Not So Sure About You

Does anyone trust their company's leadership anymore?  With the present financial crisis, your CEO may have contributed to the public problem through your company's business dealings or is contributing to your personal problem by bandying about the possibility of layoffs. In addition to blame, there's also a lot of suspicion going around.

This business environment, which reminds me of a game of Clue or one of those mystery theater dinners where a "murder" is staged and the guests have to determine the culprit before the end of the evening, is rife with unease. Who's going to be loyal to their co-workers before a matter of self-preservation--including the CEO. They were so supportive in high times, praising the efforts of the company's "team," and encouraging their workforce to strive for "merit increases" in pay. With hard times, or what you might call "low times" at hand, they may be thinking, if not outright singing, a different tune. How can they not with their own job and reputation on the line?

As loathe to spend money for learning and development as companies are when finances get tight, this might be a good time for team building exercises to shore up trust among your workforce. I wouldn't recommend any of those outdoor adventures that involve swinging from ropes with colleagues or falling off the limb of a tree as a co-worker waits to catch you, but maybe an afternoon working together on behalf of a local charity, or even going out to lunch once a month or once every other month, might help emphasize the need for camaraderie in challenging times. Incentives, such as gift card awards or additional vacation days, for coming up with innovative collaborative projects, also might help. Whatever  approach you take, you need to ensure a message sinks into your workers heads about the true dynamics of their professional survival.

For the company, including their own job, to continue to happily exist, they have to collaborate, rather than compete, with one another. True, you're asking them to work with limited resources, but rather than fighting for those resources, explain the importance of teaming up to fill in what may be missing from one another's "supplies."  Maybe two employees or two groups of employees, for instance, are working on projects with complementary aims or efforts. Is there any way you, as a trainer along with your HR colleagues, could facilitate such synergies among your workforce?  With some thought, it may dawn on you that in the course of one work group's meeting a corporate goal, they have to conduct research or come up with ideas that might coincide nicely with the direction another work group is headed toward. With stretched resources, ensure work isn't being duplicated or wasted due to a lack of coordination.

The problem with a culture in which workers just strive to save themselves is that (in addition to being mean spirited and selfish) it's shortsighted. Sure you save yourself for six months or even a year or two, but if you didn't adequately support your colleagues along with yourself, and the company as a whole fails within five years, who's helped then?

Your workers may feel a financial crime has taken place, but unlike a game of corporate mystery theater, naming the culprit is less important than everyone making it out of the debacle intact.

In this financial whirlwind, is your workforce growing more suspicious of leadership, and each other, or are they banding together now more than ever?  Any suggestions for encouraging more collaboration than competition?

My Supervisor, My Bully

Being smarter and more able than your bully is dangerous at work. It can save your turkey sandwich in the 8th grade, but in the corporate world, the person who picks on you--especially if he or she is your supervisor--isn't meant to be beaten. Just the opposite of lessons learned as a child about standing up to a bully so his/her cowardice will emerge and he/she will back down, workplace bullies generally don't subside when you outsmart them. Rather, they become more malicious than ever, angry that maybe for the first time a person (often working under them though occasionally alongside) figured out their tricks. What's worse, the subject of the bullying usually has nowhere to turn for help because the reason the bully is a bully is because he/she has the confidence of his/her boss. Then too, office bullies are typically manipulative people, who have no qualm about lies or even crocodile tears to get their way.

So with laws throughout the country considered off and on about taming workplace bullies and protecting those who've angered them or threatened them by being better, I'm a little pessimistic. With no such laws actually enacted yet, companies that want to discourage bullying should come up with their own internal rules about it--beyond the conventional policies about maintaining a respectful workplace. First, take the person overseeing the bully's work out of the equation--as I mentioned, bullies are manipulators who have long since secured the loyalty of their bosses. Instead, train a few, or even one, of your human resources team to deal specifically with these situations, and publicize through one of the HR department's regular e-mail blasts or newsletters that such a person exists. If you don't do e-mail blasts or newsletters to keep workers apprised about HR, have the bully expert circulate through your companies work teams introducing him or herself and explaining what he/she does. Just knowing such a person exists--a person who isn't a friend or anyone open to bonding with the bully--may be enough to give the bully second thought. Next give the worker with the complaint the assurance of confidentiality, that absolutely nothing will be done if he/she just wants to talk it out, and if something does need to be done, don't arrange for a private meeting between supervisor, bully suspect, and alleged victim--or at least don't rely on that meeting as your sole source of information. If this seems like a problem that isn't going away, consult with other members of the work team (the victim's co-workers) about the issue, bringing it out into the open. Whatever you do, don't leave the person being accused of short comings, whether that's the supervisor-bully or the alleged victim--out of the meetings you have about the problem. Hard to believe,but I witnessed this very phenomenon, of a key, if not the key person, in the situation left out of the discussions with HR.

