Διοίκηση Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού στην Ελλάδα (HRM in Greece)

9 Reasons Your Current Resume Will Never Get You A Job At Apple Or Google

2012-02-09T10:19:00.000+02:00

Very funny, but true. Please take a look!

The Science Behind The Smile

2012-01-03T16:29:00.002+02:00

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert is widely known for his 2006 best seller, Stumbling on Happiness. His work reveals, among other things, the systematic mistakes we all make in imagining how happy (or miserable) we’ll be. In this edited interview with HBR’s Gardiner Morse, Gilbert surveys the field of happiness research and explores its frontiers.

HBR: Happiness research has become a hot topic in the past 20 years. Why?

Gilbert: It’s only recently that we realized we could marry one of our oldest questions—“What is the nature of human happiness?”—to our newest way of getting answers: science. Until just a few decades ago, the problem of happiness was mainly in the hands of philosophers and poets.
Psychologists have always been interested in emotion, but in the past two decades the study of emotion has exploded, and one of the emotions that psychologists have studied most intensively is happiness. Recently economists and neuroscientists joined the party. All these disciplines have distinct but intersecting interests: Psychologists want to understand what people feel, economists want to know what people value, and neuroscientists want to know how people’s brains respond to rewards. Having three separate disciplines all interested in a single topic has put that topic on the scientific map. Papers on happiness are published in Science, people who study happiness win Nobel prizes, and governments all over the world are rushing to figure out how to measure and increase the happiness of their citizens.

How is it possible to measure something as subjective as happiness?

Measuring subjective experiences is a lot easier than you think. It’s what your eye doctor does when she fits you for glasses. She puts a lens in front of your eye and asks you to report your experience, and then she puts another lens up, and then another. She uses your reports as data, submits the data to scientific analysis, and designs a lens that will give you perfect vision—all on the basis of your reports of your subjective experience. People’s real-time reports are very good approximations of their experiences, and they make it possible for us to see the world through their eyes. People may not be able to tell us how happy they were yesterday or how happy they will be tomorrow, but they can tell us how they’re feeling at the moment we ask them. “How are you?” may be the world’s most frequently asked question, and nobody’s stumped by it.
There are many ways to measure happiness. We can ask people “How happy are you right now?” and have them rate it on a scale. We can use magnetic resonance imaging to measure cerebral blood flow, or electromyography to measure the activity of the “smile muscles” in the face. But in most circumstances those measures are highly correlated, and you’d have to be the federal government to prefer the complicated, expensive measures over the simple, inexpensive one.

But isn’t the scale itself subjective? Your five might be my six.

Imagine that a drugstore sold a bunch of cheap thermometers that weren’t very well calibrated. People with normal temperatures might get readings other than 98.6, and two people with the same temperature might get different readings. These inaccuracies could cause people to seek medical treatment they didn’t need or to miss getting treatment they did need. So buggy thermometers are sometimes a problem—but not always. For example, if I brought 100 people to my lab, exposed half of them to a flu virus, and then used those buggy thermometers to take their temperatures a week later, the average temperature of the people who’d been exposed would almost surely be higher than the average temperature of the others. Some thermometers would underestimate, some would overestimate, but as long as I measured enough people, the inaccuracies would cancel themselves out. Even with poorly calibrated instruments, we can compare large groups of people.
A rating scale is like a buggy thermometer. Its inaccuracies make it inappropriate for some kinds of measurement (for example, saying exactly how happy John was at 10:42 AM on July 3, 2010), but it’s perfectly appropriate for the kinds of measurements most psychological scientists make.

What did all these happiness researchers discover?

Much of the research confirms things we’ve always suspected. For example, in general people who are in good romantic relationships are happier than those who aren’t. Healthy people are happier than sick people. People who participate in their churches are happier than those who don’t. Rich people are happier than poor people. And so on.
That said, there have been some surprises. For example, while all these things do make people happier, it’s astonishing how little any one of them matters. Yes, a new house or a new spouse will make you happier, but not much and not for long. As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy and how long that happiness will last. They expect positive events to make them much happier than those events actually do, and they expect negative events to make them unhappier than they actually do. In both field and lab studies, we’ve found that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or failing an exam—all have less impact on happiness than people think they will. A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months. When good things happen, we celebrate for a while and then sober up. When bad things happen, we weep and whine for a while and then pick ourselves up and get on with it.

Why do events have such a fleeting effect on happiness?

One reason is that people are good at synthesizing happiness—at finding silver linings. As a result, they usually end up happier than they expect after almost any kind of trauma or tragedy. Pick up any newspaper, and you’ll find plenty of examples. Remember Jim Wright, who resigned in disgrace as Speaker of the House of Representatives because of a shady book deal? A few years later he told the New York Times that he was “so much better off, physically, financially, emotionally, mentally and in almost every other way.” Then there’s Moreese Bickham, who spent 37 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary; after his release he said, “I don’t have one minute’s regret. It was a glorious experience.” These guys appear to be living in the best of all possible worlds. Speaking of which, Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles, was replaced by Ringo Starr in 1962, just before the Beatles got big. Now he’s a session drummer. What did he have to say about missing out on the chance to belong to the most famous band of the 20th century? “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles.”
One of the most reliable findings of the happiness studies is that we do not have to go running to a therapist every time our shoelaces break. We have a remarkable ability to make the best of things. Most people are more resilient than they realize.

Employees are happiest when they’re trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach.
Aren’t they deluding themselves? Isn’t real happiness better than synthetic happiness?

Let’s be careful with terms. Nylon is real; it’s just not natural. Synthetic happiness is perfectly real; it’s just man-made. Synthetic happiness is what we produce when we don’t get what we want, and natural happiness is what we experience when we do. They have different origins, but they are not necessarily different in terms of how they feel. One is not obviously better than the other.
Of course, most folks don’t see it that way. Most folks think that synthetic happiness isn’t as “good” as the other kind—that people who produce it are just fooling themselves and aren’t really happy. I know of no evidence demonstrating that that’s the case. If you go blind or lose a fortune, you’ll find that there’s a whole new life on the other side of those events. And you’ll find many things about that new life that are quite good. In fact, you’ll undoubtedly find a few things that are even better than what you had before. You’re not lying to yourself; you’re not delusional. You’re discovering things you didn’t know—couldn’t know until you were in that new life. You are looking for things that make your new life better, you are finding them, and they are making you happy. What is most striking to me as a scientist is that most of us don’t realize how good we’re going to be at finding these things. We’d never say, “Oh, of course, if I lost my money or my wife left me, I’d find a way to be just as happy as I am now.” We’d never say it—but it’s true.

Is being happy always desirable? Look at all the unhappy creative geniuses—Beethoven, van Gogh, Hemingway. Doesn’t a certain amount of unhappiness spur good performance?

Nonsense! Everyone can think of a historical example of someone who was both miserable and creative, but that doesn’t mean misery generally promotes creativity. There’s certainly someone out there who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and lived to be 90, but that doesn’t mean cigarettes are good for you. The difference between using anecdotes to prove a point and using science to prove a point is that in science you can’t just cherry-pick the story that suits you best. You have to examine all the stories, or at least take a fair sample of them, and see if there are more miserable creatives or happy creatives, more miserable noncreatives or happy noncreatives. If misery promoted creativity, you’d see a higher percentage of creatives among the miserable than among the delighted. And you don’t. By and large, happy people are more creative and more productive. Has there ever been a human being whose misery was the source of his creativity? Of course. But that person is the exception, not the rule.

Many managers would say that contented people aren’t the most productive employees, so you want to keep people a little uncomfortable, maybe a little anxious, about their jobs.

Managers who collect data instead of relying on intuition don’t say that. I know of no data showing that anxious, fearful employees are more creative or productive. Remember, contentment doesn’t mean sitting and staring at the wall. That’s what people do when they’re bored, and people hate being bored. We know that people are happiest when they’re appropriately challenged—when they’re trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach. Challenge and threat are not the same thing. People blossom when challenged and wither when threatened. Sure, you can get results from threats: Tell someone, “If you don’t get this to me by Friday, you’re fired,” and you’ll probably have it by Friday. But you’ll also have an employee who will thereafter do his best to undermine you, who will feel no loyalty to the organization, and who will never do more than he must. It would be much more effective to tell your employee, “I don’t think most people could get this done by Friday. But I have full faith and confidence that you can. And it’s hugely important to the entire team.” Psychologists have studied reward and punishment for a century, and the bottom line is perfectly clear: Reward works better.

So challenge makes people happy. What else do we know now about the sources of happiness?

If I had to summarize all the scientific literature on the causes of human happiness in one word, that word would be “social.” We are by far the most social species on Earth. Even ants have nothing on us. If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network—about your friends and family and the strength of your bonds with them.

Beyond having rich networks, what makes us happy day to day?

The psychologist Ed Diener has a finding I really like. He essentially shows that the frequency of your positive experiences is a much better predictor of your happiness than is the intensity of your positive experiences. When we think about what would make us happy, we tend to think of intense events—going on a date with a movie star, winning a Pulitzer, buying a yacht. But Diener and his colleagues have shown that how good your experiences are doesn’t matter nearly as much as how many good experiences you have. Somebody who has a dozen mildly nice things happen each day is likely to be happier than somebody who has a single truly amazing thing happen. So wear comfortable shoes, give your wife a big kiss, sneak a french fry. It sounds like small stuff, and it is. But the small stuff matters.
I think this helps explain why it’s so hard for us to forecast our affective states. We imagine that one or two big things will have a profound effect. But it looks like happiness is the sum of hundreds of small things. Achieving happiness requires the same approach as losing weight. People trying to lose weight want a magic pill that will give them instant results. Ain’t no such thing. We know exactly how people lose weight: They eat less and exercise more. They don’t have to eat much less or exercise much more—they just have to do those things consistently. Over time it adds up. Happiness is like that. The things you can do to increase your happiness are obvious and small and take just a little time. But you have to do them every day and wait for the results.

What are those little things we can do to increase our happiness?

They won’t surprise you any more than “eat less and exercise more” does. The main things are to commit to some simple behaviors—meditating, exercising, getting enough sleep—and to practice altruism. One of the most selfish things you can do is help others. Volunteer at a homeless shelter. You may or may not help the homeless, but you will almost surely help yourself. And nurture your social connections. Twice a week, write down three things you’re grateful for, and tell someone why. I know these sound like homilies from your grandmother. Well, your grandmother was smart. The secret of happiness is like the secret of weight loss: It’s not a secret!

If there’s no secret, what’s left to study?

There’s no shortage of questions. For decades psychologists and economists have been asking, “Who’s happy? The rich? The poor? The young? The old?” The best we could do was divide people into groups, survey them once or maybe twice, and try to determine if the people in one group were, on average, happier than those in the others. The tools we used were pretty blunt instruments. But now millions of people are carrying little computers in their pockets—smartphones—and this allows us to collect data in real time from huge numbers of people about what they are doing and feeling from moment to moment. That’s never been possible before.

For decades psychologists and economists have asked, “Who’s happy?” But until now we were working with pretty blunt tools.

One of my collaborators, Matt Killingsworth, has built an experience-sampling application called Track Your Happiness. He follows more than 15,000 people by iPhone, querying them several times a day about their activities and emotional states. Are they at home? On a bus? Watching television? Praying? How are they feeling? What are they thinking about? With this technology, Matt’s beginning to answer a much better question than the one we’ve been asking for decades. Instead of asking who is happy, he can ask when they are happy. He doesn’t get the answer by asking, “When are you happy?”—because frankly, people don’t know. He gets it by tracking people over days, months, and years and measuring what they are doing and how happy they are while they are doing it. I think this kind of technology is about to revolutionize our understanding of daily emotions and human well-being.

What are the new frontiers of happiness research?

We need to get more specific about what we are measuring. Many scientists say they are studying happiness, but when you look at what they’re measuring, you find they are actually studying depression or life satisfaction. These things are related to happiness, of course, but they are not the same as happiness. Research shows that people with children are typically less happy on a moment-to-moment basis than people without children. But people who have kids may feel fulfilled in a way that people without kids do not. It doesn’t make sense to say that people with kids are happier, or that people without kids are happier; each group is happier in some ways and less happy in others. We need to stop painting our portrait of happiness with such a fat brush.

Will all this research ultimately make us happier?

We are learning and will continue to learn how to maximize our happiness. So yes, there is no doubt that the research has helped and will continue to help us increase our happiness. But that still leaves the big question: What kind of happiness should we want? For example, do we want the average happiness of our moments to be as large as possible, or do we want the sum of our happy moments to be as large as possible? Those are different things. Do we want lives free of pain and heartache, or is there value in those experiences? Science will soon be able to tell us how to live the lives we want, but it will never tell us what kinds of lives we should want to live. That will be for us to decide.

HBR Reprint R1201E

The Economics Of Well-Being

2012-01-03T16:20:00.001+02:00

Have we found a better gauge of success than GDP?

by Justin Fox

Money isn’t everything. But for measuring national success, it has long been pretty much the only thing (other than, of course, sports). The specific metric that has prevailed since World War II is the dollar value of a country’s economic output, expressed first as gross national product, later as gross domestic product.
This is an improvement over ranking by military victories—the most time-honored gauge. And the era of GNP and GDP has been characterized by a huge global rise in living standards and in wealth.
At the moment, though, GDP is embattled. Economists and national leaders are increasingly talking about measuring a country’s status with other metrics and even with a squishy-seeming concept like “happiness.” A 2009 study on alternatives to GDP, commissioned the year before by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and led by the economists Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, has become a global wonk sensation. In October 2011 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—a club of the world’s wealthy nations—followed with a “How’s Life?” report on “wellbeing” in its member countries. Each year since 2007 the private Legatum Institute has published a global Prosperity Index, a sophisticated mix of economic and other indicators. Individual nations are getting into the game, with Prime Minister David Cameron of the UK making the biggest waves by unveiling plans to measure national well-being. There are decades-old challenges to GDP as well, such as the United Nations’ Human Development Index and the Kingdom of Bhutan’s insistence that it is out to maximize not GNP or GDP but GNH—“gross national happiness.”
As everyone in business knows, you manage what you measure. So although the replacing-GDP discussion may seem a little airy, its growing credibility in important circles could give it a real impact on economic policy. And it parallels efforts in some boardrooms to use new metrics to measure overall success. So it’s worth exploring where the movement is coming from and where it might be headed. (For more on how the expansion of performance metrics leads to new management priorities, see “Runaway Capitalism,” by Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby, beginning on page 66.)

From Happiness Calculus to GDP

The story usually begins with Jeremy Bentham, an Englishman who in 1781 outlined a philosophy of utility that assessed the merits of an action according to how much happiness it produced. This was during the Enlightenment, when thinkers sought to replace religion-based rules with rational, scientific guides to decision making and life. Bentham suggested creating a sort of happiness calculus for any action by balancing 12 pains (the pains of the senses, the pains of awkwardness, and so on) and 14 pleasures (the pleasures of amity, the pleasures of wealth).
Although the basic idea of utility took off, Bentham’s approach to it did not. Calculating pleasure and pain in a way that could be compared from person to person was too difficult and messy. Economists, the most enthusiastic adopters of the concept, came to focus instead on the tangible expression of people’s needs and desires: what they were willing to spend money on.
This work reached an apotheosis in the 1930s, with Paul Samuelson’s attempt to explain welfare economics in purely mathematical terms. At about the same time, the economists Simon Kuznets, in the U.S., and Richard Stone, in the UK, were developing the systems of national accounting from which GNP and GDP are derived. They were not really concerned with utility; the main goal was to make it easier for policy makers to manage a national economy through financial crises and wars. But the combination of a straightforward metric, the belief among economists that spending patterns revealed all, and the rise in economists’ clout and prestige was a powerful one. In the 1940s GNP was adopted by the newly formed International Monetary Fund and World Bank as the key indicator of economic growth, and over the years it took on deeper connotations of success and well-being.
For its original purpose—measuring short-term economic fluctuations—GDP is not likely to be supplanted anytime soon. It may even be gaining ground: A major discussion is under way concerning whether the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks should in times of crisis focus not on inflation but on GDP growth.
When one moves beyond short-term ups and downs, though, things get more complicated. “Our gross national product...counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage,” Robert F. Kennedy said on the presidential campaign trail in 1968. “It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.…Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.”
Although Kennedy’s critique got little attention at the time, it has since become famous, and deservedly so, because it gives succinct voice to almost all the major criticisms of GDP. The three main strands have been these: (1) GDP is, even on its own terms, a faulty measure; (2) it takes no account of sustainability or durability; and (3) progress and development can be better gauged with other metrics. Let’s look at these points in detail.
Measurement error. Compiling GDP involves making a lot of choices, and even reasonable choices can lead to skewed results. Statisticians understandably favor goods and services that are bought and sold—and thus easily valued by market price—over economic activities whose value must be estimated. Such things as unpaid household work, although clearly of great economic importance, are left out of the calculations. And the value of government programs, including health care provision, is generally underrepresented, as is the value of leisure. Yet the anti-estimate bias is inconsistent: For example, “imputed rent”—an estimate of how much homeowners would pay if they didn’t own their homes—makes up about 10% of the United States’ GDP.
Another element of the inevitable arbitrariness of GDP was introduced with the switch from GNP in the 1980s and early 1990s. GNP counted the income of a country’s citizens wherever in the world it was earned. As global trade and investment grew, this measure became harder and harder to square with domestic indicators such as employment and industrial production. It made sense to switch to GDP, which measures only domestic production. The change, though, altered the growth trajectories of many countries. Developing nations with lots of foreign direct investment saw GDP grow much faster than GNP would have—but didn’t necessarily reap the benefits, because the investments’ profits went mostly to multinational corporations.
Sustainability. As Kennedy’s comments make clear, GDP can’t distinguish between economic activities that increase a nation’s wealth and ones that eat into its natural endowments (cutting redwoods), result in sickness and future cleanup costs (pollution), or merely ameliorate disasters whose costs are never accounted for (ambulances). Measuring the sustainability (environmental or otherwise) of economic growth requires making estimates, of course. Joseph Stiglitz, a leading proponent of what’s usually called green GDP, doesn’t think sustainability estimates are any more speculative than some of the estimates now included in GDP. “Taking into account resource depletion and some aspects of sustainability is fairly easy,” he told me recently.
It’s true that the challenges of tracking energy use or pollution aren’t huge. But the politics are extremely tricky. In its early days the Clinton administration pushed the Bureau of Economic Analysis—the agency that measures U.S. GDP—to develop a green GDP. A West Virginia congressman put a halt to the effort, fearing it would hurt his state’s coal mining industry. A green GDP initiative in China got much further, but it, too, was eventually derailed by opponents.
Other metrics. Many things of value in life cannot be fully captured by GDP, but they can be measured by metrics of health, education, political freedom, and the like. In the 1980s Amartya Sen began to distinguish between “commodities,” which show up in GDP, and “capabilities,” which do not. A few years later, in a project spearheaded by Mahbub ul Haq, a friend from his university days, Sen was able to put the idea into practice. The result was the most successful effort thus far to supplant GDP.
Ul Haq was a top adviser to Robert McNamara at the World Bank in the 1970s, served as Pakistan’s finance minister in the 1980s, and joined the UN Development Programme in 1989. He had long been frustrated by how hard it was for Pakistan and other poor nations to make rapid progress as measured solely by GDP, so he concocted a project to better track development, roping in Sen and several other prominent economists to help. The group decided to supplement GDP with data on life expectancy and educational attainment, which were readily available worldwide. And—this was ul Haq’s essential contribution—they combined the numbers into a simple index that allowed them to rank countries.
“I told Mahbub, ‘Look, you are a sophisticated enough guy to know that to capture complex reality in one number is just vulgar, like GDP,’” Sen recalled in a 2010 interview with the UNDP. “And he called me back later and said, ‘Amartya, you’re quite right. The Human Development Index will be vulgar. I want you to help me to do an index which is just as vulgar as GDP, except it will stand for better things.’”
The first HDI, published in 1990, put the U.S.—at the time far in the lead in terms of per capita GDP—in 10th place, behind Japan, Canada, Australia, and several small European countries. It also identified a few nations—Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and China were the standouts—that with respect to living standards were punching well above their economic weight. The HDI is now a dominant metric in development circles. And although the main index hasn’t changed much, the annual Human Development Report spotlights various other metrics, such as sustainability and income distribution. In the most recent report, the U.S. comes in fourth on the HDI but is just 23rd on the “inequality-adjusted” index.
The HDI has spawned legions of imitators, from single-issue rankings such as the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index to broad measures of well-being such as the Legatum Prosperity Index mentioned earlier. Anybody with enough statistical skills and time on her hands can now construct national rankings to match her priorities. In fact, the OECD’s website lets those without statistical skills join in, giving visitors the option of deciding which indicators are the most important and then spitting out a personalized country list (Australia is number one on mine).

Measuring Happiness |

An alternative to crunching data sets to produce a “vulgar” index is to find better ways of presenting them. In the late 1990s, after decades of practicing medicine in the developing world, Hans Rosling began teaching a course in global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. As he struggled to convey the complex story of the progress he had witnessed, he enlisted his son and daughter-in-law—both artists—to help. The result was software, since acquired by Google, that animates the movement of different indicators over time. Complete with Rosling’s unhinged-sports-announcer narration, it makes an improbably compelling alternative to GDP rankings. How compelling? A talk Rosling gave at the 2006 TED conference has been viewed more than 3.8 million times.
The idea that economic and other data can be better presented with a dashboard of indicators than as a single number or ranked list is very much in the air among experts and policy makers. In Sarkozy’s 2009 report on alternatives to GDP, the word “dashboard” appears 78 times. But the notion of dashboards hasn’t captured the public’s imagination. What has is a word that shows up just 29 times in the Sarkozy report (mostly in the bibliography): “happiness.”

Many things of value in life cannot be captured by GDP, but they can be measured by metrics of health, education, and freedom.

