Work-life Balance – what organisations do wrong

Work-Life Balance – Employee Expectations

In this second article on the 8 areas of employee expectation, and their impact on effective employee engagement and retention, we look at work-life balance.

Although much has been said and written about work-life balance, the focus has been on organisation-wide policies and initiatives, but what about individual employee’s real needs and those of their team colleagues?

The organisational view

Most organisations recognise their responsibilities towards their employees in maintaining a healthy work-life balance, and the long-term benefits that follow.  However, according to The Mental Health Foundation some 40% of us have neglected important parts of our lives because of work and slogging it out for long hours is likely to cause feelings of depression in nearly a third of people.

Today’s workforce obviously wants to earn enough money to live on and also have the time to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Previously its importance grew with one’s tenure; as we become more competent at our jobs our priorities also change, for instance, when we start a family or want to work closer to home. A new report from the Centre for the Modern Family, however, says only a third of UK families claim to have a healthy ‘work family balance’.

However, for young people joining the workforce today work-like balance is just as important. Millennials, globally, are more likely than other generations to say it is important to receive paid parental leave onsite or subsidised childcare and telecommuting 1-2 days a week according to the EY Global Generations survey.

So what are organisations doing wrong?

Traditional engagement surveys have evolved from the old style satisfaction surveys which tend to have answers quantified on a scale in relation to generic questions, and are usually anonymous which further undermines their reliability. Traditional engagement surveys can’t get into the specific expectations of individuals or groups in any detail, and so only measure broad perceptions of satisfaction.

To get it right the full range of expectations unique to every employee has to be captured, analysed and monitored on a regular basis. Proper expectation analytics in the hands of managers who believe in their people can start a meaningful, personalised conversation that can lead to high levels of engagement.

The group view

Organisational policies are great but how relevant to the group or team, and what is really important to them? Does everyone in the group have the same expectations and needs? Using Harrison Assessments engagement and retention analytics we can find out.

What can we interpret for this group?

• it considers having work-life balance to be only moderately important
• it considers having flexible work time to be reasonably unimportant
• it has a tendency to be moderately relaxed and easy going
• it tends to be moderately effective managing stress when it occurs
• it tends to be moderately willing to deal with the pressure of tight schedules and deadlines.

The individual employee view

In a recent report from Investors in People’s Job Exodus Trends a 34% of employees would prefer a more flexible approach to working hours than a 3% pay rise, and alarmingly 49% of the UK workforce are looking for a new job in 2016.

For line managers, understanding an individual’s expectations as well as their own expectations and behaviours has never been more important to retain the best talent and develop their team’s full potential.

Asking the right questions, and analysing each individual employee’s real engagement factors ensures managers and the wider organisation provide an environment that retains the best talent. People want to feel recognised but there are many other factors that need to be understood if they are to further engage in their work and the overall success of the organisation.

What makes up Work-life balance?

Finding out how employees think about work-life balance, and its importance to an individual, is the starting point to measure whether organisational strategies are having the desired effect, and more importantly for line managers to identify potential issues. Here are five work-life balance elements that can be measured and reported upon from the Harrison Assessment:

Wants Work-life Balance

• The desire to have sufficient time away from work for rest, enjoyment, or family
• Most individuals, unless they are confirmed workaholics, want to be able to maintain a healthy work-life balance but this does vary between people. Some may be working hard to forge a career and climb up the corporate ladder, others might just want to come in and get the job done as quickly as possible. Some will not even realise that their work-life balance is off kilter and may need someone to point it out to them so they don’t suffer from burn out.

Wants Flexible Work Time

• The desire to have adjustable working hours or holiday schedules
• One way of maintaining a good balance, of course, is offering flexible work time. This may important to certain individuals who have a family or are providing care for a sick or elderly relative, for instance. It could be less important to someone who is just out of college and is looking to push ahead with their career. Offering flexible working can be challenging for any organisation and implementing the right strategy is key to providing employees with the best option for their needs.

Is Relaxed

• The tendency to feel at ease or calm while working
• How relaxed an employee is at work can be an indication that they feel part of the team and are happy with everything that is going within the company. They get on with their work colleagues and have little in the way of issues that need to be settled. It is usually an indication too that they have a good work-life balance in place.

Manages Stress Well

• The tendency to deal effectively with strain and difficulty when it occurs
• We all encounter stress and for the large part this is a good thing. It’s part of the challenge of working in a busy office where a lot is going on. When that stress becomes unmanageable, though, things can become difficult. An employee who feels they are having problems coping with work and the stress that comes with it is likely to be less productive and unhappy.

