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I am delighted to be welcoming Arnold L. Greene to the OrgShakers team!
Since graduating from Cornell University with a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations, Arnold has enjoyed over 30 years as a Human Resources professional leading Human Resources and Training functions.
Arnold’s last corporate role was as the Head of Global Strategic Human Resources Initiatives for Northern Trust Corporation in 2023. In this role, Arnold led the most imperative HR strategic initiatives impacting global business success, engaging cross functional partners and business units to plan and execute these initiatives for 24,000+ employees globally.
In addition to his work with Northen Trust Corporation, Arnold has worked for companies such as Extended Stay America hotels, McDonald’s Corporation, YUM! Brands, Dunkin’ Brands and the Hyatt Hotel Corporation. His expertise lies in HR Strategic Leadership, Culture Building, Employee Engagement, Executive Coaching and Diversity & Inclusion.
Arnold currently serves on the Advisory Council of Sharing Sacred Spaces; and is a Special Advisor for TRU Prep Academy in Miami, Florida. He has served on the Board of Trustees for Talladega College (HBCU) in Alabama; Board of Directors for KIPP Texas (Charter Schools), Board of Directors for Parkland Hospital Foundation, Board of Directors for the American Cancer Society (Dallas Fort Worth Region), to name a few.
– David Fairhurst
Founder & CEO
New research by MetLife has revealed that, besides health, one in five parents’ (18%) biggest concern was taking time off work when their child was taken into hospital.
Of those who had had a child in hospital, one in seven (15 per cent) said they did not get paid by their employer, according to the Censuswide survey of 2,503 parents with at least one child under the age of 23.
When having to attend to having a child in hospital, the last thing employees want to be worrying about is financial stability and job security. Feeling like you must choose between your child and your job can build resentment towards your employer and lead to disengagement, so having support measures in place for workers that are also carers is an imperative for organizations.
Read the full piece here: https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1856427/one-five-parents-fear-taking-time-off-when-child-hospital-%E2%80%93-employers-offer-better-support
Despite the days of in-person client meetings lessening, employees are still finding themselves setting out on corporate trips…just for new reasons.
The pandemic quickly made a lot of businesses see the futility in travelling across countries for client meetings. After being forced to work remotely, it became logical to continue conducting business meetings across international waters via platforms like Zoom and Teams – it was less time consuming, and a much cheaper alternative.
While this initially lead to a huge decline in airlines’ profits due to this drop in business travel, an August 2023 report from the Global Business Travel Association showed that the worldwide business-travel industry is expected to surpass its pre-pandemic spending level of $1.4tn (£1.1tn) in 2024 – two years earlier than some industry analysists predicted.
Data from American Express Global Business Travel may help explain why. In collaboration with Harvard Business Review, Amex GBT researchers surveyed 425 US professionals and found companies are changing why their workers are travelling. Instead of the pre-pandemic focus on sales-driven outings, business trips are now centred on what the report defines as “non-customer travel”: companies are meeting up internally.
Read the full piece here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240103-remote-work-business-travel
According to research from Carers UK, it is estimated that 40% of carers gave up work to provide unpaid care, while 22% reduced their working hours.
Nearly half (49%) of these caregivers who had given up work or reduced their hours saw their monthly income reduce by over £1,000.
There are around 2 million employees who are delivering unpaid care according to the Office for National Statistics, and the workforce is losing them in their thousands due to a lack of flexible working policies and the unavailability of carers leave.
Read the full piece here: https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/news/thousands-of-unpaid-carers-leaving-the-workplace/
A recent survey commissioned by SnapLogic found that almost half of employees believed that generative AI had the potential to save them a full day’s worth of work per week.
Of those who were already using AI, 67% reported saving one-to-five hours of work on a weekly basis. However, despite this enthusiasm for generative AI, the survey also found that over a third of respondents were not currently using AI in their work – with a correlation being discovered that the larger the company, the less likely employees were to be using artificial intelligence.
The survey goes on to highlight one of the biggest challenges facing AI in the modern workplace – the huge skills gap between employees understanding how to use and optimize it.
