A lot is made these days of the importance of creating a flexible work environment so that employees can develop a better work-life interface. Flextime, telecommuting, compressed work weeks, and other innovations in work schedules are supposed to assist employees in managing their demands across different life domains – without having to sacrifice productivity.

Unfortunately, a recent article in the Academy of Management Journal suggests that manager assumptions about why employees utilize work flexibility practices can bias a manager’s perceptions of evaluations of those employees.

If managers believe employees utilize flexible work practices for productivity reasons, they are likely to make positive attributions about employees regarding their commitment to the organization. On the other hand, if managers believe employees utilize flexible work practices for personal reasons, they are likely to make significantly less positive attributions about employees regarding their commitment to the organization.

Therefore, two people in an organization can utilize the exact same flexible work benefit and be evaluated – even by the same manager – in a very different light, regardless of actual differences in productivity or work quality. This can have implications for employee career progression within an organization, because manager evaluations and recommendations often carry a fair amount of influence. If the manager believes an employee lacks commitment to the organization s/he may not provide the strong recommendation needed for promotion. Employees may be missing out on promotion opportunities, while organizations may fail to capitalize on the full potential of some employees.

To address this situation, employees need to ensure that they know where their manager stands with regard to flexible work practices. Just because an organization has a policy that permits the use of flexible work practices doesn’t mean that utilizing those practices comes without a cost to the employee. Here are some suggestions:

• Build rapport with your manager. Your manager is less likely to make negative assumptions about you if s/he has respect for you and your performance.
• Make sure you are not shortchanging the business. Working from home or flextime can lend themselves to abuse fairly easily – even if that abuse is unintended (e.g., too many people drop by knowing you are working from home, which disrupts your concentration and focus). You are accountable for managing your work flexibility appropriately.
• Ensure you show the business results for your productivity. All too often, employees assume that managers can “see” how much more productive they are when they have increased flexibility. Sometimes, though, it can be good to show managers the evidence to help them reach that conclusion. Don’t rely on your manager to look for it.

And there is something the organization can do as well. Work with managers to understand the benefits of the flexible work practices within the organization. Top-down decisions regarding flexible working are likely to be met with resistance at various levels of the managerial hierarchy. If you fail to get members of that hierarchy on the same page, the benefits of work flexibility for the organization will likely be reduced, and if there is too much resistance, work flexibility may show no benefits at all. Therefore, organizations need to remember to utilize proper change management techniques when trying to create a more flexible work environment.

Accountability is important to work flexibility. Employees need to be held accountable for their performance when they exercise flexibility. Managers need to be held accountable for their behaviors regarding flexible working for their employees. And senior leaders need to be held accountable for ensuring that flexible work practices are implemented in ways that are good for the organization and its employees.

During the Fall 1, 2012 term, I had the opportunity to teach an English 150 class (“The Process of Composition”) in The Learning Studio as an Innovative Teaching Fellow.  The high-tech room—with its wall of screens, moveable furniture, and available tablets and iPads—is reason enough to want to teach in the space.  An added bonus includes collaborating with an instructional designer from the Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning; I was fortunate to work with Michaella (Kella) Thornton, the Assistant Director of Instructional Design.

English 150 is often one of the first courses a student takes at SPS.  Some students have been out of school for a while and may not have written a formal essay in many years.  With these considerations in mind along with the potential of The Learning Studio, it was decided that I would pilot a special section of the writing course as theme based, wherein everything we read and wrote about would be related to food.   I had taught a similar course several years earlier while working at another university and had experienced the benefits of such a curriculum.  Not just something we  all must eat every day to survive, food offers a lens through which to examine politics, gender, class, race, identity, heritage, health, sustainability, agriculture, literature, film, and culture, to name only a few related concepts and disciplines.

As we prepared for the course, Kella and I determined that we would ask the students to participate in a course blog and Twitter.  I had never blogged before and had my doubts about Twitter, but since I was going to ask the students to be involved in these activities, I concluded that I needed to know how they worked.  Several months prior to the course’s start, I therefore started posting to a blog about food-related topics in and around St. Louis (I wrote about food years ago for CitySearch and often focus on how food and literature intersect in my academic writing, so this was not a new topic to me).  I also opened a Twitter account and started tweeting.  Shortly after I began tweeting my blog posts, George Mahe, St. Louis Magazine’s Dining Editor, contacted me about writing for the magazine.  I quickly changed my mind about Twitter ‘s usefulness.