Perhaps this isn’t so surprising. After all, happiness is what Jeremy Bentham was out to maximize way back when. In the 1950s and 1960s psychologists and sociologists reopened the question of whether it could be quantified. Opinion polls, then entering their heyday as measurers (and in some cases determiners) of the public mood, were an obvious vehicle for the attempt.
The economist Richard Easterlin imported the happiness discussion to his discipline with a 1974 paper pointing out that the results of national happiness polls did not correlate all that well with per capita income. Rich people were generally happier than poor people in the same country, but richer countries weren’t necessarily happier than poorer ones; and beyond a certain level, rises in income over time failed to increase happiness.
It took quite a while for the so-called Easterlin paradox to garner much attention from other economists. But the recent emergence of behavioral economics, which takes psychological research seriously, has caused an explosion of surveys about happiness and well-being. The trend has been fueled by the example of Bhutan, where the former king Jigme Singye Wangchuck began talking about gross national happiness in the 1970s, shortly after he came to power. A 1987 interview with the Financial Times alerted the world to his views—sending a long parade of happiness pilgrims to Bhutan and spurring the king to eventually convert GNH into something tangible enough to measure with development indicators and polling data.
The interest in happiness surveys has also led to critical scrutiny of the Easterlin paradox. After reevaluating decades’ worth of polling data, the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers made headlines in 2008 by refuting the paradox—at least the part that said people in wealthy nations weren’t happier than those in poor nations. They were unable to conclusively debunk the argument that rises in income over time fail to deliver increased happiness, but the evidence they marshaled certainly muddied the waters. Meanwhile, other researchers have begun to distinguish between happiness surveys that ask people to evaluate how satisfied they are with their lives and ones that focus on emotional states at specific times. The first quality is closely linked to income; the second is not.
The psychologist and behavioral economics pioneer Daniel Kahneman has been working with the economist Alan Krueger (now the head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers) on creating “national time accounts” in the U.S. These would combine time-use surveys conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics since 2003 with measures of economic value and maybe even happiness. The concept applies its own number-crunching precision to the study of well-being, but it uses different numbers—minutes. What’s more, there’s no obvious reason for interest groups to oppose it.
THERE ARE LIMITS, though, to how far the Bureau of Economic Analysis is willing to go. A 2010 paper by several BEA officials concluded that any GDP expansion should “focus on economic aspects of nonmarket and near-market activities…and not attempt to measure the welfare effect of such interactions.” Even then, they warned, “it is critical that such an expansion of the scope of the accounts not occur at the expense of funds needed to maintain, update, and improve the existing GDP accounts.”
Money can’t buy happiness. But it could perhaps buy the ability to measure it.

HBR Reprint R1201D

Justin Fox is the author of The Myth of the Rational Market (HarperCollins, 2009) and the editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group.

Creating Sustainable Performance

2012-01-03T16:13:00.001+02:00

If you give your employees the chance to learn and grow, they’ll thrive—and so will your organization.

by Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath

When the economy’s in terrible shape, when any of us is lucky to have a job—let alone one that’s financially and intellectually rewarding—worrying about whether or not your employees are happy might seem a little over the top. But in our research into what makes for a consistently high-performing workforce, we’ve found good reason to care: Happy employees produce more than unhappy ones over the long term. They routinely show up at work, they’re less likely to quit, they go above and beyond the call of duty, and they attract people who are just as committed to the job. Moreover, they’re not sprinters; they’re more like marathon runners, in it for the long haul.
So what does it mean to be happy in your job? It’s not about contentment, which connotes a degree of complacency. When we and our research partners at the Ross School of Business’s Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship started looking into the factors involved in sustainable individual and organizational performance, we found a better word: thriving. We think of a thriving workforce as one in which employees are not just satisfied and productive but also engaged in creating the future—the company’s and their own. Thriving employees have a bit of an edge—they are highly energized—but they know how to avoid burnout.
Across industries and job types, we found that people who fit our description of thriving demonstrated 16% better overall performance (as reported by their managers) and 125% less burnout (selfreported) than their peers. They were 32% more committed to the organization and 46% more satisfied with their jobs. They also missed much less work and reported significantly fewer doctor visits, which meant health care savings and less lost time for the company.
We’ve identified two components of thriving. The first is vitality: the sense of being alive, passionate, and excited. Employees who experience vitality spark energy in themselves and others. Companies generate vitality by giving people the sense that what they do on a daily basis makes a difference.
The second component is learning: the growth that comes from gaining new knowledge and skills. Learning can bestow a technical advantage and status as an expert. Learning can also set in motion a virtuous cycle: People who are developing their abilities are likely to believe in their potential for further growth.
The two qualities work in concert; one without the other is unlikely to be sustainable and may even damage performance. Learning, for instance, creates momentum for a time, but without passion it can lead to burnout. What will I do with what I’ve learned? Why should I stick with this job? Vitality alone—even when you love the kudos you get for delivering results—can be deadening: When the work doesn’t give you opportunities to learn, it’s just the same thing over and over again.
The combination of vitality and learning leads to employees who deliver results and find ways to grow. Their work is rewarding not just because they successfully perform what’s expected of them today but also because they have a sense of where they and the company are headed. In short, they are thriving, and the energy they create is contagious.

How Organizations Can Help Employees Thrive

Some employees thrive no matter the context. They naturally build vitality and learning into their jobs, and they inspire the people around them. A smart hiring manager will look for those people. But most employees are influenced by their environment. Even those predisposed to flourish can fold under pressure.
The good news is that—without heroic measures or major financial investments—leaders and managers can jump-start a culture that encourages employees to thrive. That is, managers can overcome organizational inertia to promote thriving and the productivity that follows it—in many cases with a relatively modest shift in attention.
Ideally, you’d be blessed with a workforce full of people who naturally thrive. But there’s a lot you can do to release and sustain enthusiasm. Our research has uncovered four mechanisms that create the conditions for thriving employees: providing decision-making discretion, sharing information, minimizing incivility, and offering performance feedback. The mechanisms overlap somewhat. For instance, if you let people make decisions but give them incomplete information, or leave them exposed to hostile reactions, they’ll suffer rather than thrive. One mechanism by itself will get you part of the way, but all four are necessary to create a culture of thriving. Let’s look at each in turn.
Thriving employees are highly energized, but they know how to avoid burnout.

Providing Decision-Making Discretion

Employees at every level are energized by the ability to make decisions that affect their work. Empowering them in this way gives them a greater sense of control, more say in how things get done, and more opportunities for learning.
The airline industry might seem like an unlikely place to find decision-making discretion (let alone a thriving workforce), but consider one company we studied, Alaska Airlines, which created a culture of empowerment that has contributed to a major turnaround over the past decade. In the early 2000s the airline’s numbers were flagging, so senior management launched the 2010 Plan, which explicitly invited employee input into decisions that would improve service while maintaining a reputation for timely departures. Employees were asked to set aside their current perceptions of “good” service and consider new ways to contribute, coming up with ideas that could take service from good to truly great.
Agents embraced the program, which gave them, for instance, the discretion to find solutions for customers who had missed flights or were left behind for any other reason. Ron Calvin, the director of the eastern region, told us of a call he had recently received on his cell phone from a customer he hadn’t seen or spoken to since working at the Seattle airport, five years earlier. The customer had a three-month-old grandchild who had just gone into cardiac arrest. The grandparents were trying to get back to Seattle from Honolulu. Everything was booked. Ron made a few calls and got them on a flight right away. That day the grandfather sent Ron a text saying, simply, “We made it.”
Efforts like this to meet individual needs without holding up flights have led to a number one rating for on-time performance and a full trophy case. The airline has also expanded considerably into new markets, including Hawaii, the Midwest, and the East Coast.
Southwest is a better-known story, largely because of the company’s reputation for having a fun and caring culture. Flight attendants are often eager to sing, joke around, and in general entertain customers. They also radiate energy and a passion for learning. One decided to offer the preflight safety instructions in rap format. He was motivated to put his special talents to work, and the passengers loved it, reporting that it was the first time they had actually paid attention to the instructions.
At Facebook, decision-making discretion is fundamental to the culture. One employee posted a note on the site expressing his surprise, and pleasure, at the company’s motto, “Move fast and break things,” which encourages employees to make decisions and act. On just his second day of work, he found a fix to a complicated bug. He expected some sort of hierarchical review, but his boss, the vice president of product, just smiled and said, “Ship it.” He marveled that so early on he had delivered a solution that would instantly reach millions of people.
The challenge for managers is to avoid cutting back on empowerment when people make mistakes. Those situations create the best conditions for learning—not only for the parties concerned but also for others, who can learn vicariously.

Sharing Information

Doing your job in an information vacuum is tedious and uninspiring; there’s no reason to look for innovative solutions if you can’t see the larger impact. People can contribute more effectively when they understand how their work fits with the organization’s mission and strategy.
Alaska Airlines has chosen to invest management time in helping employees gain a broad view of the company’s strategy. The 2010 Plan was launched with traditional communications but also with a months-long road show and training classes designed to help employees share ideas. The CEO, the president, and the COO still go on the road quarterly to gather information about the idiosyncrasies of various markets; they then disseminate what they’ve learned. The benefits show up in yearly measures of employee pride in the company—now knocking it out of the park at 90%.
At Zingerman’s (an Ann Arbor, Michigan, community of food-related businesses that has worked closely with Wayne Baker, a colleague of ours in the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship), information is as transparent as possible. The organization had never consciously withheld its numbers—financial information was tacked up for employees to see—but when cofounders Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw studied open book management in the mid-1990s, they came to believe that employees would show more interest if they got involved in the “game.”
Implementation of a more formal and meaningful open book policy was not easy. People could look at the numbers, but they had little reason to pay attention and didn’t get much insight into how the data related to their daily work. For the first five or six years, the company struggled to build the concept into its systems and routines and to wrap people’s minds around what Baker calls “the rigor of the huddle”: weekly gatherings around a whiteboard at which teams track results, “keep score,” and forecast the next week’s numbers. Although people understood the rules of open book management, at first they didn’t see the point of adding yet another meeting to their busy schedules. It wasn’t until senior leaders made huddling non-negotiable that employees grasped the true purpose of the whiteboards, which displayed not just financial figures but also service and food quality measures, check averages, internal satisfaction figures, and “fun,” which could mean anything from weekly contests to customer satisfaction ratings to employees’ ideas for innovation.
Some Zingerman’s businesses began instituting “mini games”: short-term incentives to fix a problem or capitalize on an opportunity. For instance, the staff at Zingerman’s Roadhouse restaurant used the greeter game to track how long it took for customers to be greeted. “Ungreeted” customers expressed less satisfaction, and employees found themselves frequently comping purchases to make up for service lapses. The greeter game challenged the host team to greet every customer within five minutes of being seated, with a modest financial reward for 50 straight days of success. It inspired hosts to quickly uncover and fix holes in the service process. Service scores improved considerably over the course of a month. Other Zingerman’s businesses started similar games, with incentives for faster delivery, fewer knife injuries in the bakery (which would lower insurance costs), and neater kitchens.
The games have naturally created some internal tensions by delivering bad news along with the good, which can be demoralizing. But overall they have greatly increased frontline employees’ sense of ownership, contributing to better performance. From 2000 to 2010 Zingerman’s revenue grew by almost 300%, to more than $35 million; the company’s leaders credit open book management as a key factor in that success.
Simple anecdotes lend credence to their claim. For instance, a couple of years ago we saw Ari Weinzweig give a talk at the Roadhouse. A guest asked him whether it was realistic to expect the average waiter or busboy to understand company strategy and finance. In response, Ari turned to a busboy, who had been oblivious to the conversation: Would the teenager mind sharing Zingerman’s vision and indicating how well the restaurant was meeting its weekly goals? Without batting an eye, the busboy stated the vision in his own words and then described how well the restaurant was doing that week on “meals sent back to the kitchen.”
While Zingerman’s is a fairly small business, much larger ones—such as Whole Foods and the transportation company YRC Worldwide—have also adopted open book management. Systems that make information widely available build trust and give employees the knowledge they need to make good decisions and take initiative with confidence.

Minimizing Incivility

The costs of incivility are great. In our research with Christine Pearson, a professor at Thunderbird School of Global Management, we discovered that half of employees who had experienced uncivil behavior at work intentionally decreased their efforts. More than a third deliberately decreased the quality of their work. Two-thirds spent a lot of time avoiding the offender, and about the same number said their performance had declined.
Most people have experienced rude behavior at work. Here are a few quotes from our research:
“My boss asked me to prepare an analysis. This was my first project, and I was not given any instructions or examples. He told me the assignment was crap.”
“My boss said, ‘If I wanted to know what you thought, I’d ask you.’”
“My boss saw me remove a paper clip from some documents and drop it in my wastebasket. In front of my 12 subordinates he rebuked me for being wasteful and required me to retrieve it.”
“On speakerphone, in front of peers, my boss told me that I’d done ‘kindergarten work.’”
We have heard hundreds of stories, and they’re sadly familiar to most working people. But we don’t hear so much about the costs.
Incivility prevents people from thriving. Those who have been the targets of bad behavior are often, in turn, uncivil themselves: They sabotage their peers. They “forget” to copy colleagues on memos. They spread gossip to deflect attention. Faced with incivility, employees are likely to narrow their focus to avoid risks—and lose opportunities to learn in the process.
A management consultancy we studied, Caiman Consulting, was founded as an alternative to the larger firms. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, in offices that are not particularly sleek, the firm is recognized for its civil culture. Background checks in its hiring process include a candidate’s record of civility.
“People leave a trail,” says Caiman’s director, Greg Long. “You can save yourself from a corrosive culture by being careful and conscientious up front.” The managing director, Raazi Imam, told us, “I have no tolerance for anyone to berate or disrespect someone.” When it does happen, he pulls the offender aside to make his policy clear. Long attributes the firm’s 95% retention rate to its culture.
Caiman passes up highly qualified candidates who don’t match that culture. It also keeps a list of consultants who might be good hires when an appropriate spot opens up. The HR director, Meg Clara, puts strong interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence among her prime criteria for candidates.
At Caiman, as at all companies, managers establish the tone when it comes to civility. A single bad player can set the culture awry. One young manager told us about her boss, an executive who had a habit of yelling from his office, “You made a mistake!” for a sin as minor as a typo. His voice would resonate across the floor, making everyone cringe and the recipient feel acutely embarrassed. Afterward, colleagues would gather in a common area for coffee and commiseration. An insider told us that those conversations focused not on how to get ahead at the company or learn to cope by developing a thick skin but on how to get even and get out.
In our research, we were surprised by how few companies consider civility—or incivility—when evaluating candidates. Corporate culture is inherently contagious; employees assimilate to their environment. In other words, if you hire for civility, you’re more likely to breed it into your culture.

Offering Performance Feedback

Feedback creates opportunities for learning and the energy so critical for a culture of thriving. By resolving feelings of uncertainty, feedback keeps people’s work-related activities focused on personal and organizational goals. The quicker and more direct the feedback, the more useful it is.
The Zingerman’s huddle, described earlier, is a tool for sharing near-real-time information about individual as well as business performance. Leaders outline daily ups and downs on the whiteboard, and employees are expected to “own” the numbers and come up with ideas for getting back on track when necessary. The huddles also include “code reds” and “code greens,” which document customer complaints and compliments so that all employees can learn and grow on the basis of immediate and tangible feedback.
Quicken Loans, a mortgage finance company that measures and rewards employee performance like no other organization, offers continually updated performance feedback using two types of dashboard—a ticker and kanban reports. (Kanban, a Japanese word meaning “signal,” is used frequently in operations.)
The ticker has several panels displaying group and individual metrics along with data feeds that show how likely an employee is to meet his or her daily goals. People are hardwired to respond to scores and goals, so the metrics help keep them energized through the day; essentially, they’re competing against their own numbers.
The kanban dashboard allows managers to track people’s performance so that they know when an employee or a team needs some coaching or other type of assistance. A version of the kanban chart is also displayed on monitors, with a rotating list of the top 15 salespeople for each metric. Employees are constantly in competition to make the boards, which are almost like a video game’s ranking of high scorers.
Employees could feel overwhelmed or even oppressed by the constant nature of the feedback. Instead, the company’s strong norms for civility and respect and for giving employees a say in how they accomplish their work create a context in which the feedback is energizing and promotes growth.
The global law firm O’Melveny & Myers lauds the use of 360-degree evaluations in helping workers thrive. The feedback is open-ended and summarized rather than shared verbatim, which has encouraged a 97% response rate. Carla Christofferson, the managing partner of the Los Angeles office, learned from her evaluation that people saw her behavior as not matching the firm’s stated commitment to work-life balance—which was causing stress among employees. She started to spend more time away from the office and to limit weekend work to things she could do at home. She became a role model for balance, which went a long way toward eliminating the worry of employees who wanted a life outside of work.
THE FOUR mechanisms that help employees thrive don’t require enormous efforts or investments. What they do require is leaders who are open to empowering employees and who set the tone. As we noted earlier, each mechanism provides a different angle necessary for thriving. You can’t choose one or two from the menu; the mechanisms reinforce one another. For example, can people be comfortable making decisions if they don’t have honest information about current numbers? Can they make effective decisions if they’re worried about being ridiculed?
Creating the conditions for thriving requires your concerted attention. Helping people grow and remain energized at work is valiant on its own merits—but it can also boost your company’s performance in a sustainable way.

HBR Reprint R1201F

Positive Intelligence

2012-01-03T16:10:00.001+02:00

Three ways individuals can cultivate their own sense of well-being and set themselves up to succeed

by Shawn Achor

In July 2010 Burt’s Bees, a personal-care products company, was undergoing enormous change as it began a global expansion into 19 new countries. In this kind of high-pressure situation, many leaders pester their deputies with frequent meetings or flood their in-boxes with urgent demands. In doing so, managers jack up everyone’s anxiety level, which activates the portion of the brain that processes threats—the amygdala—and steals resources from the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for effective problem solving.
Burt’s Bees’s then-CEO, John Replogle, took a different tack. Each day, he’d send out an e-mail praising a team member for work related to the global rollout. He’d interrupt his own presentations on the launch to remind his managers to talk with their teams about the company’s values. He asked me to facilitate a three-hour session with employees on happiness in the midst of the expansion effort. As one member of the senior team told me a year later, Replogle’s emphasis on fostering positive leadership kept his managers engaged and cohesive as they successfully made the transition to a global company.

That outcome shouldn’t surprise us. Research shows that when people work with a positive mindset, performance on nearly every level—productivity, creativity, engagement—improves. Yet happiness is perhaps the most misunderstood driver of performance. For one, most people believe that success precedes happiness. “Once I get a promotion, I’ll be happy,” they think. Or, “Once I hit my sales target, I’ll feel great.” But because success is a moving target—as soon as you hit your target, you raise it again—the happiness that results from success is fleeting.
In fact, it works the other way around: People who cultivate a positive mind-set perform better in the face of challenge. I call this the “happiness advantage”—every business outcome shows improvement when the brain is positive. I’ve observed this effect in my role as a researcher and lecturer in 48 countries on the connection between employee happiness and success. And I’m not alone: In a meta-analysis of 225 academic studies, researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener found strong evidence of directional causality between life satisfaction and successful business outcomes.
Another common misconception is that our genetics, our environment, or a combination of the two determines how happy we are. To be sure, both factors have an impact. But one’s general sense of well-being is surprisingly malleable. The habits you cultivate, the way you interact with coworkers, how you think about stress—all these can be managed to increase your happiness and your chances of success.

Develop New Habits

Training your brain to be positive is not so different from training your muscles at the gym. Recent research on neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to change even in adulthood—reveals that as you develop new habits, you rewire the brain.
Engaging in one brief positive exercise every day for as little as three weeks can have a lasting impact, my research suggests. For instance, in December 2008, just before the worst tax season in decades, I worked with tax managers at KPMG in New York and New Jersey to see if I could help them become happier. (I am an optimistic person, clearly.) I asked them to choose one of five activities that correlate with positive change:
• Jot down three things they were grateful for.
• Write a positive message to someone in their social support network.
• Meditate at their desk for two minutes.
• Exercise for 10 minutes.
• Take two minutes to describe in a journal the most meaningful experience of the past 24 hours.
The participants performed their activity every day for three weeks. Several days after the training concluded, we evaluated both the participants and a control group to determine their general sense of well-being. How engaged were they? Were they depressed? On every metric, the experimental group’s scores were significantly higher than the control group’s. When we tested both groups again, four months later, the experimental group still showed significantly higher scores in optimism and life satisfaction. In fact, participants’ mean score on the life satisfaction scale—a metric widely accepted to be one of the greatest predictors of productivity and happiness at work—moved from 22.96 on a 35-point scale before the training to 27.23 four months later, a significant increase. Just one quick exercise a day kept these tax managers happier for months after the training program had ended. Happiness had become habitual. (See the sidebar “Happiness and the Bottom Line.”)

Help Your Coworkers

Of the five activities described above, the most effective may be engaging positively with people in your social support network. Strong social support correlates with an astonishing number of desirable outcomes. For instance, research by Julianne Holt- Lunstad, Timothy Smith, and Bradley Layton shows that high levels of social support predict longevity as reliably as regular exercise does, and low social support is as damaging as high blood pressure.
The benefits of social support are not just physical. In a study of 1,648 students at Harvard that I conducted with Phil Stone and Tal Ben-Shahar, we found that social support was the greatest predictor of happiness during periods of high stress. In fact, the correlation between happiness and Zimet’s social support scale (the academic measure we used to assess students’ positive engagement with their social networks) was a whopping .71—for comparison, the correlation between smoking and cancer is .37.
That study focused on how much social support the students received. But in follow-on research I conducted in March 2011, I found that even more important to sustained happiness and engagement was the amount of social support the students provided. For example, how often does a student help others when they are overwhelmed with work? How often does he initiate social interactions on the job? Social support providers—people who picked up slack for others, invited coworkers to lunch, and organized office activities—were not only 10 times more likely to be engaged at work than those who kept to themselves; they were 40% more likely to get a promotion.
How does social support work in practice as a tool for employee happiness? Ochsner Health System, a large health care provider that I work with, uses an approach it calls the “10/5 Way” to increase social support among employees and patients. We educated 11,000 employees, leaders, and physicians about the impact of social support on the patient experience, and asked them to modify their behavior. When employees walk within 10 feet of another person in the hospital, they must make eye contact and smile. When they walk within 5 feet, they must say hello. Since the introduction of 10/5, Ochsner has experienced an increase in unique patient visits, a 5% increase in patients’ likelihood to recommend the organization, and a significant improvement in medical-practice provider scores. Social support appears to lead to not only happier employees but also more-satisfied clients.

