We have a lot of lost potential in our organisations. It is believed that if you direct focus at elements such as your company’s strategy, structures, products, processes and systems you will be able to achieve the results you want in your organisation. However, says Helene Vermaak - clinical psychologist, co-owner and principal consultant of The Human Edge – this couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of what happens in organisations and teams happens below the surface The majority of energy in your organisation and team is drained when your people aren’t engaged and being responsible for the work that they do. To uncover the source of the energy drain and why your people aren’t engaged with your organisation, you must seriously look at the culture of your organisation and identify what factors are causing your employees’ lack of interest in their work. As a starting point, Helene believes that there are four competencies you need to encourage your employees to build before you can expect them to change their current behaviours and become a cohesive team: 1. At a personal level, all your employees need to be engaged in self-directed change. They need to be asking themselves questions such as: • Do I have the ability to understand my behaviour? • Do I have the ability to know what change plan I need to put in place to alter whatever vital behaviours I need to enforce in my life? 2. At an interpersonal level, if you do not have open and honest conversations in your team and organisation, your long-term results will be affected. 3. At a team level, you need to be competent around accountability. “In the last probably 12 – 18 months, all the organisations we have spoken to have said that accountability is a big challenge for them,” says Helene. 4. At an organisational level, we need to become competent in influencing people’s behaviour. Are there people out there who want to change something in their lives? Vital Smarts conducted a …
What would make your employees’ souls smile?
Brett Shuttleworth has done it all: he’s kept company with some of the most glamorous people in the world as a model for the likes of Ralph Lauren, Versace and Calvin Klein, as an actor in Hollywood blockbusters, a provincial sportsman and a successful businessman. However, he’s found his niche in motivational speaking and making people’s souls smile. I recently spoke with him to find out how companies can keep their employees’ souls smiling. As I usually do before any interview, I did a bit of research into Brett’s background to find out what really makes this man tick. And while I was researching, I came across a You Tube video on his website called: “What makes your soul smile?” In it, Brett and his colleague Bert Corsius travel around India, with no money, to see how far they can travel based on people’s goodwill. The sceptic in me thought this video was too good to be true but when I spoke to Brett, and asked him about the video, he said that they actually managed to travel around the country with no money based on the goodwill of the people they met along the way. In other words, how they made other people’s souls smile. What does “make your soul smile” mean? When I posed this question to Brett, he told me that before he came up with this concept, he had gone on a journey of self-discovery, searching for what really made him happy. What he came to realise is that it’s not your external trappings – what you surround yourself with - that will make you happy; it’s what is on the inside that makes the difference. If your “soul is smiling”, you will be happy. This is a great concept from a personal growth point of view, I thought, but I wanted to delve into how making one’s soul smile can benefit your organisation. How do you make your employees’ souls smile? At an ACMP networking event, which took place in Johannesburg in February 2013, Richard Hawkey, the author of Life Less Lived, presented a set of shocking statistics that served as a huge …
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Who is Timothy Maurice Webster?