Read the full piece here: https://bit.ly/47g4QQe
A new study from health service Working to Wellbeing has found that under half (47%) of line managers said they would be able to offer support to colleagues with cancer with reasonable adjustments in their workplace.
It was also discovered that just one in four (23%) of UK line managers would actively explain a colleague with cancer’s rights at work to them.
With the Equality Act declaring progressive conditions such as cancer a disability as soon as they are diagnosed – even if the employee is still able to do day-to-day tasks – it is important for employers to be well-versed in how to accommodate for their needs from the get-go.
Click the link below to read the full piece at HR Magazine:
I am delighted to welcome Lisa Finkelstein to the OrgShakers team.
Lisa works with C-suite leaders and senior leadership teams to transform how they lead to drive excellence, to compete in disruptive environments, to navigate change and build for the future. She assures alignment to build sustainable practices and deliver measurable impact to achieve business strategies, and transformation goals.
With over 35 years of global strategic leadership advisory and consulting experience gained with firms such as Korn Ferry and Accenture, Lisa is globally recognized as a leader and has published with Harvard Business Publishing on critical topics such as Leading in Times of Crisis, Driving Change, Foundations of Great Teamwork, Breaking Decision-Making Bottlenecks, and The Value of Organizational Networks.
She has also been a featured speaker at conferences addressing global audiences on subjects including Leadership Agility, Leadership and the Transformative Power of Ideas, DE&I as a Competitive Advantage, and Workplace Evolution: Radical People Strategies. And she contributed to the groundbreaking book Driving Results through Social, when it was published in 2008.
Lisa holds an MBA from The Wharton School in Strategy, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Social Psychology.
David Fairhurst, Founder & CEO
Odgers Berndtson and SurePeople Join Forces to Revolutionize Executive Onboarding with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Prism Psychometrics, and World-Class Content by Harvard Business Publishing
New York, 26th September 2023 – Odgers Berndtson and SurePeople are reinventing Executive Onboarding with the launch of a ground-breaking new program leveraging SurePeople’s award-winning platform, powered by the Prism® psychometric algorithm and Harvard Business Publishing content. This revolutionary program accelerates the onboarding process, improves team alignment, and accelerates cultural assimilation, thereby enhancing an executive’s effectiveness during the pivotal transition period into a new leadership role.
“Our Executive Onboarding program complements the Executive Search process by blending the experience of our Human Capital Practice with robust psychometric data to generate actionable insights that help new leaders, and their teams, during the first 120 days,” says Jon Barney, Industrial Sector Practice Leader at Odgers Berndtson. “Powered by SurePeople’s patented technology and Harvard Business Publishing’s world-class content, this innovative program leaps beyond conventional offerings.”
The Corporate Executive Board reports that 50% to 70% of executives fail within 18-months of taking on a new role, regardless of whether they were an external hire or promoted from within, with Harvard Business Review estimating that the cost of this failure equates to 400% of the executive’s salary.
“The key to successful onboarding is that critical moment of truth – the early alignment of the executive with their new team and their effective assimilation into the organizational culture,” says Niko Drakoulis, Founder and CEO of SurePeople. “This innovative new Executive Onboarding program helps to deliver a frictionless transition for executive leaders and their teams by optimizing relationships, accelerating team alignment, and speeding the cycle-time from orientation to productivity.”
The program achieves this by blending SurePeople’s AI-driven technology and integrated premier learning content from Harvard Business Publishing, with the skills and experience of the accredited coaching professionals and business psychologists in Odgers Berndtson’s Human Capital Consulting practice to support new executives and their teams.
