Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he will take two months’ paternity leave upon the arrival of his daughter this month. Could his decision influence other dads to follow his lead – or encourage a more balanced attitude to parental leave?

Despite new legislation which allows couples to split parental leave of up to 52 weeks, a study by Opinion Matters found that 40% of dads opt out of taking any time away from the office. Seventy per cent of those polled said they felt that there was a social stigma attached to paternal leave, and a quarter worried that it would affect their career prospects.

Happier dads, happier workforce

Our neighbours in Sweden have been successful in encouraging fathers to take leave to care for their children. Up to 85% of men take a significant chunk of parental leave, and the benefits are clear: Sweden enjoys one of the most gender equal societies, and is consistently ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world. Children tend to be healthier, do better at school and are less likely to be limited by gender stereotypes when choosing career paths.

When Sweden announced the first “daddy month” (a month of parental leave reserved solely for fathers) in 1995, then deputy prime minister Bengt Westerberg said: “The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve equality in the home” – and it looks like he was right. Just twenty years later, the wage gap in Sweden is significantly lower than in the UK, and Sweden currently has one of the world’s highest representations of women in parliament.

The payoff for employers

The benefits aren’t all one way either: dads report a greater sense of contentment and job satisfaction when they are able to take time to bond with their children, and a recent study at Cornell University found that relationships are stronger when domestic responsibilities and childcare are shared equally.

Tackling the stigma of paternity leave

A team of professors from three major universities in the US studied the effects of California’s Paid Family Leave Program, which allows parents of both genders to take time off when children are born or adopted. They found that “contrary to popular opinion or popular media stories on these topics, it’s not the case that these businesses have any adverse effect on measures of productivity or turnover.”

So if businesses don’t suffer as a result of parents taking leave, it’s simply a matter of changing the culture. Legislation encouraging dads to take their fair share of leave is a great step in the right direction, but a Norwegian academic paper suggested that peer pressure could be the key: it found that men were more likely to take paternal leave if a brother or male co-worker did so.

Could Mark Zuckerberg’s example pave the way to healthier and happier workplaces?

Image Attribution: By TechCrunch [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

A recent BBC News article on the VW emission scandal suggests that diversity could be one antidote to toxic corporate cultures.

The article quotes Stephen Carver, lecturer at Cranfield School of Management, who suggests that diversity seems more appealing when you consider the alternatives: “groupthink and monoculture”.

Mr Carver also states, “Darwinian survival is not survival of the fittest – he never said that. It’s the most able to adapt. And that means diversity.”

If everyone in your organisation thinks in the same way then who will raise their hand and question bad practices? Who will call out damaging tactics? And who will blow the whistle on costly mistakes?

A diverse workforce doesn’t just mean employing people with different heritage – it means filling your organisation with diverse experiences, ideas and ambitions. And who knows, it may just help to safeguard your organisation against stagnation, corruption and costly mistakes.

Diversity training from VinciWorks

Do your managers understand the benefits of a diverse organisation? And do your managers know how to achieve equality in the workplace? With VinciWorks eLearning you can easily, affordably and conveniently train your team to deliver diversity.

New research from PolicyBee has found that an increasing number of students are considering freelancing and contracting as potential career options when they leave university. So what does this mean for employers?

Out of 1,000 students surveyed, 44 per cent were considering working outside of traditional permanent employment. One might think that graduates are simply keeping an open mind, but 56 per cent of the students surveyed had already tried freelancing during their studies – which suggests their plans are often grounded in experience.

A shrinking talent pool

With so many students interested in self-employment, what will be the impact on the jobs market? Employers may be forced to fight over a dwindling pool of job-seekers – or use contractors and freelancers.

Engaging freelancers and contractors brings fresh challenges, and may represent uncharted territory for some. Managers may need support to negotiate the client / freelancer relationship while adhering to the legislation affecting freelancers and contractors, such as IR35.

Contractor management training

With VinciWorks you can easily train your managers to get the best out of contractors and stay within the law. VinciWorks’ training is delivered online – so you can conveniently and affordably provide essential training for your team.

Sweden is encouraging businesses to implement 6-hour work days to reap benefits like increased employee energy levels, lower staff turnover, improved productivity and even raised profits.

