High levels of job satisfaction don’t necessarily translate into an engaged workforce.

That’s the key finding from research by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which found U.S. employees are generally satisfied with their jobs, but only moderately engaged.

The results show that, overall, employees are fairly satisfied with key attributes of their jobs, including:

• Relationships with co-workers (76 per cent).
• The work itself (76 per cent).
• Opportunities to use skills and abilities (74 per cent).
• Relationship with immediate supervisor (73 per cent).

But other aspects of the work experience were seen as falling short, and had considerably fewer respondents reporting satisfaction. These included:

• Career advancement opportunities (42 per cent).
• Career development opportunities (48 per cent).
• Communication between employees and senior management (54 per cent).
• Job-specific training (55 per cent).
• Management recognition of employee job performance (57 per cent).

As a communications coach, I've developed a four-step exercise that will work for any company or product. You must simply answer each of the following four questions in no more than two sentences.

1. What do you do?
2. What problem do you solve?
3. How is your product or service different?
4. Why should I care?

The SoLoMo Manifesto is available as a free download.

Culture, like brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feely component of business that belongs to HR. It's not intangible or fluffy, it's not a vibe or the office décor. It's one of the most important drivers that has to be set or adjusted to push long-term, sustainable success. It's not good enough just to have an amazing product and a healthy bank balance. Long-term success is dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive. Culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death. 

Think about it like a nurturing habitat for success. Culture cannot be manufactured. It has to be genuinely nurtured by everyone from the CEO down. Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty. 

If there's any doubt about the value of investing time in culture, there are significant benefits that come from a vibrant and alive culture: 

• Focus: Aligns the entire company towards achieving its vision, mission, and goals. 
• Motivation: Builds higher employee motivation and loyalty. 
• Connection: Builds team cohesiveness among the company’s various departments and divisions. 

Invite innovation. Encourage a company culture that’s open to new ideas, and you might find that last midnight brainstorming session just yielded your next million-dollar idea.

Challenge convention. Find ways to make your brand stand out and don’t be afraid to break the mold. What worked last time doesn’t need to dictate what will work the next time.

Experiment. How do you encourage experimentation? Often, people will stick to what they’re comfortable with — such as television or radio campaigns — because they have experience with those media and know what to expect. Experimenting with newer outlets — such as mobile or social media — is the only way you can say you’ve experienced them.

You can no longer be good at just one thing, or two. It is a 10-thing world now (and maybe a 20-thing world soon).

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

Andy Rementer

 

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.

Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning.

In the below video, IBM’s Vice President of Social Business, Sandy Carter discusses four barriers that are currently preventing companies from becoming a social business.  Sandy references a 2011 IBM Study where 2000 companies globally were asked what their top inhibitors were to adopting social within their organizations. They were:

1. Security – the fear of intrusion; and uninvited visitors gaining access into a private community
2. Adoption – more than just technology deployment,  but if and how employees will use the technology
3. Culture – is the business culture ready to listen to employees, partners and customers OR are they a culture that continues to want to do things their way
4. Compliance – regulated companies are unsure of what they can share, tweet, and blog about without violating any laws

The biggest hurdle to social business adoption is culture.

If we were rational about the new world of work, we would accept the idea that people should work less, since productivity has climbed so much in the past few decades. But will that be accepted doctrine of Western countries? Cab we shift to a 20 hour work week?

Heather Stewart via The Observer

A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the [recent London] event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: “There’s a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none.”