The connections I made through writing for the magazine proved invaluable for the course.  I invited three members of the local food community into the class as guest speakers.  All three guests—Reine Bayoc, chef-owner of Sweet Art ; Maude Bauschard, owner of Maude’s Market; and George Mahe—spoke not only about food but also about writing, particularly how important effective communication is regardless of one’s job or major.  Bayoc, for example, is currently writing a memoir, so her appearance during our food memoir unit made perfect sense.  At the time, students were working on their own remembered person/event paper in which the memory had to be connected to food in some way.  Thanks to The Learning Studio’s design, we recorded all of the guest speakers’ presentations.

Academic writing can sometimes seem arbitrary, particularly in entry-level courses.  Students often wonder what the larger purpose of an assignment is and approach the course as something “to get out of the way” before moving on to their major courses.  The practice of writing in and of itself provides a great means of improving one’s skills, and that’s the implicit understanding often made explicit to the students.   When writing is tied to a larger purpose, however, and the instructor and members from the outside community participate in writing on a regular basis and reinforce the need for deliberate practice, the students come to understand how important writing is well beyond the classroom; ideally, they also come to value how a basic composition course can help to launch their studies.

For an overview of the course, click on this link to see a presentation outline that Kella and I used when we presented at the Focus on Teaching & Technology Conference at UMSL last November.

I recently put together a proposal for a panel session that would bring a group of scholars and practitioners together to discuss issues related to the work-life interface. One of the experts on my proposed panel serves as an external consultant to organizations, and she mentioned that many people who work internally in organizations tend to have a very negative opinion of academics who conduct research in the area of the work-life interface. The argument is that many academics spend their time studying issues that have little to no practical value to organizations.

Of course, I would never put myself, or many other academics I work with, into that particular box. However, I know that there are an awful lot of academics who do fall into that stereotype of the “ivory tower” academic.

That got me thinking about my own philosophy and what I try to do as a professional. I was trained under the scientist-practitioner philosophy, which means that my work, whether it is consulting organizations or teaching students, is based in research, and, conversely, my research paradigm emphasizes the practical realities of organizational life.

None of this is to say that I lack an interest in understanding the inner workings of people – after all, I am a psychologist. I believe that basic research has led to many advances that have practical implications, but I also recognize that a lot of “applied” research has become so narrowly focused, and sometimes needlessly sophisticated, that it has the potential to render itself irrelevant to practitioners.

I know I’m not the only scientist-practitioner out there. I was trained to be a scientist-practitioner, so my teachers and mentors were scientist-practitioners themselves. I even work with several individuals that fit into that category, and I have a host of contacts whom I would identify as true scientist-practitioners as well. We do exist!

However, if applied psychology refuses to constantly pay attention to the “gap” between science and practice, then it runs the risk of rendering itself irrelevant to many people who deal with the day-to-day realities in organizations. And, if practitioners who deal with those day-to-day realities refuse to pay attention to solid research, then they run the risk of creating substantially less effective programs that are guided more by heuristics than sound science.

So, we have today the same struggle that has confronted applied psychology since its inception. We must constantly scrutinize the divide between scientific research and practical realities. Practitioners need to learn from researchers and utilize sound scientific processes when designing new initiatives and programs. Researchers, for their part, need to devote more resources toward the study of issues that concern practitioners and do a better job of communicating results in a way that is meaningful to people working in organizations. It sounds like a tall order, but if scientist-practitioners become more common in academia and in organizations, they can begin to diminish the gap and strengthen the relationship between science and practice.

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As professionals in training and development, one of our greatest challenges is helping individuals and organizations transfer learning from the classroom to the job. The accountability for that learning transfer lies with the learner, the leader, and with the organization in which the learner works. A few months ago, there was a post on LinkedIn in the CLO magazine group entitled “In one sentence, what’s the number one barrier to transferring learning back to the job?” There have been over 250 responses to that question to date (most of which are much longer than one sentence!) The answers consist of all of the usual suspects: it’s the learner’s fault for not taking responsibility for making the change; it’s the supervisor’s fault for not holding the learner accountable for changing; it’s the training department’s fault for being so disconnected from the work and worker; it’s the organization’s fault for not having a culture of support and reinforcement for learning and behavior change, and on and on.

