Sterling Performance

Londoners are the most miserable at work, says a survey by HireScores, a recruitment agency-scoring website. Over 70 per cent of the capital’s workers are already thinking about getting a new job from day one, while only 11 per cent of employees in the south west are unhappy in their jobs.

Depressingly, only 10 per cent of all survey respondents believe their manager would try to keep them if they were to resign, while 21 per cent think their managers would simply set about organising their leaving do.

In a separate report, communications consultancy CHA’s “Worthwhile Work” also found south-westerners more content than their London counterparts, who hanker after more meaningful roles that have a positive impact on society.

So what is it about London? HireScores’ managing director, Lisette Howlett, speculates that job insecurity and the high cost of living contribute to a feeling of dissatisfaction among London workers, while the relaxed lifestyle of Devon, Bristol and the south west makes for a more positive workforce.

Yet UK earnings are high and jobs are plentiful: labour market figures show employment at its highest level since records began in 1971, average earnings have increased and vacancies are at a record high.

So what makes us happy at work?

According to consultancy Chiumento’s “Happiness at Work Index”, the five priorities for a good job are:

1. Friendly, supportive colleagues
2. Enjoyable work
3. Good boss or line manager
4. Good work/life balance
5. Varied work

But Brits are nothing if not contradictory: while the index puts competitive salary at the bottom of the happiness-factor list, it’s the second biggest reason for being unhappy at work. There’s no pleasing some people.

For some tips on how to be one of the UK’s best companies to work for check out the special awards in the annual Best Companies list.

Competition’s fierce and purse strings are pulling ever tighter as the credit crunch bites. So save yourself some marketing spend and keep your customers happy.

Business guru Tom Peters said: “It is the greatest kept secret in the global economy today. If you can provide awesome care you will need new suitcases to carry all the money home.”

CRM has been in fashion for a number of years, and all sorts of quality-control services come and go. But keeping customers is incredibly easy. Even better, happy customers do the selling for you.

Very few businesses have really even started to understand customer care and the millions it can make them. Here are just a few very simple tips:

1. Develop a positive customer obsession from the top.
2. Make every person that touches your brand an ambassador.
3. Operate risk reversal — in other words you carry the risk, not the customer — and give a 100 per cent money back guarantee.
4. Put people back onto switchboards.
5. Do the thing you didn’t have to do: the kindness, the follow-up phone call, a small thank you gift.
6. Give absolute priority to a customer complaint — it is a massive opportunity to develop a customer for life.
7. Invest in your people, train them, inspire them and motivate them. Good training works immediately.

What are your best tips for customer retention? Let us know by adding a comment below.

The amount of talent that exists in an organisation is directly related to the quality of its managers. Good management attracts and keeps the best people, while bad management drives them out.

Toxic management. Toxic management is estimated to cost about £20bn a year, if you believe the UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line. Almost 70 per cent of public sector managers and 42 per cent of private sector managers report bullying in their workplace, according to Roffey Park Management Institute. The effect of such toxic behaviour on one individual cuts their work rate and effectiveness in half. The estimated average cost of a single manager’s serial toxic behaviour is about £70,000.

Day-to-day is what counts. We’ve had more organisations than we care to count tell us that they need to recruit new people because the ones they have aren’t good enough. This argument simply doesn’t stand up. If everyone in the company was a poor performer then it would have failed long ago. Often, it’s not the people in the organisation who lack talent; it’s just that their managers don’t know how to manage it.

Holding people back. In a recent study by the Institute of Leadership Management one-third of employees said their managers did not allow them to contribute ideas or suggestions, another third said they were told to do things without explanation, a quarter said they thought they could do their manager’s job better, and 11 per cent felt their manager was holding them back. There are a wide variety of reasons why managers and supervisors hold people back. The top three talent killers are:

1. Fear of being surpassed by someone who has greater ability or drive. But the mark of a good manager is the ability to identify grow and enable talent. The inscription on Andrew Carnegie’s tombstone reads: “Here lies a man who knew how to enlist in his service better men than himself.” Really good executives surround themselves with good people without worrying about anybody showing them up.
2. Fear of losing a good person. Because they believe in the fictional ‘war for talent’ managers are afraid that if they progress one person, they’ll be unable to fill the gap. Often these people leave anyway. If managers created a reputation for developing people and helping them progress their careers they’d be inundated with people wanting to work for them and their own value to the organisation would multiply.Talent growers are the proverbial golden goose: hard to find and incredibly valuable. Reward them significantly more than talent killers. The performance measurement is simple: it’s based on the number of people who, having worked for a manager, move on to perform successfully in other jobs.
3. Poor communication. Talent killers apply this formula: don’t tell people what they need to do to do their jobs effectively. Don’t give them any sort of behaviour specification for the job. Just let them fumble around trying to work out what they need to do to deliver on their performance objectives and when they fail to reach their targets make sure they get the message — they’re failures.

“Who Are Your Best People” by Robin Stuart-Kotze and Chris Dunn (Financial Times Prentice Hall) is out in August 2008.

INSEAD marketing professor Jean-Claude Larréché has charted over 350 of the world’s top companies that have outstripped the stockmarket for at least 10 years, finding out how they sustain growth while getting more from their marketing, R&D and even manufacturing spend.

Can you get more growth for less effort? INSEAD’s Larréché thinks so. His book, “The Momentum Effect”, puts forward a formula for first identifying — then continuously building on — a business’s true value so as “to make the competition irrelevant”. It’s a provocative proposition.

How it started
Professor Larréché, the Alfred H Heineken Chair of Marketing at INSEAD, researched the world’s top 1,000 companies to find those that demonstrated at least 10 years’ growth (he makes exceptions for new companies such as Facebook). (more…)

Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s promise to fill one-third of his Cabinet posts with women if he makes it to Number 10 has had employment lawyers up in arms. Positive discrimination, points out Glovers solicitors, contravenes EU discrimination laws. Anyway, affirmative action breeds resentment in the ranks and is seen by working women as unnecessary and patronising, right? Yet, Norway famously insists that women make up at least 40 per cent of its company’s boards.

Would this overcome the entrenched inequalities in UK boards? The number of women reaching board level is rising but it’s at a snail’s pace. The Equal Opportunity Commission’s latest Gender Equality Index found that while 10 per cent of the FTSE 100 directorships are held by women, it has taken 65 years to reach this stage. A separate survey by the Institute of Directors with Croner Reward found the pay gap between men and women widening to an average 22 per cent. An article in Portfolio magazine also reveals stalemate in the progress of senior businesswomen in the US.

Glenda Stone of Aurora, the businesswomen’s network, applauds Cameron: “He’s drawing attention to the issue and showing that he’s got a strategy to tackle it,” she says. Companies, like political parties, should reflect the society in which they work. “It’s not about tokenism; it’s about merit, about sharing the best jobs. But they are not always made available for women candidates.”

Want to know more? Check out Alison Maitland and Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s Why Women Mean Business

When it comes to getting things done it helps to draw upon different parts of your personality.

In his new book, “Focus: The Power of Targeted Thinking” (Prentice Hall Life), author and creativity expert Jurgen Wolff says that we all have many sub-personalities.

“There are times when you’re focused and times when you let your curiosity guide you,” he says. “Likewise, sometimes you are in a conciliatory mood and other times you may have a steely determination to do things your own way.”

Most of the time we leave to chance which one of our sub-personalities is in charge at any given time. So if your ‘curious kid’ persona has to organise your office most likely you’ll spot a magazine you’ve been meaning to read and a few hours later nothing much will have been done. But that kid may be exactly the right sub-personality to put in charge of brainstorming a new project.

The secret of greater success, Wolff says, is to make this unconscious process an intentional one. At the start of any task, think about which qualities are most important to get it done, then evoke that frame of mind. Do the task, then go through the same evaluation before starting on the next task.

Wolff suggests giving your personalities names to get into the right frame of mind — ‘Curious Kid’ for when free-ranging thought is appropriate; ‘Attila’ when absolute focus and determination are needed; ‘Sister Harmonia’ for times when the emphasis is on co-operation; ‘Moneypenny’ for tasks requiring accuracy.

