Everything changes and most of the time things change so fast that you find it difficult to catch up. What ever profession you are in, ensure that your knowledge and expertise are current and sound. Remember the saying “change is the only constant factor”.
            So do not resist or fear to ‘change’ as you will find with regret that you will be left behind in the rat race. Here are some reasons why some people fear to change:

Understand the situation
            You must be able to interpret YOUR FEELINGS at work. Try to discern for yourself whether you are suffering from one of the following situations at workplace, or a combination . Ask yourself. Are you stressed out? Frustrated? Angry? Insecure? Bored? Loved? Excited? Joyous? You must know and come to terms with your own feelings, so that steps can be taken to neutralise the bad feelings and enhance the good. This is an important step as you have to be on top of any situation to enable you to lead effectively.

Be confident of your potential
Success is very easy, provided you believe that it is easy to achieve success. Do not give yourself excuses that you lack the ability to succeed in whatever you do. Some people may give themselves various excuses for not being able to succeed. Here are some, which may interest you to take note. Things like lack of sufficient education, born on the wrong side of the tracks, lack of social status, economically poor during your early life, colour of your skin, your appearance, etc.
Remember you are already losing the battle if you really believe that the reasons mentioned above will not enable you to succeed in whatever you do.

Don’t Worry
            “Keep busy”. It is not work that kills men. It is worry! If you worry over everything that you do, you will not be able to function effectively and efficiently in your role as a supervisor. The human mind cannot focus on two things at the same time.

Do not Procrastinate
            If you delay or procrastinate, things or situations will not get better. From experience, procrastination will lead you to a state of despair and ultimately result in you losing control in whatever you do. It is the root of all failures and is applicable in your work life and your personal life.
            Delaying action will cause you to worry, become irritated easily, frustrated and ultimately overwhelmed over the amount of things that need to be done due to the accumulation of procrastinated work. Sometimes the damage done by procrastination is irreversible and you have to suffer for it. There will never be another opportunity NOW, so make the most of Today.

Have a Time Frame for your Goal
            You must make the best of whatever time you have. Have a realistic time frame ideas to ensure that the task can be completed within this time frame. Always get an early start when performing a task. Try to defeat the deadlines set. Acquire the habit of putting everything down on paper so that the task can be completed systematically and timely. Also develop the art of listening so that you can understand the speaker clearly and correctly. Ask questions if necessary to ensure that you and the speaker understands each other in the performance of achieving the objective.
            Be decisive when you need to make a decision. When you waiver, people will lose confidence in you and may misunderstand what you want of them. Last but not least do not overstretch yourself that you need to bring work home. You must be able to maintain a good balance between work time and personal time.

Be prepared to handle criticism
            In the performance of your task, you cannot avoid being criticised. Whether you have performed badly or correctly, people will always try to find fault. Very few will give you a word of praise where it is due. This happens in any organisation, because office politics cannot be avoided or eradicated. You have to remember not to buckle when criticism is thrown at you. Try to raise your spirits and carry on with your task. Unless the person criticising you is your boss and is being constructive, wanting you to learn from him, you should then listen attentively to what he/she has to say.
            Please note that generally, people who knows how to handle criticisms will be able to accept what is good and correct and ignore criticisms of hate and envy. These are the people who will always be successful in their endeavours.

Never fear failure
In life there should not be any failures. Always pick yourself up when you have failed and learn from the failure so that you do not repeat the same mistake or error again. Companies like Kleenex Tissues, Singer Sewing Machine, 7-UP, Malboro, Vicks Vapour rub, and many more have got this right.
You must always have a positive attitude, and do not accept failure as a way out. Don’t put yourself in a position of despair. That’s when you have lost all faith in yourself. Why do people commit suicide? It is because they feel that there is nothing worth living for anymore. They are in despair and for them the easy way out is to commit suicide.
           
