Let’s take a break from health care reform and pension funding to look at something really important: Do work-from-home employees wear pajamas all day?
No, seriously.
When companies worry about employee engagement and productivity, the clues to any breakdown in those areas are probably already evident among the workforce. And, yes, one-quarter of employee do wear their pajamas all day when they work from home, at least according to a survey of 1,013 U.S. workers conducted by Wakefield Research Study for Citrix.
Let’s consider today’s CFOs who are under pressure to increase their contributions to their organizations. These CFOs are recognizing that they need to work on developing their own staffs if CFOs themselves are going to meet these increased demands placed upon them. According to research by Deloitte, finding and developing the right talent is consistently number one or two for many CFOs. The reason? A growing number of CFOs see their staffs as lacking in the requisite skills, particularly given the increased demands on finance that show no signs of letting up. A Deloitte study conducted last year found that the vast majority of CFOs think that their staffs needed stronger analytical skills, better political acumen, and facilitation skills and macroeconomic knowledge.
But once the CFO or any manager or executive succeeds in getting their staffs up to speed, they need to look for ways to engage those employees and to make sure they are doing their best for the department and the company. After all, CFOs are not immune to any of the other employee management problems other senior executives face.
One question for CFOs is whether they have fallen into the “bad boss” trap. The Wakefield survey found that employees consider a bad boss to be someone who steals ideas (37%), knows it all (33%) and ignores employees (27%). In fact, many of these individuals are so motivated to avoid the boss that they schedule time off so that it does not coincide with the boss’s vacation. If CFOs find that their employees are taking vacation before or right after they return from vacation, there may be a reason for it.
As an aside, it seems as if CFOs and their senior management colleagues are not immune to this behavior. Nearly 40% of executive and manager-level workers admit to doing this too. In fact, one-fifth of employees say that they take a vacation as much to get a break from the boss as to get a break from their work. Making sure that they are not on vacation at the same time as the boss is another way to extend that separation.
If at times it seems as if there is nothing that can make employees happy, there may be some truth to that. The Wakefield survey found that even when companies do things in an effort to help employees bond, chances are good that at least some employees will hate it. The survey found that nearly three-quarters of employees secretly dislike at least one company event or activity, like team-building activities, designed to foster workplace cohesion.
I guess they are all dreaming of working from home in their pajamas.
By Joanne Sammer, from: http://businessfinancemag.com/article/what-wears-down-employee-productivity-and-morale-0716
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