Monday, 30 October 2006
Redesigning jobs: why it's time for radical change
Speaker: Stephen Bevan and Marian BairdRedesigning jobs: why it's time for radical change
What should jobs look like in the 21st century? How many hours should we spend behind the desk? Does it matter if we're never formally at work?
Join us at BOSS Club for a crucial conversation about the future shape of jobs.
Speakers:STEPHEN BEVAN is director of research at the premier think-tank,The Work Foundation in the UK. He is a specialist in high performance workplaces; work well-being; and productivity
MARIAN BAIRD is a senior lecturer in work and organisational studies at the School of Business, University of Sydney. She is a specialist in women and work: industrial relations and human resource management.
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Transcript
This is an edited transcript of an AFR BOSS Club held in Sydney on October 30, 2006.
MARIAN BAIRD: Good evening everyone. As Helen said, I do teach at the University of Sydney and I work in the School of Business. It used to be called the Faculty of Economics and Business. Some of you might have graduated from there as well. I also convene a group called The Women and Work Research Group, so I am speaking with many hats, if you like.
In this presentation I wanted to focus on these concepts: Ideal workers and ideal jobs. I thought I might come at this whole question of job design from a slightly different angle, and that is from these two concepts. Who is the ideal worker and what is the ideal job? I suppose being an academic, or trying to be an academic, I can work in concepts and ideals and I know that you have to put them into practice. So I am going to talk big picture, give you some of the research we are doing, maybe trigger some ideas. I will be really interested to hear what you say about your experiences in the workplace and if any of what I am saying gels with what you think should be done or is being done and what could be done.
So my central thesis I suppose is this: That we may have been concentrating on the wrong thing for many years. In the search for the ideal worker, the best person we can select, have we really thought about the job that they are going to do, and have we thought about the job fitting the new worker in the new society or the sort of Australia that we now live and work in? Thinking about those students I have, will the jobs that we offer and the organisational structure and design that we have now suit or attract them to work and to stay in the jobs and careers that we might be presenting them? So is it time to redesign work? Is it time to design the ideal job? And would everyone be better off, business people and society? I would like to envisage a situation where we could actually get benefits for all those parties.
So if we could unpack some of these themes. Ideal workers. From the research that I have been doing and that I am using to talk to you this afternoon or this evening, we use a couple of concepts. And this one, the ideal worker, is not a new concept. It has been around in academia and writings for many years, but I am finding it quite useful I think when we go into organisations and address issues of gender equity, work/life balance, and organisational performance and productivity to think about well, what does that organisation need? Who is their ideal worker? I have put it together here and I think a definition that most organisations would find quite familiar. From the employer's point of view, the ideal worker is available for long hours, is work-focused, organisationally committed, and unencumbered by care duties. He is therefore generally a man, and I am not having a go at men; I am just saying this is the way we are in Australia at the moment. He could be a woman, but typically it is the man or the woman without care duties.
On the other hand, then, what is an ideal job from the employee's perspective? From the employee's perspective, ideal jobs allow employees control over their hours, perhaps some flexible location when needed, not all the time; and recognise what we call the dual commitment of home and work. Therefore, if we think of ideal workers in this way we tend to be able to manage genders, men and females more equally.
I have to say that this isn't the situation at the moment. There aren't many ideal jobs out there. There are lots of jobs and there are lots of jobs with elements of the ideal in them. Many of you might remember that during the 1980s we really went through a flurry of activity in Australia where we redesigned jobs and we redesigned organisations. From an organisational perspective, many of these changes were driven by the need to downsize, to introduce high performance or high commitment work systems, to introduce teams and above all to introduce lean organisations. On the employee's side, sometimes the job redesign was about improving satisfaction, removing job alienation.
But interestingly, little of that research in the
What I am saying here is that I am talking about stuff that a lot of other people are talking about around the world. These are contemporary tensions and I think they are about ideal workers versus ideal jobs.
I'm going to say it’s time we welcomed Ms Harvester, and I'm not sure if many of you know who Ms Harvester is. You certainly would know who Mr Harvester was, if I reminded you of the 1907 family wage case, which was based, of course, on the needs of a man, his wife and three children and dog, and the need to have and earn a family wage. It was our first national wage case.
Since that time, the major change and probably this graph doesn't illustrate it that dramatically, is that women's participation rates in the paid workforce have continued to increase and men's, interestingly, are declining. As we speak today women in the prime child-bearing ages are participating in the paid workforce at almost exactly the same rate, that is about 70 per cent, as men in the paid workforce. So if you think about where the crunch is and who is going to hit that clash between work and family, it will be those women.
So if all those women are entering the workforce, where are they? I understand there are a few male CEOs around who have come to Australia in companies and looked around and said, "Where are all the women?" Well, here is a graph from the Equal Opportunity in the Workplace agency, their most recent census. That graph illustrates where Australian women are. It is reverse pyramids, if you like. The small bit at the top is 2 per cent of Australian women who manage to be chairs of companies; 3 per cent who manage to be CEOs. Down the bottom, 45 per cent of Australian women are participating in the workforce. There are clearly, no matter what you say about individual aspirations and expectations, there are clearly I think structural barriers to women's progression in organisations. Is it that we don't work long hours in Australia? Is something happening that says we are just not participating? That's not the case either. This is OECD material.