My position is simple. It must be the wrong learning solution. For example, have you ever tried to screw in a nail with a power drill? Probably not, because common sense tells you that it wouldn’t work! Ironically, when it comes to learning, organizations often use the wrong tool for the job. I’ve seen this happen in numerous organizations where there was a problem with the systems in place, and they kept trying to “fix” the people by sending them to more training. This created more frustration with the systems and the organization, the necessary changes didn’t occur, and everyone was pointing fingers at who was at fault for the system still being broken.

If you’ve taken our Training and Development course, then you learned about the ADDIE process, which stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. There are many organizational factors at play when it comes to transferring learning to the job. However, one of the most critical components of developing an effective learning intervention is conducting a thorough analysis of the gap and determining the best way to close the gap. One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve seen organizations make when it comes to closing a performance gap is to try and use training to “fix” the problem. Training will only be effective when the proper needs assessment indicates that training is the right solution. And of course training cannot happen in a vacuum, thus it needs to be integrated into a much larger talent management process.

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In my last post on this blog, I emphasized the importance of “presence” as the primary element of the engagement experience. I stand by that definition of engagement, but I was criticized by both a reader who informed me that I “missed an essential point to promoting engagement…trust” and another blog for “[absolving] management from making an effort” because I did not highlight the importance of trust in my blog posting. Of course, this author also criticized me for not having given people a step-by-step guide to creating engagement – which could never exist because every context is different.

I decided to play the part of the good professional and respond to these critiques. Here’s a newsflash for everyone out there: trust does NOT equal engagement. If you have major trust issues with your employees, then why in the world are you spending time reading my blog post on engagement? Engagement is the least of your worries!

Trust is a crucial antecedent of engagement. If people lack trust in their direct supervisor, then it will serve as a barrier to the engagement experience. Workers need to:

• Trust that you will have their backs when needed;
• Trust that you will make decisions that will be good for the department;
• Trust that you will consider their well-being when making critical decisions;
• Trust that you will provide honest and constructive feedback about their performance; and
• Trust that you will not keep them in the dark regarding important issues.

And I’m sure there are many more things we need to trust about our supervisor.

Of course, developing trust takes time – lots and lots of time. It is easy to lose and difficult to gain. That, unfortunately, keeps deep mistrust from being much of an actionable issue. Sure, there are probably some things you can do to help improve the trusting relationship you have with your subordinates, but that assumes there is something there on which to build.

An Organizational Development perspective treats relationships as the primary unit of accomplishing goals. Establishing trust and rapport with your subordinates is the cornerstone of accomplishing anything – whether it is day-to-day performance or improving the engagement experience. However, don’t assume that establishing a trusting relationship with your subordinates is the solution. It is only the foundation on which to build an effective culture.

And if you have serious issues of mistrust between you and your subordinates, one of you may need to go. As in sports, though, the easiest way to change the culture of a work team or unit is to remove the person at the top: You.

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The Organizational Health Initiative at Saint Louis University emphasizes the importance of a psychologically healthy workplace in overall organizational performance. As a way of contributing to the concept of a psychologically healthy workplace, I attended and presented at the recent Psychologically Healthy Workplace Conference. It was probably the best conference experience I’ve ever had.

The topic of my particular talk focused on engagement. There are so many misconceptions out there about what it means to be engaged at work. Some people think it relates to your workplace friends or workplace relationships. To that I say being too social at work and having too many close friends sounds like the archenemy of performance.

Other people think that it means loving your organization and feeling connected to the organization’s mission. To that I respond that loving your organization can occur for a variety of reasons (such as great pay or benefits), and feeling connected to the organization’s mission means nothing if you can’t perform your job well.

I am not bashing the benefits that people can experience when they feel connected to the mission of the organization or have a few close friends at work. Both of those can be instrumental in an employee’s sense of well-being. It’s just that those two things are not engagement.