Has a High/Low Pressure Tolerance

• The level of comfort related to working under deadlines and busy schedules
• Tolerance to pressure situations is another area where useful employee information can be collected to find those who perform the best when the work is the most challenging. Those who are able to maintain a good work-life balance and manage day to day stress are more likely to cope with high pressure moments whilst others might need more support to help them get through these periods.

How Harrison Assessments Talent Solution helps

Managers can measure employee expectations, the intrinsic behaviours that drive individual and group engagement, by analysing the 8 key expectation areas. This helps to understand any differences between an employee as well as looking at the overall group or team’s expectations. These insights facilitate the essential dialogue between employee and manager, fostering a shared responsibility for engagement to build a culture of employee engagement.

Managers can use the Manage, Develop and Retain report as a guide to getting the best performance out of an individual member of their team, and shows how mis-matched communication and management styles could potentially demotivate a talented employee. Instead the report suggests how best to develop and engage the employee, what type of tasks to delegate and behaviours to watch out for that could impede performance.

Employee Engagement White Paper

• This employee engagement white paper will outline why this is the case and what is needed to achieve a greater impact on organisational performance.
• It includes some key areas relating to engagement in the workplace and a crucial 3-step guide to assist with the application of engagement analytics.
• Written by Dan Harrison, Ph.D. – Organisational Psychology, developer and CEO of Harrison Assessments, this white paper is a must read for anyone involved in employee engagement.  Request your copy here –

Next Monday is Blue Monday. Are you ready?

Understanding Employee Expectations: the key to effective engagement and retention

Every year January is the month when job boards and recruitment agencies launch their “New Year, New Job” campaigns – why?

January is the busiest month for starters and leavers with the third Monday of January in particular known as Blue Monday, the one day when more employees hand in their letter of resignation than any other day in the year.

Two trends indicate 2016 will continue to be a busy year for UK recruiters:

• UK labour market statistics from the CBI show the employment rate is the highest since records began in 1971 (at 73.7%) with increasing business optimism for the economic outlook;
• However, research from HR Magazine suggests that effective employee engagement in the UK could be faltering with more than a third of us saying that we were not motivated at work during 2015.

Organisations with a good employee engagement and retention strategy can cascade retention and turnover KPIs to quantify the overall metrics and financial returns. However, even with these investments organisations still lose their best talent to the competition because of the limitations of high-level engagement surveys; specifically they do not look at an individual’s real engagement factors.

Asking the right questions, and analysing each individual employee’s real engagement factors ensures managers and the wider organisation provide an environment that retains the best talent. People want to feel recognised but there are other factors that need to be understood if they are to further engage in their work and the overall success of the organisation.

In this series of eight articles we provide detailed insights into each of the 8 areas of employee expectations, starting with:

Personal Expectations

Personal expectations can include areas such as being kept properly informed about what is going on in the company, having a strong and capable leader, access to help when needed and a clear career and development path. In isolation these cannot change performance and increase opportunity but combined with other engagement metrics can help managers develop more fulfilling job roles, set meaningful goals, leading to a more satisfied and productive team. Examples of personal expectations include:

Wants to be Informed

• Most employees who are engaged, or want to be more so, also expect to be kept informed of what is going on in the organisation they are working for. This can be particularly problematic during times of change when, for instance, departments are being reorganised or new initiatives and products being released.
• Meeting these expectations is vital for companies that want to promote better employee relations and a higher sense of well-being.

Wants Capable Leader

• One of the major reasons that top talent leave a particular company is the person in charge. That could be because the employee feels unappreciated or that they are being ‘held back’ in some way and it could mean that the person in charge is simply not very good at handling people, particularly those with obvious talent. The CIPD quote a survey last year by B2B marketplace of more than a thousand employees, over a third said they thought their manager was a bad boss.
• Most employees expect a manager or boss who is responsive, understanding and helps them do their job well.

Wants Personal Help

• Employees will have varying expectations of the kind of personal help they want or need. That may just be to ease things during busy periods with access to additional staff or it might be finding ways that fit in with their career expectations such as job development or a better work-life balance.
• It can also include employees who need additional help such as those with a disability.

Wants a Stable Career

• Employees who are constantly in fear of losing their jobs or being undermined in the office are likely, of course, to be less engaged than those who feel they have a stable career pathway.
• Top talent are usually looking for some way to progress their future employment prospects and have high expectations of a stable career pathway that meets their needs and those of the organisation they work for.