So gone are those ideas about Australians not being workers or workaholics. We certainly do spend a lot of time at work.
Of course there is considerable variation. These are the aggregate figures between men at work, women at work, professionals at work, non-professionals. We also know the distribution of overtime varies enormously, but here we have some very interesting statistics. So we do work long hours.
I would like to ask you - do you think we have made any progression in the 200 years that Australia has been around. In 1856, 200 years ago this year, we were celebrating the winning of the 8 hour day in Australia, the very first country in the world to win the 8 hour day. In 2006 full-time employment averages 43.2 hours a week and we know it is growing for men, and 39.3 hours a week for women.
We also know that there is a sizeable proportion of people who work part-time in Australia, 28 per cent of all Australian employees work part-time. Forty-five per cent of working women work part-time, 15 per cent of working men. So we have an hours gap in Australia as well as a gender gap. We also have a leave usage gap, but I won't go into all those details now. As I said, I'm just trying to paint the really big picture for you.
Given that background you can probably see that there is an enormous potential for tension in the workplace and in the home, and this is actually occurring. There are local tensions and pressures, and most of the research that I referred to earlier is being done in a number of organisations in Australia where we are trying to work out how can you get work/family balance for employees and better outcomes for the organisation. What we come across are these very real issues. The first is that people who trade off full-time work because of other commitments are not taken seriously, and this affects women and it might begin to explain that earlier pattern of distribution that I was talking about, about women's ability to progress. It might affect women now, but it also affects those few men who are trying to participate in their family and children's upbringing, and we know that many men who try and deviate from the ideal in those workplaces are often disadvantaged, seen to be unusual, maybe discriminated against.
The second quote actually I think highlights another interesting factor. Australia is in the southern hemisphere. This is something that is coming up a lot in our research now. We have to find a way to overcome this issue. I don't know how we can do it unless we get the rest of the world to go with our time zones, and I'm not sure how we manage that but I think we should give it a go. Anyway, you can see here we are striking this in many cases. In this particular case a major manufacturing company. It is the most globally integrated department and employees are expected to work all hours. People are on call between 8pm and 3am and work to other countries time. All decision making is made in the early hours of the morning. Then they go back to work at 8am because of the huge amount of work that is generated in those 3am conference calls.
I wanted to raise with you this notion that maybe the ideal job, especially for many women and especially when they return from childbirth, is part-time work. But what does that mean, and what does that mean when we are really not sure what full-time work means these days? So you can see many stakeholders who have something to say about these issues, from a manager's perspective managing part-time workers can be quite difficult, and this is a very common situation. Less than three days per week is difficult and four days per week works well. And here is the crunch line: I really get good value out of part-time staff. Many managers find that their four day a week female part-timers are producing as much as the five day a week full-timers. This sets up another issue of distributive justice; we won't go there just now.
The second thing is that the problem of part-time work is if the rest of the full-time job is not covered. Often the arrangements are ad hoc and the loss of remaining hours means other workers have to take on additional work pressures. So it is not just managers who have troubles. We know that many unions have trouble, having grown up in a situation that was really for the male breadwinner model, have trouble coping with this notion of part-time work and especially quality part-time work.
There is more to it of course than that. If you go part-time as a woman many of them think, well you might as well forget your career, at least for a particular period of your life, and there is an attitude out there that no one will pay attention to you unless you are willing to work full-time and be fully committed. So again we have that issue of the employer’s or the organisation's conceptions of the ideal worker coming up against these employees who have tremendous potential but not being able to find the job that suits where they are in their lives at the current time.
The other issue I want to raise with you in this research is we are finding that it is really important to have good policies. There has been a bit of a fashion to say that policies are not what matters, it is what matters in practice. Well, I would like to say to you that I think that the policies that many companies have are good and they should stick with them and we should keep going for good policies. What matters is having good policies and good practices, and it is that combination that we really need to work for.
But there are plenty of barriers also. We know that there is a lot of research that says okay, companies have terrific policies, but not everybody can access them or not everybody is willing to access them. There are various explanations for this. I think some of it is systemic. There are things about employee numbers, headcount, payroll issues, ways in which organisations have structured and been structured and are unwilling it would seem at times to restructure. These are things, why be so deterministic about it? It does mean someone has to make a decision. But if you have got a male manager in this position where, even though they have an employee who works three days a week, from a headcount perspective they are still counted as a full-time person, that person is down 40 per cent of a head. There is no incentive for middle management or line managers to think about introducing more flexible or different job design if those systemic issues aren't addressed.
There are also cultural issues. You work the hours you need to work to get the job done, particularly if you are trying to build a career. Meetings get called for after hours, it is a natural expectation. The contract of employment says reasonable overtime. Everybody's version of reasonable is different. This is where we get into a whole lot of issues about what does an organisation mean when it sets up these policies and what are the messages that it sends through its managers, through its peers, through its teams and through its actual practices?
So I think in short it is about job size, job design and job value. I often say to my students these are quite old-fashioned topic areas but it's time to really assess them. This is a quote from a female who has returned to work after having a child, but I think it really encapsulates almost everything I have been trying to say.
"There are not enough hours to do all my work. My current workload is for a full-time job. There has been no real assessment of what can be done within the time I work. Before my maternity leave I used to work 40 hour per week, now I do 28 hours." But she does the same amount of work.
This quote I think says something about the time crunch. There are not enough hours to do all the work that some people have in some organisations.