There was a mixed reaction to the news here in the UK (where the average employee works 8.7 hours per day) with some even suggesting that if employees can get as much done in 6 hours as they did in 8, they must not have been working very hard.

… which is kind of the whole idea behind the 6-hour work day.

The theory is that employees working for 8-hours-plus only tend to get six hours of useful work done anyway, filling the rest of the time with personal tasks, breaks, and distractions, leaving them tired in the evenings, with less time to spend with their families.

Here in the UK, there’s certainly a desire for increased flexibility around work, and work-life balance is one of the top priorities for today’s workers, so a reduction in working hours would certainly be welcomed by employees – but would it really improve productivity on the whole for businesses?

Here are some of the challenges that changing the working day as we know it could bring:

Need to ensure time is spent working to maximum capacity

Moving to a 6-hour working day only makes sense if employers don’t believe their workers are fully productive over 8-hours – otherwise there’d be no gain to be made. So, if your staff aren’t working to 100% capability in 8 hours, what has to change to ensure productivity improves in 6-hours?

Sweden’s answer: eliminating distractions including access to social media, freedom to chat with colleagues, and getting stricter about how employees spend their time.

Reportedly, staff responded positively to this increased intensity, with boosted happiness and energy levels.

Whether this would be the case for all staff is questionable, and management must therefore consider whether potential productivity increases would outweigh the impact of a more intense and potentially stressful day, as well as the impact of increased scrutiny on employees.

Need to cover more hours

Regardless of productivity, certain jobs require employees’ presence within set hours. In those cases, reducing hours may benefit employees but necessitate hiring more, which is exactly what happened in a Swedish nursing home which trialed the 6-hour working day to reduce burnout among staff.

Following the changes, staff and residents reported boosted happiness levels, although this came at a cost in the region of $1m spent on hiring staff to cover the required hours.

The question for management is whether possibly increasing happiness and energy levels in staff would justify significant cost increases, whether overall productivity would be improved, or if there are other ways that money could be spent to yield better overall results for the business.

Need to adjust communication methods

Communication is vital in all businesses, with meetings and conference calls among the most commonly-used tools to achieve this, especially in businesses with employees around the globe.

Cutting the work day down to 6 hours further limits the windows of opportunity for communication to take place, and may increase the pressure on staff to be available at all hours, which could prove counter productive to the aims of the 6-hour work day.

In Sweden, management took steps to reduce meetings, conference calls, and work in general which were not essential or productive. While results so far appear positive, management would need to consider how to ensure reducing hours wouldn’t slow down communication and decision making.

A former public school master has recently suggested that state schools aren’t doing a good enough job of imparting soft skills such as communication, teamwork and empathy in their students.

When high-performing school leavers or graduates enter the working world without a grounding in soft skills, they may initially excel, primed as they are to complete tasks to a high level.

As employees become more integrated into business activities, however, any soft skills deficit will lead to increasing levels of friction among teams.

The highest performing may even land themselves management positions, only to find themselves responsible for getting the best out of teams, yet lacking in the skills necessary to nurture talented employees.

When employees work for, or with, somebody with poor communication, integrity, empathy, or teamwork – soft skills, in other words – performance inevitably suffers, impacting overall productivity.

If staff who deal with customers lack soft skills, they could even be driving customers away.

Bridging the soft skills gap

In any business process, having poor skills is like driving a car with the handbrake on.

It therefore pays to ensure that all employees have the necessary skills to carry out business activities optimally, and make training available for those whose responsible for areas whose performance is in need of a boost.

As well as impacting millions of workers at the lower end of the payscale, pay increases are likely to cascade upwards with senior members of staff expecting proportionately higher pay.

These increases could see wage bills rising by upwards of 50%, adding pressure on businesses to boost productivity levels and minimise costs – in other words, achieving more with less.

Doing more with less

The concept of doing more with less is hardly revolutionary, but as wages increase, companies that focus on productivity will have a growing advantage over their competition.

So, what options are available to businesses looking to offset wage rises? Here are some suggestions:

Reduce employee turnover

The more frequently employees leave your business, the more effort you’ll need to spend on recruitment, which comes with numerous costs including advertising, time spent assessing applications, interviewing potential candidates and performing necessary administration tasks, time and money spent training new recruits, and any agency fees payable to recruiters.

