David Bowles

PHYSICAL ENCOUNTER AND SELF-DISCLOSURE

This study investigated the hypothesis that physical and body contact exercises within an encounter group reduce barriers between people and increase their willingness to self-disclose. Ss participating in these exercises (n = 18), in contrast to 9 controls, showed a significant increase in self-disclosure following the group session.

How do Organizations Measure Morale

We have a question for you: Its Monday morning in Beijing, London or Sydney; do you really know how your employees there are doing?

Creating/Maintaining the High Morale Organization: Do We Create High Morale — Or Step Out of the Way?

Some organizations already have high morale without any purposeful effort to reach that point. An especially charismatic leader, a fortunate market position (Google comes to mind), a small start-up with a lot of excitement, expectations and young, idealistic founders and employees … all these individually or in combination can have a powerful effect on morale and represent very fortunate circumstances for everyone involved. It is part of the reason why such organizations seem to rocket to success out of the blue; not just the new technology of a breakthrough search algorithm as in Google’s case but the added driver of morale which brings loyalty, almost limitless enthusiasm and engagement. In these examples there are clues as to what is possible and we can learn much from them, but what percentage do they represent of the organizational universe? It’s not such a big one, and means that for the rest of us there is work to do!

Employee Morale as a Response to Challenging Times

Open image in new window Early on in this book we asked you if you knew how your Beijing employees were doing. Perhaps it is fitting therefore that we come full circle to China to begin our closing comments. More than the structure of this book drives this, however, the twenty-first century will be, there is no doubt, the Chinese century. How we compete and cooperate with this emerging giant will shape all our economies, and the world stage. As we were researching the possibility of using the famous Chinese word “wēijī”, or crisis (see above), we were chastened and amused by an article written by a China expert, Victor H. Mair, professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.1 As Professor Mair tells us, the widely disseminated idea that this word means both “crisis” and “opportunity” is completely misguided: instead it holds the meaning of “danger with uncertain outcome”, nothing as optimistic as some Western interpretations. Professor Mair’s advice is timely: as we write this book, the largest economy in the world is in crisis and at a crossroads and other major economies are teetering. “Danger with uncertain outcome” is everywhere and optimism might even be seen as foolhardy. The fear level is palpable.

Current Trends, Issues and Myths in Employee Morale

One of the most interesting aspects of working in this field is to see how different groups of people respond to surveys measuring their morale. Being able to rank them and see the differences is something which certainly has captivated our clients over the years, as they looked at data from their organization and compared the performance of different units. But if we step back from a single organization or even industry, and look at some of the differences between countries, that truly can be an eye-opening experience. Having access to large international databases is the key here, and so we draw for this section on the valuable work done by the international human resource consultant Mercer.*

Case Study: Culture, Morale and Customer Satisfaction: Hilti Group, Schaan, Liechtenstein

Note: Our case study organization was chosen with three criteria in mind: It should have created a demonstrably high morale culture, proven by employee surveys. This culture should have endured over time. We did not want a “flash in the pan”. It should have won national or international awards for its efforts in this area, demonstrating that it is recognized by industry peers or by specialized outside organizations as setting a particular standard of excellence in the area of morale.

Why Morale is So Important

If there is one word which encapsulates the benefits which accrue from a high morale organization, it is this: performance. This refers to performance at the individual level and that of the organization as a whole. Evidence for morale correlating highly with, and driving, performance is strong and growing.

What is Morale

Early on in our consulting practice, at the end of an employee survey, managers representing different parts of the organization would be presented with the results, a process which often took a couple of hours and involved looking at massive amounts of data, question by question, group by group. At the end they would frequently ask an important question about their own area: “I saw the presentation, but can you tell me how my group did?” As easy as the task of answering this may sound, it is not: how do you “boil down” the results of 110 questions into one quick summary? They had seen the results on the screen, even summarized by major topics like “compensation and benefits”, “communications”, etc., but they often had no real sense of the overall picture. At the time, the tactic which was used was to say something like this: Well, your employees love their jobs but don’t feel so good about the company; they think many more decisions should be made at the local level and that they are being micro-managed by corporate. As you saw, your group was lower than the company average on a few questions, but also higher on others.