Job design: Jobs aren't looked at frequently enough perhaps, especially when people come and go. So her job wasn't redesigned; it's still a full-time job being done in part-time hours. Job evaluation: Has there been any real assessment of the work that's going on and what time it takes to do that work? I think the (issue of the job you are doing) before maternity leave and what to expect after, is something that is really hitting organisations now.
In all the women we have conducted focus groups with - in organisations that go from manufacturing right through to knowledge workers, in every industry sector - there is what I am calling a new emerging norm, and that is women are expecting to return to work after the baby, but they are not expecting to return to work full-time or would rather return to work part-time initially. Now if Australia is suffering a shortage of labour market expertise and skills and wants to tap into that group of people, we do have to seriously consider how to organise jobs that will attract them.
I want to get up to another sort of concept, and this is this notion of real time versus face time. This is really strong in organisations as well. Here I am talking about people who spend a lot of time at the desk or in the office, and those people who spend a lot of time thinking about their work and doing their work, but they don't necessarily do it in the office. Which of those two groups are privileged? It is those people who can sit at the desk and have their suit coat hanging on the hook. It is not those women who take the work home, do the emails at night, or are on call on their day off. There is a real gender distribution of work and there is a real gender distribution of time in organisations.
The conception of what constitutes part-time employment is affected by what we regard as full-time employment. So in a sense I'm coming full circle again. Until we work out what full-time is, and that's changing, we can't really work out what part-time is. But we do know that at the moment, as the majority of part-time positions are also occupied by females, one's sex and time spent at work combine to form a highly gendered segmentation of working hours and career progress. This is added to Australia's highly segmented labour market; we are one of the most segmented labour markets in the world. Unless we start to address all of these issues we won't see any progress, I would argue, in terms of female career progression or their ability to return to work. We will also see less progress in the ability of men and Generation Y to participate in their children and their roles as fathers, some aspirations that we are told they have.
So I think that really it is time in Australia to have a new objective, to think about the ideal jobs we need to attract the ideal workers. I am not saying that business just has to do whatever employees want, but I am arguing that if we do that then business probably will be better off, people will be better off, and Australian society will be better off as well.
STEPHEN BEVAN: There are many things happening, it seems to me, in the Australian economy which are very similar and mirror what is going on in the UK economy. I just want to pick out a few issues that I think are relevant both in the UK and in Australia.
Just to give you a quick history lesson, The Work Foundation was founded in 1918 as the Boys’ Welfare Society. There was a concern then there was no requirement to have toilet facilities and general factory conditions were really bad, particularly for boys. There was no requirement to have toilet facilities for girls at all. So they changed its name very quickly to the Industrial Welfare Society. The employers at the time too said that a legal requirement to have toilet facilities for girls in the workplace would be an intolerable burden on business. You can make your mind up whether attitudes have changed very much since then.
Our goal is good work for all. We think it is actually really important that organisations if they are to be successful should pay considerable attention to the quality of working life of the people who work for them. Therefore, we are not a soft and cuddly organisation. We are very keen to promote high performing and productive organisations, but we think as we are moving into a knowledge based economy you ignore the needs of your workforce at your peril.
The research we are currently doing is looking at new models of work in this new knowledge based economy, how you design jobs in a way that gets maximum productivity and indeed commitment from people, how you deliver high levels of employee engagement and how you design jobs that promote wellbeing in the workplace. There is lots of evidence that bad jobs are bad for your health, and that is not just a health issue, it is an economic issue, and I will come back to that in a second.
It seems to me that there are a number of drivers that have changed which really are pushing workplaces to modernise and to think rather more creatively and laterally about how they organise themselves.
In terms of what is happening in the market it does seem to me that customers are being hugely more demanding than they were before. They are requiring more personalisation and tailoring of services, and there is also growth in service centre demand, and the demand for goods and services is happening 24/7. There are now 30 per cent of UK workplaces that operate 7 days a week and obviously that has implications for the service of customers, but also the organisation of staff who work in those organisations. UK household expenditure in services has doubled since 1970 to 54 per cent of all household expenditure. So it is really clear that from the demand end customers want to be able to access goods and services whenever they want then, rather than when the provider is prepared to deliver them, and that is quite an important shift.
There are big changes in the way that we organise work, so technology for example has had a big impact on work organisation. It allows people, for example, to work remotely if their organisations allow them. It also means that organisational boundaries have become a lot more porous. Organisations are working much more in networks and collaboratively with other organisations. But also the organisation of work at work is changing, a lot more desk hopping. There is a study in the UK that shows that the average desk is unoccupied for 45 per cent of office hours. That raises some really interesting questions about how we use our work space to deliver both quality of life and productivity. We have seen a big increase in outsourcing and off-shoring.
One of the big differences I have noticed - and loads of things about the UK and Australia are very similar - is there are some aspects of the regulatory framework which are a bit different. Clearly the whole world has been affected the Enron and the WorldCom scandals, and therefore corporate governance has undergone a really significant shift. But regulatory standards across most developed economies are requiring organisations to work and govern themselves in particular ways.
I would say that one of the differences I have noticed between the UK and Australia is around some aspects of employment legislation, and Marian has been talking about some of those. It does seem to me that the Australian economy, rather perversely, doesn't seem to give as much support to women who want to work as is happening certainly in Europe. In fact, the OECD puts Australia as 17th out of 20 OECD countries in their support for working women, so quite low down the league table.