Without actually meeting the man in person, this is a very difficult question to answer as resources on the Internet about this dynamic and thoughtful man are few and far between. So needless to say, I was very curious at the prospect of meeting Timothy and finding out a bit more about him… Timothy, according to Vuma Reputation Management’s website, has written three brand leadership books, and is a prolific columnist, writing columns for Destiny magazine and The Star Workplace. In addition, he is a lively speaker and consults widely on the subject of personal branding. He came to South Africa almost 10 years ago and began his career in publishing by writing a weekly column for The Star, something which he still does to this very day. When I asked what subjects he favours, Timothy told me that he writes about “people” in his columns. He makes a point of listening to what people say in response to his columns. Timothy’s writing is, according to him, influenced by three pillars: 1. How you develop your values and how your values are influenced by your environment, 2. How your values create your image – in other words, your brand, and 3. How do you position your brand and use it as a tool to create, for example, a career for yourself. Walt Whitman’s influence on Timothy’s work The poet, Walt Whitman, greatly influences his work: • During the Civil War, Whitman discovered that there is a relationship between your internal being and the external world. He believed that there is an integral connection between these two elements and that your internal being is influenced by the world that you live in. Timothy believes that a similar relationship exists between companies and their employees: “Once you’ve been in a corporation for a while, you take on its personality,” he says. Timothy’s opinion about why staff members leave an organisation A problem, which I’m sure not one organisation in South Africa is immune from, is the issue of high …
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How to deal with fraudulent medical certificates
Now that you’ve read Jan Kemp Nel’s article on HR Pulse about what information needs to be in a valid medical certificate, and you suspect one of your employees of having turned in a fraudulent sick note or, worse, a series of fraudulent sick notes, you need to know how to deal with this situation. Recently, I went to a seminar run by Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr (CDH) where speakers Mohsina Chenia and Michael Yeates from CDH told us what to do if we ever found ourselves in one of these situations. What to do first when you suspect that a sick note is a fake After you’ve found one/a number of suspicious-looking medical certificates in your organisation, the first thing you need to do, says Chenia, is to contact the medical practitioner and verify the authenticity of the certificates and possibly the diagnosis. But be warned that the practitioner is under no legal obligation to tell you anything as this could constitute a serious breach of doctor-patient confidentiality. However, says Yeats, if the CCMA subpoenas the medical practitioner he would be forced to provide details of the employee’s illness. What is a medical practitioner allowed to tell you? If you contacted an employee’s medical practitioner to establish the nature of the illness that forced the time off work, the practitioner would be able to confirm: • If he/she had examined the employee, • On what date he/she had examined the employee, and • If he/she had issued a medical certificate stating that he/she had examined the employee and had found the employee to be unfit for duty. Verify the medical practice’s address and registration number There have been cases where one practice number has been used by multiple doctors to issue false medical certificates. So if you have a number of employees with medical certificates issued from doctors with the same practice number, and you suspect foul play, investigate this thoroughly! If you suspect that the medical practitioner or the practice number …
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What does the law say about traditional healers?
For many years, traditional healers have been looked at very sceptically by many of those who do not visit these practitioners for health-related ailments. However, recent cases which have passed through our courts have left many employers wondering if they now need to accept sick notes from traditional healers. A couple of weeks ago, I went to a seminar run by Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr (CDH) where Mohsina Chenia from CDH told us where the law currently stands with regard to traditional healers. In Jan Kemp Nel’s article on HR Pulse, entitled 7 Facts that you must know NOW about sick notes, he says that as yet, traditional healers have not been allowed to issue valid medical certificates. However, in Kiviets Kroon Country Estate (Pty) Ltd v Mmoledi & others [LAC] JA78/10), where an employee was dismissed because she stayed away from work, inter alia, because she had a medical certificate from a traditional healer saying that she had “perminitions of ancestors”, the CCMA and the Labour Court declared that the employee’s dismissal was unjustified, as she had a justifiable reason for her unauthorised absenceWhen the case was taken on appeal, the Labour Appeal Court stated, among others, that as the Constitution recognises traditional beliefs and practices, others should reasonably accommodate others’ beliefs and not trivialise them. Employers must develop their own systems to deal with medical certificates from traditional healers As consulting a traditional healer is, in most cases, cheaper than consulting a Western-trained medical practitioner, allowances should be made by employers to accommodate their employees. Chenia stated that many large corporations are choosing to work with traditional healers and often, in conjunction with the representative trade union in the workplace, reach agreements which recognise under certain conditions, certificates which are issued by these healers The Traditional Health Practitioners Act of 2004: The …