In addition to the importance of bringing the potential problem to light with the whole work team if necessary, I would begin looking for patterns and feedback about the possible supervisor-bully. If he/she is known for a "tough love" approach to work, and is involved with (either making accusations about or being cited as a potential source) of trouble for an employee, raise your eyebrows. Something may be suspicious there--could it be more than a disciplined approach to management such as just a downright mean streak?  Once--if your organization is unfortunate enough--the possible bully is promoted to head honcho, is there an exodus of employees working under him/her?  If so, something may be a little fishy. I once worked under a woman who got angry when I didn't look at her when she had on new outfits (and I suspect cried to our boss about it) and last I heard she's the new boss lady. So don't assume your organization is too smart to promote such people.

There are a final two worst things about bullies I noticed: they have the uncanny ability to paint themselves as the victim when that's the only way they can win, and they have the sad tendency to cling to their posts and the company that hired them years ago. Like the middle school ogre, they're insecure about their "talents" and doubt whether they'll get hired to anything comparable anywhere else. When you combine these two tendencies--the placing of themselves in the role of victim in order to win and their stubbornness about ever leaving, you have a problem on your hands that is hard to detect and probably isn't going away on its own.

I wish as grownups it was just about free lunches. I think I may have been tempted to reach an agreement with my bully in exchange for a pleasant workplace. My plan would be known as Turkey Sandwiches for Peace.

Do you think there are workplace bullies lurking in your offices and cubicles?  Do you offer employees working under or alongside them any defense if there are?

Think 'Learning Process' Not 'Learning Event'

Traditionally, training has been thought of as an event. You go to a training class or you log into an e-learning module and take the training but then you never seem to have any follow up or follow through. You never again look at those  'action items' you wrote down at the end of class.

Changes are needed.

One of the ways to ensure that training leads to behavioral change is to follow up on the actions learners indicated they would take. Before technology,  follow up was too cumbersome but now you can leverage  technology tools to help remind learners of what they learned and what they need to do to continue the process and to build a learning process around a particular subject.

Perhaps the simplest technology to employ is to send an email several weeks after class highlighting the main performance objectives from the class and reminding the learner of what he or she might do to apply the techniques for class to daily job activities. You may even consider sending an email to the manager to remind her of what her employee should be doing back on the job as it relates to the topics covered in the learning event.

To get a little more sophisticated, you could create a learning blog within the company and encourage the participants from the class to visit the blog and write about how they are applying the information recently acquired to their work processes. You should have someone monitor the site to add additional insights and help explain concepts employees may have trouble implementing.

Another, even more sophisticated approach is to create an on-line social network. This allows for more robust interactions among the former classmates and can be used to post RSS feeds from related blogs as well as connect learners to one another and relevant content.  A good social network software for this type of thing is Ning or IntroNetworks.

Recently I wrote about a process created by Cal Wick where his company has created an entire software application that provides tools for following up on end-of-training commitments of the learners. The software provides a dashboard for managers and allows the learners to follow their progress and the progress of others over time. The level of sophistication is high but the tools are simple and straightforward. 

So next time you are developing a learning event, stop and think how you can leverage technology to transform learning into a process. Your organization will be stronger for it.

Karl Kapp is the Assistant Director of Bloomsburg University’s Institute for Interactive Technologies and a professor of instructional technology. See his own blog, Kapp Notes for information on the convergence of learning and technology. He is the author of the book Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning.   

Ethics Ethos

Would you feel guilty if your company paid you very well, yet dealt with customers and business partners under-handedly? When your rent is due, and you'd like to take a vacation to some place more exotic than the local strip mall, it can be hard to find your ethical streak. When the economy plummets, I have a feeling business ethics risks going with it. With your employer's and your own finances in a race to see which can go South fastest, caring whether your company's business dealings are both profitable as well as moral isn't easy.