The labour market, as we have heard, is shifting enormously. There is a change in supply of employees and also tighter labour market conditions, so more and more employers experiencing shortages. I think that the labour market, particularly here but also elsewhere, in the UK, is going to become permanently more diverse. By the end of the decade in the UK only 1 in 5 workers will be a white able-bodied man under 45 in full-time work. Just think about that for a moment. So there is the demise of the pale, male and stale workforce. We have got, in the UK, certainly a growing number of people with disabilities; we've got different ethnic groups. Diversity in the UK means something different than in Australia, it seems to me, where it probably means gender. We actually genuinely mean all sorts of disadvantaged groups in the labour market and positive action to try and improve their labour market chances.
There is also growing need for flexibility from this permanently more diverse workforce, flexibility over working time and indeed over the places that people work. We have struggled, as you are, with organisations that believe that part-time work means part-time commitment. It seems to me there is whole changing set of expectations around work. The division of labour in the home, which I think is quite interesting, hasn't really changed as quickly as the labour force. Even if you go to enlightened countries like Sweden and Denmark, where they have got a lot more labour market equity, the division of labour in the home is still skewed towards women. In Australia women work, on average, 40 hours unpaid each week compared with 17 hours for men, and there are some really big issues about how labour market equality and domestic equality pan out.
But it seems to me that we are changing our views about what work is, what it means, how central it is to our lives. Work is both an economic and a social act, it is a source of status and a source of meaning, it is a source of intrinsic rewards, and it is also the place where, if we are lucky, we get autonomy and discretion and personal growth and control which we find enriching. That means we have got to move away from old-fashioned models of organising work, your very hierarchical, rely on command and control and paternalistic cultures. And that is easier said than done.
There are two ways of looking at job redesign, it seems to me. One is from the supply side and one is from the demand side. Both are right in parts, but neither of them tells the complete story. Let me quickly go through a caricature of the supply side. The argument runs that demographic change will mean more of the workforce will want to work flexibly. That is undeniably true. What that means, then, is that if you are in a tight labour market then employers who want to attract and retain talent have got to respond. So that your workplace practices and the way you design and organise work have got to respond to the increasing need in the labour market for flexibility, and that as a consequence redesigning work around changing patterns of labour utilisation have got to result as a natural consequence. All the demographic trends that we have been highlighting so far this evening are permanent and are not going to go back to how they used to be. So organisations have got to get used to this. So one sort of thrust for the argument for redesigning work is very much supply side. Unless you adapt, you aren't going to get the people you need in order to do the work. So that is a legitimate argument. I would say that's a necessary but not sufficient condition of getting organisations really to grasp this nettle. So I think we need to look at the demand side.
The demand side says that customers are demanding flexible and tailored services 24/7 in a knowledge based economy and they want it now. They want personalised and tailored services. So the traditional provider led model of working time is inadequate in the face of this. We can't, as organisations selling products and services, dictate to customers when we are prepared to give it to them. We have to be very responsive. Organisations who are quickest and more agile at delivering are the ones that are going to win out. So there will be some withering on the vine of organisations who don't get this. I'm sure yours isn't one of them. Therefore redesigning work around changing patterns of customer need has to be the result.
Now in reality neither of those have got, as I say, the monopoly on the truth. Both of them have to work in parallel. So changing workforce demographics and demanding customers lead to greater competitive advantage. Organisations that are able to harness and use both of those forces to their advantage will do better economically, there is no doubt.
What that means is that organisations have got to come up with new forms of organising work and different ways of designing jobs and that is an inevitable consequence. So I'm saying that the argument that your employees want it is a good argument but not sufficient. There has to be an economic and a business case to this.
There is a really good article about redesigning jobs written in Harvard Business Review last July, which doesn't mention flexibility or employee needs at all. It's really interesting. It just takes a business perspective. I'm not going to go through this in a huge amount of detail, but what it does do is identify the sort of drivers of job design in high performance organisations.
It looks at four elements or spans which organisations can decide within a role to make either very narrow or very wide. The four spans are spans of control, spans of accountability, spans of influence and spans of support. So for example, you can make the tasks within a job incredibly standardised and very routine, and therefore you have got very low discretion if you are the job holder, you pretty much do what you are told, all the things you do are incredibly prescribed. That may be absolutely right in certain circumstances in certain jobs in certain business models, for example, where cost control is a primary driver of competitive advantage.
But similarly, if you are an organisation that is relying on being more innovative than your competitors you might want to widen some of these spans in order to give people in their jobs a lot more discretion, control, autonomy, decision latitude and so on. And what the article argues, and uses IBM examples to illustrate this very well, is that organisations have got choices about how they use these spans either to tighten up or to loosen the control they have over the way the jobs are specified and indeed the way jobs link to each other. I recommend the article; it's definitely worth looking at.
Now, it does seem to me that one of the tricks about job design, when we get down to the nitty gritty of it, is to help organisations, and particularly line managers who are often the people who end up having to do all this, to think about what a job is and what its component parts are. Here is just one example. You can think of a job in terms of different dimensions; what the function of that job is, what its core purpose is, what the role is. So what organisational contributions does it make? Is it a support role or a front line role? What activities go to make up that job? What are the key accountabilities and outcomes? What are the specific tasks, the micro-level job components at a level of which training might be targeted? And then what are the very specific skills required?
