The alpha female

The plight of the alpha female: why women say they prefer working for men

Sandy Burgham Diversity & inclusion, Leadership, Organizational culture 3 Comments

Recently a colleague was relaying a conversation she’d had with another woman regarding how they both prefer working for male CEOs. She and her friend had both experienced working for male and female bosses. “We were just saying that female CEOs are always having to prove themselves… the trouble with alpha females …… they have something to prove …and they show their insecurity” she bemoaned. While I like to think I am a good listening ear, I cut her short. In fact, to be honest, I might have even talked over her and started womansplaining what was going on. Over …

The business case for measuring and managing employee mental wellbeing

Laura-Jane Booker Employee experience, Organizational culture, Wellness Leave a Comment

This is the second part in our employee mental wellbeing series. If you haven’t read it yet, check out part one: Encouraging employees to flourish. Here’s a quick recap. Employee mental wellbeing Mental wellbeing is a continuum. At the positive end you have flourishers. At the negative end you have languishers. The goal of any organisation is to enable all of their employees to be flourishers. Why? Because flourishers drive positive business outcomes such as engagement, productivity, organisational commitment, and organisational citizenship behaviours. Flourishers also take fewer sick days, are more resilient, and are less likely to seek employment elsewhere. …

Finder - medals of honour

The truth about millennials: global connectivity creates EX equality

Jamie Finnegan Employee experience, Organizational culture, Rewards & recognition 1 Comment

Create a global employee experience where everyone is equal, no matter which office they’re in. Remember when there was no easy way to access the internet and we couldn’t do our job effectively from anywhere other than our place of work? Me neither! Like many millennials, I was born around the same time as the world wide web, in the late 1980s. Although I still dimly remember the struggles of dial-up internet and a world where mobile phones were rare, for most of my professional life I’ve enjoyed robust internet connectivity. This huge advance in technology leads to a frequent …

Is your employee experience Theory X or Theory Y?

Robin Schooling Employee experience, Motivation Leave a Comment

Sixty years ago Douglas McGregor from the MIT Sloan School of Management presented two theories of workforce motivation he named “Theory X” and “Theory Y.” Over the intervening decades these theories have been used by leadership teams, HR professionals and OD folks as they craft and create HR policies, performance management programs, rewards and recognition, and work space design. If it’s been some time since you gave much thought to McGregor’s work, here’s a refresher: Employee experience Theory X vs Theory Y Theory X assumes that: people dislike work people want to avoid work (i.e. “people are inherently lazy”) people …

Encourage employees to flourish

The business case for employee mental wellbeing: encouraging employees to flourish

Laura-Jane Booker Employee experience, Wellness 1 Comment

People tend to associate the term mental wellbeing with illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and bi-polar disorder. As a result, organisations tend to think it’s not relevant to everyone and shy away from addressing employee mental wellbeing. But what if I were to talk about stress, anxiety, and burnout? Suddenly, mental well-being becomes highly relevant because these are common work-related terms and issues that affect many employees. The languishing-flourishing continuum If employee mental wellbeing is a spectrum, at the positive end we have employees at their peak mental state – or flourishing. An employee who is flourishing is filled with …

We need to have a conversation about engagement

Karen Rayner Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback Leave a Comment

Numbers are easy*. Anyone can take an employee survey and make something of it: response rate is obvious, unhappy and engaged answers easily coded. We can chart results and turn them into reports and pretty infographics with a bare minimum of effort. 77% of employees hate the food in the cafeteria! 31% of millennials in Townsville stay for the beanbags! Numbers, saving us from too much thinking since forever. Unfortunately, numbers are also simple. Surveys in particular condense a whole heap of potentially mind-blowing information into a single, easily digestible figure. Say I discover that only 31% of employees think …