How Harrison Assessments Talent Solution helps

Managers can measure employee expectations, the intrinsic behaviours that drive individual and group engagement, by analysing the 8 key areas. This helps to understand any differences between an employee as well as looking at the overall group or team’s expectations. These insights facilitate the essential dialogue between employee and manager, fostering a shared responsibility for engagement to build a culture of employee engagement.

Managers can use the Manage, Develop and Retain report as a guide to getting the best performance out of an individual member of their team, and shows how mis-matched communication and management styles could potentially demotivate a talented employee. Instead the report suggests how best to develop and engage the employee, what type of tasks to delegate and behaviours to watch out for that could impede performance.

Assess employee engagement factors for individuals and groups with summary dashboards and detailed reports.

Employee Engagement White Paper

• This employee engagement white paper will outline why this is the case and what is needed to achieve a greater impact on organisational performance.
• It includes some key areas relating to engagement in the workplace and a crucial 3-step guide to assist with the application of engagement analytics.
• Written by Dan Harrison, Ph.D. – Organisational Psychology, developer and CEO of Harrison Assessments, this white paper is a must read for anyone involved in employee engagement.  Request your copy here –

Employee engagement is a shared responsibility

How Employee Engagement Analytics Help Create a Culture of Engagement

Employee engagement is a hot topic—and for good reason. Research studies from Gallup®, BlessingWhite®, and many more continue to demonstrate that employee engagement highly impacts key organisational metrics including talent retention, mission achievement, growth, and profitability.

Engagement surveys are commonly used to assess the organisation’s level of employee engagement.  While this approach has proven valuable in many organisations, it has limitations in terms of improving individual engagement and creating a culture of engagement.

• This employee engagement white paper will outline why this is the case and what is needed to achieve a greater impact on organisational performance metrics.
• It includes some key areas relating to engagement in the workplace and a crucial 3-step guide to assist you with the application of engagement analytics.
• Written by Dan Harrison, Ph.D. – Organisational Psychology, developer and CEO of Harrison Assessments, this white paper is a must read for anyone involved in employee engagement.  Request your copy here –

Case Study: The entrepreneurial warehouse managers

Organisations seek to to attract and retain the best talent for specific roles and more importantly – the right cultural fit.

Even organisations that outsource their selection processes have told us that although outsourcing solves the initial sorting process it often does nothing for the ‘cultural fit’ of applicant to organisation. In fact, the CIPD recently published statistics showing that only 8% of organisations are actually happy with their talent management approach. In our experience there are a number of reasons for this  – disparate methods being used at differing levels and in different areas of the organisation and the perception of cost and dissatisfaction with assessment tools are among the most common.

So how do you measure company values?

It has become common practice for business trainers/facilitators to help organisations identify their values and connect these to the behaviours expected in support of these values. Harrison Assessments helps to identify the behaviours behind the values in a way that hasn’t been easy before.

How do companies measure employee performance against their values?

The concept is simple. If something is important to us as human beings we will behave in a way that supports this value. So behind each value must be a set of behavioural competencies and behind each competency is a set of behavioural traits.

Case Study: The entrepreneurial warehouse managers

We were recently working with an organisation who have a strong value around entrepreneurship. They wanted all their warehouse managers to behave in an entrepreneurial way as if the business was their own. Of course this can mean different things to different people and it took time to establish what was really required in terms of behaviour. For example true entrepreneurs can be very high risk takers unable to convey their vision to others. This is certainly not what the organisation was looking for. When we broke it down we discovered that what was actually required was –

• Essential traits – optimism, persistence, self-acceptance, self- improvement, the ability to take initiative, enthusiasm for the role, the ability to be open and reflective and some warmth and empathy.
• Desirable traits – collaboration, effective enforcing, a desire to lead, a systematic approach, the ability to work as a team, diplomacy, frankness, the ability to enlist co-operation, the ability to handle conflict, flexibility, helpfulness and tolerance of structure
• Traits to avoid – rebellious autonomy, harshness, insensitivity, evasiveness, imprecision caused through speed, scepticism, permissiveness and slow precision.

Taking a closer look at these you may say that some entrepreneurs will fit into this profile but others definitely not. So gaining a clearer picture was essential to fully understand what the organisation was looking for.

All the other company values were analysed in the same way to produce an overall profile against which the company can measure accurately.