Job design necessarily means thinking about a job, breaking it down to its component parts and then reconfiguring that job to make sure that (a) the job gets done to the organisation's standards, and (b) that the person doing the job is intrinsically motivated to do it. And that's the trick. You can redesign jobs in a way that completely de-skills the job and so hack off the post holder that they leave or their performance isn't very good.
The typical way that organisations think about job design is through enlarging jobs, i.e. making them bigger. It means adding tasks, hoping that increased variety will result. It is usually increased boredom and increased alienation from the work. So you say well, your core job is task a, b and c, but to make it more variable we'll give you a couple more tasks. You'll thank us for it, we promise you. This is the short-sighted way of redesigning jobs.
A slightly better way, if it's done effectively, and certainly has been shown to work in some manufacturing organisations, is job rotation. So the work still needs to be done in its component parts but you multi-skill or you train people to work flexibly across a range of different task areas and then rotate them around different aspects of the job. That provides a bit of variety of people, it gives people the opportunity to practice certain skills and develop new skill areas. This can be a positive way of redesigning work. It can also be slavery as well, if it's done badly. There is always a gap between design implementation in most of these things.
Probably the best way of doing it is to think about enriching the job. It is about thinking how tasks link together, give people a series of tasks in their job that (a) need to be done, and secondly, provide people with a sense of meaning and a sense of intrinsic reward. Job enrichment, if you are going to do it, and there is loads of stuff that you can read about this, by the way, and some good examples, in the context of redesigning work should be reflecting the logical flow of tasks, should be sequential, should be cumulative, should be more meaningful for the job holder, and to be more intrinsically motivating and healthier for employers. There is a very eminent Australian professor who is now working in London, Professor St Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist who has done some brilliant work that shows that people in low-level, low-skill, low-control jobs are more at risk of coronary heart disease than people at very senior levels in organisations. He has written a great book called Status Syndrome, which basically says that people working in low levels in organisations are not just less motivated if they are in jobs that aren't well designed but they are less healthy. It’s a big issue. And also people in these sorts of jobs are easier to manage and monitor.
What I would say, then, is that redesigning work has got to be a balance between the demands of the business and the demands of employees, which as I have demonstrated are changing. It has got to preserve job quality and it has got to maximise intrinsic motivation. It must make effective use of the skills and the potential of the post holder, and it must be a process in which the post holder is fully involved. It can't be imposed if it is to be successful. As our developed economies and the organisations and people who drive them step blinkingly into the dazzling lights of the 21st century, their capacity to competently adapt to the challenges of the future will condition their chances of being (a) truly competitive economies, and (b) deliver high quality working life for our citizens. Thank you very much.
QUESTIONS:
HELEN TRINCA: Marian, you said something interesting to me a while ago when I was interviewing you about something else, which was that there is far too much stuff in some jobs and far too little in other jobs, which is the crux of this issue I suppose. I just wanted to ask both of you whether in fact one of the solutions to that might be to reinstate support staff?
MARIAN BAIRD: I think that's a really interesting question. If you look at a big bureaucracy or a large company and you go in and you talk to a wide range of people you find some people who are absolutely over-stressed and over-worked. There is no question about it; they are in tears when you go in as an outsider. Then there are other people in that same organisation who are bored, uncommitted, really don't have enough work, and either are just sitting there and keeping their seat warm because they want to retire or they can't be bothered finding another job. That sets up a whole lot of problems. It sets up problems internally because workers are very aware of how jobs are allocated and who does what work in an organisation.
I think that the answer is probably twofold. One is that many organisations I think have stripped back too much. In fact what we are asking them to do is put on more people and it is hard to make a business case for that sometimes. So the other answer might be to actually do a proper job analysis of everyone's job again and work out how to share the jobs, rotate the work, look at what is going on inside jobs. Because people take a job and within 12 months - or you advertise a position, you’ve got the job description, someone comes on board, but within 12 months or even 6 months the job is often very different to the one that they accepted. So we need a way I think of being much more adaptive to the changes that happen in organisations but also responsive to the need to probably put more people on.
That was a good argument when unemployment was high. It's a bit harder now when we don't have that many people, so maybe it is an issue of redistribution and reallocation in organisations as well.
STEPEHN BEVAN: We're doing some work at the moment looking at this whole issue of job matching across the European workforce, i.e. how many people in the workforce are (a) either overqualified for the jobs they are doing, or (b) under qualified? The latest data suggests that in the UK at least we have got about 20 per cent of the workforce who are either over or under qualified. That varies a lot by gender and by sector and so on, and it has shifted quite a bit over the last few years. I think job design offers the opportunity to make some adjustments around that. It is certainly true in the UK that we have a number of people who are suffering from - I hate the term - workplace stress. It doesn't exist, by the way, stress, as a medical condition. Just thought I'd stir things up a bit by saying that. We call them common mental health problems, so depression, anxiety, adjustment disorders and so on. We have had a trebling of the number of people in the UK who have common mental health problems. It is estimated the cost of workplace mental health in the UK is equivalent to 2 per cent of GDP, so it is pretty significant. Largely it is down to three things: Increasing pace of work and intensification of work; secondly, people being in debt more frequently; and third, family and marital breakdown. That raises some interesting questions about the extent to which work is the primary driver of this. It clearly is for some people, but it is the way it combines with other factors in people's lives that makes the big difference. So just trying to tackle the work bit of that problem may not get you anywhere. That raises some really interesting questions about what role employers can play in helping people with jobs be more interesting, easier to cope with, particularly in terms of peaks and troughs in demand, but recognising they have got other duties of care in terms of their wider wellbeing.
