or her workday on emails. Emails also hamper employees from becoming productive and efficient.

So how can you increase your work productivity with the use of Microsoft Outlook? Martin Severn, director of Productivity Management gives us three tips on how to better utilise our time and emails.

Have trouble loading the video? Why not check your company or computer’s firewall settings to make sure that Youtube videos can be streamed on your computer.

HR puts companies on massive diet

Employees are going to cry in their nonexistent coffee cups soon if the recession keeps up its relentless pace as more HR practitioners look to scrap off more staff perks this year.

Things are definitely not looking up for corporate folks these days. A recent CareerBuilder.com survey of more than 3,000 employers and HR professionals reveals 38% of them will make administrative cuts to perks such as company social events and corporate travel sometime this year.  No more cushy flights or free flowing champagne for you then.

Some employers in Singapore are already taking a harder cost cutting stance as overheard during the recent Conference for Fair Employment Practices. “I’m going to cut everything. [Like] D&D this year, I’m going to cut the dance. And the dinner.”

Employees should also start loading up on their vitamins or a fitness regime as healthcare benefits take a backseat this year for a quarter of employers polled. Likewise, charity will remain at home this recession as 21% plan to cut or reduce spending on philanthropic activities. Same goes for pantry offerings and incentive trips, say 34% and 28% of respondents respectively.

But there is tiny ray of joy still even if companies are curbing expenses in these areas. Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources for CareerBuilder.com, says companies are nevertheless “keeping in mind the importance of retaining their top talent”.

“We see companies offering more flexible work arrangements and placing an increased emphasis on employee recognition programmes to help maintain job satisfaction levels within their organisations,” she adds. Other special recession perks include increased telecommuting, public transportation discounts, compressed workweeks and increased mileage reimbursement rates. (Click here for cheap employee perks you can implement now!)

Are you impressed or depressed by HR right now? Feel free to let us know if the gloom has set in for you in your company in the comments below.

Hang on, there is more to this. Read more on the craziest, and some would say drastically hilarious, cost-cutting measures in Human Resources magazine’s newest column by The Daily Grimer in the upcoming March issue.

If you’re feeling sad and lonely this coming Valentine’s day, perhaps it’s time to approach your HR department for a little social get together with other eligible folks… on a cruise.

As reported in our HR Bulletin yesterday, some companies in Singapore have signed up their single workers to go on a cruise to meet other potential soulmates.

So I asked my single colleagues in the office as to what their reaction would be if our company sent them on a cruise with other singletons. Here’s what they have to say.

Keav, a young account executive’s first question was: “Is the boat going to be full of despos?” His requirements are “simple”. If there are going to be beautiful (and possibly rich) ladies — he’s in.

Rayana, a journalist with Marketing is less skeptical of such an idea. As long as the people on the boat are diverse, engaging and hopefully not too much older than she is, Rayana’s open to giving this a shot. “I’m probably going more for the cruise, rather than love,” she quipped.

Angeline, editor of Procurement Asia is determined not be sent to any of such outings. According to her, meeting new people and making small talk is really stressful and awkward. I couldn’t agree more. How are sparks supposed to fly under such business-like conditions anyway? I imagine people coming up to each other, handing out business cards and exchanging brief pleasantries as if it were a conference or networking event.

Melody, the production editor summed it up best. “I need to know the demographics of the people on the cruise before blindly signing up! Something that sounds like a loveboat initially can end up like Murder on the Orient Express.”

So now you know what a bunch of pessimists we are when it comes to matters of the heart. Ideally, it would be great to leave it up to the forces of nature for some loving to come our way. Still, given the amount of time workers spend in the office, a nudge in the right direction from the HR department might help speed Cupid’s work up a little. Or maybe companies should just secretly sign their employees up instead, leaving no room for arguments.

What are your thoughts? Do you need your HR department’s help in finding some romance in your life? Or should companies stay out of employees’ personal lives completely?