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3 Lessons I learned about big data
A term that has been popping up all over the place recently is ‘big data’. It has taunted me on Twitter, leered at me from LinkedIn, frolicked on Facebook and gallivanted all over Google +. And when I could take it no longer, and screamed: “Yes, I can see you’re there so I suppose that it’s time for me to find out more about you!”, I made the decision to attend the Going Big on Data event which was held at the Gordon Institute of Business Science. And I am so glad that I went because I learned A LOT! Lesson #1: There is a great need for workforce-related data Marius Meyer, CEO of the SA Board for People Practitioners (SABPP), launched the proceedings with some criticisms of HR in South Africa at the moment. The hardest-hitting fact for me was finding out that workforce analytics is a system that is largely ignored by South Africa’s HR practitioners. Meaning of workforce analytics Workforce analytics is a process during which an organisation’s leaders use statistical models that are created from internal and external business-related information to interpret employee-related data. As a result, leaders gain a better understanding of the workforce, which improves their ability to predict talent-related behaviour and anticipate any future worker-related challenges. Source: http://searchfinancialapplications.techtarget.com/definition/workforce-analytics. Marius referred to an IBM study which measured the extent that workforce analytics is used by SA HR practitioners. The study revealed two startling facts: 1. A large number of the practitioners did not know about workforce analytics, and 2. The majority of them had no system of measuring or recording workforce-related data. This means that leaders are not recording data such as absenteeism rates and staff turnover, which are possibly two of a company’s biggest expenses. Why is it so important to record and interpret workforce-related data? Interpreting workforce analytics leads to a …
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How can you effectively engage your employees?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Technology has turned the world we live in upside down. Our communication methods have done a total 180 degree turn thanks to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. In six months, a motor vehicle company can imitate, produce and bring to market a vehicle that another company has only just launched - the turnaround time was once something like six or seven years… Businesses have found it increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves because technology has made it easier for people to imitate others’ products. So when you try to engage your employees, or even attract new employees, you must focus far less on differentiating what you do and more on how you do it because they are focused on differentiated services on a minute-by-minute basis. What are the nuts and bolts of employee engagement? People are the DNA of your organisation and in this knowledge economy, says chairman and founder of the virtual works Jonathan Hall, you need to concentrate on retaining your people if you want your business to survive. According to Gallup’s latest report, engaged organisations have: • A 10% better customer retention rate than other organisations which are not engaged, • A 21% better productivity level than their rivals, • 147% better earnings-per-share than their competitors, and • 90% better growth trends that their competitors. So there is ample benefit for your bottom line to institute an employee engagement plan! Why do engaged staff outperform their disengaged counterparts? At a presentation entitled Aligning and engaging employees for future advantage, Hall offered a very interesting explanation about why engaged employees perform better than their non-engaged counterparts. He said that when people are excited, happy and feel that they belong in a company, they release a number of chemicals in their brains which make them feel inspired, creative and ready to work. When people feel demotivated …
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What must you do to safeguard your company from payroll fraud?
In the current tough economic climate, businesses are in survival mode. People need to work harder than ever before to get recognition from the companies they work for. Unfortunately, this gives rise to many disgruntled employees who feel that they are working at 150% capacity but are not getting rewarded for it. As such, these individuals are more than happy to “dip their hands in the payroll jar” to get what they feel they deserve from the company. Small businesses are especially prone to payroll fraud as they don’t have formal systems in place to prevent payroll fraud from happening. At the beginning of last month, at an interactive forum run by Accsys entitled Payroll in the 21st Century, CEO of Profile Software International David Brown, spoke about a number of forms of payroll fraud that you need to be aware of to ensure the health of your company’s payroll. Buddy punching is not just about giving your friend a black eye... Brown indicated that this type of payroll fraud originated with the old punch card system where people would punch their friends in to make it seem as if they were at work. This type of fraud would only work if there was a single point to get in and out of the operation. Don’t let your company be haunted by ghost employees! Ghost employees, as the name indicates, are employees who are “ghosts” in your organisation but are very much present on your payroll and draw a salary. These types of employees are very easy to create and can be created by anyone who has access to your HR system. All you need to create a ghost employee is a valid ID number. Be careful that your employees’ discharge is not delayed Another very popular form of payroll fraud is delayed discharge. What this means is that if an employee is discharged on 31 October, his third-party deductions – e.g. medical aid deductions, pension fund, etc. – will be stopped but his gross salary will continue to be paid into his bank account. He will continue to be …