BARBARA HOLMES: Good evening, it's Barbara Holmes from Managing Work Life Balance, and in fact formerly of the Industrial Society. I noticed and we are all aware that in fact in the UK the legislation is in place for flexibility in the workplace, and I wondered the extent to which that legislation has not only increased flexibility but has actually led to any potential job redesign and what change that really has had?
STEPHEN BEVAN: Well I think we have had a growing array of legislation that enabled employees to work more flexibly. The most recent one is now the right to request flexible working, and basically employers can only really not grant those requests if they can come up with a pretty solid business case that working flexibly will be bad for business. The early evidence is that somewhere between 70 and 80 per cent of people who ask get it. What that means is that in large organisations it has meant some job redesign, it's meant helping line managers deal with jobs that for example convert from full-time to part-time or where people want to job share and so on. It is not straightforward. I think there is probably a better array of good practice examples because we have been doing it for a bit longer. So I think that does make a difference. I think we still have a long way to go, but it is clear that the regulatory framework is much more supportive of people operating that way. We have got the second highest rate of part-time working, second to Holland I think now, which is a good thing. But we still have problems. We still have got a large number of women who think that working part-time is career death for them. There are still rather pernicious organisational cultures that don't attach value to part-time working and so on. So there is a degree of occupational segregation, there is a degree of ghettoisation of part-time work. We have less casual work than you do. We have only got 6 per cent of the workforce working on temporary or short-term contracts. But I say that most large organisations are a bit better at doing that.
The real challenge for the UK is its small business sector, where nearly 60 per cent of all our people work, and that is a challenge. Getting small businesses to accept that they have to redesign work, offer part-time work and so on is a bit more challenging.
LYN WOOD: Lyn Wood, independent director. Marian, you mentioned that there is an increasing requirement for face time in organisations, which is clearly the case in senior management in a lot of organisations. Why is this happening, when these days, as has been pointed out, we have much more technology, lots of people at senior management level have BlackBerries, mobile phones if not BlackBerries, so they are accessible away from work?
MARIAN BAIRD: Well I think it does go back to what I think is a very resilient concept of the ideal worker being a full-time worker, and many organisations find it very hard to deal with someone who isn't full-time. Now, having said that, it's mostly women in those positions who attempt to return in a part-time capacity and that as I've said is three days minimum, four days works better. Almost without exception, women who do that in those sorts of senior level jobs work another day or equivalent to a day at home and they're not being paid for it. We have done some work in some professional organisations to encourage that change in mindset that you can work from home and I know many organisations are actually experimenting with that. Perhaps it is not as widespread as it could be.
Of course, the other side of the technology issue is that it also enables people to work more. It intensifies their workload. So it is managing that technology. I think the issue is we have to be sure that if we do introduce reduced hours, flexible hours we need some way of valuing those hours that those people work and not cutting off the career movement for those people in organisations.
TREVOR MASTERS: One of the questions I've got .… is around the discrimination that happens with people perceiving they have got more preferable working hours than somebody else. Any comment on how you can overcome that?
STEPHEN BEVAN: This is one of those concepts in work/life balance research called backlash, and it is something that I have had a quick look at to see to what extent it really exists. There are some studies in the States that suggest that workers who don't have access to very carer friendly employment practices do harbour some resentment, but that is usually offset by the fact that they are actually working for a reasonably responsible and caring employer and recognition at some point, they may need the use of those qualities at some point in the future. So I think that for the most part, from what I have seen, the notion of backlash can be a bit overstated.
I think, however, that is not helped if organisations conceive of work/life balance, for example, or flexible working as being about accommodating the needs of mothers. Although people with domestic caring responsibilities clearly do have a very explicit set of demands for flexible working, the evidence from the UK is definitely the case that more people who don't have caring responsibilities also want work/life balance. There is a strong desire to have flexible working to enable people to do further education, to do voluntary work, to do other things and have a life.
That is increasing. There was a study recently which looked at Arts graduates, new graduates straight out of university, what characteristics of a good employer they would be looking for when they entered the job market, and work/life balance came in the top three. So already they are anticipating they are going to want some flexibility.
So I suppose the answer to that is don't have policies that are there just for a narrow group of people who have got specific domestic caring responsibilities. Try to find ways of accommodating everybody's needs for flexible working; they will need them at different stages in their lifecycle. Even having a policy like salary sacrifice, where people can buy more leave or sell leave for more salary is one way that people can exercise a bit more control over their working time and you still get the work done.
QUESTION: I’m Dana from Fenton Communications. I was just going to comment. I have seen the backlash in quite a few large organisations, particularly among young people who are thinking well, I don't have a family, I might never want one, but yet I can't leave at four o'clock, but may have other interests, write a screenplay, what have you. But when they hear about other organisations that are adopting those policies, even if it is just for family care and leave, they say hey, that’s great, why doesn’t my organisation have it. So it seems to be a lack of understanding and perhaps communication on behalf of the organisation to explain to their employees how these policies can be used and how they can affect the whole range of employees, not just carers or parents, things like that.
