Avoid presenteeism and increase productivity with alternative working methods

Everybody has unproductive days at work sometimes – management focus, natural peaks and troughs in work rate and work flow, health, outside commitments and many other factors contribute – but it is in every organisations’ interest to maximise productivity. Absenteeism can be managed effectively by ensuring that all staff get a back-to-work interview when they return to the business. So how do we manage and reduce presenteeism: employees attending work when they are sick, or even just staying around beyond the time needed for effective performance?

There’s some good evidence that the ideal model in terms of productivity is for employees to work as hard as possible for an average or shorter working week, rather than to work longer hours at a lower intensity. This also looks like a good route to a fair and health-enhancing Work/Life Balance. But the UK for example has some of the longest working hours in Western Europe, with some of the lowest productivity results: good neither for organisational finances nor for employees’ lives.

The HR approach to increasing work intensity and productivity is obvious. Recruit the right people based on competence and potential, invest in their development, and ensure that their managers use all the proven tools to maximise their effectiveness and empowerment: especially coaching and performance management.

It’s also worth considering alternative ways of working too, all of which can increase productivity while reducing unnecessary attendance.

• Flexitime (flextime in the USA): core hours are, for example, 10.00am to 3.00pm in the working week, with earlier start and finish times, between 7.00am and 7.00pm say, flexibly decided by the worker and/or agreed with their manager or team, so that the total number of hours per week, month or year meets the organisation’s policy. (Pros: more employee choice, better match of availability to workload, environmental benefits as workers are not all commuting at the same time. Cons: needs attentive management and systems, continuous dialogue between staff and managers, and promotion of the system to full-time workers and other stakeholders.)

• Staggered shifts: pre-agreed start and finishing times varying between team members, with a core hour overlap similar to flexitime. (Pros and Cons also similar to flexitime.)

• Compressed working week: say, four 10-hour days rather than five eight-hour days per week. (Pros: can suit people able to concentrate for longer, gives employees bigger blocks of time off. Cons: can leave teams short staffed at times, can impact negatively on productivity for some workers.)

• Part-time: 16 hours per week or less in the UK. Experience shows that part-time workers are often more motivated than full-time workers to keep their productivity up and their hours down to the contracted amount. (Pros: can attract and retain high quality employees who cannot or do not want to undertake full-time work. Cons: full-time workers need monitoring and encouragement to treat part-timers as equals.)

• Job-share: two or more part-time workers sharing a single role. (Pros and cons similar to part-time.)

• Hot-desking: rather than set individual work stations or desks, employees can work anywhere in a shared work space, with their materials, equipment and belongings cleared away and kept in lockers when they are not working. (Pros: forces employees to plan and organise better, works especially well with staff not based in one workplace all the time, reduces the physical space necessary for a team to work. Cons: hated by many workers for being too unsettling, can be seen as a way to cut costs rather than increase productivity.)

• Home-based working, telecommuting or ‘homeshoring’: employees are based in their own home office, communicating via the web and telephone to colleagues and stakeholders. (Pros: physical space and cost is saved at the main workplace, employees reduce ‘dead’ commuting to almost nothing, staff get to wear and eat what they like. Cons: not available to all roles, managers need to trust, brief and monitor their employees, reduces face-to-face communication, employment contracts need to be more complex and more explicit.)

So… ways to help your people get more done while spending less time working.

Be better informed and use more recent references in your assignments

The CIPD has just sent out its first issue of In a nutshell..., its monthly email summary of new and interesting thinking and research from across HR literature. (It's being emailed to all CIPD members, so if you haven't got yours, check your spam filter, and failing that, contact the CIPD directly.) This is so useful because, when talking about HR to managers and directors who question its relevance, it helps to be able to cite new and well-written articles, rather than the old stuff everybody learns in college. And of course you can use the research as references in your CIPD Certificate assignments!

If you like that, then there are other free regular emails you can subscribe to.

The BPS Occupational Digest email is a short and easy-to-read summary of occupational, work and business psychology research and theory, put together by the British Psychology Society. You can visit its website and subscribe to the email at http://www.bps.org.uk/publications/occupational-digest/occupational-digest

And if that gets you interested in more general psychology theory and research - much of which is just as relevant to HR and business - then look at the BPS Research Digest, at http://www.bps.org.uk/publications/research-digest/research-digest

Happy reading!

Commuting and corporate social responsibility

A quick thought. The average one-way commute to work in the UK in 2006 was 27 minutes (The National Traffic Survey 2006 pub. DfT 2007) and in the USA it was 26 minutes (ABC news survey 2005). Elsewhere in the world, journey times look similar. But these are the averages, and commuters report wide variance in actual times travelled day by day. Moreover, the phenomenon of the long-distance commuter – one to two hours each way, each day – is becoming ever more common.

Sitting in an air-conditioned bus or train, reading a good book, listening to music, watching a movie or TV show on a laptop, or playing a game... Well that doesn’t sound too bad, so long as the vehicle keeps moving and the price is acceptable. Even reading reports or handling email on a smart phone is ok, if it saves time in the workplace. Walking and cycling are ideal, although not realistic in many situations. But crawling in a car in near-stationary traffic is bad for the person doing it, bad for the environment and bad for the employer too, when their employees turn up tired and stressed.

Trouble is, when the infrastructure is in place and employees can afford to travel further... they do.

But we all know the benefits of a shorter commute:
• People spend their time more usefully: at work, at home, asleep but not in a vehicle.
• Employees can spend their money on something other than transport.
• Employing organisations become better grounded in their local communities.
• Employees’ wages are spent in the community so local businesses, services and their workers all benefit.
• Etc.

So how come more organisations don’t make it policy to improve their Corporate Social Responsibility by acting to shorten the commuting distance and time of their employees? In other words, why not make it a policy to prefer employees and applicants who live closer to the workplace? There may be some diversity and equal opportunities issues to resolve, but wouldn’t the work be worth it?

Staff turnover: what’s the right percentage?

Often, when organisations talk about their staff turnover being a problem, it’s because it is seen to be too high. In call centres in the UK for example, current rates of staff turnover are about 23-24% – meaning that centres lose and need to replace about a quarter of their workforce every year, or that on average staff stay about four years. This is an improvement on far higher rates in the past.

In major UK urban centres, young adults often say that they want to move jobs every two to five years, a rate that seems too fast for them to learn how to do a job well before moving on. The employment prospects of young adults in the UK are the worst they’ve been for fifty years or more, mainly due to the worldwide economic crisis, but maybe also partly due to employers not seeing young people as a ‘good investment’ when they want to move on so soon.

So, is low staff turnover and high staff retention always good? Oakwood associates have considerable experience in working with organisations based in small communities far from major urban centres. In these settings we see many people who have 25 or more years’ service with their employers, with no plans to move on or indeed to progress or develop within their organisation until they retire. Some of these people are in top management positions, but not all are.

In many of these organisations, such long service is rewarded without looking at the relative productivity or profitability of long-serving employees. If the organisations are not growing, unproductive long-serving workers can block the recruitment, development and promotion of newer employees and in so doing stifle innovation and useful change.

So what’s the answer? We need effective competency models and performance management systems that enable us to set standards and measure the effectiveness of all employees. And we need to ‘know the numbers’ about how employees’ effectiveness changes through their life-cycle in the organisation. Only then can we start making policy about ideal minimum and maximum staff turnover and retention rates: but in the future we could see 25 years service as no better than 2 years!