Do employees value environmental efforts? YES!

THE ISSUE: Whether a company's environmental efforts influence an employee's desire to work there.

THE TAKE AWAY: A 2007 poll by Monster.ca highlights that some 75 per cent of those polled would switch to a more environmentally conscious employer, if one could be found. Unfortunately, only one in five thought their own company was doing a good job with promoting a greener approach to business.

Coming at a time when the Canadian Council of Chief Executives has started to highlight the need for a more proactive approach to environmental issues by Canadian businesses, the poll points to a disconnect between attempts by individual employees to live a greener lifestyle at home and what they experience in a typical office. Although most modern offices feature a host of more environmentally-conscious services, the infrastructure demands of commercial and institutional buildings mean they still account for a substantial portion of annual greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the Monster.ca poll, areas where employers might consider improving their efforts include encouraging greater use of carpooling, public transit, and alternative modes of transportation -- like cycling to work.

Green Workplaces: Why Canadians Don't Want to Work for Polluters

By Melanie Joy Douglas, Monster.ca

Many Canadians recycle diligently, choose environmentally-friendly products whenever possible, and narrow their eyes at shoppers who actually still use plastic shopping bags. They feel good about the ‘green’ choices they’re making because it all adds up; they are making a difference.

And then they get to work, where, in most offices, the lights and computers have been on all night. The printers and photocopiers are constantly in use throughout the day. The building is frosty cold in the summer and searing hot in the winter. The parking lot is rammed full of cars that carry single employees back and forth from home to work.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Workers are increasingly becoming aware of this glaring discrepancy in their home and work life and are starting to look for "greener pastures" at work, according to series of online polls by Monster.ca.

Currently, commercial and institutional buildings account for over 30% of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. The average office worker uses a quarter ton of materials each year, including a whopping 10,000 pieces of copier paper.

It’s no wonder that in Monster’s first poll (“How environmentally-friendly is your workplace?”), 81% of 1,275 participants reported that their employer was either “polluting the environment,” “ignoring the need to be environmentally friendly,” or in need of “help to become greener”. Only 18% of employees considered their employer to be extremely green.

Just how serious are employees? Of 2,854 respondents to a second poll, 78% said that given a choice, they would leave their current job in favour of a greener workplace. Recruiters are now reporting that candidates are demanding to know a company’s environmental specs before taking a job.

Canadian workers are realizing that wellness at work goes beyond flex time, extended health benefits, and extra vacation days, and they’re increasingly weighing environmental issues in the context of a healthy work environment.

Read the full post on Monster.ca >>


Source: http://content.monster.ca/14502_en-CA_p1.asp

Powered by ScribeFire.

Does being balanced pay off?

For many aspiring to positions of leadership, there seems an irreconcilable trade-off: your career/work, or having a life.

In past, the general opinion was that having a life was something that a leader needed to sacrifice in order to get to where they could make a difference. More recent research, however, highlights that having appropriate work-life balance actually is part of what makes a leader great, and that it actually is an essential part of advancing one's leadership career.

Drawing upon 360-degree assessments completed by individuals in their leadership programs, the Centre for Creative Leadership has found that the most effective leaders actually have a work-life balance score roughly sixteen per cent higher than less effective colleagues.

The numbers are important in challenging the assumption that leadership is about getting to the end point, rather than how the leadership journey takes place.

Trends in Leadership

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in the U.S. has identified five leading trends for senior executives, based on 247 leaders who participated in their "Leadership at the Peak" program from July 2006 to April 2007:

The Rise of Complex Challenges - driven by internal changes to the organization, market dynamics, a shortage of talent and globalization.

The Innovation Revolution - innovation efforts achieved through new ideation processes, task forces, cross functional innovation teams, off-site innovation programs and stage-gate processes, accompanied by a focus on talent/talent development, reward/recognition programs and research/external best practices.

The Art of Virtual Leadership - communication as a central skill to bridge cross-cultural, geographical and functional boundaries, but with the skills for virtual leadership differing from those used for face-to-face leadership.

Collaboration Nation - over 97 percent of executives surveyed believe that leaders in their organization must collaborate to succeed, but only 47 percent of believed leaders in their organization are highly skilled in collaboration.

The World of Interruption - dealing with fragmented work time, with a typical worker interrupted every 11 minutes, and taking an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task. Senior executives report being interrupted every 30 to 40 minutes.

The results are reported in the August 2007 issue of the CCL Leading Effectively e-Newsletter, and are drawn from a broader white paper titled 10 Trends: A Study of Senior Executives' Views on the Future, authored by Corey Criswell and Andre Martin.

Of significance, the wider study goes on to highlight the importance of several additional trends, including an increased emphasis of authenticity of leadership, being able to plan for leadership succession, and ensuring that current leaders maintain their personal wellness to maximize leadership longevity.

Organizational wellness & dysfunction – watching for the signs

Too often, organizational leaders equate “wellness” with physical health-oriented programs, such as giving staff subsidized memberships to the local gym, or adding health support programs to the benefits plan.

But true organizational wellness is much broader in scope, and the best organizational leaders seek to identify and address root causes rather than symptoms. If stress-related absences are on the increase, internal conflicts between people and teams is mounting, and there is declining productivity and morale, this can be a strong sign that there are deeper issues of dysfunction inside the organization. These issues directly impact the organization’s relative wellness and its capacity for peak performance, both of which warrant the attention of senior leadership and the board.