“This Executive Onboarding program aligns perfectly with our objective to be a progressive, technology-enabled leader in the global executive search landscape,” says Kennon Kincaid, CEO of Odgers Berndtson. “Effective onboarding is crucial for the success and growth of organizations. By combining powerful insights from SurePeople’s Prism with Harvard Business Publishing’s academic excellence, we are reshaping the onboarding landscape, making it evidence-based, purposeful, and tailored to the needs of individuals and teams. Our new Executive Onboarding program allows executives and their teams to embark on their journey with a shared vision and reinforces Odgers Berndtson’s commitment to being the change-drivers in our industry.“
“Our team at Harvard Business Publishing is excited to integrate our world-class content and thought leadership, leveraging the remarkable depth and breadth of Harvard Business School, Harvard Business Review, and an unrivalled network of industry experts into SurePeople’s patented platform,” says Douglas Beimler, VP Global Sales at Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. “This synergy enhances executive and leader onboarding by accelerating speed-to-relationships and enriching cultural assimilation. It amplifies leader effectiveness and fosters a cohesive, engaged, and agile team environment. Together, we’re enabling executives to enhance their people skills and perform at their best during critical onboarding and leader transition processes.”
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About Odgers Berndtson
Odgers Berndtson delivers executive search and human capital consultancy to businesses and organizations of all sizes and maturity. We work across 50 sectors, whether commercial, public, or not-for-profit and draw on the experience of partners and their teams in 33 countries. odgersberndtson.com
About SurePeople
SurePeople empowers organizations to build and sustain a people-centric culture. Our patented software platform integrates people science, powered by the Prism® psychometric algorithm, with the latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). SurePeople’s solutions include executive onboarding, team alignment and optimization, people skills development, and change management. Our platform has been recognized for innovation and impact by leading research and analyst firms such as Brandon Hall Group, Deloitte Consulting, and Training Industry. Learn more at surepeople.com.
Maxine Lynskey, a former consultant for Direct Line, was recently awarded over £64,000 in damages after a tribunal ruled her menopause symptoms as a ‘disability’ under the 2010 Equality Act when her former employer failed to make the correct reasonable adjustments.
After working there for 4 years, she began to experience consistent menopausal symptoms of concentration and memory loss, feeling frequently tearful, and ‘brain fog’. Maxine was transferred to a lower-paid role which was felt would be less challenging for her.
As she continued to struggle in her new role, she was placed on a performance-improvement plan. Despite mentioning her symptoms repeatedly to her direct report, HR were not informed that there were any reasons for her sudden shift in performance.
Click the link below to read the full piece at HR Magazine:
https://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/content/news/menopause-ruled-a-disability-in-direct-line-tribunal
Emerging from a pandemic which saw a huge shift in mindset for the current workforce, the trend of ‘Quiet Quitting’ surfaced as a way for employees to set boundaries around the work they do and the timeframe they do it in.
Looked at objectively, this was employees taking responsibility for their own work-life balance and a blow to the culture of ‘presenteeism’ – both issues that employers have been trying to tackle for many years.
However, the problem with the term ‘Quiet Quitting’ is that it is inherently negative, suggesting an employee is giving up rather than taking control.
And now, we’re seeing another unhelpful misnomer popping up on social media – the ‘Lazy Girl Job’: a job that can be done remotely, and which offers workers autonomy by having a manager who measures their performance based on output rather than input.
The problem with describing these roles as “Lazy Girl Jobs” is that as the pace of organizational change continues to accelerate, many employers are starting to recognize that they need a more flexible and methodological approach to work. This is seeing companies increasingly adopting a skills-based approach to managing work and workers, and slowly moving away from the rigidity of a ‘job’.
In a report published by Deloitte, it was discovered that while 93% of organizations believed that moving away from the ‘job’ construct is very important to their success, only 20% of organizations felt very ready to actually address this movement. What the ‘lazy girl job’ actually represents is a step towards skills-based, flexible working, whereas the idea of it, and its implications, are seeing employers take two steps back.
So, we are seeing the same problem we saw with ‘Quiet Quitting’ – a ‘Lazy Girl Job’ implies that working remotely is lazy, whereas in reality half of employees feel more productive when working from home and are able to operate beyond the constraints of time and geographical differences.
These misnomers catch on because they are utilizing irony, but this irony may be doing more harm than good. Work-life balance, healthy boundaries around start and finishing times, and remote working are all positive tools that employers can use to improve the performance of their employees, but dressing them up as ‘quitting’ and ‘lazy’ fuels the ideology of presenteeism and stunts the transformational progress of this organizational change.