Change Your Relationship with Stress

Stress is another central factor contributing to people’s happiness at work. Many companies offer training on how to mitigate stress, focusing on its negative health effects. The problem is, people then get stressed-out about being stressed-out.
It’s important to remember that stress has an upside. When I was working with Pfizer in February 2011, I asked senior managers to list the five experiences that most shaped who they are today. Nearly all the experiences they wrote down involved great stress—after all, few people grow on vacation. Pick any biography and you’ll see the same thing: Stress is not just an obstacle to growth; it can be the fuel for it.
Your attitude toward stress can dramatically change how it affects you. In a study Alia Crum, Peter Salovey, and I conducted at UBS in the midst of the banking crisis and massive restructuring, we asked managers to watch one of two videos, the first depicting stress as debilitating to performance and the second detailing the ways in which stress enhances the human brain and body. When we evaluated the employees six weeks later, we found that the individuals who had viewed the “enhancing” video scored higher on the Stress Mindset Scale—that is, they saw stress as enhancing, rather than diminishing, their performance. And those participants experienced a significant drop in health problems and a significant increase in happiness at work.
Stress is an inevitable part of work. The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, try this exercise: Make a list of the stresses you’re under. Place them into two groups—the ones you can control (like a project or your in-box) and those you can’t (the stock market, housing prices). Choose one stress that you can control and come up with a small, concrete step you can take to reduce it. In this way you can nudge your brain back to a positive—and productive—mind-set.
IT’S CLEAR that increasing your happiness improves your chances of success. Developing new habits, nurturing your coworkers, and thinking positively about stress are good ways to start.

HBR Reprint R1201G

THE PERFORMANCE CONNECTION

In a sweeping meta-analysis of 225 academic studies, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener found that happy employees have, on average, 31% higher productivity; their sales are 37% higher; their creativity is three times higher.

My research shows that employees who score the highest on providing social support are 40% more likely to receive a promotion in the following year, report significantly higher job satisfaction, and feel 10 times more engaged by their jobs than people who score in the lowest quartile.

The History of Happiness

2012-01-03T16:07:00.002+02:00

How the pursuit of contentment has shaped the West’s culture and economy

by Peter N. Stearns

A modern Russian adage holds that “a person who smiles a lot is either a fool or an American.” It’s true that when McDonald’s arrived in Russia, in 1990, one of its first tasks was to train clerks to seem cheerful. I’ve spent time since with Russian friends, discussing cultural rules on showing happiness, agreeing that differences remain.
The point here is not to disparage Russians. Most East Asian cultures also have lower happiness expectations than Americans are accustomed to. Some Latin American cultures tend in the other direction. The point is that cultural variations on happiness are considerable, contributing to the findings of international happiness polls that dot the contemporary public opinion landscape.
Moreover, attitudes toward happiness don’t just vary; they change. Danes, the current polls suggest, are no longer so melancholy. Exploring the nature of such change not only illuminates our own context for happiness but also allows us to assess its advantages and downsides. Without historical perspective, American expectations seem so normal and so natural that they’re difficult to evaluate.
The fact is that the commitment to happiness in Western culture is relatively modern. Until the 18th century, Western standards encouraged, if anything, a slightly saddened approach to life, with facial expressions to match. As one dour Protestant put it, God would encourage a person who “allowed no joy or pleasure, but a kind of melancholic demeanor and austerity.” This does not mean people were actually unhappy—we simply cannot know that, because cultural standards and personal temperament interact in complicated ways. But there is no question that many people felt obliged to apologize for the moments of happiness they did encounter. Sinful humanity had best display a somewhat sorrowful humility.

This changed dramatically with the 18th century and the values of the Enlightenment. Alexander Pope declaimed, “Oh happiness! our being’s end and aim!” while one John Byrom urged that “it was the best thing one could do to be always cheerful… and not suffer any sullenness.” The charge here was double-edged and has remained so. On the one hand, it was now perfectly legitimate to seek happiness. On the other, not being happy, or at least not seeming to be, was a problem to be avoided. Ordinary people began writing about their interest “in enjoying happiness and independence.” Disasters, such as the brutal yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793, produced recommendations to the survivors to keep up their spirits and avoid excessive grief.
The list of historians working on happiness is not long, but those who’ve tackled some aspect of the subject generally agree: At the level of rhetoric, at least, a significant shift occurred in Western culture around 250 years ago.
The obvious question is why, and while some causes are pretty clear, we probably still fall short of a fully satisfactory explanation. Components include, certainly, the intellectual shift toward a higher valuation of matters in this world and a reduced commitment to traditional Christian staples such as original sin—all part of the cultural environment created by the Enlightenment. It’s important to stress that the happiness surge was not antireligious; a key component was the new idea that being cheerful was pleasing to God. The 18th century also saw some measurable advances in human comfort for the middle classes and above, ranging from better home heating to the availability of umbrellas to provide shelter from the rain. (Only a few British traditionalists objected to the latter as undermining national character.) One historian has also noted the 18th century as a time of improved dentistry, when people became more willing to lift their lips in a smile; he argues that the ambivalent smile of a Mona Lisa probably reflected embarrassment at tooth decay. The several shifts driving the happiness surge were powerful enough to propel happiness into politics by century’s end, with the American revolutionary commitment to the pursuit of same.
The smiling American was becoming a stereotype two centuries ago.
Indeed, there seems to have been a bit of an American twist on all this even early on. A British journalist in 1792 was surprised at “the good humor of Americans,” and 40 years later another noted that Americans seemed unwilling to complain, for the sympathy they might gain would be outweighed by their friends’ disapproval. It was in the 1830s that Harriet Martineau, often described as the first female sociologist, professed amazement at how often Americans tried to make her laugh: One stranger “dropped some drolleries so new to me, and so intense, that I was perplexed what to do with my laughter.” The smiling American was becoming a stereotype two centuries ago, as a new nation sought to justify its existence by projecting superior claims to happiness. It was no accident that this same new nation, at this same point, quietly revolutionized the approach to death by introducing the garden cemetery, where people could gain a sense of contentment, if not happiness, as they contemplated the end of life.
All of this constituted the first stage in the emergence of modern Western happiness, but there were further stages, building even greater potency into the culture that still claims us. During the 19th century, although the commitment to happiness in general did not escalate, there were important applications to facets of daily life.
The new middle-class work ethic came close to arguing that work should be a source of happiness. There was some complexity here: Horatio Alger stories of the beauties of work also pointed to higher earnings and social mobility—not just intrinsic happiness—as rewards. But it was convenient for a rising class to believe that working people had no reason not to be happy and that laziness and bad habits disrupted not only performance but also contentment.
The happiness surge applied even more clearly to family life. Now that the family began to play a decreasing economic role, as jobs moved out of the home, it took on new emotional responsibilities. Wives and mothers were urged to maintain a cheerful atmosphere in order to reward their hardworking husbands and produce successful children. Moralists told husbands and wives alike to keep anger away from family life. The rising American divorce rate of the later 19th century owed much to expectations that family reality often could not match—another problem that has hardly disappeared.
Americans also took the lead in efforts to reconcile death with the demands for happiness. The idea gained ground that heaven was a happy place marked by, among other things, blissful reunions with departed family members. This was an intriguing redefinition of spiritual rewards, clearly designed to reduce the need for extensive fear or grief. Its logic, in the context of the ascending culture of happiness, helps explain its persistence in popular religious culture to this day—even to the point where, in a recent funeral service, deceased family pets were assumed to be part of the celestial scene.
With these various developments, the claim of happiness on the culture was established. But the history was still not complete, for there was yet another surge, particularly in the United States, from the 1920s onward. A vast literature began to emerge that stressed simultaneously the importance of being happy, the personal responsibility to gain happiness, and the methods available. Titles, over several decades, included monuments like 14,000 Things to Be Happy About, Happiness Is a Choice, and A Thousand Paths to Happiness (with claims that this was an “emerging science”). Targeted programs ultimately included Happiness for Black Women Only, The Ladder Up: Secret Steps to Jewish Happiness, Gay Happiness, and, for the emotional omnivore, Find Happiness in Everything You Do.
The push went beyond popular books and articles. The cultural commitment to happiness promoted new efforts to associate work with happiness, through experiments in human relations techniques or just piped-in music. It inspired new workplace standards that instructed white-collar employees and salespeople in the centrality of cheerfulness. It spawned new commercial empires such as the Walt Disney Company, whose corporate motto became “make people happy” and whose employees convinced customers that they were already happy simply because they were in a Disney setting. It prompted “happy meals.” It spurred an advertising executive, Harvey Ball, to create in 1963 the yellow smiley face, which took off even in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and whose annual licensing revenues exceeded $50 million within the decade. It helps explain another American invention, the laugh track, to assure people they were happy even when comedy fell short. Along with technological improvements in photography, it prompted new standards for public poses, with smiles all around, whether at family outings or in politicians’ mug shots.
The happiness imperative also spread to childhood, another area where cultural norms have become so powerful that it may be hard to imagine historical contrast. Traditionally, childhood and happiness were not generally associated. Again, this does not mean that past children were less happy, but it does mean that their happiness was not obligatory, often not vividly remembered in adulthood, and certainly not any parent’s responsibility. Even the Enlightenment turn to happiness did not initially penetrate childhood, where work and obedience continued to hold pride of place. Only in the early 20th century were child-rearing manuals filled with chapters on the happiness of children. Among the exhortations: “Happiness is as essential as food if a child is to develop into normal manhood or womanhood”; “the purpose of bringing-up in all its phases should be to make the child as happy as possible.” There was some tension in the new common wisdom between a belief that children were naturally happy (all an adult had to do was not spoil things) and a nagging worry that childhood was actually more complicated (parents had to produce the necessary joy). But there was no dissent from the belief that a key responsibility of parents was to solidify the link between childhood and happiness. Revealingly, by the 1940s the concept of boredom shifted from being an undesirable character trait, which good children should avoid, to presenting a challenge for parents. This was also the context in which, in 1926, the song “Happy Birthday” was composed, becoming a family staple by the late 1930s—despite, or perhaps because of, the gloom of the Great Depression.
The escalation of happiness built on the existing culture, but there were other contributing factors. The transition from a largely manufacturing to a white-collar economy played a role, providing more settings in which managers could see happiness as a business advantage. Consumerism was central. All sorts of advertisers (a newly distinct profession) discovered that associating products with happiness spurred sales. This is what most clearly explains why the intensified happiness culture of the mid-20th century has, in the main, persisted to the present day. We’re still supposed to be smiling.
Understanding the happiness imperative as an artifact of modern history, not as an inherent feature of the human condition, opens new opportunities to understand central facets of our social and personal experience. Some undeniable challenges emerge.
The comparative angle is intriguing, especially as elements of the West’s happiness culture have been widely shared. “Happy Birthday,” for example, has been translated into all major languages, and birthday celebrations are now important in the middleclass consumer cultures of China and Abu Dhabi, altering or even reversing prior traditions. Will a happiness surge be part of globalization? We don’t yet know—remember the less-smiling Russians—but it’s a theme worth watching.
More important, whether globally or nationally: What does the evolving culture have to do with actual happiness? Here, too, it’s not easy to say. Some experts argue that happiness is an inborn trait, so urging a person to become happier is like insisting she become taller. This probably goes too far. Cultures that stress happiness likely do produce more happy people, but the link is complex and fragile.
The historical evolution of our happiness culture also suggests limitations. We have seen that the translation of happiness norms into family and work expectations produces frustration and disappointment when experience contradicts cultural hyperbole. When too much is expected, less actual satisfaction may result. New norms might also make it harder to confront experiences, such as death, where happiness is hard to find—another vulnerability of contemporary culture.
The happiness imperative certainly hinders exploration of the gray areas of modern experience, and its compulsory quality can misfire. Here are the two clearest downsides.
Some experts argue that happiness is an inborn trait, so urging a person to become happier is like insisting she become taller.
First, although the most obvious drawback of the emphasis on happiness involves the gaps with reality that can, paradoxically, create their own discontents, there’s also the risk that people will fail to explore reasons for dissatisfaction because of pressure to exhibit good cheer. We may miss opportunities to improve situations, for example in work settings, because we assume that problems result from personality and not from more-objective conditions. Those risks suggest the need to cut through the pervasive happiness rhetoric at certain points.
Second, and at least as important, a culture saturated with happiness makes it difficult for people to deal with sadness, in themselves and others. A sad child is a comment on the parents—the source of that modern scourge, the “unhappy childhood.” But what of children who are sad or who go through periods of sadness? What are their acceptable outlets? The same applies to adults. We know that at least a quarter of depression diagnoses are mistakes, confusions of normal sadness with a pathological state. Indeed, some depression may result from the difficulty of manifesting a more modest dose of sadness, making it “easier” to drift into outright illness.

EVERY CULTURAL system has drawbacks to go with the advantages that facilitated its adoption in the first place. Seeing a culture as the product of historical change is an invitation to step back, assess, and then consider further change. We may not wish to alter the happiness culture that modern history has bequeathed us; its considerable problems may be outweighed by the pleasure of having cheerful artifacts and smiling faces around us. But we can at least consider the possibility of modification. In our happiness culture there might yet be, after a couple of centuries of acceleration, room for improvement.

HBR Reprint R1201H

1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence declares that all men have a right to “the pursuit of happiness.”
1926 The song “Happy Birthday” is composed.
1963 Smiley face is invented; annual licensing fees exceed $50 million by the decade’s end.
1977 McDonald’s introduces the Happy Meal.

HBR Spotlight on happiness

2012-01-03T16:04:00.003+02:00

To Harvard Business Review είναι ένα από τα καλύτερα και σημαντικότερα επιχειρηματικά περιοδικά. Tο τελευταίο του τεύχος (Ιανουάριος-Φεβρουάριος 2012) έχει ένα ειδικό αφιέρωμα στην ευτυχία, από την σκοπιά της Θετικής Οργανωσιακής Ψυχολογίας και Συμπεριφοράς, ένα ζήτημα που μας έχει απασχολήσει αρκετά σε αυτό το blog.

Σε μια σειρά από κείμενα θα μεταφέρουμε τα σημαντικότερα σχετικά άρθρατα τα οποία ελπίζουμε να βρείτε χρήσηιμα.

Διεθνής Έρευνα Μεθόδων Επιλογής Προσωπικού - Organizational Hiring Practices Survey

2011-11-30T09:40:00.001+02:00

Πρινμια δεκαετία περίπου, ερευνητές από την SHLκαι το Michigan State University συνεργάστηκανγια τη διεξαγωγή μιας διεθνούς έρευνας αναφορικά με τις πρακτικές επιλογήςπροσωπικού που ακολουθούν κατά τόπους οι επιχειρήσεις. Το Michigan State Universityδιεξάγει και πάλι αυτή την έρευνα σε 15 γλώσσες με στόχο να συγκεντρώσειπληροφορίες για την χρήση των μεθόδων (test)αξιολόγησης στην επιλογή προσωπικού.

Λαμβάνονταςμέρος στην έρευνα θα λάβετε, δωρεάν, την αναφορά των αποτελεσμάτων για τις διεθνείς πρακτικές επιλογήςπροσωπικού.

https://edu.surveygizmo.com/s3/437332/greek

Οι υπεύθυνοι της έρευνας ζήτησαν την βοήθειά μας για την συλλογή των στοιχείων. Είναι σημαντικό σε αυτή την έρευνα να υπάρχουν επαρκή στοιχεία/πληροφορίες από την Ελλάδα, προκειμένου να έχουμε μια ακριβή εικόνα της χρήσης των μεθόδων επιλογής συγκριτικά με άλλες χώρες. Στην πρώτη έρευνα είχαν συμμετάσχει μόλις 27 Ελληνικές επιχειρήσεις!!!!

Βιβλίο Οργανωσιακής Ψυχολογίας και Συμπεριφοράς

2011-11-24T10:55:00.001+02:00

Εκδόθηκε πριν λίγες μέρες το νέο βιβλίο των Επίκουρων Καθηγητών του Οικονομικού Παν/μίου Αθηνών Μαρίας Βακόλα και Ιωάννη Νικολάου με τον τίτλο "Οργανωσιακή Ψυχολογία & Συμπεριφορά" από τις εκδόσεις Rosili. Περισσότερες πληροφορίες μπορείτε να βρείτε στην ιστοσελίδα του εκδότη.

ΠΕΡΙΓΡΑΦΗ ΤΙΤΛΟΥ

Γιατί κάποιοι λουφάρουν;
Γιατί δεν μπορώ να επικοινωνήσω με τον διευθυντή μου;
Γιατί δεν αλλάζουν νοοτροπία οι συνάδελφοι μου;
Γιατί δεν μπορώ να συνεργαστώ με αυτή την ομάδα;
Τι προκαλεί τόσο άγχος στη δουλειά μου και πως αντιμετωπίζεται;
Πως θα βρω τον κατάλληλο άνθρωπο για την κατάλληλη θέση;

Αυτά είναι κάποια από τα ερωτήματα που φιλοδοξεί να απαντήσει το βιβλίο αυτό που έχει ως αντικείμενο την ανθρώπινη συμπεριφορά στον εργασιακό χώρο. Η μελέτη της ανθρώπινης συμπεριφοράς που είναι και το αντικείμενο της οργανωσιακής ψυχολογίας και συμπεριφοράς είναι απαραίτητη για την επιτυχία των επιχειρήσεων αφού είναι πλέον σαφές ότι μια επιχείρηση διαφοροποιείται από τους ανταγωνιστές της και είναι επιτυχημένη εξαιτίας του ανθρώπινου δυναμικού της.
Ολοκληρώνοντας αυτό το βιβλίο, οι αναγνώστες/ριες θα είναι ικανοί να εξηγήσουν και να κατανοήσουν διάφορα φαινόμενα όπως η παρακίνηση, η δυναμική των ομάδων, η ηγεσία, η επικοινωνία,η οργανωσιακή αλλαγή/κουλτούρα, η επιλογή και η αξιολόγηση ανθρώπινου δυναμικού,η προσωπικότητα και η συναισθηματική νοημοσύνη, το άγχος, τα στερεότυπα κλπ. Το βιβλίο αυτό είναι γραμμένο για να προσφέρει όχι μόνο την πρόσφατη γνώση στα επιστημονικά αντικείμενα της οργανωσιακής ψυχολογίας και συμπεριφοράς αλλά και πολλά παραδείγματα, μελέτες περίπτωσης, ατομικές και ομαδικές ασκήσεις κλπ. Η φιλοσοφία μας και η επιστημονική μας προσέγγιση στηρίζεται στις αρχές του evidence based management που σημαίνει ότι το βιβλίο στηρίζεται σε πρόσφατα ερευνητικά ευρήματα αλλά και στις βέλτιστες πρακτικές στο χώρο των επιχειρήσεων και των οργανισμών.

The Big HR Debate

2011-11-11T14:47:00.001+02:00

Πραγματοποιείται την Τετάρτη 16 Νοεμβρίου 2011 στο συνεδριακό κέντρο Δαΐς το 2ο Big HR Debate. Το συνέδριο συνδιοργανώνουν το Ελληνικό Ινστιτούτο Μάνατζμεντ Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού της ΕΕΔΕ με το HR Professional και την Boussias Communications.
Το συγκεκριμένο συνέδριο έχει κατά την γνώμη μου μια σημαντική ιδιαιτερότητα, την οποία δεν συναντά κάποιος εύκολα σε τέτοιου είδους συνέδρια. Δίνει την ευκαιρία για εκτεταμένη συζήτηση και ανταλλαγή απόψεων μεταξύ των ομιλητών αλλά και με το κοινό, πέρα από παρουσιάσεις και "προώθηση" προϊόντων και υπηρεσιών. Η θεματολογία του συνεδρίου θα κινηθεί γύρω από τρία panels ομιλητων, με θέμα την Στρατηγική Διαχείριση Ταλέντων, το Rightsizing vs Downsizing και την Παρακίνηση των εργαζομένων. Προσωπικά ανυπομονώ να συντονίσω το πρώτο panel.
Περισσότερες πληροφορίες μπορείτε να βρείτε στην ιστοσελίδα του συνεδρίου.

Ρετσίνα - Guinness σημειώσατε διπλό

2011-11-08T14:04:00.009+02:00

Λέγεται ότι οι Ιρλανδοί είναι οι Ελληνες του Βορρά. Τα τελευταία δύο χρόνια, δυστυχώς ή ευτυχώς, οι δύο κοινωνίες μοιράζονται πέρα από την "έξω καρδιά" και την ανάγκη για τα "κεφάλια μέσα".

Σε μία προσπάθεια να κατανοήσω γιατί η Ιρλανδία τα πηγαίνει σαφώς καλύτερα από την Ελλάδα στην αντιμετώπιση της οικονομικής κρίσης, επανεπισκέφτηκα τη φαινομενική συγγένεια κουλτούρας των δύο κοινωνιών, ρίχνοντας μια ματιά στο γνωστό μοντέλο των 4 χαρακτηριστικών (1. απόσταση δύναμης, 2. ατομισμός, 3. ανδρικότητα, 4. αποφυγή αβεβαιότητας) που έχει προτείνει ο Geert Hofstede ως διαστάσεις-κλειδιά που μας βοηθάνε ν' αναγνωρίσουμε και να κατανοήσουμε διαφορές κουλτούρας και κοινωνικης συμπεριφοράς ανάμεσα σε χώρες (αλλά και όχι μόνο).

Σύμφωνα, λοιπόν, με το μοντέλο του Hofstede, διαπιστώνουμε ότι, ενώ οι Ελληνες και οι Ιρλανδοί μπορεί να είναι "έξω καρδιά", διαφέρουν ωστόσο σε κάτι το οποίο νομίζω ότι είναι καίριο για να καταλάβουμε τη σχετική δυσκολία των πρώτων ν' αναγνωρίσουν την αναγκαιότητα συνεργασίας και το σημαντικότερο να δράσουν ανάλογα (δηλ. συνεναιτικά) σε περίοδο κρίσης. Η διαφορά αυτή σχετίζεται με τον δείκτη "αποφυγή αβεβαιότητας" - όπου η Ιρλανδία σκοράρει πολύ χαμηλά, και για την ακρίβεια χαμηλότερα από τον Ευρωπαϊκό μέσο όρο, ενώ οι Ελλάδα "χτυπάει κόκκινο" [Η περιγραφή των 4 δεικτών κουλτούρας εδώ].

Ενα ακόμα ενδιαφέρον στοιχείο που προκύπτει από την ανάγνωση των διαφορών κουλτούρας ανάμεσα στις δύο χώρες σχετίζεται με τον δείκτη "ατομισμός" - όπου η Ελλάδα σκοράρει χαμηλότερα από την Ιρλανδία αλλά και από τον Ευρωπαϊκό μέσο όρο. Και εκεί, νομίζω, εντοπίζεται το παράδοξο. Μία πιθανή εξήγηση ίσως να βρίσκεται στον τρίτο δείκτη "απόσταση δύναμης", όπου η Ελλάδα σκοράρει σημαντικά υψηλότερα από την Ιρλανδία. (Σημ: Παραδόξως για κάποιους/ες, όσον αφορά στο δείκτη "ματσισμού (ή ανδρικότητας), το σκορ της Ελλάδας ακολουθεί τον Ευρωπαϊκό μέσο όρο).