With this potential time of desperation upon us, what are you doing to reinforce to employees that corporate values and "social responsibility" aren't just for when you feel like you have enough to be generous, but for even those times when you could use a little generosity yourself?  If I were in the shoes of a trainer responsible for delivering a corporate ethics program, I would try to team up with those in management crafting messages about pushing harder to meet financial goals. Maybe if you talk to them about it, they wouldn't mind sliding in a few sentences about employees maintaining the business ethics they agreed to when hired--even when they're working like a dog to get the company out of the dog house.  Actually, you might point out that, aside from it being the right thing to do and part of what they already agreed to do anyway, shady business practices further endanger an already ailing company from a legal and PR perspective.

Maybe the online branching-style simulations you use for ethics training could be updated or accompanied by added classroom material to illustrate the moral challenges employees may face if the economy turns as bad as it looks like it might. Either online or off (whichever you can afford, I guess), have employees compete against each other in teams with a hypothetical desperate business scenario as the challenge each group has to work through to reach profitability. Unlike other such games solely focused on which team can work most efficiently to make the most money, this game would tie ethics into the equation, punishing the groups that cheat or otherwise violate company ethics standards to make themselves more competitive. And to make it a real test, make it very easy and tempting for the groups to bend rules to suit their need to stay afloat.

Of course, being in such potentially (or are we already there?) desperate times, this exercise can't take too long or else the higher-ups risk getting annoyed about risk management/ethics education you'd like to provide. Which brings me to another point--it could be useful to remind workers about the interaction between risk management and ethics, and that they aren't necessarily synonymous. Just because a business practice is legal, and will make the company money, doesn't mean it's the way your company likes to treat business partner and customers.  From a self-serving perspective, a lot that's legal and profitable, might not be the best idea from a PR point of view. If your customers are outraged, it doesn't help to whine that what you did was legal.

Then, after you've harped on what's legal and illegal, and what's ethical and unethical, you, unfortunately, also will have to add a few words about the importance of maintaining quality of products and services during the desperation--something today's airlines hopefully are worrying about.

So, you have your work cut out for you. You have to train and encourage your workforce to win, but not by using any and all tools they can find. Desperation in business can make you feel like a caveman who's just discovered how to use his hands to make tools. It's exciting when you think of a new way to make money, but unlike an eager caveman, you have regulatory agencies, reciprocal business partnerships to maintain, and, oh yeah, those pesky customers, too.

Have you stepped up or changed your corporate ethics program now that potentially hard times are here?  Do you think your employees will stay true to your company values no matter how tough business gets?

Really Resilient...Or Really Nervous?

One way to extend your corporate branding internally is by handing out, free of charge, as an incentive gift, brown hyperventilation bags emblazoned with the company logo. I've heard there's a lot of anxiety in corporate America these days on account of rumors about the economy tanking. If you're at the top of the organizational hierarchy, you worry because you're not making your profit goals; if you're in the middle or bottom of the organization, you worry your job will be slashed in the pursuit of cost savings. So, in short, there's a good deal of nausea/butterflies-in-the-stomach in your cubicles and glass-walled offices.

It's hard to stay engaged in your company when you're so terribly nervous. The worst is leaving your workers dangling as to their employment fate. You've been taught it's pragmatically savvy to not tell employees whether they'll be fired until the last minute, keeping your plans about who's staying and going a closely held secret, but in addition (as I noted in a previous blog) to the inhumanity of that tactic, it leads to a generalized nervousness. Nobody can rest safe--even the workers you most want to retain--because the firings that take place appear arbitrary. What's worse, in some cases, those eliminated were liked and respected by peers. If you're lucky, those you get rid of will have been a nuisance to at least a few people. Along with the kindness of giving terminated workers advance warning so they can look for something new, it might be smart to let your workforce in on the "big picture," the strategy behind possible future layoffs. Understanding the thought process behind it may give your staffers a greater sense of control, and for those who apparently will be spared by your long-term approach, this new understanding will enable a sigh of relief.

