Improving the Quality of Working Life

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Improving the Quality of Working Life
Partnership The Next Challenge NCPP Conference,
22nd June 2006

• Ciaran A. OBoyle
• Professor of Psychology
• Vice-Dean, Medical Faculty
• Head of School of Healthcare Management
• Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
• coboyle_at_rcsi.ie

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Paradigms

• Scientists, just like the rest of humanity,
  carry out their day to day affairs within a
  framework of pre-suppositions, called a paradigm,
  about what constitutes a problem, a solution and
  a method. At any given time a particular
  scientific community will have a prevailing
  paradigm that shapes and directs work in the
  field. People become very attached to their
  paradigms and scientific revolutions always
  involve intellectual bloodshed.
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
  Revolutions, 1962.

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Paradigms

• Managers, just like the rest of humanity, carry
  out their day to day affairs within a framework
  of pre-suppositions, called a paradigm, about
  what constitutes a problem, a solution and a
  method. At any given time a particular managerial
  community will have a prevailing paradigm that
  shapes and directs work in the field. People
  become very attached to their paradigms and
  managerial revolutions always involve
  intellectual bloodshed.
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
  Revolutions, 1962.

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How do organisations see their people?

• People as company capital, assets human
  resources
• Most valuable assets but assets nonetheless

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The Workplace of the Future

• 1. Agile
• 2. Customer centred
• 3. Knowledge intensive
• 4. Responsive to employee needs
• 5. Networked
• 6. Highly productive
• 7. Involved and participatory
• Continually learning
• Proactively diverse
• Report of the Forum on the Workplace of the
  Future, 2004

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Core characteristics of human beings

• We are, each of us, unique individuals.
• We construct the world including the self
  through a search for meaning
• We have a deep seated drive to self-actualization.
  

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People are Individuals

• All men and women share a common humanity and
  yet although there are billions of them, every
  one has certain uniqueness, every one has a
  unique perspective on the world and is
  responsible for a unique life
• John Macquarrie

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Foundations of constructivism
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The myth of self

• Why are you unhappy?
• Because 99.9 of what you think,
• And everything you do.
• Is for your self,
• And there isnt one
• Wu Wei Wu

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Viktor Frankl Mans Search for Meaning
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The drive to self-realization

• The driving force, so far as it is possible for
  us to grasp it, seems to be in essence only an
  urge towards self-realization.
• C. G. Jung

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The nature of human beings

• Human beings are unique, active, complex,
  socially embedded and developmentally dynamic
  self-organizing systems.

We are engaged in a lifelong quest to achieve
meaning by maintaining a delicate balance between
ordering and disordering processes.
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Work and individuation?

• The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts
  working the moment you get up in the morning and
  doesnt stop until you get into the office
• Robert Frost

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David Whyte

• In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a
  dark wood where the true way was wholly lost
• Dante, Commedia.

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Soul at work?

• Always this energy smoulders inside
• when it remains unlit
• the body fills with dense smoke.
• David Whyte

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Managers quality of life
OBoyle and Corscadden, 2005
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Quality of Working Life Work Pressures in
Ireland 2005

• 31 of employees always or often come home
  exhausted
• 15 indicated their job always/often takes family
  time
• 18 indicated that they are always/often too
  tired to enjoy things at home
• 10 report their family gets fed up with their
  job pressures
• 20 of Irish employees are engaged in shift-work
• 25 work outside their core-work hours
• 17 of total employment is now part-time
• Night working and Sunday working are getting more
  prevalent.

The Changing Workplace Surveys of Employers and
Employees Views and Experiences. Report of the
Forum on the Workplace of the Future. National
Centre for Partnership and Performance, 2005.
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Psychological contract?
An idiosyncratic set of reciprocal expectations
held by employees concerning their obligations
(i.e.what they will do for the employer) and
their entitlements (i.e. what they expect to
receive in return). These contracts are important
as they specify how the employee defines the
deal - and whether or not the employee feels
that the deal has been honoured or violated.
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The psychology of well-being

• Psychological well-being (Eudaimonic)
• Environmental mastery
• Personal growth
• Purpose in life
• Autonomy
• Self-acceptance
• Positive relations with others

• Subjective well-being (Hedonic)
• Subjective happiness
• Pleasure
• Avoidance of pain
• Balance of positive over negative emotions

Ryff CD and Keyes CLM, J Pers Soc Psy, 1995,
691069-1081
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The new Positive Psychology

• Signature strengths
• Wisdom/knowledge
• Curiosity/interest
• Judgement/critical thinking
• Open-mindedness
• Practical intelligence
• Social intelligence
• Emotional intelligence
• Courage
• Perseverance
• Kindness/Justice