Αν και ασφαλή συμπεράσματα για τους (πολλούς και πολύμορφους) λόγους που ίσως καθιστούν τη συνεργατικότητα στην Ελλάδα ως πρόκληση δεν μπορούν να εξαχθουν από μία γρήγορη ματιά στο χάρτη του Hofstede, θα διακινδυνέψω ωστόσο να κλείσω το σύντομο αυτό post βάζοντας - με μολύβι - "διπλό" στον αγώνα Ρετσίνα-Guinness.

Οι δικές σας προβλέψεις;

Food for Thought: Distributed Leadership

2011-11-07T13:28:00.010+02:00

Είναι άραγε η εναλλαγή προσώπων στη θέση ηγεσίας ικανή να επιφέρει τις αναγκαίες βελτιωτικές αλλαγές σε έναν οργανισμό, συμβάλλοντας έτσι στην πρόοδό του, ειδικά σε κρίσιμες περιόδους;

Σύμφωνα με την ιδέα της διανεμημένης ηγεσίας (ΔΗ), η απάντηση είναι "μάλλον όχι".

Παρ' όλο που η έννοια της ΔΗ έχει αρχίσει εδώ και μία δεκαετία περίπου να βρίσκει απήχηση και εφαρμογή στην αποτελεσματική οργάνωση εκπαιδευτικών οργανισμών (π.χ. πανεπιστήμια, σχολεία), φαίνεται να συναντάει ισχυρές αντιστάσεις από πολλές επιχειρήσεις. Ενας βασικός λόγος, όπως αναφέρει ο Peter Senge, σχετίζεται με την παραδοσιακή οπτική μέσα από την οποία βλέπουμε και κατανοούμε το ρόλο των ηγετών.

"Our traditional view of leaders – as people who set the direction, make the key decisions and energize the troops – is deeply rooted in an individualistic and non-systemic worldview. Especially in the West, leaders are heroes – great men (and occasionally women) who rise to the fore in times of crisis. So long as such myths prevail, they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning" (Senge, 2002, p.22)

Περισσότερα για την έννοια της ΔΗ στο πρόσφατο, ειδικό τεύχος του International Journal of Management Reviews (σημ: όλα τα άρθρα είναι ελεύθερα προσβάσιμα).

Και παραφράζοντας ελαφρά το ρητό του Bertol Brecht, θα μπορούσε λοιπόν να ειπωθεί ότι "unhappy the organization that is in need of heroes".

Who Can You Trust?

2011-11-02T18:31:00.007+02:00

Το σκιτσάκι που συνοδεύει την επιστολή του Γ.Γ. του Ο.Η.Ε. Ban Ki-moon στους χθεσινούς NY Times (αναδημοσιευμένη εδώ) απεικονίζει έναν καλοπροαίρετο αλλά σχετικά αμήχανο Χριστό, ο οποίος περιστοιχισμένος από 7 δισ. κατοίκους της υφηλίου, φαίνεται να έχει δυσκολίες να τους πείσει για την ικανότητά του να επαναλάβει με επιτυχία το θαύμα με το ψωμί και τα ψάρια. "Στους δύσκολους αυτούς καιρούς, η μεγαλύτερη πρόκληση με την οποία έχουν έρθει αντιμέτωπες οι κυβερνήσεις δεν είναι η έλλειψη πόρων αλλά το έλλειμα εμπιστοσύνης. Ο κόσμος χάνει την πίστη του στους ηγέτες και στους δημόσιους θεσμούς να πράξουν το σωστό", κρούει το καμπάνακι του κινδύνου ο Ban Ki-moon.

Εάν θέλετε να συμμετάσχετε στο μίνι poll θεσμικής (και όχι μόνο) εμπιστοσύνης, που εδώ και δύο εβδομάδες έχω ξεκινήσει στην προσωπική μου σελίδα στο Facebook, μπορείτε να κάνετε κλικ εδώ. Τα μέχρι στιγμής αποτελέσματά του, αν και σε καμία περίπτωση αντιπροσωπευτικά, προσφέρουν μια ενδιαφέρουσα, νομίζω, οπτική στο ερώτημα "who can you trust (in these difficult times)?", τις ΗRΜ προεκτάσεις του οποίου θ' αναλύσω σε επόμενο post. Until then, happy voting :)

How to Hang On to Your High Potentials

2011-10-21T23:19:00.001+02:00

How to Hang On to Your High Potentials

Emerging best practices in managing your company's future leaders

by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Boris Groysberg, and Nitin Nohria

THE WAR FOR talent shows no signs of letting up, even in sectors experiencing modest growth. According to a global study we conducted, only 15% of companies in North America and Asia believe that they have enough qualified successors for key positions. The picture is slightly better in Europe, but even so, fewer than 30% of European companies feel confident about the quality and amount of talent in their pipelines. Moreover, in the regions where many companies are focusing their growth strategies—emerging markets—the supply of experienced managers is the most limited, and the shortage is expected to continue for another two decades.

One popular battle strategy is to institute programs aimed at "high potentials"—the people that companies believe may become their future leaders. The appeal is clear for both sides: Promising managers are attracted to companies known for strong development opportunities, and a well-managed talent pipeline dramatically increases the odds that a company will appoint great leaders at the top.

But these programs aren't simple to execute. The selection criteria are often confusing. Employees are frequently mystified by who's included and who's excluded. Company leaders have to weigh the upside of putting top performers into developmental opportunities against the downside of temporarily distracting them from an enterprise's immediate needs. Firms risk demoralizing solid contributors who are not anointed as high potentials—the vast majority of managers, the people who keep the trains running on time. Sometimes the chosen few don't stick around or don't live up to expectations. And too often, the programs fail to maintain momentum, leaving companies unsure they have paid off and fueling worker cynicism.

The desire to have a positive impact on others for the good of the organization is a key predictor of executive potential.

There are exceptions, of course. Companies such as GE, Unilever, PepsiCo, and Shell have long been known for their careful attention to talent management. But those companies are not the norm.

As far as we know, no one has yet studied the process of managing high potentials from end to end. In order to fill this void, in 2007 we launched a joint research project with the executive search firm Egon Zehnder International, conducting a large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of how companies assess and manage their rising stars. We also interviewed executives from 70 companies that have programs for high potentials—firms of all sizes, located around the world.

From this research, we identified a set of cuttingedge practices. Some are from unexpected places—such as an Argentine manufacturer of steel tubes that's become an international leader despite regional and industry turbulence, and a Turkish bank that has gone global. Some are broad—such as the direct involvement of a pharmaceutical-device maker's senior management team in the development of that company's 600 most promising leaders. Though high-potential programs abound, the field is so new and so dynamic that these practices haven't yet been time-tested. Still, they can provide valuable ideas and inspiration to companies looking to strengthen their talent pipelines.

One important finding of our research was that the effective management of the next generation of leaders always encompasses three sets of activities. The first involves the establishment of clear strategic priorities, which shape the way companies groom high-potential leaders. The second involves the careful selection of high-potential candidates—and communicating who they are to others in the organization. This can be touchy. And the third comprises the management of talent itself—how high potentials are developed, rewarded, and retained.

There is no cookie-cutter method for creating a successful program. Just as you can't lift any other people management process directly from another company, you can't assume that a high-potential program that works somewhere else will work for you. Your strategy and your culture influence the nature of the program that will be most effective. If your strategy is to aggressively expand through acquisitions in emerging markets, for instance, you'll need a different type of program than you would if you were pursuing low-cost leadership through operational and productivity improvements.

We'll outline the strategic, selection, and managerial aspects of effective high-potential programs below. But first, let's start with a definition.

What Is Potential?

We were a little surprised to discover how many companies launch high-potential programs without first clearly establishing what they mean by "potential." We use the following simple definition: Potential indicates whether someone will be able to succeed in a bigger role in the future. It is a person's ability to grow and to handle responsibilities of greater scale and scope. By "greater scale" we mean a job in the same area but with, say, a larger budget or staff; by "greater scope" we mean a job involving activities of substantially more breadth and complexity.

Consider a sales vice president who consistently meets her budget forecasts. Could you reasonably expect her to take responsibility for marketing as well? Might she be able to lead a multidivisional initiative—repositioning the business from a product-centric to a customer-centric organization? She doesn't have to be ready to take it on tomorrow to be high potential. However, if you're going to invest significantly in her development, you want to be reasonably confident that the investment will pay off.

Before classifying her as an up-and-coming leader, then, you'd look for signs of her capacity to learn quickly on the job, genuine interest in broadening her scope (is she inclined to show up at meetings where she might learn something that doesn't directly relate to her job?), and willingness to take on extra work on short notice. She might be very bright and a highly valued contributor but still not qualify as a high potential.

A basic model for assessing executive potential, developed by Egon Zehnder International, is depicted in the exhibit "The Essentials of Executive Potential." It contains five elements, shown in the exhibit as a section of five concentric rings. These range from very difficult to change (motives) to highly teachable (skills).

At the inner core are the individual's motives. These predict consistent patterns of behavior over time. They tend to be stable, are usually not conscious, and are highly related to what people enjoy and get energized or engaged by. Does the person get satisfaction from seeing others succeed? Does she demonstrate a passion for the organization's mission over personal reward? Foundational research at Harvard long ago showed the relevance of the "Three Social Motives"—achievement, affiliation, and influence. One form of the last motive, the desire for socialized influence (having a positive impact on others for the good of the larger organization), is a predictor of senior executive potential. To a certain extent, it may be something you're born with—or at least a product of early social interactions. However, positive work experiences and wise mentorship can help people develop better motives.

One level out you'll find a series of abilities we call "leadership assets," which predict how far and how fast an executive will grow. There are four important assets: A high potential derives insight; she can make sense of a vast range of information and discover and apply new ideas that transform past practices or set new directions. She also effectively engages others through emotions and logic, communicating a persuasive vision and connecting individuals. She demonstrates resolve and keeps on driving toward goals despite challenges. Finally, and perhaps most important, a high potential seeks understanding; she constantly looks for new experiences, ideas, and knowledge; asks for feedback; and adjusts her behavior accordingly.

At the next level is a sense of self, or identity. Identity is how you see yourself on the stage. For high potentials, this means envisioning yourself as a senior executive—not just for the prestige but because you want to fulfill a passion for developing a team or make things happen. Individual contributors may be motivated by others' success, for instance, but may have no wish to play an enterprise-wide role.

The characteristics found in the three innermost rings—which are so hard to change or learn—are essential to high potential. The things in the outer two rings of the model—skills and knowledge—can be acquired. Skills—what an executive is actually able to do and apply—can effectively be taught or learned on the job. And in order to perform an individual job well, every manager needs some specialized knowledge (say, about a market, a business, or certain practices), which should be tested and eventually supplied before any critical promotion.

Align Development to Strategy

Many companies' programs for high potentials simply replicate those in place at other firms, as if talent could be developed with an off-the-shelf model, without taking into account an organization's goals. Potential is situational, and programs that manage it should be aligned with a company's strategy. (If your value proposition to employees is that you'll develop them for successful careers wherever they go, that's a legitimate aim, but it's not something that will necessarily strengthen your talent pipeline.) There is no universal great manager, as we found when conducting an analysis of a large group of GE "graduates" who went on to become CEOs at other companies. Some added tremendous value to their new organizations, but others proved disastrous. Doubtless all of them went through a rigorous development process at GE, but they could excel in a new company only if it was a strong strategic, organizational, and industry fit.

A firm focused on emerging markets needs flexible people who can handle the unfamiliar; a low-cost firm needs disciplined people.

If, for instance, a company's strategy is to grow in emerging markets, it might focus on a more global talent pool as well as people who have demonstrated flexibility operating in unfamiliar settings. In contrast, a company that is committed to being the low-cost leader might target people who are highly disciplined and results-oriented.

Best-practice organizations start with this strategic focus but periodically reexamine their strategic priorities and refresh their pool of candidates. Such flexibility is key; from what we've seen, companies that set rigid goals about the type or number of high potentials, instead of taking a dynamic approach, become complacent and don't get much out of these programs.

One more note on tying talent management to strategy—it's not a matter to be left to HR. If the senior management team is not involved, the process may be doomed. It can be tough to get the senior-most executives viscerally engaged in talent development, but if they aren't personally invested from the start, the whole program could easily head down the wrong path.

Select with Care

Though it can be tricky, choosing candidates for these programs is an extremely important part of the process: The consequences of a faulty assessment can be costly. Not only is it wasteful—in terms of training and developing people unlikely to become leaders—but it undermines employee morale and the credibility of the whole program. Furthermore, poor assessments also mean that people who have strong potential are excluded. Disheartening a prospective star for the wrong reasons can be extremely expensive.

Identifying promising candidates. Selection usually begins either with nomination by the employee's immediate supervisor or through the annual appraisal process. At several companies we studied, including a Caribbean financial services firm, an Italian utility, and a Cypriot bank, managers are expected to pinpoint high-potential employees. At some companies, managers are expected to put forward candidates from their own departments but can nominate individuals from other departments as well.

Other companies, like one Danish bank we studied as well as a European airline and a Scandinavian online service provider, allow employees to nominate themselves. However, we found that the practice is not prevalent, because it carries risks. Across the board, people overestimate their potential. Their self-assessments might be useful but need to be taken in context.

Using annual appraisals to make the first cut brings more objectivity to the process. At a gas pipeline company we studied, two years' worth of outstanding reports qualify an individual as high potential. At an insurance company, the annual appraisal process specifically calls for categorizing individuals as lateral, potential, or high potential: lateral signifies that someone is ready to move into positions only at the same level; potential, readiness for promotion in two years; and high potential, the ability to make two major moves upward in the next five years. But annual appraisals alone are not enough—research has shown that most high performers are not, in fact, high potentials. That's why we recommend supplementing appraisals with a subjective view of candidates—like supervisors' recommendations and other inputs.

After you've identified your first cut of candidates, the next step is to develop valid and reliable assessments of their potential. Many companies routinely use personality tests to do this. The practice is somewhat more commonplace in North America and somewhat less popular in Asia and Africa. We don't recommend it; though some research in the early 1990s provided evidence that personality can predict job performance, it has become clear that personality tests have low validity. Furthermore, if they're self-reported, you can't prevent people from gaming them. The best tools for assessing potential are references and behavioral interviews. At some companies, psychometric tests are used only to customize development plans for candidates who have already been selected by other means.

Increasingly, major organizations also complement their own internal appraisals with periodic input from qualified external partners. External assessments decrease the element of bias and offer a broad set of benchmarks—allowing companies to compare their talent against strong outside candidates.

Just as important as the choice of methods is the person conducting the assessment. Most people aren't nearly as good as they think at sizing others up. Indeed, most managers are dismal at predicting employees' future accomplishments. The good news is that it's not about intuition: Accurate assessment can be learned. And the right person using the right model can learn to assess potential (predicting whether a person will not be promoted, will be promoted once, or will be promoted twice or more over the next four to five years) with 85% accuracy.

Communicating wisely. Many organizations try to "hide" high-potential classifications, as if that were possible. A study conducted by Anthony J. Fresina and Associates in 1987, featuring 225 corporations in 10 industries, found that 78% of companies did not inform high potentials of their designation, but 90% of the time employees knew anyway. Yet even in that study, informing high potentials of their status was clearly associated with enhanced retention and improved productivity.

Nonetheless, this is a delicate topic. If you're completely open about who is on the list, you have to prepare for the disappointment of those not anointed and even the frustration of high potentials whose expectations are not met. We believe strongly in transparency—let people know if they're high potential; acknowledge it when they are not. To some extent, the instinct to keep the list private is understandable, because the process is new at many firms and because companies have so much trouble evaluating even past performance. Still, we've found that the main reason companies don't communicate openly is that their process is overly subjective or unfair and therefore indefensible.

To make sure they provided the right type of feedback, the companies we studied would typically inform managers in private discussions that they had or hadn't been designated as high potentials. Some companies also communicated status indirectly, by suggesting enrollment in special programs or appointing the managers to special developmental roles and assignments. However, transparency wins over secrecy.

Develop and Reward Thoughtfully

The development of high potentials needs to go beyond formal education programs and include self-directed learning and other types of training. On-the-job development is also key. Changing underlying motives and traits is hard, but a combination of targeted mentoring, coaching, education, and job experiences can achieve considerable impact. The best companies in our study look for experiences that will both challenge and motivate people, and strongly encourage senior leaders' involvement in key activities like mentoring.

Programs for high potentials typically employ a handful of time-tested methods. One Eastern European financial services company we looked at offers a classic example of a formal, well-thought-out program. At this firm, in addition to performing their regular jobs and stretch assignments, selected young middle managers attend a 15-month training program designed and taught by business-school faculty and featuring case studies and other business-school content. They receive coaching at the same time. When the program ends, they get a three-to six-month foreign assignment, chosen for its opportunities for personal development, to do a job closely related to their job at home.

It's useful to involve company leaders as teachers—in both formal programs and informal conversations—and as networking resources. High potentials need visibility with senior executives, as well as role models of leadership. At a major pharmaceutical company we studied, the CEO and other members of the senior team meet one-on-one with people on the leadership development track. "They'll ask them about their experience being a member of the talent pool," explains the company's executive vice president of HR and corporate affairs. "Do they feel they're getting appropriate development? Are they getting good coaching from their leader? How can we help them? Do they understand the benefits of being a member of the global talent pool? When the CEO spends time doing this, it shows you how important he thinks it is."

Make sure you don't overload people. There is a fine line between a challenging assignment and an overwhelming one.

Job rotations. It's well established that on-the-job experiences are by far the biggest lever you can pull in developing the skills that will take high potentials to larger, more senior, and more complex positions. As long ago as 1988, a study on managing high potentials conducted by C. Brooklyn Derr, Candace Jones, and Edmund L. Toomey showed that 84% of firms used job rotations as the primary strategy to develop high potentials.

Rotations that develop managers include bigger scale, bigger scope, line-to-staff or staff-to-line switches, cross-moves (handling a very different set of activities across divisions, functions, or industries), start-ups, turnarounds, change management initiatives, and international assignments. Changes in level, organizational unit, location, industry, and circumstances all help managers grow. Ideally, job assignments will involve novelty and the need to adapt. The greater the change in scope and responsibility, the greater the learning. There is, however, a fine line between a challenging assignment and an overwhelming one.

Because job rotations are costly, they should be chosen with care. Here again, it helps to go back to the strategic goals of the organization. What is it that this high potential would need the most to further contribute to our strategic objectives? If it's, say, broader international experience, consider a geographical shift with an eventual increase in job scale. But make sure you don't overload people—if you're expecting somebody to lead a significant overseas expansion, don't add too many new challenges in other dimensions.

Rewards and incentives. Some companies seem to believe that the high-potential classification is a significant reward in itself. But the best companies think beyond the benefits of participation in specific development programs and make considered choices about their high potentials' compensation, as well as how it's paid out.

Financial incentives should not be excessive—compensation is only one part of any reward strategy—and they must be properly aligned with the objective of building lasting strengths for the company. And external incentives like money work only in conjunction with internal motivators like the need for achievement and recognition. While companies need to pay people well to attract and retain high potentials in the first place, they should be careful not to overdo it, because that is the surest way to demotivate employees who are not classified as high potentials, who may feel unfairly paid.

IF PEOPLE are your most important asset, as companies like to say, then high potentials are vital to your future. We are hesitant to definitively label the processes we describe here "best practices," because they are evolving and we don't yet have long-term evidence of their merit. But we give credit to the companies experimenting with new approaches, because they are on the vanguard as we move into what may prove to be the most intense battle yet in the global war for talent.

HBR Reprint R1110D

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz is a senior adviser at Egon Zehnder International, the author of Great People Decisions (Wiley, 2007), and a frequent keynote speaker. Boris Groysberg is a professor of business administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School. Nitin Nohria is the George F. Baker Professor of Administration and the dean of the faculty at Harvard Business School.

From Harvard Business Review, October 2011

“Should I stay or should I go?” και το δίλημμα του Hirschman

2011-10-19T12:31:00.002+02:00

Τις τελευταίες ημέρες, με αφορμή το σχόλιο του Paris2 για τo κύριο άρθρο της Καθημερινής με τίτλο «Να σταματήσει η κατρακύλα» (14/10/2011), εξελίχθηκε μία ζωηρή ανταλλαγή απόψεων στον ιστότοπο της εφημερίδας, σχετική με το δίλημμα «μένω ή φεύγω» από την Ελλάδα της «κατατρύλας», ένα δίλημμα το οποίο έχει πρόσφατα αποτελέσει αντικείμενο ενός γόνιμου προβληματισμού (π.χ. εδώ). Αρκετοί αναγνώστες συμφώνησαν με το κάλεσμα του Paris2 για έξοδο από τη χώρα ως μία υπεύθυνη, ίσως αναγκαία πράξη για την προσωπική και επαγγελματική επιβίωση όλων αυτών που έχουν «μεγάλες δυνατότητες, ταλέντα, όρεξη, αξίες, προσόντα» και ως προϋπόθεση για να μπορούν να «ονειρεύονται δημιουργικά». Άλλοι πάλι διαφώνησαν, εκφράζοντας τη διάθεσή τους να «μείνουν, ν’ αγωνιστούν, να φτιάξουν με τις δικές τους δυνάμεις ό,τι στραβό μπορούν να διορθώσουν».

Διαβάζοντας τα σχόλια των αναγνωστών της Καθημερινής, θυμήθηκα το βιβλίο του Albert O. Hirschman «Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States» και αποφάσισα να κάνω μία μικρή αναφορά στο πόσο εύστοχα πραγματεύεται ο Hirschman το επίκαιρο δίλημμα «μένω ή φεύγω» αλλά κυρίως να ξεκινήσω μία συζήτηση με τους αναγνώστες του HRM in Greece αναφορικά με τις προεκτάσεις του διλήμματος αυτού στον τρόπο με τον οποίο οι ταχύτατες αλλαγές, θετικές ή αρνητικές, που συντελούνται στη διοίκηση του ανθρώπινου δυναμικού στην Ελλάδα μπορούν να κατανοηθούν και να διαχειρισθούν.