RICHARD MASON: Richard Mason of No Limits. Have any of the panel seen organisations that have introduced flexible work practices for their staff succeed better than those that haven't?
STEPHEN BEVAN: Look at Tesco in the UK. Extremely profitable retail organisation, huge amount of flexible working, bends over backwards to help their staff adapt their working time to their needs, and it absolutely mirrors the changing patterns of customer demands. Indeed, many Tesco stores are open 24 hours a day. They introduced thermal imaging technology, so that they could monitor the build-up of queues of checkouts and then deploy their staff flexibly according to the changing patterns of consumer demands. They are making a lot of money. I think they would argue, particularly in conjunction with the partnership agreement that they have struck with their union, for example, which has simplified and modernised working practices, that has made a huge contribution to them being one of the most profitable companies in the world. And they are not playing at it and they are not soft and cuddly, I tell you. They are bastards. They are very tough and commercial and they hugely admired around the world, and flexible working has played a central part in their ability to deliver that.
MARIAN BAIRD: We have found in the studies we have been doing that are exactly focused on that that it can be very hard at an organisational level to prove that connection. That of course makes it difficult as a researcher and also to sell it. But if you can break it down into particular policies or particular units and show that the introduction of, for example, part-time work for that group of people improves retention, then you can prove it. Or that if you introduce a carers’ room it means that that person isn’t absent from work, then you can show those results.
It is not an easy task to actually prove directly the relationship between the introduction of more flexible policies or more life friendly policies and the bottom line every single time. I know it is easy for me as an academic to argue that maybe we just have to go with it anyway and prove it in the long run, but there are studies out there and there is a particular methodology we use to try and prove that.
STEPHEN BEVAN: I have to say it’s the wrong question. I meet lots of organisations that are hesitant about introducing flexible working because their accountants demand what the rate of return is going to be in the first quarter of the investment, and as long as accountants dominate this debate we are not going to get anywhere. I have only been able to give you a glimpse of the data about how labour markets are changing and how customers are changing. Believe me; it’s coming your way. I just have this vision of loads of organisations who get this running very fast to adopt these policies, whilst those who are dominated by the business case argument and the need to satisfy their accountants are going to get left way behind and serves them right in my view.
QUESTION: I just have a comment actually as someone who works within an organisation that I guess is what you would call a micro multinational. We are based in Singapore, we have got 90 staff around Asia, our executive teams are located in Singapore, India and here in Sydney, and I am a working mum. Nobody cares within my organisation where I am or what I am doing. I have some very clear objectives to meet. They are incredibly flexible with me and I show them the same respect.
It is not just about women, as you have said. We have just come off Ramadan. We have had staff in Singapore who are fasting so they don't take lunch breaks, so they leave an hour earlier. We have had staff in India celebrating Divali. So if I think about the diversity within our company and the culture within it, we don't get everything right, but it is an interesting success story which I don’t think would have survived in the industry we do, which is the digital music industry, which is very new, unless we were doing things the way that we do
But one question I have, and something I struggle with I guess talking to a lot of female friends in the Australian marketplace, is we have got the worker on one side and you’ve got the company on the other, which is quite a two-dimensional environment. There is a third dimension in terms of partners, family, colleagues, peers. I think I can do what I do because I work with Asians, who don't have the same mindset to be honest and don't have the same expectations of what I should be doing compared to them. I am just wondering how much of this is actually a societal issue and whether that can be changed or will change or whether we have just got to have the worker in the company trying to force the change from within.
MARIAN BAIRD: That two-dimensional picture you paint I think is one of the problems we have at the moment. Change needs to happen in companies with individuals and in households. Stephen touched on the distribution of labour in the household and we know in Australia that that just does not budge. Interestingly, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) many of you will be familiar, had a project to examine that very issue, how do you change what happens in the household? They had public inquiry, went all around Australia. I think they got two men responding. The only people who are interested in what is going on are women. Because, one, it is a private issue; two, the status quo suits one particular gender at the moment. It is true, that is the reality. To shift that is a very big thing to do and I think it will take time.
If I look at the students I teach - and I am interested in that study - I had a group of students who did a very similar study. They went and interviewed students in every faculty across Sydney University to work out what young men and women wanted when they left university out of their employers. This was a group of female students in this class, in Work and Organisational Studies, so they were very keen to go and interview the boys around the university. They interviewed them and asked them question about what did they expect out of work, what did they think of the male breadwinner model, would they share child raising with their partners? The initial answers that they got were all exactly yes, they would do all of those things. Then after about 10, 15 minutes of questioning, when people were actually being much more I would say open and honest, one particular response, and I think it was a classic from this guy who just suddenly let go, he said, “Listen, I haven't been at university for 4 years to stay at home and look after the kids.”
It is very hard to change that because those students know that to get some of those jobs they are not going to be able to ask for the family friendly conditions, so we continue to perpetuate those gender divisions.
To answer your question, I don't have a quick solution. I think it is going to take a long time. I do see men in organisations who want to participate, use the policies that are available. They often meet with resistance from their male colleagues and their managers as well. So it is all stakeholders having to somehow adjust and change.