(Next month we’ll be talking about “Leadership Skills for the Supervisor”. So look out for the next issue of TNI’s e-Newsletter)

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Ever felt that you work with a bunch of zombies? Well you’re not the only one. Big companies are a breeding ground for demotivated and disenchanted staff who stagger through their working days with their brains switched off. David Bolchover explains how managers can break the curse of the living deat

Forget bird flu. As anyone even casually acquainted with the business news will tell  you, it’s stress that’s the biggest threat to workplace health. You can hardly switch on the radio these days without hearing some Professor of Stress Studies going on about overwork in the British workforce. You know the sort of thing – we work on average 83 hours a day, life expectancy has consequently plummeted, and there is a good chance that the British people will be extinct by 2050 at this rate. Our personal lives are destroyed, our sex lives are non-existent, none of us has seen our children for a couple of decades. And all because of the demands of our rapacious employer, who is demanding every last drop of sweat in an ultra-competitive world.
            That’s the received wisdom anyway, the orthodoxy to which everyone loves to subscribe. But let me put a rather large spanner in the works of this cosy national consensus. How about this for a start? A 2004 Web@Work survey revealed that 51% of US workers spend between one and five hours online each day for personal reasons. A whopping 56.3% of US employees send up to five personal e-mails a day, a further 18.7% send up to 20, and 7.2% actually find time in their chaotically hectic schedule to send more than 20.
            Back here in the UK though, employees’ personal use of the internet is being heavily restricted – by the fact that they’re finding it increasingly difficult to make it into work in the first place. Nine million ‘suspicious’ or ‘questionable’ requests for sick notes are made each yearto UK doctors – a figure that represents around one third of the UK workforce.
            Oh, the British working class. Always were lazy, weren’t they? A good job we’ve got all those yuppie workhorses champing at the bit to spend a good 16-hour at the coalface. Haven’t we? Wake up and smell the coffee! According to an internet poll of highflying whizzkids, one third of the UK’s supposedly dynamic young professionals are hungover at least twice a week on working days, while half of those polled admitted to being the worse for drink at least one working day a week. Two-thirds admitted to having called in sick due to alcohol on at least one occasion in the previous month. Meanwhile, a recent survey in Time Out magazine revealed that one in three people has taken drugs such as ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis while supposedly hard at work.
            While all these methods of measuring workplace inefficiency and employee boredom are illuminating, they do not represent the entire picture. Personal internet use, for example, has simply added to the tools a bored worker would have used in the pre-internet days to waste time. More important still, these stats do little to explain just why so many workers are skiving off.
            Research organisation Gallup regularly gauges worker motivation through its Employee Engagement Index Q12 surveys. By analyzing the results of these polls, it divides employees into three types – the ‘engaged’ (loyal, productive, find their work satisfying), the not ‘not engauged” (not psychologically committed to their roles and may leave if an opportunity presents itself) and ‘the actively disengaged’ (utterly disenchanted with their workplaces).

Breaking Engagement
Alarmingly, the latest survey of British employees revealed 19% to be ‘engaged’, 61% ‘not engaged’ and 20% ‘actively disengaged’. On the whole, Gallup estimates, this widespread lack of engagement costs the UK economy between GBP37.2 billion and GBP38.9 billion a year through high employee turnover, absenteeism and low productivity.  Another recent survey by communications company Fish Can Sing revealed that a shocking 67%of employees aged between 18 and 35 in the UK are ‘unhappy at work’, of which 83% are 30 to 35 year-olds. Worse news still for the corporate world is that this dissatisfaction with the workplace is only likely to rise. We live in an era that prizes individual meaning, fulfillment and excitement. Some people have always been bored in their jobs. It is not the boredom that is new, it is the intolerance of it and the willingness to acknowledge it openly.
            So where does all this leave those companies brave enough to accept the truth of work, rather than the myth of work? The truth being that there a mass of people who go into a large office every day, arrive around the same time, leave around the same time, but inbetween are so bored and disillusioned that they will look for any reason to waste time. How can companies get ahead of the competition by stemming the tide of discontent?
            To avoid widespread dissatisfaction and disenchantment in a workforce – a situation where those that can get up and leave and only the mediocre remain – management is key. Not CEOs or board directors. But the people who can actually affect the everyday motivation of the grassroots – the first-line and middle managers. As Gallup rightly concluded after examining the results of interviews with more than a million employees across a range of industries – ‘The talented employee may join a company because of its worldwide training programmes….but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with this immediate supervisor.’
            Many of us will recognize the truth of this statement from our own personal experience. But businesses are clearly not responding sufficiently. One of the major problems is that we currently have far too many reluctant managers. Lots of ambitious workers see the move to management as a step up in status and remuneration but, when they get there, don’t have the interest or commitment needed to help staff realize their full potential at work. Can you be an excellent accountant or lawyer if you really don’t want to be one in the first place? Of course not, so why should we expect managers to defy a similar logic?
            Avoiding this will take a huge shift in the traditional attitudes towards management. First and foremost, companies need to start appointing and paying managers to manage; not for their functional or technical skills, but for their ability to motivate, communicate and build relationships effectively. Perhaps more controversially, making people management a priority means ensuring managers’ financial remuneration is determined largely, if not entirely, by the performance of their team.