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The new Positive Psychology

• Identify your signature strengths
• Choose work that lets you use them every day
• Re-craft your present work to use your signature
  strengths
• Employers Choose employees whose signature
  strengths mesh with the work they will do
• Managers make room to allow employees to
  re-craft their work within the bounds of your
  goals

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Protean careers

• Traditional career a series of upward moves, with
  steadily increasing income, power, status and
  security
• Protean careers
• Driven more by individuals than organisations
• Driven more by need for psychological success
• Re-invention, continuous change and
  self-assessment

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Protean careers

• Consists of all the persons varied experiences
  in education, training, work in several
  organisations and changes in occupational field.
• Career choices and search for meaning and
  self-fulfilment are the unifying integrative
  elements
• Protean careers
• Meaning vs money
• Purpose vs power
• Identity vs ego
• Learning vs attainments

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Protean careers

• Flexibility
• Does not follow a linear course
• No idealised career path
• Person creates a flexible idiosyncratic unique
  course
• Enlarged career space - boundaries between work
  and non-work become blurred
• New paradigm for the relationship between
  individual and organisation individual in the
  foreground - organisation in the background
• Organisations role?
• Helping people be whole at work (and at home?)
• Providing a rich ground for learning through
  challenging growth and enriched relationships
• A purpose to which the individual can commit with
  pride

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Work-life integration

• Meaningful daily achievement and enjoyment in
  each of four quadrants work, family, friends,
  self.

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Work-life balance

• Doesnt mean equal balance
• Varies over time
• No one size fits all
• Has to fit the business needs

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Work-Life Balance - a growing issue
Too many British workplaces are characterised by
a trust deficit. Employees report falling job
satisfaction Working time is a particular
problem - with people reporting work
intensification and problems with work-life
balance. Most workers lack strong influence over
most of the issues that affect them directly at
work. An Agenda for Work. The Work
Foundations Challenge to Policy Makers. 2005.
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Is work-life balance important?

• Looking at the future structure of the Irish
  population, work/life balance will be the biggest
  issue in 10 years time. WLB policies need to be
  promoted within an overall context of diversity
  management, so as not to stigmatise or adversely
  affect the careers of those who take up flexible
  arrangements. Equally, the benefits of
  family-friendly policies to employers need to be
  promoted.
• IBEC Submission to the Forum on the Workplace of
  the Future

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Work-life balance Business case for employers

• As a recruitment tool to attract the best talent
• To retain employees
• To improve customer service
• To increase the return on training investment
• To create a more diverse workforce to reflect the
  customer base
• To reduce absenteeism, sickness and stress
• To improve morale commitment and loyalty
• To improve organisational flexibility and
  change-competency
• UK Department of Trade, 2005

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Mirror managers and Window managers
Mirror people see in everything only
reflections of their own behaviour. Window
people can see beyond the images in front of
them. Organisations need managers who see both
ways in a sense who look out the window at
dawn, to see through their own reflections to the
awakening world outside. Reflect in Latin means
to refold, which suggests that attention turns
inward so that it can be turned outward. This
means going beyond introspection. It means
looking in so you can better see out in order to
perceive a familiar thing in a different way.
Gosling J and Mintzberg H. The five minds of a
manager. Harvard Business Review , November 2003.
Reprint RO311C.
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Talent Management

• Leadership challenges
• Knowing that talent is available
• Managers must take and interest
• Using talent effectively
• Organisations use only 40-50 of knowledge,
  skills and experience effectively
• Developing the available talent
• Managers must provide opportunities for people to
  apply their talents

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The Universal Mission Statement
To improve the economic well-being and quality of
life of all stakeholders.
Stephen R. Covey
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Places to intervene in a complex system

• The power to transcend paradigms
• The mindset or paradigm out of which the system -
  its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters -
  arises
• The goals of the system
• The power to add, change, evolve or self-organise
  system structure
• The rules of the system (incentives, punishments,
  constraints)
• The structure of information flow ( who does and
  does not have access to what kinds of
  information.
• Meadows D. Leverage Points Places to Intervene
  in a System. The Sustainability Institute, 1999.

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Paradigms again!

• Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one
  has yet seen, but to think what no one has yet
  thought about that which everybody sees.
• Schopenhauer

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There has perhaps never been a time when the
importance of being is so neglected in the
general preoccupation with doing, and there is
no realisation, at heart, of the unfolding of the
human spirit that truth demands Laurens Van
Der Post