Instead, employers need to focus on the fact that the way people want to work is continuing to change, expand, and evolve at an exponential rate, and this is only gaining velocity as a new generation flock into the workplace. While these buzzwords represent real call-to-actions for employers and highlight key areas of focus for attraction and retention, it is important that the meaning behind them isn’t misconstrued just because they have been labelled lazily.
If you would like to discuss how we can help support and guide you in your journey of organizational change, please get in touch with us.
Matt Phelan’s new book – The Happiness Index – is released today … and we’ve been lucky enough to get a sneak preview of what we think is a ‘must read’ for HR practitioners and business leaders.
As the co-founder of a unique platform which helps organisations measure key employee engagement and happiness drivers (also called The Happiness Index!), Matt is a global authority on how people think, feel, and behave in the workplace.
In his book, he sets out to explore how businesses can ensure that the people who fuel the success of their business – their employees – are fully committed to their organizational goals.
To do this he takes a deep dive into the data gathered by The Happiness Index platform from over 100 countries and 2 million employees to help the reader understand what really drives engagement and happiness at work – and how this can be harnessed to accelerate an organization’s performance.
Matt defines employee engagement as what our brains need to thrive at work, and employee happiness as what our hearts need to do the same. Both, he argues, are equally important and consist of 24 neuroscience-based sub-drivers:
By taking this scientific, data-driven approach, the book provides a robust examination of the factors that determine employee engagement and happiness at work, including in-depth interviews with specialists in each of the 24 sub-drivers and compelling case studies from organizations around the world. In doing so, it shows how firms can weave happiness and engagement into the fabric of their people strategy.
In The Happiness Index, Matt expertly paints a picture of a world of work where people can truly thrive and grow – and organizations can truly prosper from that growth. It’s a transformational picture we know HR practitioners and business leaders will find inspiring.
If you would like to discuss engagement strategies in more detail, please get in touch with us on our contact page.
And to get in touch with Matt, head over to his LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewphelan/
Currently, many HR buzzwords and phrases originate from the same place: TikTok.
First we saw the rise of ‘quiet quitting’ take TikTok – and then the wider internet – by storm. And now we are seeing a new trend with over 5 million views: ‘Managing Up’.
Managing Up is when employees work out how to best manage their manager; determining their manager’s working style and then adjusting their own approach to engaging with the manager to make both their jobs easier and more productive.
There are some great benefits that could emerge from this growing trend. For one thing, this counters the outdated idea that the relationship between manager and employee is a one-way (downward!) street.
Managing Up aims to cultivate a connection that is rooted in optimized, two-way communication.
By recalibrating this traditional hierarchical model of the manager and ‘the managed’, Managing Up allows for mutual understanding and respect to be built. This results in a more dynamic relationship between colleagues that allows them to work more cohesively and productively.
The accepted wisdom is that when a company hires someone, there is a relationship to be fostered between the hiring manager and candidate. Well, Managing Up highlights that there is a relationship to be fostered in the other direction as well.
If staff know the best ways of engaging with their managers, this will create a culture of openness where managers become more approachable regarding concerns that may not have initially been brought to their attention. This gives managers the ability to address issues that, traditionally, would not have been ‘on their radar’ which, in turn, will help create a higher-performing team.
However, a potential barrier to Managing Up taking root in an organization is team members not being able to successfully identify their manager’s working style. If they assume they know it and run with these false assumptions, what should be a respectful exchange can quickly break down.
This is where a psychometric profiling would be a great investment. OrgShakers’ technology partner SurePeople offer the robust and affordable online psychometric tools organizations need to create detailed profiles of managers and their teams along with practical advice on how those individuals can work together to optimize relationships, build trust – and accelerate performance.
In short, to deliver the promise of Managing Up.
If you would like to discuss how embedding online psychometric tools into your business can boost individual and team performance, please get in touch with us via our contact page.