Debunking the Myths   
Radical as they may seem, these innovations alone would not solve the problem of disengagement at work. After all, the idea that anyone who’s good at their existing job can be promoted to become a manager, irrespective of their aptitude or commitment, is just one of several longstanding myths that have impacted on organisational performance over the years.
            Another such needless barrier to productivity is UK employers’ obsession with their staff’s physical whereabouts. Alarmed by soaring absenteeism, many organizations are employing ever more ingenious strategies to maximize staff attendance. But if millions of disengaged workers are happy to fake illness to avoid going to work, what is to stop them simply faking work when they are in the office? The idea that physically turning up to the workplace is in itself a measure of productivity is naïve to say the least.
            This fixation with employee attendance simply fuels the average worker’s skewed  understanding of their psychological contract with an employer. For many workers, not to mention their mangers and employers, it is the turning up that’s the priority, not the amount of work they get done while they are there. Just consider the long hours office culture common to many service industries. For a lawyer or other professionals who charge out services by the hour, the long hours they put in will have a direct impact on the company’s profitability. But in the majority of office jobs where output is difficult to measure, where the job description is nebulous and the management does not take a detailed interest in employee output, long hours are in the main an overt political statement, a route to individual success in the corporate world, rather than evidence of hard work. Statistics on long hours are repeatedly used to demonstrate overwork and stress. But overwork is not the same as long hours. Indeed, a culture of long hours can frequently indicate a low level of performance measurability, which will inevitably result overall in underwork, rather than overwork. Lack of transparency creates the conditions for image to triumph over performance.  
            One way to combat this lack of transparency is, paradoxically, to remove the office employee from view altogether, by ensuring they work from home on a regular basis. Opponents of home working may argue that it is more difficult to manage and monitoring the performance of home workers. But the opposite is true. Dishonesty may hold sway in the office. But as soon as an employee works from home, his contribution, or lack of it, cannot be camouflaged by simply saying late at work or leaving a jacket over his chair while he heads off to the pub. Home working shifts the emphasis from presence to work, forcing everyone to refocus their attention on why people are employed to do their jobs in the first place.
            At the moment, regular home working is widely seen as a perk for senior trustworthy staff. According to the UK Labour Force Survey of 2002, there are twice as many tele-working managers as administrative staff. But this is a big mistake. Home working should be introduced at all levels as a positive strategy to boost performance and separate productivity from posturing.
            Another widespread workplace myth is the idea that the more experienced workers are, the better they are at their jobs. Recent Gallup research has actually revealed an inverse relationship between length of service and employee engagement. While people might start off their new jobs with a feeling of enthused optimism, this soon dissipates. Gallup found the percentage of engaged workers in the first year of service approaches 40% but that decreases to an average of little more than 20% for the period between three and ten years of service. ‘For most employers,’ Gallup reports ‘the first year on the job is their best.’ It’s downhill from there for the worker and for the company as well – because disengaged employees are a drag on profit and sales and overall satisfaction among customers.
            One way for employers to avoid workers’ rapid descent into disenchantment and dissatisfaction in their roles would be to take greater care to ensure they hire the right person, with the skills, attributes and characteristics needed to perform, enjoy and continue to grow in their role.
            But that is only half the problem. Even if you do get it spot on at the recruitment stage, all but those with the most limited horizons and least imagination are going to become a little jaded after doing the same job for a number of years. In this way, the passage of time all but guarantees that a good fit between individual and job eventually ceases to be productive.