So now the company has an accurate measuring tool as well as a clearer understanding of their own expectations in relation to their advertised values. This not only represents a huge cost saving in making sure they recruit people who will fit the culture, it highlights automatically areas for development for existing employees and forms the basis for personal development plans. A next possible step is to incorporate this measurement into the appraisal system thus making it easier for managers to have conversations which may previously have been avoided.

Talent Management Solutions – A Strategic Approach

CIPD research tells us that only 8% of HR professionals are satisfied with the way they deal with talent management and yet talent attraction, development and retention is high on the agenda of most progressive HR professionals.

One of the challenges for HR Directors is establishing a talent management solution which gives real, progressive data on attracting, developing and retaining the best talent in a cost effective manner. Until now measuring the very things that make people good at their job, ie, the things they enjoy doing, have not been measurable in any robust or non-subjective way so making a business case for introducing development plans can be a tough call for even the best of HR Directors. Faced with measurable business cases from finance, sales and marketing, IT and operations HR initiatives can often fall under the radar due largely to a lack of measurability. Aspects that are measurable are often administrative by nature – holiday records, salary pay scales, overtime hours and so on. But what of those that aren’t perceived to be measurable? These often fall into the ‘pink and fluffy’ category simply because measurement has been a challenge. Making a business case is difficult and measuring the success of any development initiative can be a challenge.

So what if HR professionals were in a position to measure on an individual, team and organisational basis, 175 aspects of business success such as –

• Ability to take initiative
• Optimism
• Ability to analyse pitfalls
• Inclination to experiment
• Inclination to take risks
• Interpersonal skills
• Ability to influence
• Frankness
• Diplomacy
• Desire for self-improvement
• Levels of self-acceptance

What if they can measure such traits in relation to specific roles, organisational and/or team values, behavioural competencies, benchmarking excellent performance, maintaining a talent pipeline, succession planning, career development and placing graduate/wp-contentrentice talent? How different would Board meetings be if HR could produce statistics to support business cases for development in specific areas and to measure the success of such initiatives.

The Harrison Assessment Talent Management System can do just this and here is how.

• The central driver of the HATS system is the SmartQuestionnaire™ – the result of over 30 years of research by Dr Dan Harrison into what makes people successful at work. Its focus on working preferences makes it much easier to interpret and more flexible than other assessments.
• HATS records all in one place the working preferences, ie the success factors over and above qualifications and experience, of the entire workforce as well as any prospective employees. It does this by completion of a robust and accurate SmartQuestionnaire™ and provides a fresh and up-to-date pipeline of talent.
• HATS has over 6,500 job profiles on the system against which to measure the suitability factors of prospective candidates for a role. These are flexible and can be designed for the organisation’s individual and specific requirements. Including suitability factors as well as eligibility factors for a role will increase the predictive success rate from 40-45% using just eligibility factors to nearer 90-95%. Many organisations will pay an external talent seeker an average of 15-20% of salary to fill some roles – a high price to pay for only a 40-45% success rate! One HR Director told me recently that to find 12 young graduates for their graduate training scheme cost a total of £100,000.
• There is a range of reports to use for development for individuals and their managers as well as teams.
• Employees can be encouraged to take responsibility for their own career development through the talent readiness part of the system.
• The data drawn from the system puts HR in an excellent position to build a business case for development for individuals, teams and/or groups and the results of such development are now clearly measurable – no more guess work or subjective reasoning – just clear and accurate data pushing HR talent solution initiatives up the list of Board level priorities.

HATS is designed for maximum customer effectiveness

There is no license fee and installation is quick and cost effective – training and consultancy packages are available from Quadrant 1 International on +44 (0)7768 922244 – a much better investment than a license fee.

A typical package may include –

• Installation of system and 6 days consultancy spread throughout the to be used for training up to 6 people to use the system, support with campaign designs, benchmarking exercises and/or cultural measurement, setting up the talent readiness system, consultancy on dissecting the data to support business cases as appropriate.
• Design 6 job specific suitability profiles for recruitment campaigns and/or talent readiness programme
• 1,000 HATS units – enough to fully profile 166 managers or measure 1,000 people against a baseline profile. More can be added as and when required.
• After the first year customers can choose to continue with consultancy from Quadrant 1 but by this time customers are generally self-sufficient and the only cost then is in purchasing additional units.

After the first year customers can choose to continue with consultancy from Quadrant 1 but by this time customers are generally self-sufficient and the only cost then is in purchasing additional units.