8 million UK workers are miserable. Are you one of them?

According to research reported by the Chartered Management Institute, almost eight million of us workers in the UK are unhappy in the roles we currently occupy.

The incisive, in-depth, profound, comprehensive (and 100% sarcasm free) research into worker satisfaction found that 28 per cent of workers are unhappy in their role, although only 25 per cent are currently looking for career development opportunities elsewhere. How many of the 25 per cent listen to the news, I wonder?

Also, according to the findings, UK workers think a good salary is the key to happiness at work, with 64 per cent of respondents stating that a good salary would make them altogther more cheerful. Herzberg, where are you now that your transatlantic cousins need you?

Who commissions these surveys? I though that the Ministry for Research into the Flipping Obvious was one of the quangos that was wound up just after the current coalition government was elected?

Let's face it, we're living at a 17-year high point in unemployment. According to the Office of National Statistics, the unemployment rate stands at 8.3%. Between July and September of this year, UK unemployment rose by 129,000 between July and September to 2.62 million.

For the UK's youth, the situation is even more bleak, with over 20% of those aged 16-24 out of employment.

To make matters worse, inflation is wobbling at around the 5% mark, and bank interest rates for those fortunate enough to have any savings are so low that the biscuit tin under the bed seems an attractive location for any few coppers remaining at the end of the month.

Bearing all the above in mind, is it actually surprising that UK workers are not currently constantly convulsed with laughter?

What is irritating is not so much the fact that the outcome of such reseach could be predicted in advance, but that there is a hint that if employees are unhappy, it is inevitably the fault of management who must thereofore also do whatever it can to turn its workforce into deliriously happy chappies!

Or am I just being Mr Grumpy?

Parlez-vous français?

After participating in a management meeting yesterday afternoon, I thought I’d set you all a little test in understanding management speak.

Exercise One:
How many of the following terms could you explain the meaning of to a colleague:

• Memorandum of Understanding
• Orientation Curriculum
• Ambassadorial Staff
• Incorporation Documents
• Ministry of the Interior
• Company Registration
• Country Representative
• Cultural Integration and Adjustment
• Non-Governmental Organisation
• Emotional Health

Award yourself one mark for each that you could explain to someone.

How did you do? Above eight and you are clearly set out for a life in the higher echelons of management.
 
Exercise Two:
Repeat Exercise One, but this time do it in French.

Still score as highly as last time?

If you are like me, your score on Exercise Two will (malheureusement) have been substantially lower than on Exercise One.

The meeting I sat in had six participants: A resident of Niger (whose native tongue is French), An American, a Cameroonian, and three Brits. Guess who were the ones who needed serious help when translating to and from French? No marks (nul points, perhaps) for correctly guessing that it was the Brits (including me, I hasten to add).

Language courses have slipped down the league tables in our school curriculum. Since 2006, there has been a 22% fall in the numbers of teenagers taking a modern foreign language at GCSE. Clearly this means that we are raising a generation of employees who will be unable to communicate in an increasingly global (and therefore multi-lingual) workforce.

Does it matter? As a German colleague of mine once remarked: if you want to buy something from a German, it’s fine that you only speak English. But if you want to sell him something, you need to speak German, and speak it well.

Just a thought: enrolment for adult education classes will be taking place over the next few weeks. French anyone?

New Survey Demolishes Established HR Thinking

Regular readers of HR case Studies will be aware of the editorial team’s scepticism at the number of surveys that are commissioned in the HR world. Normally such surveys are thinly disguised marketing tools to “prove” that the service offered by the sponsor is the answer to all the world’s problems, and that you’d be daft not to give them a call and beg them to help you. Generally the surveys tell us in quantitative terms (and attempt to blind us with statistics) something that even the dumbest of us would have taken for granted anyway.

But a recent survey undertaken by the Chartered Management Institute radically breaks with this tradition and reveals something that will leave readers slack-jawed and wide-eyed with amazement.

It seems (brace yourselves) that managers might be to blame for worsening workplace morale.

Recoil with shock all those of you that thought that good morale in the workplace was actually the responsibility of the outsourced catering staff (See Gary Hamel’s seminal work, “Syrup Sponge and Custard: Unlocking Employee Engagement with Tasty Desserts")

Faint with horror anyone who still clings onto the well-researched theory that there is a demonstrable link between the United Kingdom’s performance in the Eurovision Song Contest and workplace productivity (See Ulrich and Brockbank’s influential Harvard Business Review article “Boom Bang-A-Bang: Competitive Advantage Through Employee Polyphony" (Foreword by Sir Terry Wogan)

Stagger under the impact of the paradigm shift that explodes the view that it’s really the responsibility of the employees themselves to keep morale high (see Paul McKenna’s bestseller, “I Can Make You Rather Jolly”)

The ground-breaking conclusion came as a result of the CMI's "Spring economic outlook survey" which found that 70% of managers admitted that morale in their organisations has dropped over the last six months. Throwing all the well-attested theory aside, the Chartered Management Institute has responded to the findings by suggesting that managers themselves could be responsible for the decline in morale.

Incredible, isn’t it? Just not at all what you'd expect.

Missing, presumed dead: the eighth most stupid management fad

A recent post on BNET (The CBS Interactive Business Network) listed what the author (and he's written for Computer Gaming World and Men's Health magazine, so he's clearly a managerial heavyweight) names as the eight most heinous, stupid, painful and useless management fads that you'll ever encounter.

BNET: The 8 Stupidest Management Fads of All Time
 
He'd evidently got bored or run out of steam by the time that he got to number eight, but here are the other seven manifestations of managerial madness:

1. Six Sigma
Improve the quality of your processes by identifying and removing the causes of defects. You assign various people different colored “belts” (like a karate class) based upon their expertise in the Six Sigma methodology.

2. Business Process Re-engineering
Analyze the workflows and processes within your organization and rework them to achieve a defined business outcome.

3. Matrix Management
Temporarily pool people with similar skills for discrete work assignments. For example, all engineers may be in one engineering department and report to an engineering manager, but these same engineers may be assigned to different projects and report to a project manager while working on that project. Therefore, each engineer may have to work under several managers to get their job done.

4. Management by Consensus
Make important decisions with the agreement of everybody in the group. Proposals should be collaboratively developed, and full agreement is a primary objective. Consensus management is usually seen as an alternative to “top-down” decision making common inside hierarchical organizations.

5. Core Competency
Focus on the one thing that your firm does better than anyone else.  That will make your strategy difficult for competitors to imitate and keep your organization from wasting time doing things that they’re not very good at.

6. Management by Objectives
Define objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to what is required of them and understand where they are placed in the organization. Then compare the employee’s actual performance with the standards set and agreed upon.

7. The Search for Excellence
Solve business problems with as little business process overhead as possible, and empower decision-makers at multiple levels of a company.

I suspect that most of the highly intelligent readers of HR Case Studies will be aware that the author's descriptions are so much of a caricature that they are either misleading or in some instances plain wrong, but hey it's the end of the week so we need a bit of light entertainment, don't we!

More importantly, we need to find a replacement for the eighth management fad that we've cast overboard.

So dear readers: what's the daftest management fad that we still cling to but we really need to consign to the dustbin of history?

You may turn over and begin . . .