Aπλή αλλά όχι απλοϊκή, η κεντρική ιδέα του βιβλίου του Hirschman είναι η εξής: όταν τα μέλη ενός οργανισμού – είτε πρόκειται για τους εργαζόμενους μίας επιχείρησης, είτε για τους πολίτες μίας χώρας – διαπιστώσουν ότι ο οργανισμός τους αδυνατεί να τους προσφέρει τα οφέλη ή την ικανοποίηση που προσδοκούν από τη συμμετοχή τους σε αυτόν, είναι εξαιρετικά πιθανό να αντιδράσουν με δύο τρόπους. Ο πρώτος τρόπος είναι να διακόψουν τη σχέση τους με τον οργανισμό – εδώ ανήκουν οι αναγνώστες εκείνοι που προτείνουν την «έξοδο» από την Ελλάδα. Ο δεύτερος τρόπος είναι τα μέλη του οργανισμού να προσπαθήσουν να βελτιώσουν τη σχέση τους μαζί του, επικοινωνώντας τη δυσαρέσκειά τους και προτείνοντας αλλαγές με στόχο την επιδιόρθωση της σχέσης – εδώ ανήκει η δεύτερη κατηγορία αναγνωστών που εκφράζουν τη διάθεσή τους να μείνουν στη χώρα και να προσπαθήσουν να «φτιάξουν» τη σχέση τους με αυτή.

Η επιλογή ανάμεσα στην «έξοδο» και τη «φωνή» δεν είναι ούτε εύκολα προβλέψιμη, ούτε ξεκάθαρη, ούτε καν ελεύθερη, αλλά αποτελεί συνάρτηση πολλών παραγόντων που σχετίζονται με το κοινωνικό, οικονομικό και πολιτικό πλαίσιο μέσα στο οποίο αναπτύσσεται η σχέση του ατόμου με τον εκάστοτε οργανισμό. Πρόθεσή μου δεν είναι η ανάλυση όλων των παραγόντων, ούτε η κριτική των πτυχών του πλαισίου που διαμορφώνει συνολικά τη σχέση των ελλήνων πολιτών με τη χώρα – αν και αυτό θα ήταν αναμφισβήτητα χρήσιμο. Θα εστιάσω μόνο σε μία σημαντική, «παγκόσμια» παράμετρο η οποία, όπως αναφέρει ο Hirschman, μπορεί όχι μόνο να τροποποιήσει δραστικά την απόφαση «εξόδου» ή «φωνής» ενός ατόμου αλλά και να συμβάλλει στην αποτροπή της «κατρακύλας» του ίδιου του οργανισμού στον οποίο συμμετέχει. Η παράμετρος αυτή αφορά στην αφοσίωση και πίστη που επιδεικνύει το άτομο στη σχέση του με τον οργανισμό ή ακριβέστερα με την αποστολή και το όραμά του. Η παρουσία ισχυρής πίστης στη σχέση, υποστηρίζει ο Hirschman, μειώνει το κίνητρο «εξόδου» από αυτή, ειδικά όταν οι εναλλακτικές επιλογές δημιουργίας νέων σχέσεων δεν είναι ιδιαίτερα ελκυστικές. Βέβαια, αυτό δεν ταυτίζεται σε καμία περίπτωση με το ρητό «πίστευε και μη ερεύνα». Αντίθετα, προσδίδει αξία στο δυναμικό, αμφίδρομο χαρακτήρα της σχέσης εμπιστοσύνης μεταξύ εργαζομένων και επιχείρησης, αναδεικνύοντας τη σημασία ενός άλλου ρητού που λέει «it takes two to tango».

Θα ολοκληρώσω αυτό το σύντομο post με δύο στοιχεία και δύο ερωτήσεις, οι οποίες, αν και γενικές, θεωρώ ότι ίσως αγγίζουν μερικές κρίσιμες πτυχές του διλήματτος του Hirschman και των συνεπειών του για τις σχέσεις εμπιστοσύνης των εργαζομένων με τους οργανισμούς τους στις σημερινές δύσκολες συνθήκες για την ελληνική οικονομία και κοινωνία.

Με βάση τα αποτελέσματα του Ευρωβαρόμετρου για το φθινόπωρο του 2010, μόλις 2 στους 10 Έλληνες δήλωσαν ότι εμπιστεύονται τις μεγάλες επιχειρήσεις. Δε γνωρίζω εάν και το βαθμό στον οποίο τα αποτελέσματα του Ευρωβαρόμετρου είναι αντιπροσωπευτικά του επιπέδου εμπιστοσύνης των εργαζομένων στις επιχειρήσεις τους – ίσως μία εθνικής κλίμακας έρευνα να βοηθούσε εδώ. Πρόσφατα στοιχεία από 23 χώρες δείχνουν πάντως ότι οι επιχειρήσεις που χαίρουν της εμπιστοσύνης της κοινωνίας είναι εκείνες που συνδυάζουν το κέρδος με την καλή μεταχείριση των εργαζομένων τους, την παραγωγή ποιοτικών προϊόντων και υπηρεσιών, και τη διαφάνεια και ειλικρίνεια στον τρόπο με τον οποίο κάνουν business και επικοινωνούν με τους shareholders τους. Και οι ερωτήσεις:

Είναι διατεθειμένες ή/και ικανές οι ελληνικές επιχειρήσεις να διατηρήσουν πολύτιμο ανθρώπινο κεφάλαιο στους κόλπους τους;

Kαι εάν ναι, πώς μπορούν να εμπνεύσουν την εμπιστοσύνη και αφοσίωση των «επιζήσαντων» εργαζομένων τους σε συνθήκες έντονης εργασιακής αβεβαιότητας και μειωμένων πόρων;

Ποιά είναι η δική σας γνώμη;

Έρευνα μεθόδων επιλογής προσωπικού

2011-10-12T14:51:00.000+02:00

Το Εργαστήριο Οργανωσιακής Συμπεριφοράς και Ηγεσίας του Οικονομικού Παν/μίου Αθηνών (CROB-L) σε συνεργασία με τον Σύνδεσμο Στελεχών Διοίκησης Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού Ελλάδας (ΣΔΑΔΕ) και το Ελληνικό Ινστιτούτο Μάνατζμεντ Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού (ΕΙΜΑΔ) της Ελληνικής Εταιρίας Διοίκησης Επιχειρήσεων πραγματοποιεί έρευνα με θέμα τη χρήση αλλά και τα κριτήρια επιλογής των μεθόδων επιλογής προσωπικού που χρησιμοποιούν τα στελέχη και οι σύμβουλοι Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού στην Ελλάδα.

Με την έρευνα αυτή επιθυμούμε να εξετάσουμε και να καταγράψουμε τη χρήση των διαφορετικών μεθόδων επιλογής για τις διαφορετικές κατηγορίες ανθρώπινου δυναμικού και στη συνέχεια να αξιολογήσουμε τα βασικά κριτήρια βάσει των οποίων τα στελέχη Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού αποφασίζουν ποιες μεθόδους επιλογής θα χρησιμοποιήσουν με τους υποψηφίους τους. Στόχος μας είναι να εξετάσουμε σε τι βαθμό η οικονομική κρίση έχει επηρεάσει τη χρήση και την επιλογή των μεθόδων επιλογής προσωπικού.

Η παρούσα έρευνα διεξάγεται από τον Ιωάννη Νικολάου, Επίκουρο Καθηγητή Οργανωσιακής Συμπεριφοράς του τμήματος Διοικητικής Επιστήμης και Τεχνολογίας του Οικονομικού Παν/μίου Αθηνών. Η έρευνα απευθύνεται αποκλειστικά σε στελέχη Ανθρωπίνων Πόρων ή συμβούλους Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού οι οποίοι καταναλώνονουν ένα μεγάλο μέρος του χρόνου τους (ή και αποκλειστικά) στην προσέλκυση και επιλογή προσωπικού.

Εάν ενδιαφέρεστε να λάβετε μέρος στην συμπλήρωση του ερωτηματολογίου της έρευνας επισκεφτείτε την ακόλουθη ιστοσελίδα: http://bit.ly/r7DzDH.

Με την ολοκλήρωση της έρευνας (τέλη του 2011) θα αποσταλεί σε όλους του συμμετέχοντες αναλυτική έκθεση με τα αποτελέσματά της.

ΣΔΑΔΕ-Συνάντηση γνώσης

2011-09-23T12:34:00.001+02:00

Την πρώτη συνάντηση για τα μέλη του μετά τις καλοκαιρινές διακοπές διοργανώνει ο Σύνδεσμος Διοίκησης Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού Ελλάδας (ΣΔΑΔΕ). Η Συνάντηση Γνώσης με τον τίτλο "10 Λόγοι για να είμαστε ξανά μαζί" θα διεξαχθεί στις 13 Οκτωβρίου 2011 στο ξενοδοχείο Sofitel Athens.

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες μπορείτε να βρείτε στην ιστοσελίδα της συνάντησης.

Πρώτες στο πανεπιστήμιο, πρώτες και στην ανεργία

2011-09-06T08:15:00.000+02:00

Οι φοιτήτριες κυριαρχούν στην Τριτοβάθμια Εκπαίδευση, αλλά μόλις βγουν στην αγορά εργασίας τις... καταπίνουν εμπόδια κοινωνικά και διακρίσεις

ΟΙ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΔΕΣ ΦΕΜΙΝΙΣΤΡΙΕΣ των αρχών του 20ού αιώνα, όπως η Καλλιρρόη Παρρέν και η Αύρα Θεοδωροπούλου, θα πανηγύριζαν δίχως αμφιβολία διαβάζοντας τα στατιστικά δεδομένα που δημοσιοποίησε πριν από λίγες ημέρες το υπουργείο Παιδείας. Σύμφωνα με αυτά, η ανώτατη εκπαίδευση στην Ελλάδα του 21ου αιώνα είναι γένους θηλυκού. Το ποσοστό επιτυχίας των μαθητριών στις πανελλήνιες εξετάσεις είναι κατά πολύ υψηλότερο σε σχέση με τους συμμαθητές τους, ενώ υψηλόβαθμες σχολές που πριν από μερικές δεκαετίες ήταν προνόμιο των ανδρών,όπως η Ιατρική,η Νομική και η Αρχιτεκτονική,σήμερα αποτελούνται κατά σημαντική πλειονότητα από γυναίκες!Ωστόσο,μόλις οι σπουδές τελειώσουν τα δεδομένα αντιστρέφονται. Οι γυναίκες παρουσιάζουν σημαντικά μεγαλύτερο ποσοστό ανεργίας, λάμπουν διά της απουσίας τους σε υψηλόβαθμες θέσεις-«κλειδιά» και εξακολουθούν να βασανίζονται από το αιώνιο δίλημμα μεταξύ καριέρας και οικογένειας. Οπως όλα δείχνουν, η ακαδημαϊκή επιτυχία του λεγόμενου «ασθενούς φύλου» ελάχιστα έχει καταφέρει να ανατρέψει τους παραδοσιακούς συσχετισμούς δυνάμεων στην αγορά εργασίας.

Η νομική επιστήμη είναι χωρίς αμφιβολία ο τομέας με το μεγαλύτερο χάσμα ανάμεσα στις ακαδημαϊκές και στις επαγγελματικές επιδόσεις των γυναικών. Οι γυναίκες αντιπροσωπεύουν περισσότερο από το 70% του φοιτητικού σώματος των νομικών σχολών και όμως, μόλις εισέλθουν στην αγορά εργασίας μια «μαύρη τρύπα» μοιάζει να τις καταπίνει. «Σε σκληρούς τομείς,όπως το Ποινικό Δίκαιο, η συντριπτική πλειονότητα των επιφανών συνηγόρων είναι άνδρες. Είναι αξιοσημείωτοόμωςότι ακόμη και σε κλάδους όπως το Εμπορικό, το Αστικό και το Ναυτικό Δίκαιο, όπου οι δικηγορίνες διακρίνονται για τη μεθοδικότητα και τις αναλυτικές τους ικανότητες, συναντάμε εταιρείες όπου οι γυναίκες αποτελούν το “βαρύ πυροβολικό” και οι άνδρες τη “βιτρίνα”. Δυστυχώς, αυτό φανερώνει ότι ακόμη και σήμερα η ελληνική αγορά δυσκολεύεται να αποδεχθεί μια γυναίκα επιστήμονα στη θέση“κλειδί”» αναφέρει μιλώντας στο «Βήμα» ο πρόεδρος του Δικηγορικού Συλλόγου Πειραιά κ. Στέλιος Μανουσάκης .

Υπάρχει όμως ένας τομέας της νομικής ο οποίος βρίθει γυναικών, σε τέτοιο βαθμό μάλιστα που αρκετοί ανησυχούν ότι μέσα στις επόμενες δεκαετίες ο αρσενικός δικαστής θα αποτελεί... είδος υπό εξαφάνιση. Η συντριπτική πλειονότητα των επιτυχόντων στις εξετάσεις της Εθνικής Σχολής Δικαστών και του Νομικού Συμβουλίου του Κράτους είναι γυναίκες, ενώ οι συμβολαιογράφοι είναι και αυτές κατά κανόνα γένους θηλυκού. Αποτελεί κοινό μυστικό στους νομικούς κύκλους ότι η αιτία που οδηγεί κατά χιλιάδες τις γυναίκες στα εν λόγω νομικά επαγγέλματα δεν είναι ούτε ο υψηλός μισθός ούτε το κύρος που τα περιβάλλει.

«Αντιθέτως,είναι ο μόνος τρόπος για να συνδυάσουμε την επιστήμη μας με την ανατροφή της οικογένειας» σχολιάζει η 28χρονη δικηγόρος κυρία Μαυρέτα Γλένη, η οποία ακολούθησε πολύμηνη (και πολυέξοδη) προετοιμασία σε ειδικό νομικό φροντιστήριο για να συμμετάσχει στις εξετάσεις του Νομικού Συμβουλίου του Κράτους.

«Δυστυχώς στις μέρες μας η οικογένεια παραμένει αποκλειστικά γυναικεία ευθύνη.Οι άνδρες έχουν την “πολυτέλεια” να δουλεύουν όλη μέρα και έχουν έτσι την ευκαιρία να διαπρέψουν στη μάχιμη δικηγορία με τα εξαντλητικά ωράρια διάρκειας ως και δεκαπέντε ωρών την ημέρα.Εμείς οι γυναίκες αναγκαζόμαστε να βρούμε “εναλλακτικές” και να καταφύγουμε στον δημόσιο τομέα» καταλήγει η ίδια. Στην ιατρική επιστήμη τα πράγματα δεν είναι καλύτερα. Οπως εξηγεί η δρ Ελισάβετ Διαμαντή, επίκουρη καθηγήτρια Νεογνολογίας στην Ιατρική Σχολή του Αριστοτελείου Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλονίκης, «κατά την επιλογή των ειδικοτήτων οι διαφορές ανάμεσα στα δύο φύλα είναι εμφανείς.Πολλές γυναίκες γνωρίζοντας ότι το βάρος της οικογένειας θα πέσει αποκλειστικά στους δικούς τους ώμους αποφεύγουν τις ανταγωνιστικές ειδικότητες, όπως για παράδειγμα τις χειρουργικές, και επιλέγουν με κριτήριο να έχουν ένα λογικό ωράριο που θα τους επιτρέψει να αναθρέψουν τα παιδιά τους».

Δεν είναι ωστόσο όλες οι αιτίες κοινωνικής φύσεως. «Η αυξημένη φυσική αντοχή των ανδρών και η σωματική τους διάπλαση τους δίνουν προβάδισμα σε χειρουργικές ειδικότητες που απαιτούν να στέκεται κάποιος όρθιος και σε ακίνητη θέση για οκτώ ως δέκα ώρες.Αλλα χειρουργεία,όπως τα ορθοπαιδικά,απαιτούν όχι μόνο αντοχή στην κούραση αλλά και μυϊκή δύναμη,κάτι που σαφώς ευνοεί τους άνδρες» τονίζει η δρ Διαμαντή.

Εν τέλει η «εξαφάνιση» των γυναικών από την αγορά εργασίας είναι συνειδητή απόφαση ή κοινωνικό φαινόμενο; Η επιλογή της οικογένειας έναντι της καριέρας είναι φυσική τάση εγγεγραμμένη στο γυναικείο DΝΑ ή συμβιβασμός ανάγκης; «Θα σας απαντήσω με ένα υποθετικό σενάριο:αν μια γυναίκα ανακοινώσει ότι θα κάνει διδακτορικό ή ότι θα κάνει ένα παιδί,σε ποιο από τα δύο ενδεχόμενα θα τη συγχαρεί με ειλικρινή ευτυχία η μητέρα της;Η απάντηση φανερώνει τους στόχους που η ίδια η κοινωνία θέτει για τις γυναίκες» λέει χαρακτηριστικά η κυρία Μαρία Βακόλα , οργανωσιακή ψυχολόγος και επίκουρη καθηγήτρια στο Οικονομικό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών.

Οπως εξηγεί, στη διοίκηση επιχειρήσεων χρησιμοποιείται ένας ιδιαίτερος όρος για να περιγραφεί η άνοδος της γυναίκας στην εταιρική ιεραρχία: «γυάλινη οροφή». «Είναι αυτό το αόρατο εμπόδιο που επιτρέπει στη γυναίκα να βλέπει την κορυφή,αλλά για μια σειρά κοινωνικών αιτιώννα μην τη φτάνει ποτέ! Μια επιχείρηση αποτελεί αντανάκλαση της κοινωνίας και αντιστρόφως. Αρα η οργανωσιακή κουλτούρα των επιχειρήσεων αντανακλά τις πατριαρχικές δομές της κοινωνίας» τονίζει.

Για να αντιστραφεί αυτό το φαινόμενο η κυρία Βακόλα υποστηρίζει ότι οι επιχειρήσεις πρέπει να στηρίξουν όχι τη γυναίκα, αλλά την οικογένεια. «Αυτό σημαίνει επιδόματα,μειωμένο ωράριο και διευκολύνσεις για τον γονέα, είτε αυτός είναι άνδρας είτε γυναίκα. Μόνον έτσι θα πάψει το δίλημμα “καριέρα ή οικογένεια” να αποτελεί γυναικεία υπόθεση και θα γίνει ζήτημα χαρακτήρα και επιλογών που δεν σχετίζονται με το φύλο» καταλήγει.

Μάλιστα, το δίλημμα «καριέρα ή οικογένεια» φαίνεται ότι τίθεται σε όλο και νεαρότερη ηλικία στις Ελληνίδες. Η 18χρονη Αννα Καραμάνη-Πλουμπίδου είχε από μικρή έφεση στις θετικές επιστήμες και στις εφετινές πανελλήνιες εξετάσεις πέτυχε να εισέλθει στο Τμήμα Χημικών Μηχανικών του Εθνικού Μετσόβιου Πολυτεχνείου. «Ημουν σε μεγάλο δίλημμα ανάμεσα στην Ιατρική και στο Πολυτεχνείο και οι γονείς μου ήταν πολύ αρνητικοί στο ενδεχόμενο της Ιατρικής. Μου έλεγαν ότι είναι δύσκολη καριέρα για γυναίκα,ότι δεν συνδυάζεται εύκολα με την ανατροφή οικογένειας.“Οταν εσύ θα ολοκληρώνεις τις σπουδές σου, οι φίλες σου θα έχουν ήδη οικογένεια.Πώς θα νιώσεις τότε;” μου έλεγαν» διηγείται η ίδια μιλώντας στο «Βήμα». Τονίζει βέβαια ότι η απόφασή της εν τέλει δεν καθορίστηκε από το παραπάνω δίλημμα, καθώς αυτό που επιθυμεί είναι «ένα επάγγελμα που μου αρέσει και που είναι χρήσιμο στην κοινωνία.Το θέμα της οικογένειας δεν με απασχολεί ακόμα».

Μια Ελληνίδα φτιάχνει software για τον ινδικό στρατό!

Χωρίς αμφιβολία το δυσκολότερο εγχείρημα για μία γυναίκα είναι να διακριθεί σε έναν ανδροκρατούμενο επαγγελματικό τομέα χωρίς να απολέσει τη γυναικεία της φύση. Η 28χρονη ηλεκτρολόγος μηχανικός κυρία Φωτεινή Αγραφιώτη είναι ιδιοκτήτρια εταιρείας στο Τορόντο του Καναδά που παράγει λογισμικό για τον αμερικανικό στρατό, εταιρείες σεκιούριτι, αεροδρόμια και πρόσφατα και για τον... ινδικό στρατό. Η εταιρεία της θα κάνει εφέτος, τον πρώτο χρόνο λειτουργίας της, τζίρο 250.000 δολάρια και κατασκευάζει προγράμματα ταυτοποίησης ατόμων σε συγκεκριμένα περιβάλλοντα, όπως για παράδειγμα στρατιωτών σε πεδίο μάχης.

«Οταν έκανα τις προπτυχιακές μου σπουδές στο Πολυτεχνείο της Κρήτης θυμάμαι ότι ένιωθα σαν ξένη σε έναν “αγορίστικο τομέα”. Οταν είχα κάποια σημαντική παρουσίαση απέφευγα να ντυθώ θηλυκά, φοβόμουν να φορέσω ένα όμορφο φόρεμα ή να βάψω τα νύχια μου. Υπήρχε πάντα αυτή η αίσθηση ότι δεν θα με αντιμετώπιζαν ποτέ ως ίση» διηγείται η ίδια μιλώντας στο «Βήμα».

«Κατά τη διάρκεια της πρακτικής μου στο εργαστήριο του Πολυτεχνείου πήρε τη θέση του διευθυντή ένας καθηγητής από την Αμερική. Θυμάμαι ότι με κάλεσε στο γραφείο του και μου είπε:“Αν νιώσεις οποιαδήποτε διάκριση εις βάρος σου επειδή είσαι γυναίκα, οποιαδήποτε έλλειψη σεβασμού απέναντι σε εσένα ή στις ιδέες σου,θέλω να μου το πεις”.Τελικά δεν ανέκυψαν προβλήματα, όμως εκτίμησα πολύ τη στάση του» τονίζει.

Το 2007 η κυρία Αγραφιώτη αποφάσισε να συνεχίσει τις μεταπτυχιακές της σπουδές στο Πανεπιστήμιο του Τορόντο. «Οταν τελείωσα το μάστερ, είχα την επιλογή να επιστρέψω στην πατρίδα.Η έρευνα που ήθελα να κάνω απαιτούσε βέβαια προϋποθέσεις και εργαστήρια που δεν θα είχα στην Ελλάδα- καθώς και χρήματα,τα οποία επίσης δεν θα είχα. Ο καθηγητής μουλοιπόνμου πρότεινε να μείνω στο Τορόντο. Μου προσέφερε εργαστήριο και χρηματοδότηση για την έρευνα» αναφέρει. Μάλιστα, το πανεπιστήμιο κατοχύρωσε τις πατέντες, πλήρωσε τους δικηγόρους, έστησε την εταιρεία και σήμερα αποδέχεται μόνο ένα ελάχιστο, συμβολικό, ποσό των κερδών. «Στον Καναδά σε κρίνουν μόνο για τη δουλειά σου,όχι για το φύλο σου ή για άλλα κοινωνικά χαρακτηριστικά. Οι ευκαιρίες δίνονται σε αυτούς που τις κυνηγούν.Γνωρίζω πολλά παιδιά που είναι πολύ πιο έξυπνα από εμένα και έμειναν στην Ελλάδα. Θλίβομαι στην ιδέα ότι αν ήταν στο εξωτερικό θα έκαναν καταπληκτική δουλειά.Πολλές φορές συμμετείχα σε συνέδρια όπου η αντιπροσώπευση των ελληνικών πανεπιστημίων ήταν μηδαμινή.Δεν είναι θέμα μυαλών αλλά βασικών προϋποθέσεων» καταλήγει.