“Of course you don’t have to say them out loud.” Indeed, that might be for the best.

Steps to switching personalities

1. Identify the next task you want to accomplish.
2. Identify the key trait that the task requires. If you were hiring someone else to do it, what is the main attribute you’d be looking for?
3. Remember a time when you exhibited that quality yourself, even if in a totally different context. For instance, if you’re a fierce competitor at games, you can bring that to the table in negotiations. If you feel you don’t have any of the desired quality, think of someone who does and imagine what it feels like.
4. When you get into character, use all your senses. What do things look like, sound like, and feel like when you’re in the mental mode you’ve chosen?
5. As you do the task, if you find yourself slipping out of your chosen character, stop and refresh the feeling.
6. When the task is done, take a moment to clear your mind. Stretch, walk around for a moment, to clear your head.

The technique may sound a bit eccentric at first but Wolff says many participants in his workshops have found it the secret to getting more done and enjoying tasks they used to avoid. And finding that we have such receptive staff at our beck and call — if only internally — is a pleasant surprise.

The aftershock at T5 continued this week, with each day adding fresh hell for beleaguered BA boss Willie Walsh and landlord BAA. Reports vary as to the longer-term effects of T5’s catastrophic scheduling delays, computer glitches and complaints on both businesses.

But the cost, according to BA, will be around £16m and the reputation damage to the airline considerable, its so-called employee success formula, the “BA Way” now the punchline of a bad joke.

Naturally, there have been calls for Walsh’s resignation - in an open letter, the British Air Line Pilots Association called for a “fundamental change of attitude” from the senior management at BA. Meanwhile, House of Commons’ Transport Committee will be holding its own investigation into the T5 disaster on 7 May.

But some appreciated Walsh’s ‘mea culpa’ stance. We know it’s the board’s job to take the flak and we are accustomed to the top brass taking the credit when projects go well but heartfelt apologies are rare. Coach and author Marshall Goldsmith would heartily approve: his book, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”, is big on the value of the apology.

BA has a lot to be sorry for: post 9/11, it has faced a pensions crisis, catering strikes, green and nimby protests, fuel price hikes, “OpenSkies” mud-slinging and yet further disruption due to terror threats. Yet Walsh has pressed on, building on a reputation as a turnaround expert / hatchet man (take your pick) at Aer Lingus.

Perhaps his lead-from-the-front attitude will see him through this time, perhaps not. But at least he’s visible.

Now has anyone heard from BAA’s chief, serial job-hopper Colin Matthews?

One of the big stories of the past week has been Tesco’s attempt to take the US by storm (starting with parts of its west coast) with its Fresh & Easy chain of convenience stores. There seems to be no shortage of pundits saying that, even at this early stage, the retail giant is struggling.

We shall see.

What’s apparent now is that corporate blogs – and by that we mean real, unmanufactured blogs penned by executives – can be troublesome. While a whole marketing and PR machine can spend months working on a tightly spun message, to hit different people at different times, one honest comment going out over the most far-flung medium the world has ever known can upset the apple cart.

That’s what happened to Tesco. Marketing director Simon Unwins let it slip on his blog that Fresh & Easy would put the brakes on for now, in terms of new store openings. (Which is not quite the same thing as total failure, as some would have it.)

Who doesn’t like corporate blogging? Well let’s ask the opposite question – who likes it? The media love them (this writer can say with surety), customers and various partners tend to as well, for their openness. Even the financial community can get more of an insight than before and make, you’d think, better investment decisions as a result.

Doesn’t leave many constituencies – apart from HQ.

There will always be those that figure the best way to connect with an audience is through being straightforward and honest.

And there will always be those who see the world as a much more complicated place than that. A few words of honesty can move a share price a few per cent – which in the case of a Tesco’s is no small change – just as they can improve longer-term relationships and brand equity.

For those reasons, most corporate blogs will continue to be PR guff. The rest will either fade away or – hold onto your chair - be truly valuable.