STEPHEN BEVAN: Can I say, it takes decades I think. Scandinavia is always held up as one of the more enlightened areas of the world on this and it has made great strides, but it has spent 20 or 30 years with a policy of social investment which has invested heavily in pre-school education, making sure that work/life balance and flexible working opportunities are shared equally between men and women, and so on and so on. It has made a difference over a period of time but it has taken a lot of time. And they pay very high taxes in order to get that level of social support. I did talk to an HR director of a Danish company who said that they have achieved what they never thought they would, which is that they now have peer pressure amongst the male workers to take up paternity leave. So it is regarded as not actually playing your part in the bringing up of your children and your family life if you don’t take your full entitlement to paternity leave. I think most other countries are miles away from that. We interviewed a senior manager at an American investment bank about paternity leave, and he said yes, we have paternity leave. And we said do you monitor the take up? And he said yes, because it helps us weed out the losers. And I suspect that is where most organisations are currently.
HELEN TRINCA: If you had to say what work would look like, in 5 or 10 years time, what do you think it would look like?
STEPHEN BEVAN: Job quality is very important. We have now got 41 per cent of the UK workforce who are knowledge workers and that is going to grow. The only way the western economies can cope with the growth of the Chinese economy is to invest in the development and exploitation of knowledge as a source of competitive advantage. So knowledge work, where people are treated like adults, where they have high levels of discretion, able to be creative and so on meets both the needs of the organisation and the needs of the individual. So it is that mutuality of advantage that I think has to characterise the way we design jobs in the future. If it is just win/lose or one side does better than the other, then I think we have no future at work.
HELEN TRINCA: Is it about, for example, people spending less time at the desk? Or do we get hung up on that?
STEPHEN BEVAN: No, we get hung up on long hours working. It’s bad if people don’t have control over working time. We’ve been working on this concept of time sovereignty, which recognises that people by and large work long hours. Some people choose to work long hours and they get satisfaction from it, but only because they can control it. Other people work long hours because they cannot afford to live, or they work in very pernicious organisational cultures where you’re expected to work long hours. So I think that we have to be a bit careful about saying that long hours working is unambiguously a bad thing. I think the key thing is control. And so control, autonomy, discretion are the key things that drive work quality and effective job design.
HELEN TRINCA: And Marian, what do you think jobs will look like here in five or 10 years time if you had your way?
MARIAN BAIRD: And of course I think they won’t change as rapidly as we might like, but some will. I’d like to add to what Stephen said because I think there are many parallels between jobs in the UK and Australia. I think in Australia we have to remember that a fundamental living wage is the basis of any good work family policy. And that we will probably see a polarisation occur in Australia because our regulatory environment has changed, and that will be something that we need to keep tabs on, to check.
If we look at white collar, professional jobs, job quality, I had job autonomy, or time autonomy or time control. I also think job security is also going to become an issue. Despite what Generation Y say they want, I think job security of some sort, it might redefined. Also comparative worth. We know that we are highly segregated in terms of gender lines. I don’t think we can change that in the foreseeable future but we can value jobs more equally, men’s jobs and women’s jobs, and that is a costly exercise and I suspect that will fall to the state. And that is where one of our real tension points will be.
JOHN LITTLE: John Little from the Australian Employers’ Network on Disability. Stephen, if the common mental health problems equals depression largely, which is growing in the western world and will be the largest health burden on the planet by 2020, do you think that is having any effect and are there any statistics on the effect of depression and other common mental health problems on graduates? Second part to that question, if there is any statistics does it show any difference between, let’s say in Australia, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and non-English speaking background?
STEPHEN BEVAN: Well, it’s something that we are only really waking up to relatively recently in the UK. I think that you could argue that one of the biggest impediments to any economy being fully productive is the health and wellbeing of its workforce. We have got 25 per cent of the UK workforce with some sort of longstanding illness or injury that affects their ability to work and that is getting worse. There are now more people with chronic low back pain in the UK than there ever were when everyone was a manual worker. There is all sorts of factors driving that.
It is clear there are big differences in the population with common mental health problems. We are only beginning to understand that. It is certainly not the high paid, limousine driving chief executives. They are okay, thank you very much. It’s single mothers, it’s people from different ethnic groups, who are basically low pay and low status people. So there’s clearly an issue about social status and mental health. It’s a big issue. It’s growing enormously. We’ve got 16 per cent of our workforce with a mental health problem and only about 1 per cent of those ever get seen by their GP or by a clinician.
So we’ve got some big issues, and as I said earlier I think there is an issue about the extent to which work is wholly to blame. I think it is pretty clear work can make it worse, but it’s a wider public health issue as well as a health at work issue, and it is something that many UK employers are beginning to wake up to and put into place policies to help deal with it. We’ve got a long way to go.
MARIAN BAIRD: I just wanted to add to that, because there’s a very interesting study underway in Australia at the moment in Canberra, the Centre for Epidemiology and Public Health. They are actually conducting studies right now on worker wellbeing and stress. They say that you can measure stress in families, children and working parents, and show very clear correlations between job quality and worker wellbeing on a number of measures.
There’s also a very large study in Canada, which is a very interesting one, on worker health and wellbeing and the cost to the economy of poor jobs and high worker intensification or stress or whatever you call it. And they measure that in terms of the huge increase in their equivalent of medical public health costs and pharmaceutical bills. They want to replicate that study in Australia. We’re looking for some very big company to fund it at the moment, or a consortium of companies, because it will be great data to be able to show that.