Face the Facts 
Much more regular switching of roles would no doubt act against boredom and drift, ensuring staff are regularly presented with a fresh challenge in the form of new tasks, responsibilities and development opportunities. But there are two powerful factors preventing individual workers, organizations and the wider economy capitalizing on the obvious benefits of regular job switching. First, the gross indifference of short-sighted managers, for whom restless workers wanting to change jobs internally are little more than an irritant. And second, the huge barriers to entry that seemingly exist in all industries to protect the incumbents and their meal tickets. These take various forms. Industry jargon is one, and another is the myth that insiders possess huge amounts of esoteric knowledge that a newcomer would take years to grasp. One route to solving employee engagement is therefore to admit something that is somewhat taboo – most jobs are not, in fact, all that difficult to grasp, and any reasonably intelligent, motivated and well trained individual could learn to do them quickly.
            Another unavoidable – if unpalatable – fact of working life is that the bigger an organisation is the higher the chance of disenchantment and inactivity. Chiefly because there is simply a greater proportion of people in large companies who have no interest in their work. When Gallup conducted a survey measuring engagement levels at both small and large companies, its conclusions was that employees become less engaged as a company’s workforce grows. Engagement, the feeling of being fully involved with one’s job, was highest (33% of employees) at companies with fewer than 50 workers. Among companies of 1,000 to 5,000 staff, 19% feel ‘actively disengaged’, or fundamentally disconnected from their work, versus 12% at companies with fewer than 50 workers. Gallup researchers attribute the higher engagement of small company employees to their greater sense of ‘local control’ – ‘the feeling of connection to, and accountability for, company output.’
           
Small is Beautiful

To address this mounting malaise, Gallup suggests large companies learn from their smaller counterparts. Wherever possible, large organizations and departments should be broken down into small teams of individuals with a loyalty to each other and to the clear and agreed goals of that particular team. Even the most mundane tasks can seem engaging once the individuals involved acquire a genuine personal interest in the standard of their work. Forget loyalty and commitment to the wider company. In a convoluted corporate monolith, it simply won’t exist – not at the grass roots level anyway.
            Of course, it is individual managers who hold the key to this strategy. As Gallup acknowledges: ‘In work units of fewer than ten people, engagement will soar or plummet depending on the manager. That’s because in small groups, each member keenly feels a good manager’s ability to communicate and motivate – and a bad manager ‘s incompetence. So if you expect your teams to be top-performing, make sure your managers are up to the challenge.
The only way a large company can cure the plague of the ‘Living Dead’ is by religiously chopping and dividing until the company comprises numerous self-contained units, each run by talented managers who are dedicated and passionate about managing. Awkward and uncomfortable as it may be, increasing motivation levels in large companies demand the decentralization of power.A monolith corporate structure might offer the mirage of control, but you cannot control the minds of the bored thousands who turn up to get their pay cheque and then direct their energies and talents towards doing as little as possible. Their second coming, and correspondingleap in productivity and performance, will only be made possible by replicating the dynamic and transparent environment of a small company, and then installing the right managers to generate the necessary commitment. Because when it comes to employee motivation, small is beautiful. And big is very ugly indeed.

• TNI has been in this business since late 1999, and has grown to be one of the leading training providers in town.
• TNI specializes in In-House training as they are able to customize the training according to the needs of the client(s). However public courses are also available on request, as many small companies (and even the larger ones) are usually unable to release all their staff for training at the same time.
• For those interested to know more about TNI you may contact us as follows:-