Φωτεινή Αγραφιώτη

Ιδιοκτήτρια εταιρείας software στον Καναδά

«Οταν είχα κάποια σημαντική παρουσίαση απέφευγα να ντυθώ θηλυκά, φοβόμουν να φορέσω ένα όμορφο φόρεμα ή να βάψω τα νύχια μου. Υπήρχε πάντα αυτή η αίσθηση ότι δεν θα με αντιμετώπιζαν ποτέ ως ίση»

Μυαλό ανδρικό, γυναικείο ή «μαθηματικό»;

Ποια είναι τα αίτια της αυξημένης επιτυχίας των κοριτσιών στις πανελλήνιες εξετάσεις; Είναι θέμα εξυπνάδας, οργάνωσης, πειθαρχίας; «Η εποχή που μπορούσε να κάνει κάποιος χονδροειδείς συγκρίσεις εξυπνάδας ανάμεσα στα δύο φύλα- του τύπου “τα αγόρια έχουν μαθηματικό μυαλό”- έχει περάσει ανεπιστρεπτί»αναφέρει ο καθηγητής Φυσικής κ.Απόστολος Βαλσαμίδης, ο οποίος εδώ και δεκαετίες προετοιμάζει τελειοφοίτους για τις εισαγωγικές εξετάσεις.

Ο ίδιος αποδίδει το συγκριτικό πλεονέκτημα των κοριτσιών σε κοινωνικά χαρακτηριστικά και όχι σε γενετικές διαφορές στον εγκέφαλο των δύο φύλων.«Τα κορίτσια εμφανίζονται πιο πειθαρχημένα και πιο δεκτικά στις συμβουλές, κάτι που κατά πάσα πιθανότητα σχετίζεται με την ανατροφή τους και τους δίνει προβάδισμα κατά την προετοιμασία για τις εξετάσεις.Αντιθέτως,έχω παρατηρήσει ότι τα αγόρια αντιδρούν πιο συχνά και υιοθετούν εύκολα μια στάση αμφισβήτησης απέναντι στον καθηγητή,η οποία συχνά τείνει να τους αποσυντονίζει» καταλήγει.

«Είναι πλέον παρωχημένες οι αντιλήψεις που απέκλειαν τα κορίτσια από τις θετικές επιστήμες. Στο τμήμα μου στη θετική κατεύθυνση ήμασταν ίσος αριθμός κοριτσιών και αγοριών και σεβόμουν απόλυτα τις συμμαθήτριές μου για το μυαλό και τις ικανότητές τους»τονίζει ο 18χρονοςΝίκος Σκουτέλης,ο οποίος εισήλθε εφέτος στην Ιατρική Αθηνών. Ο ίδιος μάλιστα εντοπίζει μία...αντίστροφη διακριτική μεταχείριση:«Ενώ κανένας πλέον δεν εμποδίζει ένα κορίτσι στις θετικές επιστήμες, οι περισσότεροι αποθαρρύνουνέστω και εμμέσως- ένα αγόρι που αγαπά τις θεωρητικές επιστήμες,όπως την ψυχολογία, τη φιλολογία ή τη θεατρολογία. Ιδανικά θα έπρεπε ο καθένας να ακολουθεί ελεύθερος τις κλίσεις του»καταλήγει.

Ταυτόχρονα, η 25χρονη ηλεκτρολόγος μηχανικός κυρίαΔέσποινα Τσελεγκαρίδουεντόπισε κατά τη διάρκεια των σπουδών της σε μια «ανδροκρατούμενη» σχολή ακόμη μία διαφορά ανάμεσα στα δύο φύλα: τη φυσική δεξιότητα ή πιο απλά την ικανότητα να «πιάνει το χέρι τους».«Στις πολυτεχνικές επιστήμες απαιτείται ο μηχανικός να είναι διατεθειμένος να δουλέψει με τα χέρια του, να αποσυναρμολογήσει,να ξεβιδώσει,να λερωθεί. Η εξυπνάδα και το μαθηματικό μυαλό δεν αρκούν,χρειάζεται αυτό το ιδιαίτερο μεράκι,η επιθυμία να δημιουργήσεις με τα ίδια σου τα χέρια.Από την προσωπική μου εμπειρία μπορώ να πω ότι αυτή τη φυσική δεξιότητα την εμφανίζουν κατά κόρον οι άνδρες. Η ικανότητά τους να καταπιάνονται με τεχνικά ζητήματα τους δίνει συγκριτικό πλεονέκτημα» καταλήγει η ίδια.

Στα αζήτητα τα υψηλόβαθμα στελέχη στην Ελλάδα

2011-08-23T08:28:00.003+02:00

Αισιόδοξη η διεθνής επιχειρηματική αγορά για ανάκαμψη οικονομίας, κυρίως στην Ασία, ενώ στη χώρα μας υπάρχει επιφύλαξη

Στα αζήτητα παραμένουν τα υψηλόβαθμα στελέχη στην Ελλάδα, με τον κλάδο της ενέργειας και των αλυσίδων να παρουσιάζει μια κινητικότητα και τον τραπεζικό κλάδο να έχει παγώσει. Τα μεσαία και χαμηλόβαθμα στελέχη κινούνται περισσότερο, καθώς οι μισθοί τους είναι μικρότεροι, αν και το δεύτερο εξάμηνο του 2011 φαίνεται να είναι πιο στάσιμο από την αρχή του έτους, που ήταν πολύ καλύτερη από το 2010.

Σύμφωνα με στοιχεία εταιρειών συμβούλων επιχειρήσεων η κατάσταση στην αγορά στελεχών στην Ελλάδα είναι θυελλώδης και δεν μπορεί να γίνει κάποια εκτίμηση για το μέλλον, γιατί κανείς δεν σχεδιάζει πλέον μακροπρόθεσμα, ενώ έχει παρατηρηθεί ότι γίνονται κάποιες προσλήψεις αλλά και πολλές απολύσεις. Το παράδοξο στην αγορά στελεχών στην Ελλάδα, αναφέρει η κυρία Δρ Βενετία Κουσία, διευθύνουσα σύμβουλος της Manpower ότι «ενώ πολλές εταιρείες απολύσουν στελέχη, είτε γιατί κλείνουν, είτε γιατί μετακομίζουν στο εξωτερικό, είτε γιατί μειώνουν τις δραστηριότητές τους, άλλες επιχειρήσεις, όπως εξαγωγικές, δεν μπορούν να βρουν τα κατάλληλα υψηλόβαθμα στελέχη για να προσλάβουν». Επίσης, συνεχίζει η κυρία Κουσία, «τα υψηλόβαθμα στελέχη δεν αποφασίζουν εύκολα να μετακινηθούν αυτή την περίοδο σε άλλες εταιρείες, ενώ αρκετοί από αυτούς που έχουν απολυθεί είναι διατεθειμένοι να φύγουν στο εξωτερικό ή να δεχθούν μείωση στο μισθό και τις απολαβές τους».

Εν τω μεταξύ, επιφύλαξη και σκεπτικισμός σχετικά με τις δυνατότητες ανάπτυξης της ελληνικής επιχειρηματικότητας κυριαρχεί στα υψηλόβαθμα στελέχη, με πάνω από 60% να δηλώνουν ότι δεν θα προχωρήσουν σε προσλήψεις τους επόμενους μήνες στη χώρα μας, ενώ η διεθνής επιχειρηματική αγορά είναι αισιόδοξη, με τις θετικότερες απαντήσεις να προέρχονται από χώρες της Ασίας, όπως προκύπτει από διεθνή έρευνα της Cornerstone σχετικά τις βραχυπρόθεσμες τάσεις της οικονομίας σε τοπικό και παγκόσμιο επίπεδο για το 2011, καθώς και τις ανάγκες σε ανθρώπινο δυναμικό.

Πιο συγκεκριμένα, όσον αφορά την Ελλάδα, ο διευθύνων σύμβουλος της Cornerstone Athens, κ. Ν. Γιαννουλάτος, επεσήμανε ότι «το 65% των συμμετεχόντων δήλωσαν ότι δεν πρόκειται να προχωρήσουν σε προσλήψεις τους επόμενους μήνες, αφού δεν αναμένουν άμεση ανάκαμψη της οικονομίας. Ωστόσο, η πλειονότητα (72%) συμφώνησε ότι είναι επιτακτική η ανάγκη εξοικονόμησης πόρων για τους τομείς της εκπαίδευσης και ανάπτυξης του ανθρώπινου δυναμικού, ώστε να υποστηριχθεί το ηθικό των εργαζομένων και να διασφαλιστεί το απαιτούμενο επίπεδο παραγωγικότητας. Επίσης όσον αφορά στο σκέλος της κρατικής παρέμβασης και στο ρόλο που διαδραματίζει στην ανάπτυξη της οικονομίας, οι Έλληνες συμμετέχοντες συμφώνησαν (68%) ότι δεν έχει βοηθήσει ιδιαίτερα στη διαμόρφωση ενός θετικού κλίματος για την εξέλιξη της επιχειρηματικότητας».

Σημειώνεται ότ η έρευνα αφορούσε σε επιχειρήσεις στην Ευρώπη (36%), στην Αμερική και στον Καναδά (32%), στην Αφρική, στη Μέση Ανατολή και στην Ινδία (8%) στην Λατινική Αμερική (11%) και στην Ασία (13%). Οι συμμετέχοντες ανήκουν κυρίως στην κατηγορία των υψηλόβαθμων στελεχών.

Τα αποτελέσματα της φετινής χρονιάς υποδεικνύουν ότι υπάρχει σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο αισιοδοξία ως προς το θέμα της πολύ - αναμενόμενης οικονομικής ανάκαμψης, αν και υπάρχει ταυτόχρονα επιφύλαξη σχετικά με την ανάπτυξη της επιχειρηματικότητας. Συγκεκριμένα το 36% αναμένει ρυθμούς ανάπτυξης μεταξύ 8-14%, το 32% κάτω από 8%, το 18% μεταξύ 15-24%, το 14% κάτω από 24% και το 32% κάτω από 8%.

Στο κρίσιμο ερώτημα για το αν η παγκόσμια οικονομική ύφεση βρίσκεται κοντά στο τέρμα ή όχι, προέκυψε μια αβεβαιότητα με το 31% να δηλώνει ότι η καθοδική πορεία δεν έχει ολοκληρωθεί, το 21% να δηλώνει ότι δεν είναι βέβαιο και το 48% να είναι πιο αισιόδοξο και να δηλώνει ότι υπάρχει ανάκαμψη. Τα πράγματα φαίνεται να είναι λίγο καλύτερα σε επίπεδο τοπικής οικονομίας, όπου το 59% των συμμετεχόντων δήλωσαν ότι η κατάσταση φαίνεται να βελτιώνεται, ενώ το 34% διαφωνούν και κρίνουν ότι δεν αναμένεται ανάπτυξη.

Ως προς το σκέλος της τοπικής κρατικής παρέμβασης, το 44% κρίνει ότι τα μέτρα τα οποία ελήφθησαν στη χώρα τους θα βοηθήσουν την οικονομική ανάπτυξη, ενώ πάνω από τους μισούς συμμετέχοντες είτε διαφωνούν, είτε δηλώνουν αβέβαιοι για την αποτελεσματικότητα των μέτρων αυτών.

Το κρίσιμο θέμα των προσλήψεων, τέθηκε επίσης στο πλαίσιο της έρευνας και είναι θετικό το ότι παρόλο που υπάρχει επιφύλαξη σχετικά την ανάπτυξη της τοπικής οικονομίας, ωστόσο σχεδόν το 63% σχεδιάζει να ενισχύσει το ανθρώπινο δυναμικό του στους επόμενους μήνες, έναντι του 15% που σχεδιάζει να προχωρήσει σε απολύσεις.

Όσον αφορά στις κυριότερες προκλήσεις που αντιμετωπίζουν οι επιχειρήσεις σήμερα διεθνώς, η Επιχειρηματική Εξέλιξη παραμένει η μέγιστη προτεραιότητα (90%) και ακολουθούν η Υψηλή Αποδοτικότητα (81%), η Προσέλκυση Ταλέντου (77%), η Στρατηγική Κατεύθυνση (76%), η Τεχνολογία (66%), τα Ανταποδοτικά Οφέλη προς τους Εργαζόμενους (66%), τα Χρηματοοικονομικά (62%), η Παγκοσμιοποίηση (59%) και η Διατήρηση των Εργαζομένων (55%).

Επίσης, η βιώσιμη ανάπτυξη αποτελεί ένα ακόμη σημαντικό παράγοντα ο οποίος φαίνεται να επηρεάζει την ευημερία της αγοράς. Συγκεκριμένα το 82% των συμμετεχόντων δήλωσε ότι η βιωσιμότητα αποτελεί κλειδί για τη διαμόρφωση στρατηγικής στις επιχειρήσεις για τις οποίες εργάζονται.

Το ανθρώπινο δυναμικό

Όσον αφορά στους κυριότερους παράγοντες που επηρεάζουν την απόδοση των εργαζομένων, σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο, οι συμμετέχοντες δήλωσαν ότι η διατήρηση των ταλέντων μέσα στον οργανισμό παραμένει η μεγαλύτερη προτεραιότητα (79%), ενώ βαρύνουσα σημασία έχουν οι προσλήψεις (67%), η διαχείριση των ικανοτήτων των στελεχών (65%), η εξέλιξη της καριέρας τους (59%), η διαχείριση ενός πλάνου διαδοχής (56%) και τα ανταποδοτικά οφέλη προς το προσωπικό (33%).

Επιπρόσθετα οι εταιρείες αναζητούν όλο και περισσότερο εξωτερική υποστήριξη για τη διαχείριση του ανθρώπινου δυναμικού και συγκεκριμένα, το 87% κρίνει ότι χρειάζεται να αξιοποιήσει την τεχνογνωσία των Συμβούλων Επιλογής Στελεχών, καθώς και να χρησιμοποιήσει εξειδικευμένες υπηρεσίες για την εκπαίδευση των υψηλόβαθμων στελεχών (70%), την αξιολόγηση μεθόδων διαχείρισης του ταλέντου (51%) και την αξιολόγηση των μελών της διοίκησης (43%).

Σε αυτό το πλαίσιο οι εταιρίες αναζητούν εξωτερική υποστήριξη για την επάνδρωση των θυγατρικών τους σε χώρες στις οποίες υπάρχει ανάπτυξη, ενώ ταυτόχρονα δείχνουν αυξημένο ενδιαφέρον για ειδικές υπηρεσίες (Onboarding) οι οποίες αφορούν στην ταχεία εκπαίδευση υψηλόβαθμων στελεχών, ταυτόχρονα με την ανάληψη των καθηκόντων τους, ώστε να διασφαλιστεί η άμεση αποδοτικότητά τους

Corporate Recruiter or Head Hunter?

2011-08-19T13:11:00.003+02:00

The lines are getting blurred. Targets are being moved. Job titles are getting more and more, well… stupid

Take Pride in What You Do

2011-08-19T13:11:00.000+02:00

On Recruiter.com, we’ll often discuss all of the fun positives of working as a professional recruiter. We talk about the flexibility, fast-pace and great opportunity. We joke about the off-time, the compensation and the competition. A lot of other times we discuss the negatives…the difficult clients, kooky candidates and all around frustrations of recruiting. But there’s something that definitely deserves a lot more time: professional pride

Η Ελλάδα γυρνά στο 1961

2011-08-17T15:12:00.002+02:00

Επιστροφή στη δεκαετία του '60, όσον αφορά την ανεργία προβλέπει για τους επόμενους μήνες το Ινστιτούτο Εργασίας της ΓΣΕΕ.

Με το τέλος της τουριστικής περιόδου, όταν χιλιάδες άνθρωποι θα μείνουν χωρίς δουλειά, η περίοδος θα είναι ιδιαίτερα δύσκολη με τη ΓΣΕΕ να εκτιμά ότι ο αριθμός των ανέργων θα ξεπεράσει τους 900.000.

Η ετήσια μελέτη του Ινστιτούτου για την ελληνική οικονομία, η οποία θα παρουσιαστεί στην ΔΕΘ, εκτιμά ότι η επίσημη ανεργία θα αγγίξει το Φθινόπωρο το 18% και μέσα στο 2012 θα ξεπεράσει το 20%.

How to become an Evidence-Based HR practitioner

2011-07-21T12:30:00.000+02:00

Σε συνέχεια της πρόσφατης ημερίδας που πραγματοποιήσαμε στα τέλη Ιουνίου στο Οικονομικό Παν/μιο Αθηνών, το τελευταίο τεύχος του περιοδικού "Human Resource Management Journal" δημοσίευσε ένα άρθρο των Denise Rousseau & Eric Barends σχετικά με τα βήματα που μπορεί να ακολουθήσει ο επαγγελματίας της Διοίκησης Ανθρωπίνων Πόρων προκειμένου να εφαρμόσει το Evidence Based Management στον οργανισμό όπου εργάζεται.

Το άρθρο είναι απλά γραμμένο και απευθύνεται σε επαγγελματίες της ΔΑΔ και όχι σε ερευνητές....
Ακολουθεί η περίληψή του, ενώ το πλήρες κείμενο του άρθρου μπορείτε να το βρείτε εδώ.

Καλό καλοκαίρι

Περίληψη
Evidence-based HR (EBHR) is a decision-making process combining critical thinking with use of the best available scientific evidence and business information. We describe how to get started as an evidencebased HR practitioner. Actively managing professional decisions is a key aspect of EBHR. Doing so involves making decisions, especially consequential or recurring ones, using practices supported by high-quality research. We present a step-by-step set of approaches to becoming an evidence-based HR practitioner: from getting started, through everyday practices and continuous learning to integrating EBHR into your organisation. In offering guidance for evidence-based practice, this article underscores the connection between effective practice and organisational research.

20 ways to screw up a job interview

2011-07-08T14:32:00.000+02:00

Καταπληκτικό!!!!

Παρουσιάσεις της Εκδήλωσης στην Προσέλκυση-Επιλογή Προσωπικού

2011-06-24T11:22:00.000+02:00

Πραγματοποιήθηκε χθες Πέμπτη 23/6/2011 στο αμιθέατρο Αντωνιάδου η εκδήλωση με θέμα Evidence Based Approaches in Recruitment and Selection” και την συμμετοχή των Prof. Neil Anderson (Brunel University, UK), Prof. Cornelius Konig (Universität des Saarlandes, Germany), Prof. Fiona Patterson (City University, UK), και Ιωάννη Νικολάου (ΟΠΑ).

Συμμετείχαν 120-140 συμμετέχοντες (HR Executives και προπτυχιακοί/μεταπτυχιακοί φοιτητές). Ακολούθως μπορείτε να δείτε τις παρουσιάσεις των ομιλητών.

Ioannis Nikolaou (Athens University of Economics & Business, Greece): Evidence-Based (EB) Management: A focus on Evidence Based-Human Resource Management
Neil Anderson (Brunel University, UK): Good Practice and Good Science: The Intriguing Case of Recruitment and Selection in Europe
Cornelius König (Universität des Saarlandes, Germany): Using personality tests for selection.
Fiona Patterson (University of Cambridge, UK): Evaluating new methods for high stakes selection: Implications for policy and practice

Εκδήλωση-Συνέδριο στην Προσέλκυση & Επιλογή Προσωπικού

2011-05-28T19:19:00.000+02:00

Το Μεταπτυχιακό Πρόγραμμα Σπουδών στην Διοίκηση του Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού του Οικονομικού Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών(ΟΠΑ) και ο Επίκουρος Καθηγητής Οργανωσιακής Συμπεριφοράς κ. Ιωάννης Νικολάου ανέλαβαν από το European Association of Work & Organizational Psychology (EAWOP) την διοργάνωση του Επιστημονικού Συνεδρίου “EAWOP Small Group Meeting on Selection &Assessment”.

Το συνέδριο θα πραγματοποιηθεί στην Αθήνα (Park Hotel) από τις 21-23 Ιουνίου 2011 με την συμμετοχή 40 επιστημόνων από την Ευρώπη και τις ΗΠΑ και θα αναλυθούν όλες οι πρόσφατε τάσεις και προσεγγίσεις στο χώρο της προσέλκυσης, επιλογής και αξιολόγησης του Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού των επιχειρήσεων και οργανισμών.

Στα πλαίσια του συνεδρίου, θα πραγματοποιηθεί στο αμφιθέατρο Αντωνιάδου του ΟΠΑ ομιλία-διάλεξη με θέμα: “Evidence Based Approaches in Recruitment and Selection” με τους ακόλουθους ομιλητές: Prof. Neil Anderson (Brunel University, UK), Prof. Fiona Patterson (City University, UK), Prof. Jesus Salgado (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain) και τον ΙωάννηΝικολάου (ΟΠΑ).

Η διάλεξη είναι ανοιχτή στο κοινό με δωρεάν συμμετοχή, και θα πραγματοποιηθεί την Πέμπτη 23 Ιουνίου (18.00 – 21.00). Διεξάγεται σε συνεργασία με τον Σύλλογο Αποφοίτων του Μεταπτυχιακού Προγράμματος Σπουδών στην Διοίκηση του Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού “HR Alumni” και την υποστήριξη του Συνδέσμου Διοίκησης Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού Ελλάδος (ΣΔΑΔΕ) και του Ινστιτούτου Μάνατζμεντ Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού (ΙΜΑΔ) της Ελληνικής Εταιρείας Διοικήσεως Επιχειρήσεων (ΕΕΔΕ). Χορηγός Επικοινωνίας είναι το HR Professional.

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες στο http://eawopsgm.wordpress.com/

Employee Moods Impact Performance

2011-05-10T21:54:00.000+02:00

Γνωστό θέμα εδώ και καιρό τους "παροικούντες την Ιερουσαλήμ". Όσο πιο πολλά τεκμήρια όμως τόσο καλύτερα.... Και αυτό το άρθρο από το SHRM.