In addition are the opportunity costs arising from not having fully trained staff in place to fulfil the job roles your business requires, and even once new staff are in place it will take them a while to be up to speed.

A combination of factors play their part in minimising employee turnover levels. Studies show that the newer an employee is to a business, the more likely they are to leave, so it pays to make sure you have an effective onboarding programme in place and that new hires receive all the support they need while becoming familiar with how your business works.

Reduce onboarding & training costs

To run a successful business, your staff must understand how the business works and what is expected of them, so staff training is essential, particularly when it comes to new hires.

While some areas of training are job-specific, and make sense to be carried out by the manager or peers of the new recruit, others apply to the whole business, such as training on health and safety and data protection policies.

In either case, if your business relies on face to face training then it could be missing out on opportunities to drastically reduce costs. Every time face to face training takes place – so, every time a new hire joins, or an existing member of staff needs refresher training – the trainer’s time is required, duplicating the work.

Using eLearning enables you to drastically reduce the cost of staff onboarding and refresher training, as the work of completing the course has already been completed, so training can be delivered to thousands of people consistently and immediately, with minimal work required.

Improve staff skills and productivity

Once your staff are in place and familiar with their roles, you can still boost productivity by helping them to develop in a number of key areas.

Soft skills are often mistakenly considered to be ‘nice-to-have’ or ‘fluffy’, when compared to hard expertise in the skills directly relevant to a specific job, yet poor communication and teamwork are among the chief causes of friction in the workplace.

Offering training to all staff in areas such as internal customer management and soft skills can drastically reduce the communication overhead within your business, enabling employees to communicate more effectively and freeing up more of their time to spend on productive work.

Combine this with training managers in getting the most from their teams by setting the right objectives and managing performance effectively and you’ll ensure that every employee within your business is focused on doing the work that brings in the best results.

Reduce stress levels

UK businesses lose millions of days of work every year due to stressed employees.

Stress weakens the immune system, leaving stressed employees more vulnerable to illness and increasing absenteeism, but employees who are suffering from stress are also more error-prone and less productive as a result.

Causes of stress can differ depending on the individual, and individuals are often unaware that they are suffering from stress, so ensuring organisation-wide awareness of the symptoms, causes and management of stress is the most effective way to reduce instances of stress in your business, and enjoy increased productivity and reduced absenteeism as a result.

Implement a flexible working policy

Studies have shown that flexible working can improve employee retention, engagement and productivity.

Flexible working is an attractive benefit for employees, so businesses can enjoy the benefits of attracting talented workers and keeping them happy by allowing them to balance their work and personal commitments.

Although there are a number of benefits, flexible working does pose some challenges, so it’s important to ensure it is the right fit for your business, and the employee in question – and equip managers to handle the challenges that arise from it.

Performance Management eLearning

Our Performance Management Suite contains eLearning courses to boost organisations’ performance in a number of key areas by training managers and employees.

The BBC has reported that one in three employees feel they have been bullied in the workplace, and a further one in five have witnessed a colleague being bullied.

Bullying is a serious problem for businesses which can lead to loss of morale, decreased motivation and reduced productivity, as well as having a negative impact on the health and wellbeing of the victim.

Businesses must therefore put measures in place to ensure that bullying is not tolerated in the workplace, and understand the crucial role of the manager in shaping corporate culture.

Role of the manager

Often, managers may not be aware that bullying is even taking place, highlighting the importance of developing open, communicative relationships which enable employees to feel confident about approaching managers with any bullying-related concerns.

On other occasions, managers may be aware of bullying taking place, but not feel confident in handling the situation – especially where it involves confronting a known bully.

However, the way that a manager responds to these situations goes a long way in establishing the culture of a business, and avoiding addressing these issues can cause problems to continue, and possibly escalate – with serious consequences to the business, as well as the victims of bullying.

Acting immediately to address the situation may be challenging for a manager, but will ultimately earn them the respect and trust of their employees, ensure the bully is aware of the issue, and hopefully lead to a positive resolution.

Our Manager’s Guide to Handling Difficult Conversations eLearning course can help managers to deal with these situations with confidence, a key factor in establishing a bully-free workplace culture.