The International Institute of Management (IIM) has published an online white paper titled Organizational Politics: Symptoms of Dysfunctional Organizations by Med Yones that outlines a range of warning signs to be looking for if you are an organizational leader or board member. These include:

• Management that stifles discussion and disagreement
• Inefficient allocations of resources and unequal workloads internally
• Poor linkages between strategic plans and actual performance
• Constant crisis mode
• Excessive fragmentation, turf wars, and empire building, with poor internal collaboration
• Low overall productivity, high stress levels, and backstabbing

Since senior management is often an integral part of the problem – either as a direct contributor, or in terms of not being seen by front-line staff to be taking interest in or acting to correct the problems – it is more difficult to return to a positive state if things get too far. Accordingly, a better solution is to continually monitor the organization for signs of its relative wellness and act promptly when negative symptoms appear.

Potential actions for senior leadership and board members include:

• Recognizing that organizational wellness is a priority and that it directly impacts long-term performance
• Using scorecards and/or objective external assessment to get a good picture of current organizational wellness, and making ongoing use of scorecards and direct feedback a priority
• Emphasizing collaboration as an organization-wide initiative, with senior leadership and board members clearly “walking the talk” (this includes the board providing adequate support to senior leadership for necessary changes)
• Providing necessary training and coaching across the organization on collaboration approaches, and backing this up with incentives for positive behaviour
• Not tolerating unacceptable behaviour (i.e., continual non-collaboration), including replacing uncooperative staff if mediation over valid differences of view doesn’t solve the issue

Similarly, the Booz | Allen | Hamilton consulting group has developed an online self-assessment tool called the Org DNA Profiler® that helps you to understand your organization’s cultural style compared to one of several “DNA types” that their consultants have developed. Is it Passive-Aggressive, Fits-and-Starts, Outgrown, Overmanaged, Just-in-Time, Military Precision, or Resilient? And what does it mean to fall into any of these categories?

Although not a detailed assessment of your organization’s relative cultural wellness, the value of the tool lies in its ability to start a conversation on how people see the organization. From there, it is possible to start addressing the root causes that are leading to the different interpretations of how the organization operates, and how to take steps to improve its relative wellness. **Note that the assessment tool has modified versions for for-profit and government or non-profit organizations.

The assessment tool builds on a series of articles about the concept of organizational DNA, including “The 7 Types of Organizational DNA” by Gary Neilson, Bruce A. Pasternack, and Decio Mendes in the Summer 2004 issue of Strategy+Business magazine (free registration required to view articles).

Health Literacy: Improving the Consumer

Do you know how to manage your own health care?

As an aspect of broader personal wellness, being able to take charge of your own health and wellness seems an obvious step. But research in the U.S. shows that a major obstacle to this is health literacy - particularly among groups potentially at risk. In fact, the study contends that health literacy is the biggest single predictor of overall health status, exerting more influence than factors like age, income, employment status, education level, or race and ethnicity.


A new initiative by the Partnership for Clear Health Communication (tm) is focused on helping consumers of health services improve their understanding of health options. The AskMe3 (tm) program is intended to provide health care consumers, health care providers, and organizations with a simple way to improve individual health literacy.

The answer, in their view, is equipping consumers to ask three simple questions:

The intended result is a simplified method of ensuring that consumers of health care services are able to get clear answers to their health concerns, and that they understand how to act appropriately on the health care advice provided.

The initiative's website provides a range of easily downloaded materials for patients, health providers, and employer organizations.

Wellness Programs: Continuing Progress

Workplace wellness programs have evolved in terms of their scope and relative complexity, but there is a continuing body of evidence that any program -- no matter the relative size of the organization -- can have positive impacts.

Two related studies highlight the trend, and provide an interesting glimpse into the evolving nature of workplace wellness programs. Of note, many programs have advanced considerably from an initial health-dominant focus to a broader range of considerations around whole-person wellness, improving organizational culture and workplace learning, and improving overall productivity.

The first, published in 2002 by the now-defunct Canadian Labour and Business Centre (CLBC), provided an overview of Twelve Case Studies on Innovative Workplace Health Initiatives. While highlighting the long-term nature of such initiatives and the relative difficulties in creating universal impact measures, the study emphasized that health and wellness initiatives are most effective when they are seen as an integrated part of the organization's business strategy, rather than being a "nice to have". In turn, this spotlights the leadership dimension of such initiatives -- both executive and staff participation are key.

A follow-up study in 2006 by the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL, which now incorporates the prior work of the CLBC as part of its Work and Learning Knowledge Centre) observed a continuing trend toward greater effectiveness in such programs since 2002. A highlight of the 2006 study is again the critical importance of leadership in such initiatives, with several key steps being present in most of the programs adopted:

Policy and Communication—Senior managers signed health and safety policy commitment statements, which were then brought to the attention of all employees. In some cases, these statements were embedded in the firm’s mission statement.

Organization—Roles, responsibilities and accountability for employees, committees and management were clearly outlined.

Planning and Implementation—Guidelines were developed for proactive health and safety planning, setting of objectives, internal inspections and risk assessments.

Measuring Performance—Commitments were made to consistent data gathering in order to monitor progress in implementation and success in achieving overall objectives.

Audit and Review—Audits and reviews were built into the programs to assess the effectiveness of program delivery systems and overall impact on business performance and employee health, wellness and morale.

Source: http://www.ccl-cca.ca/CCL/Reports/LessonsInLearning/LiL-31March2006.htm