Not slacking but frowning: the advent of the part-time culture

Maybe it’s a national tradition of a long hours culture, maybe it’s our seemingly ingrained dislike of ‘shirkers’, but ‘part-timers’ is one of the more damning verdicts I’ve heard casually passed in many of the organisations I’ve worked in. But will changes in our working culture make that far less of a put-down and much more a case of ‘Just saying …’? The Daily Telegraph, reporting on the latest ONS figures last week, revealed that the total number of us in part-time work increased by 26,000 to reach 7.96m – more than a quarter of the working population. And it is estimated that 1.16m of those are people actively seeking full-time work but ‘settling’ for something less (the highest figure for people in this category since records started in 1992). As Ian Brinley of The Work Foundation commented at the start of 2010:

The overall stability is deceptive in terms of the hours of work on offer. The number of people in full-time work is still going down, offset by more part-time jobs. The competition for such jobs is intense. There are now one million people working part-time who really want full-time work – up nearly 40 per cent compared with the same three months a year ago.”

These are striking figures that have been subjected to much commentary in terms of the economy and our national prospects. But apart from the financial impact – part-time workers naturally earn less, and are statistically also twice as likely to receive less than the minimum wage – there has been little commentary on other. more subtle impacts.

 

“Nice work if you can get it”: popular song or something to campaign for?

From some recent posts, you might think we were either consistently sceptical about the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) or picking on them for some social media kudos. We do understand the merits of keeping our fingers on the zeitgeist and cutting a certain profile, even if we haven’t necessarily mastered it (a quick ‘back of a calculator’ moment indicates we’re 9,250 hours short of the mythically required 10,000 hours), so today we are going to use the ‘f’ word in the opening paragraph. Yes, fairness. And we’re going to applaud John Philpott, CIPD’s Chief Economist. You might want to sit down.

At CIPD’s Annual Conference in Manchester, delegates heard employment minister Chris Grayling calling for employers – and their HR functions – to support the government in providing ‘good work’ and to support the Government’s Work Programme. (As you would imagine, there’s been commentary: here and here, for example.)

 

The multiple faces of employee engagement

We can be a perennially puzzling species. While the majority of us almost certainly head to work intending to do our best, it would interesting to know how many of us are that generous in our assumptions and assessments about those around us – and how far any gap is accounted for by the generosity we tend to extend when we are invited to assess ourselves. But I strongly suspect that the start of any new job – something we’ve (usually) chosen to apply for, polished our cvs and interview skills, cleared the hurdles of interview and assessment centre – is a time when all of us are at our most positively intentioned. There’s a lot of hoping as well as striving in the journey from hoping to induction, and the moment of arrival is a time when we are looking to invest that hope.

That’s a view echoed in the words of Orlagh Hunt, group HR director at the RSA Insurance Group, in an interview with People Management:

We know that people show up in a new company wanting to engage. Very few people think, ‘I’m going to do as little as humanly possible and be as destructive as I can’. They start off thinking this is a shining new opportunity, and then the job they do, the leader they get, the environment they’re in either translates that optimism into having a great time and doing a great job, or not quite so much.” 

 

The Spending Challenge – or the Engagement Puzzle?

Despite the evidence from our tape-measures, we are entering an era of belt-tightening. It’s not so much ‘staying in’ that’s going to be the new ‘going out’, as going without. The recession is rumoured to be over, but the recovery is a matter of doing more with less. And – less widely spoken but just as importantly – for less. Even Waitrose – a winner during the last two years, much to some people’s surprise – now has an Essentials range. As they say in supermarket circles, every little helps (customer service and commitment to quality probably being among those helpful little things.) How different organisations and sectors have responded shows interesting differences, however, as evidenced by CIPD’s Employee Outlook Quarterly Survey Report Spring 2010 (download as PDF here). Decisions taken will, of course, be influenced by big differences in flexibility within national or local arrangements, but the figures for the latest report show a marked polarisation in a number of factors closely related to talent retention and development between the public and private sectors. 

 

Culturalism and the manipulation of free will

Another article that readers can now download. Published in the May edition of Talent Management, the article – by ASK MD, Robert Terry, questions whether the way we engage with our talent is stifling their behaviour and, with it, the scope and opportunity to be creative and productive.

To give a flavour, one short extract is given below (the full article can be downloaded as a PDF file here):

Perhaps we will come to view the corporate and political excesses of the first decade of the 21^st century as blessings in disguise, serving as they did to awaken us to the threat of manipulation, the fallibility of power and the meanings that lie beneath the surface of words.

 The lesson of the last 10 years is that legitimacy (and with it the right to set and pursue standards not just for the behaviour of others but also for their thoughts and feelings) flows from moral authority and cannot be commanded, no matter how big the PR budget. Legitimacy is a social construction and is conferred or withdrawn by those who would be controlled. It cannot be begged, bought or stolen.”

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

 

A Good Foundation? The ‘Exceeding Expectations’ Report

Last month, The Work Foundation published ‘Exceeding Expectations’, a report from the first Phase of their own empirical research that is, in their own words “a major qualitative study centred on what leaders themselves believe leadership to be and how they practice it”. One of their drivers for doing so was to move our collective understanding of leadership beyond simply having faith in what we belief to the case in the various historical models of both leaders and leadership:

The problem is that in most cases these thoughts about leadership are not empirically derived rather they are conceptual. In fact it is really rather striking that what we know about leadership is on the whole derived from informed belief.”