It may be that Your Search Lights is really My Search Lights. I began this blog in April to create a place for Career Networking Resources so more folks could find this information easily.
I decided to name the blog Your Search Lights because the possible interpretations are rather limitless.
With the original purpose of the blog fulfilled - a place for the networking information -I have the luxury of allowing my writing and interests to unfold here. I realize this must be disconcerting for folks who are focused and thrive with SMART goals. I could say the common thread in my posts is providing resources and ideas for finding ways to be engaged and stay engaged in a world of turbo-charged transition.
With this unfolding process in mind my interests have turned to the challenge of employee engagement. There is nothing more important to an organization's success than engaged employees. Since engagement is about how a person thinks and feels about their work, an engaged employee is energized and involved. Both the organization and the employee benefit from successful engagement. Genuine engagement is one of those rare win-win experiences.
I leave us today with a brief background and a question:
For many years there was a social contract between employees and employer. It was that employees worked hard and employers took care of them. Employees were the primary stakeholders of the organization.
Since the 1970s when management broke this social contract by implementing cost cutting measures which viewed employees as a cost rather than precious resources and stakeholders, the only stakeholders became the shareholders.
Now with this latest recession gripping our economy and the hearts and minds of employees, how do we genuinely create employee engagement? It is possible for employees and employers
to care about each other and make commitments to each other now that the social contract is broken?
This is what I'm thinking about lately and I would love to read your thoughts on this. Please comment!
More later this week.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Janice,
You say, “I believe a caring relationship can and must be present to create successful organizations.” I’d like to ask what you mean by “successful”, because many financially successful organizations, perhaps the vast majority, don’t seem to care about relationships.
As MacDonald’s corporate raider Mike Dean in “A Man of Affairs” tirades, “You sicken me. You pollyanna boys want to go around thinking the business world is honorable and reasonably decent . . . . Listen to me. There’s no more morality or ethics in industry than there is in that pack of barracudas out there…. I tell you the only limitation is the law. And everything else goes.”
Just as Alaskans have profited from extracting (depleting, destroying) the state’s natural resources, so can any company profit from extracting, depleting, or destroying its human resources. It is relatively easy to profit when you can externalize costs; be it cyanide into the waste water, CO2 in to the atmosphere, or stressed and depressed employees with layoffs, alcoholism, and divorces. As your article says “Employee Engagement, Who Cares?”
While I know from personal experience that caring and engagement of employees leads to both profits and satisfaction, I don’t see the evidence that fear, threats, and treating people as objects, cannot also create marketplace success. Far out on that curve, Stalin ruled with terror and killed millions, creating a powerful, wealthy, awesome Soviet state.
But perhaps you define success as I do, as including personal costs and benefits, the pleasure of looking forward to your work day, the deeply rewarding experience of being a valued, appreciated member of your work group, the excitement of bringing your creativity and full energy to the task at hand, the intellectual excitement of seeing yourself as part of the bigger system and enthusiastically improving it.
The current public rage against outlandish banker’s bonuses captures nicely this person-non-person divide. The financiers just don’t get it. In their barracudaland people are anchovies, winners take all. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. These barons don’t care or even notice that ordinary people pay the price with, alienation, unemployment, anxiety, violence and stress related diseases, and, that we all pay for pollution, natural resource depletion and global warming.
While the last hundred years shows a trajectory from a less humane to a more humane workplace, the understanding that this is both good for business and good for people is not yet part of the business culture. And it is certainly not part of the regulatory/legal field. Until it is, employee engagement will remain a hard sell and you will continue to ask, “Who Cares?”
Barry Phegan
Meridian Group, Sausalito
Good post and this mail helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you as your information.
Post a Comment