When hard times hit, you also will have to decide which workers you want to expend effort and resources to retain, and how. One school of thought says to just concentrate on your highest performers when the going gets rough, but I favor a different tactic. My best guess about what would work best is giving a little less to a greater number of people. Instead of maintaining or boosting the bonuses of "top performers," spread the wealth across the organization by either maintaining salaries or giving modest raises to workers meeting their performance goals, whether or not they fit the classic definition of a "top performer."  My thought behind this is the importance of giving the widest spectrum of employees possible a sense that the company is doing well enough to invest in them, and wants to do so. You may be surprised at the continued anxiety of a "high potential" worker who is given a large raise or bonus himself but witnesses ongoing layoffs of colleagues and maybe even has to participate in the "streamlining" process by firing subordinates. Even though he's doing fine personally, he still may feel demoralized by the environment. Then, also, this approach helps avoid the snowball effect of hard times in which the company is doing poorly to start with, then starts cutting jobs and reducing wages or leaving them stagnant, thereby making the situation even worse by creating a workforce too hopeless to be productive. In other words, those "top performers," and, indeed, the whole company, profits by keeping the bottom and middle ranked workers engaged enough to do a good job.

What are you doing at your company to stem the nervous twitching? As far as I know, it still isn't legal to give workers complimentary bottles of Xanax, so I guess you'll have to find a way to soothe the anxious workers taking a few extra cigarette breaks or devouring a few more Hostess Cupcakes from the vending machine. Sedatives can do wonders, but you'd be surprised how well open communication with your employees works. Better yet, there's a chance your exchange with them won't put them to sleep.

Any thoughts on how to soothe the nerves of overwrought employees in a struggling economy?

Moving Target

I had an old colleague who told a story of a man he met at a business conference who handed him his business card, and then promptly told him, "Never call me."  Well, I'm too nice to say anything like that, but that's how I feel about this whole reach-me-any-time-anywhere-whenever-you-need-me-movement.  I have a cellphone like every other person who's not in a back-to-nature-caveman-cult, but I never give work contacts outside my company the number, and unless it's an emergency, expect no one (co-workers included) to call me during my off-hours about business. As for a BlackBerry, I swear I have no idea how to use one--never even held one in the palm of my hand--imagine that!

Luckily, my company knew better than to equip me with a cell phone or PDA. Since when does a trade journalist need one, anyway, so I probably wouldn't use it for its intended purpose. I probably would focus on getting my hair appointments organized first. And, guess what?  I bet a lot of your employees aren't using their company-provided mobile devices for what you had in mind either.  If they are, I wonder if it wouldn't be better, after all, to use the cell phone or PDA, or whatever it is you've saddled them with, for their own personal fulfillment.  Don't they spend enough time at work already? 

An old joke about the U.S. is us workers think we're so indispensable we can't take a full work week off, so instead of taking Monday through Friday, we take, say, Wednesday to Wednesday, or, for the really creative, Tuesday to next week's Thursday. While Europeans enjoy the whole month of August for travel and relaxation, Americans are loathe to cobble together a meager two weeks worth. So, who in the world thought arming workaholics with mobile devices for additional outside the office labor was a good idea?  A laptop is one thing, but do we really need vendors and other business partners calling us as we peruse the fruit aisle or, more frightening, attempt to change lanes on the freeway?

Luckily I am without car, but if I had a car I would be the exact example of someone the company would have to worry about talking or PDAing while driving. I was a horrible driver to begin with, so with a business "partner" jabbering in my ear about his many pains, I can't imagine what a terror I would be. A company-sponsored highway debacle would be in the works, for sure. So, like my envisioned use of the company cell and PDA for uses other than business needs, I imagine more than a few of your workers are similar to me in their driving abilities. Any thought what to do about that?  What would happen if they were on their cell or using their PDA while driving--to meet your company's work-at-all-times cultural expectation--and got into a serious accident?  You may not be legally liable, but it might weigh on your conscience.  And, of course, increase company health insurance costs and time away from the office due to injury.

Most of all, the mobile devices trend that makes workers feel compelled to respond to business contacts wherever, whenever is a bad idea because it threatens to increase your worker burnout and turnover. Giving them a laptop so they have the option to work from home when desired or necessary is one thing; expecting them to be on hand for advice and consultation at all hours is another. The idea that you can never psychologically detach from your role as a worker is draining. Employees in that kind of a culture stumble to work in a perpetual exhaustion because they never had a chance to fully refresh.

This analogy might help you: Your workers are like cell phones. Just as a cell phone needs to be re-charged, so too do the employees who use them. You usually can't plug your employees into the wall, but you can let them shop for melons in peace.

How do you manage use of the mobile devices you supply workers with?  Do you worry you're making it impossible for them to disconnect and get refreshed before the next work day?