Take Time To Ask, Listen, Notice And Appreciate

One example of how an organization is addressing time bias comes from a financial services organization that created a gender pay gap modelling tool for managers to use during the pay process so they could see the impact of different reward decisions immediately instead of waiting for the annual pay gap reporting cycle to roll around. Third, they are adapting their pay philosophies to reflect the evolving patterns of work today and starting to pay according to where people spend their working time. As the length of the average working week rose 9% during 2020, firms began offering a corporate ‘wellbeing’ day off to thank employees for their hard work and to emphasize the importance of rest. In some cases, the two days are offered as additional paid leave. Longer stretches of paid leave are also being offered for a wider range of reasons than historically permitted, and being extended to all employees – not just parents – for myriad purposes, including travel, education or dealing with the unexpected. One consultancy offers three months’ unpaid sabbatical to all employees regardless of length of service, while another consultancy’s Time Out Programme offers one month’s unpaid leave with no reason required. A global law firm offers 12 days’ paid leave per annum for personal emergencies. Volvo, Aviva, the John Lewis Partnership and Diageo are among employers offering equalized paid parental leave to men and women to encourage greater sharing of caring responsibilities. For example, employers are helping people to minimize any emotional ‘spillover’ from their home lives into their work lives by facilitating access to relationship experts. Other companies are providing a personalized wellbeing budget. This is typically somewhere in the hundreds of pounds per person/per annum, and employees can spend their budget on any activity outside of work that promotes their wellbeing. This sends the signal that diversity of experience and time invested in outside interests are valued positively.

Turn The Lights Out When You Leave

By making considered investments in people’s ongoing acquisition of skills that are highly sought after by employers. There are business benefits from closing skills gaps, attracting a more diverse workforce and boosting income and profits. The top 5% of companies investing in people development increase their revenue twice as fast as the bottom 5% and their profits 1.4 times as fast. When selecting leaders, career committed organizations are assessing the extent to which candidates have empowered their teams to adopt a healthy time culture as well as achieve their business results. For example, PwC host a leadership retreat called ‘Discover’ for junior employees who have recently taken up their first managerial position. This investment in lifelong learning and transferable skills helps people to move across job families and competency models, and enables the business to resource work in an agile way. L&D programmes are becoming more personalized, supported by data and technology and coaching time with managers. For example, ‘passion’ projects, where people can spend an agreed percentage of their working time on an initiative that is not directly related to their day job, can enhance people’s sense of purpose, loyalty and creativity. As an employee, keeping track of your completed training courses, certifications and development initiatives across your career can be cumbersome. Why not take the lead and launch a talent or leadership passport in your industry? Narrow recruitment criteria and recruiting from the same limited sources can act as a barrier to some groups.18 By broadening the recruitment process and reaching young people earlier in their education, we can encourage a wider range of applicants.

No One Ever Tells You

They see this as a win–win situation, helping more school leavers/graduates into jobs and expanding the future talent pool for their industry. Induction and onboarding programmes play a vital role in welcoming a new employee to the organization and helping them understand who’s who and how things are done ‘around here’. Traditionally, these programmes have focused on the factual element of roles, but advice on how to succeed in the company is greatly valued by new joiners. So clearly set out the different career paths available, the working time flexibility on offer and the positive time norms you encourage to help people to flourish in their careers. While the salary and benefits you offer need to be competitive, professionals place a high value on time for physical networking. It’s not just a ‘nice to have’ – clients are increasingly asking for evidence of this in selecting their service providers. Analysing your stay gaps help you to identify which employees are failing to thrive in your organization and why, so you can address these cultural and career barriers. They are jointly planning how the individual’s role and time commitment might evolve – for example to become one element of a new portfolio career or to switch tracks from selling and managing work to taking on greater responsibility for developing others. Remember those statistics on long working hours, burnout and stress from Part 1? The most effective way to promote good levels of physical and mental wellbeing among employees is not to have a culture that depletes people so badly in the first place. During 2020, many employers rushed to roll out wellbeing initiatives to help employees cope with the pandemic. I believe wellbeing should not be seen as a set of benefits detached from people’s daily experiences of work. Overwork, stress and burnout aren’t just problems for individuals to overcome.

Full Circle

Public Health England research confirms that, ‘Changes to workload or working practices appear to reduce stressors and factors that can lead to burnout. You can invite leaders and teams to try a few different approaches and find out what works best in your business. New topics are being broached too, such as effective brain functioning and how we can protect our cognitive health from overload. Open these sessions up to mental health champions to help them have conversations with people who are overloaded or struggling and, importantly, help escalate to leaders any organizational factors that are outside the individual’s control. This might consist of reminders to group together similar work activities, set fixed times for checking emails, allow transition time between calls and take frequent breaks, for example.