Starting work in a bad mood can trigger a chain reaction that can cause a worker’s job performance to spiral downward throughout the workday, according to a study conducted by researchers at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
The researchers found that employees’ moods at the start of the workday affected how they felt and performed for the rest of the day. The moods were linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers’ moods.
“We saw that employees could get into these negative spirals where they started the day in a bad mood and just got worse over the course of the day,” said Steffanie Wilk, associate professor of management and human resources at Fisher College of Business.
Wilk conducted the research with Nancy Rothbard, an associate professor of management for the Wharton School. The results of their study, which will be published in the Academy of Management Journal, examined the daily work habits of 29 customer service representatives for a large U.S.-based insurance company. The researchers tracked their moods and behaviors over three weeks.
At the start of each workday, the study participants completed a brief survey designed to determine their mood. As the workday progressed, participants respond to a second survey to describe their attitudes at that point in the day and to describe the customers that they dealt with during the day.
The study results showed that when employees began the day in a good mood, they tended to rate customers more positively and tended to feel more positive about themselves as the day progressed.
Similarly, the researchers found that bad moods at the start of the day had a strong negative effect on work performance. Employees who started the day in negative moods performed less work during the day compared to their “positive mood” counterparts: They tended to answer fewer calls and needed more breaks between calls when they felt bad.

“The employees knew that they were being monitored and that their supervisors knew when they weren’t taking calls. Still, when they were in a bad mood they tended to be less available, which suggested they needed time away,” Wilk said. “They just couldn’t sit there, take the calls and pretend.”
The study found that employees in positive moods were more likely to see their attitudes sour after dealing with negative customers. Surprisingly, employees who started the day in a bad mood weren’t affected as much by negative customers, and their moods were more likely to improve during the day.
“We call this the ‘misery loves company’ effect,” Wilk said. “If you’re in a bad mood, it seems to help to talk to someone else who is feeling as bad as you. Maybe the employees were able to blow off some extra steam by reacting to rude customers.”
Still, the research identified a clear pattern: Employees did better and more work when they started the day in a good mood. According to Wilk and Rothbard, the study shows that managers need to be aware of employee moods and do everything possible to ensure that workers are in a good mood.
Mood Monitoring Challenges
While many employers understand that employee moods can affect job performance and customer service ratings, it’s difficult to track employee moods.
Guaranteeing that workers are in a good mood is practically impossible.
“When I worked at Southwest Airlines, our CEO used to say all the time that we can’t be responsible for an employee’s bad mood. Everybody has bad days, and it shouldn’t be the employers’ responsibility to make sure your day gets off to a good start,” said Libby Sartain, a former Society for Human Resource Management Board chair, an HR management consultant and former chief HR officer for Southwest Airlines and Yahoo. “The best thing that an employer can do is create an atmosphere and culture where people enjoy coming to work. When you work with other people who are positive and happy about their jobs, it tends to rub off on you.”
Sartain, who spent more than 20 years working for Southwest Airlines, knows well the effect that negative and abusive customers can have on employees.
“It can be tough and put you into a bad mood real quick when you deal with a nasty and abusive person,” she said. “If you trust that employees will do the right thing and handle situations as best they can, then that’s what will happen.”
Employers that empower their employees and encourage them to make decisions when dealing with customers tend to have relatively more productive workforces and retain employees. Focusing on empowerment and engagement, as opposed to daily mood swings, is a much more effective way to get the best performance from workers, according to Melodie Howard, a program director with the executive development program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.
“Everyone has bad days. People go through divorces or don’t feel well or they might have a relative, a friend or a pet die. So, frankly, if I was having a bad day for what I felt was a good reason, and a manager hinted that I needed to improve my mood, well I’d be tempted to kick that person in the shins,” she said with a laugh. “The most effective way to keep employees engaged and performing well is to empower them and provide a workplace and culture that is encouraging and supportive.”
Howard said an employer needs to look at the organization’s whole culture and concentrate on creating an environment that encourages and rewards employees to contribute. Once an organization creates that type of culture, employees will want to perform well and “go the extra mile” for their employers, she said.
Sartain agreed, saying that employers should focus on creating work environments that encourage employees to enjoy their work. When Sartain worked at Yahoo as the chief HR officer, she said the company’s offices had game rooms with foosball tables. Employees were urged to use the game rooms to play and work off stress.
“It worked too, because employees used those areas constantly. … The ones who did tended to be the most productive and positive employees at Yahoo,” she said.
Wilk and Rothbard said that workplaces with strict and inflexible work and attendance policies usually add to employees’ bad moods, resulting in an increase of sub-par performances. “If you’ve had a rough commute and you have to rush to your desk, and you know you’re going to be in trouble, that’s just not a good way to start your workday,” said Rothbard. “Once an employee starts that way, it could have negative consequences for the company the whole day.”

Lessons Learned from ‘Undercover Boss’

2011-05-10T21:48:00.002+02:00

Ένα realitty show που δεν μας έχει έρθει (ακόμα τουλάχιστον) στην Ελλάδα και το οποίο σχετίζεται με την ΔΑΔ είναι το Undercover Boss, όπου CEOs και άλλα ανώτατα στελέχη μεγάλων οργανισμών εργάζονται ως entry-level εργαζόμενοι, εν αγνοία των συναδέλφων τους για ένα μικρό σχετικά χρονικό διάστημα. Περισσότερα γι' αυτό αλλά και για τις συνέπειές του στο ακόλουθο άρθρο από το SHRM.

In the television series “Undercover Boss,” CEOs, owners and other high-level executives go “undercover”—donning disguises, aliases, and bogus biographies—and work temporarily as entry-level employees in their organizations. Working closely with various employees, the participants get a chance to see what it is like to work for the company and how they are perceived as a leader.
Participants invariably get into some amusing predicaments, unearth problems within the organization and get to know a few employees. Toward the end of each show, the executive’s identity is revealed, dedicated employees are rewarded, and the executive works to address the issues and breakdowns in the organization that employees helped bring to light.
Despite the happy-ending-in-an-hour format and the requisite reality television-manufactured tension and tear-jerker moments, the program offers some valuable human resource gems:

Being an effective CEO takes courage. The CEOs on “Undercover Boss” might get some great publicity for their organizations, but only by being brave enough to expose themselves and their management policies on television. Heading up a company is a challenging job that requires risk taking and unconventional ideas.
Saying “thank you” matters. In every episode, the executive calls a few special employees to his or her office for a debriefing. At that time, the CEO makes sure to thank employees for their hard work and dedication to the company. This is a highly anticipated part of the show, as viewers live vicariously through these employees as the CEO says “thanks.”
Rewards should be personal. The visit to the CEO’s office includes a reward tailored to each individual. The CEO doles out perks tied to something employees need or a goal they want to achieve. Examples include training and development, help with educational costs, financial rewards, a new assignment or promotion, solutions for work/life balance and vacations.
Small changes can make a big difference. Sometimes the management changes that boost morale and productivity the most on the show aren’t expensive or expansive. In an episode featuring ABM Industries, a commercial building maintenance company, one of the housekeepers explained to the CEO that it was difficult to do her job in a dress, which was the company’s uniform at the time. During the show, her wish to work in a shirt and pants created a new policy for all female employees. She was thrilled by this small, but not insignificant, change.
Every company has room for improvement. During each episode it is easy to see the problem with certain programs, products or policies. It is okay to acknowledge that there are problems within an organization. The goal should be to address issues rather than ignore them.
Sometimes there’s a breakdown in the management process. Most CEOs who appear on the show are surprised by at least one issue they identify on their undercover journey. In some cases this is because information has not trickled down to every employee. HR managers need to create opportunities for gathering—and spreading—information without putting the CEO in a wig and glasses.

Giving Employees a Voice
Organizations don’t have to send their CEO undercover to identify issues that need correcting. All they need to do is give employees a voice. Engagement surveys give employees a voice but can be expensive and time-consuming to administer and analyze. Moreover, poorly designed or managed surveys can do more harm than good. If the questions aren’t phrased accurately, data can be misinterpreted and companies can end up implementing engagement programs that isolate and confuse employees rather than reignite their passion.
There are other ways to get feedback from employees—formally and informally—so leaders can identify problems and work on solutions:

Let managers know that it is their job to check in with employees, to ask for feedback and to consider employee requests carefully, rather than giving an automatic “no.” Managers should have the power to address problems that employees identify.
Let employees know that they are responsible for speaking up. They can’t complain about a problem unless they are working with management to fix it. Naturally, employees need to feel safe from punishment when sharing grievances.
Have a suggestion box. Depending on the size of the company, suggestions can be collected in an actual box, on a virtual discussion board, at a dedicated e-mail address or during staff meetings. Although there are issues with each of these methods, the value of the input tends to outweigh the negatives.
Encourage leadership to take a trip into the culture. The leadership team should be leaving their corner offices to go where employees go: the cafeteria, gym and break room. Informal conversations are a great way to gather valuable information.

Reality TV shows are far from reality. It is not possible to unearth and fix every management problem and reward exceptional employees in an hour or even a week. Yet insights can be gained by watching someone else’s CEO squirm on network television.

Εδκήλωση ΙΜΑΔ-ΕΕΔΕ

2011-04-11T21:29:00.000+02:00

Το Ελληνικό Ινστιτούτο Μάνατζμεντ Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού (ΕΙΜΑΔ) στο πλαίσιο της ενημέρωσης των μελών του σε σύγχρονα θέματα της Διοίκησης Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού που απασχολούν τα στελέχη,διοργανώνει εσπερίδα τη Μ. Δευτέρα 18 Απριλίου 2011 και ώρα 18.00, στη συνεδριακή αίθουσα «Γ. Κοντογεώργης» της ΕΕΔΕ, με θέμα:

Η ΕΠΟΧΗ ΤΟΥ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΥ - Τάσεις στη Διαχείριση Ταλέντων

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες εδώ.

Employee Engagement

2011-04-09T09:12:00.002+02:00

Έλαβα πριν λίγες μέρες μέρος στο ετήσιο συνέδριο του Συνδέσμου Διοίκησης Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού Ελλάδας, (twitter feed) όπου και συντόνισα ένα panel με θέμα το employee engagement.

Ο ρόλος της δέσμευσης των εργαζομένων παρουσιάστηκε στο συνέδριο μέσα από την παρουσίαση των αποτελεσμάτων μια έρευνας σχετικά με το θέμα αλλά και μέσα από δύο τελείως διαφορετικά case studies. Η έρευνα μελέτησε τις απόψεις των HR Directors και των CEOs σχετικά με το θέμα του Employee Engagement. Στα περισσότερα ζητήματα που μελέτησε η έρευνα υπήρχε μεγάλη ευθυγράμμιση μεταξύ τους. Το εντυπωσιακότερο σημείο της έρευνας, κατά την γνώμη μου, είναι η πολύ θετική άποψη που είχαν και οι δύο πλευρές σχετικά με την δέσμευση των εργαζομένων τους. Σίγουρα μια αισιόδοξη νότα, η οποία όμως στην συντριπτική πλειοψηφία των επιχειρήσεων που λειτουργούν στην Ελλάδα μάλλον απέχει από την πραγματικότητα….

Στην συνέχεια παρουσιάστηκαν οι μελέτες περίπτωσης δύο επιχειρήσεων, αναφορικά με το θέμα του employee engagement, μέσα από παρουσιάσεις των CEOs αλλά και με την συμμετοχή στη συζήτηση που ακολούθησε των HR director τους. Η πρώτη παρουσίαση έγινε από την Nutriart, μια ελληνική εταιρεία που προέκυψε από την συγχώνευση τριών γνωστών Ελληνικών εταιρειών (Αλλατίνη, Κατσέλης, Plaza) και στην συνέχεια με την παρουσίαση της Microsoft Hellas. Οι δύο οργανισμοί είναι τόσο διαφορετικοί, τα προβλήματά τους τόσο διαφορετικά, όπως επίσης και τα θέματα που σχετίζονται με το engagement του ανθρώπινου δυναμικού τους, που η σύγκριση είναι αναπόφευκτη, αλλά ίσως και άδικη.

Η Nutriart αντιμετώπισε πραγματικά προβλήματα ύπαρξης εν αντιθέσει με την Microsoft. Τεράστια οικονομικά προβλήματα, κάκιστες εργασιακές σχέσεις, αποτυχία ενσωμάτωσης των εργαζομένων στην προσπάθεια ανάπτυξης νέας οργανωσιακής κουλτούρας, μεταξύ άλλων, προμήνυαν ένα τελείως αβέβαιο αύριο. Οι προσπάθειες της διοίκησης εστιάστηκαν στην επιβίωση της επιχείρησης με κάθε μέσο. Η μείωση προσωπικού, όπως και το κλείσιμο παραγωγικών μονάδων ήταν αναπόφευκτη, προκειμένου να μην κλείσει η επιχείρηση. Η διοίκηση της επιχείρησης ενέπλεξε με επιτυχία τα σωματεία των εργαζομένων προκειμένου να καταλήξουν σε μια από κοινού αποδεκτή λύση, προς όφελος του οργανισμού και της πλειοψηφίας των εργαζομένων.

Αντίθετα η Microsoft, στην παρούσα περίοδο της κρίσης, επέλεξε μια τελείως διαφορετικά πολιτική, γιατί προφανώς είχε την οικονομική δυνατότητα. Μια επιθετική πολιτική, όπως την χαρακτήρισε ο Διευθυντής Ανθρωπίνων Πόρων της Microsoft, προσφέροντας ευκαιρίες ανάπτυξης/εξέλιξης του ανθρώπινου δυναμικού της τόσο στην Ελλάδα όσο και μέσα από τοποθετήσεις-προαγωγές προσωπικού σε γραφεία της εταιρείας στο εξωτερικό.

Οι συγκρίσεις ήταν αναπόφευκτες . Είναι όμως αναγκαίο να κατανοήσουμε το διαφορετικό στάδιο εξέλιξης των δύο οργανισμών. Η Nutriart, αν δεν έκανε όσα έκανε, πιθανότατα θα έπαυε να υφίστατο στο άμεσο μέλλον, με αρνητικότατες συνέπειες για όλους τους εργαζόμενους της. Αντίθετα, στην Microsoft, η ύπαρξη μιας ισχυρής μητρικής εταιρείας/φίρμας, της επέτρεπε να κινείται με μεγαλύτερη ευελιξία προσφέροντας στους εργαζόμενούς της περισσότερες ευκαιρίες ανάπτυξης της οργανωσιακής τους δέσμευσης.

No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its HUMAN RESOURCES.

2011-04-05T09:52:00.000+02:00

Χωρίς άλλα σχόλια....
Από το Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, D.C.

PwC Scholarships 2011-2012

2011-03-31T16:10:00.000+02:00

PwC is pleased to announce the start of the Scholarships Programme for the academic year 2011-2012. The scholarships will fund tuition fees for postgraduate degrees in a Greek or foreign university (excluding professional qualification courses and PhDs).

The postgraduate degree must correspond to one of the following fields of study: Finance, HR, Banking, Internal Audit, Risk Regulation, IT Systems & Security / Information Systems, Shipping, Statistics / Actuarial.

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες στην σελίδα της PwC.

ΣΔΑΔΕ-HR alert (7/4/2011)

2011-03-24T17:08:00.001+02:00

Για άλλη μια φορά διεξάγεται το ετήσιο συνέδριο του ΣΔΑΔΕ με τον τίτλο HR Alert.
Φέτος πραγματοποιείται στις 7/4 στο ξενοδοχείο Sofitel, Αθήνα. Το πρόγραμμα του συνεδρίου μπορείτε να το βρείτε εδώ.

Για πρώτη φορά για μια τέτοια εκδήλωση το blog μας θα είναι χορηγός επικονωνίας!!!

Τεστ αξιολόγησης υποθετικών καταστάσεων - Situational judgement tests

2011-03-24T17:01:00.000+02:00

Τα Τεστ Αξιολόγησης Υποθετικών Καταστάσεων (Situational judgement tests -sjt) είναι μια σχετικά πρόσφατη μέθοδος αξιολόγησης η οποία εφαρμόζεται ιδιαίτερα στον χώρο της επιλοής και αξιολόγησης προσωπικού. Πρόσφατες μετα-αναλύσεις έχουν δείξει ότι η προβλεπτική εγκυρότητα της μεθόδου για την πρόβλεψη της εργασιακής απόδοσης κυμαίνεται μεταξύ .30 και .40. Λιγότερες εφαρμογές των sjt υπάρχουν στον χώρο της εκπαίδευσηςτου ανθρώπινου δυναμικού. Σε πρόσφατο άρθρο που δημοσιεύσαμε στο τεύχος Μαρτίου 2011 του HR Professional μαζί με την Μαρία Βακόλα, αναφερόμαστε στους τρόπους που τα sjt μπορούν να χρησιμοποιούν ως ένας τρόπος αξιολόγησης της αποτελεσματικότητας της εκπαίδευσης που παρέχουμε στο ανθρώπινο δυναμικό ενός οργανισμού.

8 things to avoid in your Executive Search

2011-03-24T16:03:00.000+02:00

Luoise Kursmark, a highly experienced resume writer and career coach, recently asked a number of senior executive recruiters in the AESC / BlueSteps Executive Search Network on Linkedin, ‘What are your biggest candidate turn-offs?’ Following a number of responses, read on to discover the DO’s and DON'Ts when contacting executive recruiters or headhunters, then make sure you join the conversation:

1. Do not mass email

DON'T: Many executives send their resume to every executive recruiter listed on the company website – letting everyone there know you are blasting your resume everywhere possible.

DO: Instead, target executive recruiters via industry, function and location – usually listed on their website, or comprehensively found in the BlueSteps International Search Firm Directory. Executive recruiters or headhunters want to deal with candidates who are focused in their job search, know where they have come from, and exactly where they want to go.

2. Read the job description

DON'T: Applying or expressing interest for a job that in no way matches your career history or path is a good way to leave a lasting bad impression with executive recruiters. Too many executives send off generic applications to every position they come across - seeing the job search as a numbers game.

DO: Only apply for executive positions that you strongly feel you are qualified for and match your career path, do not apply for every position out there as you will come across as desperate instead of a highly respected executive transitioning into the next stage of your career.

3. Attitude of entitlement

DON'T: Loiuse Kursmark rightfully mentioned this as it is a huge problem for executive recruiters and headhunters. Candidates often have the attitude that headhunters must dedicate themselves to the job seeker and find you a job. This is not the case.

DO: When dealing with senior executive level positions the executive recruiter is working for the client, not the candidate. Yes they look for great candidates, but their time is dedicated to the client and if you do not match any current executive searches they do not have the resources to find you a job. Be targeted and positive but do not expect anything.

4. Spelling / grammar mistakes

DON'T: Have you ever read an article with many spelling or grammar mistakes? What was the feeling left ? For me it demonstrates a rushed piece of writing with a lack of dedication and lack of second look – all things that should not lack in a carefully constructed CV or resume.

DO: Get a second, third or even fourth review of your resume by peers and professionals to eliminate this simple, but important problem. BlueSteps members get a free resume review after joining.

5. Not being to the point

DON'T: When contacting executive recruiters, not being extremely clear and to the point will lead your email to be passed by and forgotten.

DO: Make sure you know your elevator pitch and how to put this down on paper, and ensure that you are industry / function specific in your message.

6. Tailor / personalise

DON'T: To whom it may concern or using a company name is not acceptable when trying to establish relationships with senior executive recruiters – you would not start a relationship with anyone else this way.

DO: As related to mass emailing above, find the personal contact and tailor your message specifically to them.

7. Do not lie or exaggerate the truth

DON'T: Whether you are elaborating on minimal experience in one area or completely fabricating others, any exaggerations of professional accomplishments will soon be discovered in interviews or future discussions.

DO: Stick to your core strengths and you will soon realise exaggerating is surplus to requirement and just dilutes your professional image – we cannot and should not be experts at everything. And if you really do not meet the requirements, think twice about applying (not to discourage aspirations but you should be targeted in your job search).

8. Do not just have a functional resume – must also be chronological

DON'T: Functional resumes are used to highlight key achievements, usually in a section at the top titled ‘professional achievements’ or similar. However, executive recruiters will also need to see a chronological history of your career - omitting this suggests you may have something to hide.

DO: Once again, seek peer review and professional support to create a resume / CV that is effective at marketing you and your career achievements.

KPMG - Εκτός εργασίας; Εντός ευκαιρίας.

2011-03-08T13:35:00.001+02:00

Σε αυτούς τους δύσκολους καιρούς η συγκεκριμένη πρωτοβουλία της KPMG είναι πάρα πολύ χρήσιμη. Συγχαρητήρια.

Πρόγραμμα εταιρικής κοινωνικής ευθύνης για την ενίσχυση δεξιοτήτων στην αναζήτηση Εργασίας

Γιατί παίρνουμε αυτήν την πρωτοβουλία

Με την ευκαιρία της συμπλήρωσης των σαράντα χρόνων συνεχούς δραστηριότητάς της στην Ελλάδα, η εταιρεία μας πραγματοποιεί σειρά εορταστικών εκδηλώσεων, αρκετές από τις οποίες έχουν τη μορφή προσφοράς στους πελάτες μας και στην κοινωνία.

Επιδεικνύοντας σημαντικό έργο στον τομέα διαχείρισης ανθρώπινου δυναμικού και ιδιαίτερα στελεχών, μέσω των υπηρεσιών που παρέχουμε σε μεγάλο αριθμό πελατών μας, έχουμε αποκτήσει σημαντική εμπειρία και γνώση στα προβλήματα που αντιμετωπίζουν τα στελέχη στην αναζήτηση εργασίας. Στην παρούσα οικονομική συγκυρία επιθυμούμε να υποστηρίξουμε έμπρακτα την κοινότητα των στελεχών, παρέχοντας σε αυτούς που βρίσκονται εκτός εργασίας ένα Πρόγραμμα Εταιρικής Κοινωνικής Ευθύνης για την ενίσχυση των δεξιοτήτων αναζήτησης θέσης εργασίας, προσαρμοσμένο στις ανάγκες τους.

Σε ποιους απευθύνεται

Σε στελέχη της ελληνικής αγοράς τα οποία βρίσκονται σε φάση αναζήτησης της επόμενης κατάλληλης θέσης εργασίας.

Στόχος του Προγράμματος

Η υποστήριξη στελεχών που βρίσκονται εκτός εργασίας και η ενίσχυση του επαγγελματικού τους προφίλ.

Με διαδραστικές και στοχευμένες διαλέξεις, οι συμμετέχοντες:

θα γνωρίσουν χρήσιμες πρακτικές στην αναζήτηση της κατάλληλης θέσης εργασίας, στην αποτελεσματική διαχείριση συνεντεύξεων, στην ενίσχυση των ικανοτήτων δικτύωσής τους στην αγορά,
θα ενημερωθούν για τις τάσεις που επικρατούν στην αγορά εργασίας, εντός και εκτός Ελλάδας.
Θα προβληματιστούν δημιουργικά σε θέματα καριέρας.

Θεματικές Ενότητες Προγράμματος

Το Πρόγραμμα περιλαμβάνει:

Σύνταξη βιογραφικού σημειώματος

Καθοδήγηση στην ανάδειξη των συγκριτικών τους πλεονεκτημάτων μέσα από το βιογραφικό σημείωμα.
Εκπαίδευση στη διαμόρφωση συνοδευτικής επιστολής (για εταιρείες επιλογής στελεχών, πιθανούς εργοδότες, ανταπόκριση σε αγγελίες, κλπ).

Τεχνικές για μία επιτυχημένη συνέντευξη

Εκπαίδευση στην ανάδειξη των δυνατών τους επαγγελματικών χαρακτηριστικών και στην αποτελεσματική περιγραφή ενός ολοκληρωμένου επαγγελματικού προφίλ.
Καθοδήγηση στη διαχείριση δύσκολων ερωτήσεων.

Αποτελεσματική δικτύωση στην αγορά εργασίας

Παρουσίαση τεχνικών προσέγγισης της αγοράς εργασίας
Αξιοποίηση των γνωριμιών και επαφών, πηγές πληροφόρησης, τρόπους και τεχνικές δικτύωσης.

Διερεύνηση αγοράς εργασίας

Αναζήτηση ευκαιριών απασχόλησης, ανεύρεση και διαχείριση διαθέσιμων θέσεων εργασίας και στόχευση επιθυμητών εργοδοτών.

Διαχείριση καριέρας

Αναγνώριση παραμέτρων που υπεισέρχονται στην αποτελεσματική διαχείριση της καριέρας
Κλάδοι της αγοράς που βρίσκονται σε ζήτηση και κλάδοι σε παρακμή/ύφεση.
Βασικά βήματα για τον καθορισμό ρεαλιστικών στόχων και στο σχεδιασμό δράσεων για την επίτευξή τους.

Τόπος και Χρόνος Διεξαγωγής

Θα πραγματοποιηθούν συνολικά 12 εκπαιδευτικά προγράμματα (χωρίς καμία χρέωση των συμμετεχόντων) στο διάστημα Φεβρουαρίου - Ιουλίου 2011.

Η εκπαίδευση θα διεξάγεται στα γραφεία της KPMG στην Αθήνα (Στρατηγού Τόμπρα 3, Αγ. Παρασκευή) και θα είναι διάρκειας 3 ωρών ανά άτομο, σε ομάδες των 20-25 ατόμων.

Εισηγητές στο Πρόγραμμα αυτό είναι στελέχη της KPMG, με πολυετή εμπειρία και βαθιά γνώση της αγοράς καθώς και των θεματικών ενοτήτων που καλύπτονται στο πλαίσιο του Προγράμματος.

Συμμετοχή: ΔΩΡΕΑΝ

Περισσότερες πληροφορίες και δήλωση συμμετοχής εδώ.

Οκτώ γκάφες σε συνεντεύξεις για δουλειά

2011-03-01T21:46:00.000+02:00

Ωραίο άρθρο!!!!

Πράγματι συμβαίνει πολύ συχνά. Μου έχει τύχει το δεύτερο και το προτελευταίο

Κατά τη διάρκεια της 25χρονης εμπειρίας μου ως διευθυντικού στελέχους ανθρωπίνου δυναμικού, αρκετές φορές πήρα συνέντευξη από ανθρώπους που δεν ήταν ακριβώς αυτό που λέμε ιδανικοί υποψήφιοι. Παρακάτω ακολουθούν μερικές από τις πιο αξέχαστες συνεντεύξεις, ακολουθούμενες από το «ηθικό δίδαγμα» της κάθε ιστορίας, για να μην βρεθείτε κι εσείς μια μέρα σε μια λίστα σαν τη δική μου.

Ψυχολογικές Ανάγκες (Από ένα σύμβουλο επιλογής προσωπικού)

2011-02-28T23:07:00.000+02:00

Είχα πρόσφατα την εξής εμπειρία, στα πλαίσια ενός έργου εξεύρεσης στελέχους για λογαριασμού κάποιου πελάτη μας:
Παρουσιάσαμε ένα πολύ δυνατό shortlist. Όλοι οι υποψήφιοι άρεσαν στον πελάτη, και όλοι οι υποψήφιοι μας είπαν αμέσως μετά τη συνάντησή τους ότι έμειναν ιδιαίτερα ικανοποιημένοι από αυτήν, βρίσκοντας "πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα" τη θέση για την οποία συζητούσαν. Ο πελάτης έδωσε σε 3 από τους υποψήφιους ένα Σαββατοκύριακο για να χωνέψουν την κουβέντα και να επανέλθουν με επιβεβαίωση του ενδιαφέροντός τους, ώστε να προγραμματιστεί ένας νέος κύκλος συνεντεύξεων. Τη Δευτέρα όμως, προς μεγάλη έκπληξη τόσο του πελάτη όσο και δική μου, οι 2 από τους 3 απέσυραν την υποψηφιότητά τους, για λόγους που δεν χρειάζεται να αναλυθούν εδώ. Προσπάθησα να τους μεταπείσω, χρησιμοποιώντας δοκιμασμένη επιχειρηματολογία η οποία πιάνει στο 90% των περιπτώσεων, αλλά μάταια.
Στα 13 χρόνια που κάνω αυτή τη δουλειά, ομολογώ πως κάτι τέτοιο δεν μου είχε ξανασυμβεί. Μερικές φορές μπορεί να "χάσεις" έναν υποψήφιο σ' αυτό το στάδιο του έργου, αλλά δύο ποτέ: Η διαδικασία που ακολουθούν οι σύμβουλοι είναι τέτοια ώστε να "ξεσκαρτάρει" τους πιθανούς "λιποτάκτες" πολύ νωρίτερα, πριν να πραγματοποιήσει τις συνεντεύξεις του shortlist ο πελάτης. Στο σημείο αυτό λοιπόν, κι εδώ είναι που θέλω να σταθώ, ανέλαβε πρωτοβουλία ο πελάτης: Με ρώτησε αν θα είχα αντίρρηση να κάνει κι αυτός μια προσπάθεια να μεταπείσει τους δύο υποψήφιους, στη συνέχεια τους τηλεφώνησε και τελικά κατάφερε να συμφωνήσει μαζί τους να έχουν άλλη μία συνάντηση.
Γιατί πέτυχε ο πελάτης εκεί όπου εγώ έφαγα τα μούτρα μου, και μάλιστα χρησιμοποιώντας επιχειρήματα παρόμοια με τα δικά μου; Πιστεύω πως η απάντηση είναι η εξής: Περισσότερο από μια καλύτερη θέση, περισσότερο από έναν υψηλότερο μισθό, ο κάθε εργαζόμενος θέλει να νιώθει πολύτιμος, να τον σέβονται, να αναγνωρίζεται η αξία του. Η προσωπική κίνηση του πελάτη να καλέσει ο ίδιος στη συγκεκριμένη φάση κάλυψε μία σειρά από ψυχολογικές ανάγκες των υποψηφίων οι οποίες βρίσκονται υψηλότερα στην "ιεραρχία αναγκών" του Maslow, με αποτέλεσμα να δουν πιο θετικά μια προοπτική συνεργασίας με την εταιρεία αυτή.
Νομίζω πως σ' αυτή την ιστορία υπάρχει ένα μάθημα για όλους μας. Για να μην κάνω κήρυγμα όμως, αφήνω τον κάθε αναγνώστη να αποφασίσει μόνος ποιο είναι αυτό.

Χάρης Καραολίδης, Partner
Συμβολή InterSearch Greece

Οι Ευρωπαίοι είναι οι καλύτεροι μάνατζερ στις πολυεθνικές

2011-02-23T12:03:00.002+02:00

Παραδοσιακά, οι πολυεθνικές των ΗΠΑ, της Ιαπωνίας, της Γαλλίας, της Βρετανίας και της Γερμανίας συνήθιζαν να στέλνουν «πακέτο» από τη μητέρα εταιρεία και τον αλλοδαπό επικεφαλής μάνατζερ. Σήμερα, όμως, τα πράγματα έχουν αλλάξει. Οι «έξυπνες» πολυεθνικές εταιρείες συνηθίζουν να τοποθετούν διευθύνοντες συμβούλους με εθνικότητες των χωρών στις οποίες επενδύουν - είτε ήδη λειτουργούν τις θυγατρικές τους. Οι λόγοι που συνηγορούν γι’ αυτή την πρακτική είναι πολλοί. Επιπλέον, οι εταιρείες αναγνωρίζουν ότι με την πρακτική αυτή αφενός δεν «ρηχαίνει» η δεξαμενή των υποψηφίων διευθυντών τους, αφετέρου δεν επιδρά αρνητικά στο ηθικό των ντόπιων και ικανών στελεχών της θυγατρικής εταιρείας, αφού δεν προοιωνίζεται ότι η σταδιοδρομία τους προς την κορυφή αργά ή γρήγορα θα «κλαδευτεί» λόγω εθνικότητας.

Ωστόσο, τους λόγους για τους οποίους η Ευρώπη «εκτρέφει» τους μεγάλους παγκόσμιους μάνατζερ, τους έχει τεκμηριώσει ο κ. Karl Moore, καθηγητής Μάνατζμεντ στο Πανεπιστήμιο McGill, και associate fellow στο Templeton College του Oxford University με έκθεσή του ύστερα από πολυετή πολυπολιτισμική μελέτη και συνεργασία του με πολυεθνικές στη Βόρειο Αμερική, στην Ευρωπαϊκή Ενωση και στην Ιαπωνία. Η έκθεση αναφέρει ότι οι μεγάλοι διεθνείς μάνατζερ δεν προέρχονται από τις ΗΠΑ είτε από άλλες χώρες, οικονομικές υπερδυνάμεις.

Περισσότερα στο σχετικό άρθρο της Καθημερινής

From: http://ping.fm/RYlbq

Οι πιο δημοφιλείς κλάδοι για τους νέους επαγγελματίες του 2010

2011-02-20T19:37:00.000+02:00

To ξέραμε κάποια στιγμή θα φτάναμε και σε αυτή την κατάσταση!!!

Ασφάλειες, μεσιτικές, λογιστικές και συμβουλευτικές υπηρεσίες, καφέ, καφενεία, κυλικεία, ψησταριές και κομμωτήρια αλλά και πράσινη ενέργεια πρωταγωνιστούν στις επιλογές εκατοντάδων επαγγελματιών, οι οποίοι αποφάσισαν κατά την περυσινή χρονιά να στήσουν τη δική τους, μικρή ή μεγαλύτερη, επιχείρηση.

Πρόκειται σε μεγάλο βαθμό, όπως επισημαίνουν εκπρόσωποι των μεγαλύτερων επιμελητηρίων της χώρας, για ανθρώπους που έχασαν τη δουλειά τους και αναζητούν καταφύγιο στη δική τους επαγγελματική δραστηριότητα. Μάλιστα, αρκετοί από αυτούς είναι πρώην συμβασιούχοι του Δημοσίου, οι οποίοι απασχολούνταν σε προγράμματα stage που δεν ανανεώθηκαν, ενώ αρκετοί ήταν μέχρι πρότινος εργαζόμενοι σε συναφείς εταιρείες. Εχοντας χάσει την εργασία τους διοχετεύουν την εργασιακή τους εμπειρία στη δική τους αλλά μικρότερου μεγέθους δουλειά προκειμένου να αντιμετωπίσουν τη συρρίκνωση των θέσεων εργασίας σε μεγαλύτερες επιχειρήσεις καθώς η ανεργία έχει εκτοξευτεί στο 13,9%.

Peter Salovey @KPMG conference (Συγνώμη...)

2011-02-17T23:59:00.000+02:00

Πήγα σήμερα στο ετήσιο Συνέδριο Ανθρώπινου Δυναμικού που διοργανώνει η KPMG για να παρακολουθήσω τον Peter Salovey. Δυστυχώς ελλείψη χρόνου και λόγω αυξημένων υποχρεώσεων δεν μπόρεσα να παρακολουθήσω το υπόλοιπο συνέδριο της KPMG.

Ανέμενα με μεγάλη χαρά να δω από κοντά τον Peter Salovey. Για μας που ασχολούμαστε συστηματικά τόσο ερευνητικά όσο και επαγγελματικά με την έννοια της Συναισθηματικής Νοημοσύνης (ΣΝ) ο Salovey και ο Mayer είναι οι "γκουρού" της συγκεκριμένης έννοιας. Το άρθρο τους [Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality] έχει 3000 αναφορές... και αποτελεί ένα από τα πιο μελετημένα άρθρα στο χώρο της Οργανωσιακής Συμπεριφοράς/Ψυχολογίας. Επίσης, είχα και λίγο άγχος μιας και τον είχα προτείνει εγώ στην KPMG ως ομιλητή.... κάτι που τριγύρναγε συνέχεια στο μυαλό μου όσο παρακολουθούσα την παρουσίασή του.... Ο λόγος;;;;

Ο λόγος ήταν ότι απογοητεύτηκα από την ομιλία του... γιατί; Γιατί περίμενα κάτι πολύ καλύτερο/περισσότερο από ένα τέτοιο όνομα... Δεν ήταν κακός... Δεν ήταν όμως αυτός που θα μπορούσε (και θα έπρεπε) να είναι απέναντι σε αυτό το κοινό. Όταν δε είδα το γράφημα SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) στην παρουσίασή του με το ζόρι κρατήθηκα και δεν έβαλα τα γέλια... Δεν διαφωνώ με την ουσία. Άλλωστε το είπε ο ίδιος (και συμφωνώ απόλυτα), ότι δεν πρέπει να με πιστέψετε επειδή απλώς σας το λέω ότι η ΣΝ είναι κάτι καλό αλλά θα σας δείξω και αποδείξεις (δηλ. έρευνες).

Αυτό με το οποίο διαφωνώ είναι ότι όλα αυτά που πολύ ωραία μας παρουσίασε θα έπρεπε να τα προσαρμόσει για το κοινό που είχε απέναντί του, αλλά και να τα εμπλουτίσει περισσότερο. Δεν ήταν μεταπτυχιακοί φοιτητές ψυχολογίας ή HR ούτε επιστημονικό συνέδριο (αν βέβαια παρουσίαζε αυτά τα ευρήματα σε ένα επιστημονικό συνέδριο, πιστέψτε με, δεν θα πέρναγε και πολύ καλά....). Το κοινό ήταν επαγγελματίες και στελέχη του HR στην συντριπτική τους πλειοψηφία.... Καταλαβαίνουν από νούμερα και έρευνες, αλλά δεν θέλουν αυτά... ή μάλλον δεν θέλουν μόνο αυτά. Θέλουν την ουσία. Και η ουσία είναι αρκετά απλή. Πώς είναι χρήσιμη η ΣΝ; Πώς μπορούν να την χρησιμοποιήσουν/αναπτύξουν/αξιολογήσουν στο προσωπικό τους ή στους υποψήφιούς τους; Πέρα από split-half reliability indexes και RMSEA.... Δυστυχώς πολλοί συνάδελφοι πανεπιστημιακοί κάνουν αυτό το λάθος (πιθανότατα το κάνω και εγώ...). Δεν χρειάζεται να "βομβαρδίζουμε" το κοινό με νούμερα. Μπορούμε να τους αποδείξουμε την ισχύ όσων λέμε και με λιγότερα νούμερα αλλά με περισσότερο ουσία. Και καταλαβαίνεις ότι το κοινό δεν έχει πιάσει την ουσία, όταν η πρώτη ερώτηση από τον Β. Αποστολάκη της KPMG είναι: τελικά σε τι διαφέρει η ΣΝ από το IQ. Εκεί καταλαβαίνεις, αν είσαι έξυπνος (συναισθηματικά ή γνωστικά δεν έχει σημασία), ότι κάτι δεν πάει καλά...

ΥΓ Το post αυτό το έγραψα από τις "ενόχες" μου και χωρίς καμία κριτική διάθεση απέναντι στην KPMG την οποία πρέπει να συγχαρώ για την διοργάνωση του συνέδριου. Πάντως για ένα πράγμα είμαι σίγουρος... δεν πρόκειται να ξαναζητήσουν την γνώμη μου για ομιλητές στο μέλλον...

Staffing trends for 2011 - Ere.net

2011-02-15T17:25:00.003+02:00

Αυτά στην Αμερική.... εδώ τι γίνεται;;;;

The staffing industry is poised for a year of exceptional growth. The economy continues to strengthen, and flexible work arrangements appear to be the hiring structure of choice for businesses looking to expand capacity, capitalize on new opportunity, and minimize risk.
So what are the big staffing trends that will impact your sales team in 2011?
1) 20% plus growth for temporary staffing in Q1 2011.
According to The Palmer Report by G. Palmer and Associates, demand for temporary workers is expected to increase 20.3% in the first quarter of 2011.
2) Strong demand for light industrial, healthcare and IT staffing.
Industrial staffing saw a big rebound in 2010, and while the rate of growth is likely to subside, the sector will remain strong as demand for consumer goods rises. Healthcare and IT staffing also saw a rebound and will likely see increases in demand throughout 2011.
3) Hot careers for 2011.
According to CareerBuilder’s 2011 Job Forecast, the following are the top 10 function areas poised for growth:

Sales
Information Technology
Customer Service
Engineering
Technology
Administrative
Business Development
Marketing
Research / Development
Accounting / Finance

4) Continued expansion of VMS and pricing pressure.
According to a post on Staffing Industry Analysts Contingent Blog, temporary staffing purchases via VMS continued to grow even through the industry’s downturn in 2009. The implication is that VMS as a percentage of staffing spend is on the rise, which will equate to more pressure on margins even as the industry improves.
What does this mean for your staffing firm?
You’re going to have more opportunity than you’ve seen in years, but employers are going to be cautious about all spending. Don’t expect easy sales. You’re going to face aggressive competition and have to prove the value of your services.
Candidate shortages are likely to reappear for high skill positions. If you’re a firm that specializes in healthcare, technical or other high skill talent, you’re going to need to focus more resources on recruiting.
Margins will continue to be pushed. Despite the increase in demand for staffing, employers are going to be more aggressive than ever on pricing. If you’re not the low priced player in town, be prepared to make a strong argument why your services are worth more.

Staffing trends for 2011 - Blogs - Community - ERE.net

Wall Street Journal Ελληνες οι πιο σκληρά ευρωπαίοι εργαζόμενοι

2011-02-15T16:46:00.002+02:00

Στην κατάρριψη των στερεότυπων ότι οι λαοί του ευρωπαϊκού Βορρά είναι πιο εργατικοί από αυτούς του Νότου προχωρεί η Wall Street Journal σε δημοσίευμα της, εστιάζοντας στο παράδειγμα της Ελλάδας.

Ο αρθρογράφος της εφημερίδας Μάθιου Ντάλτον υποστηρίζει ότι η κρίση χρέους στην ζώνη του ευρώ έχει υπογραμμίσει ένα από τα πιο «ανθεκτικά στερεότυπα» της Ευρώπης, αυτό που αφορά στη διάκριση των σκληρά εργαζόμενων βόρειων χώρων, σε σύγκριση με τον τεμπέλικο Νότο. Μάλιστα, όπως υπογραμμίζει, αυτά τα στερεότυπα υπεισήλθαν σε κάποιο βαθμό στο πολιτικό διάλογο της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης για την αντιμετώπιση της κρίσης χρέους.

Διαβάστε περισσότερα: http://ping.fm/ex2CT

From: http://ping.fm/wV0Xi

Second-rates and saboteurs: possible consequences of employee of the month schemes?

2011-02-12T09:41:00.002+02:00

As the BPS' newest employee, I'm thinking about how to make a good impression on my peers and managers. Perhaps I could even make it to Employee of the Month! "EOM" schemes are highly popular across companies, and considered by many to be best practice, so I was fascinated to find a paper by Johnson and Dickinson that starts to explore the motivational consequences of such schemes.

The studies described in the article seem to me preliminary, with a small student sample and favouring eyeballing over statistical analysis; I'll just touch on them below. The literature review, however, is a real eye-opener, and reveals how much opportunity there is for investigation of this area, with “no published empirical studies on EOM, even within a variety of disciplines such as psychology, management, and economics." Moreover, there are a number of criticisms of EOM design, including:

* A competitive structure. If everyone performs well this month, there's still only one EOM: it pays to do better than others, not to excel together.
* A winner-takes-all design. Small differences in performance may make the difference between acclaim and... tumbleweed. The pretty good and the mediocre are treated the same: they're invisible.
* A focus on results over methods. Getting things done by bulldozing your workmates could be a way to win the award.
* Criteria that are often vague and not transparent.

Some EOM schemes attempt to 'share the wealth' by ensuring the award revolves around to new individuals. This could however dampen any recognition value it has: "I've performed best this month... except for maybe Janet and Khaled, who already got it." The authors investigate this: in their sample of six students they don't see visible improvements on a dull computer-based processing task after being told they have won a revolving award.

A non-revolving scheme however, can end up with one or several great performers end up hogging the award, leaving the swathe of the 'able middle' unrecognised and unmotivated. Johnson and Dickinson look at this also, in a study where they set up their participants to always come in between 2nd and 5th place behind a named (fictional) "co-worker". Over time, a few of the students tailed off somewhat in performance, but a few others didn't. In my view this research doesn't provide compelling evidence for or against these EOM features, but lays some groundwork for subsequent work: watch this space.

One further risk, deliberately excluded from the research by using fictional teams, is that employees may seek the award via counterproductive work behaviours that could even slip into covert sabotage. If Steve is just one flawless restaurant set-up ahead of me, maybe I'll dawdle the next time he's in charge. This is serious business, and the consequence of EOMs focusing on results over behaviour.

Overall, this paper calls to our attention how shaky the theory and evidence for EOM schemes is, despite their obvious attractions as catchy, memorable, and simple ways to try to recognise employees. Raising the number of awards and a greater focus on behaviours seem supportable steps, but it's also key that organisations look inward to how the schemes are viewed by the employees who participate – or not.

Does your organisation have a EOM scheme? What are your views on its strengths and weaknesses?

From: http://ping.fm/TaFwS