To really understand engagement, you have to go back to the original definition that Kahn presented in 1990. He argued that engagement was defined as “psychological presence.” That means that to be engaged in something – like a hobby or a sport – you need to be psychologically present in what you are doing at the time. In layman’s terms, it means you are harnessing every ounce of you – your energy, your concentration, your emotion – and applying it to what you are doing at the moment. That is the engagement experience.

I’m sure those of you who have heard me speak before will not be hugely surprised to find that my talk made a few waves. That’s because when I start talking about engagement, I start talking about the importance of understanding the unique engagement experience of individual employees. What do they feel like when they are engaged? What are the things that happen in the organization that facilitate that experience? What are the things that happen in the organization that inhibit it?

Now, that doesn’t sound controversial – until you realize that many consulting firms make a living providing people with misinformation about engagement. Engagement is about a best friend at work. Engagement is about what your boss does to engage you. Engagement is about feeling connected to the mission. If I were British, I would yell “Bollocks!”

Engagement isn’t about any of those things. Engagement is about feeling mentally, physically, and emotionally present while you are completing your work tasks. Being present means you’re not distracted by worries at home. Being present means you’re not thinking about something else you’d rather be doing. True, your boss can have a positive impact on the engagement experience, but there are many factors that can influence “presence.”

Being present means:

1. Having sufficient personal resources (energy, time, skills) to meet work demands;
2. Possessing sufficient interest in meeting those demands that you are willing to marshal your resources toward effectively responding to them; and
3. Responding to demands in an environment that does not promote distractions and interruptions that might disrupt your flow.

That’s what being present means, and that’s what it means to be engaged at work. So, if you want to better manage your people, create an environment and a culture that promotes actual work engagement, not just one that promotes friendships or effective management.

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In today’s market landscape, creating an effective work-life interface is essential as a way of managing stress. A recent poll in the UK found that more people ranked work-life balance as a top priority when looking for a new job (at 36%, the highest result in the poll) than they did a competitive salary (at 31%). Similar polls in the US and around the world continue to find that people crave a better interface between the work and non-work lives.

What does this mean?

It means that many workers around the world are struggling to keep the stress and demands of their work lives from spilling over into their home lives. Some organizations provide greater levels of flexibility (such as flextime or telecommuting) that permit employees to better manage and juggle their work and personal life demands. That can be an effective tool, if you (a) have access to flexible workplace practices, and (b) possess the personality and competency necessary to utilize them effectively.

Instead, though, some people try to ‘get more done’ by working on two or more tasks at the same time. We see it all the time. People talk on the phone while checking their email. People will be an active participant in a meeting and shift their attention back and forth between the meeting and information coming in on their smartphones. We affectionately refer to this as multitasking.

Is multitasking really an effective way of ‘getting more done’? The research on this topic says, unequivocally, NO! For example, I recently posted elsewhere that multitasking can decrease performance by as much as 40%.

In a recent study my colleagues and I completed, we found that people who responded to emails while checking their voicemail messages responded to 19% fewer emails that people who did not have the distraction of checking their voicemail messages. Furthermore, the multitasking resulted in a decrease of 18% in the accuracy of email responses. So, not only did multitasking slow people down, it also lowered the quality of their work.

Perhaps even more damning was the fact that multitasking resulted in increased levels of stress and negative mood. So, not only did performance suffer, but so did multitaskers’ well-being.

The conclusion we can draw from all of this is that multitasking is not an effective way to ‘get more done.’ It also is not an effective way of decreasing the stress that results from a poor work-life interface. All you do is end up less efficient and more stressed. I’m pretty sure that is self-defeating!

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As we enter the month of August, parents are getting ready to send their children back to school. College students are starting to make their trek back to campus, and faculty member are diligently preparing their classes.

Now is a good time to reflect and share some of the important lessons I have learned over the past few years. These are not a “Top 5″ list or anything like that (you’ll see the problem with that down below). To be better prepared for the upcoming challenges that a new school year present, I am sharing my wisdom.

Lesson #1: Most lists are arbitrarily put together. Any time you see a ‘Top 5′ or ‘Top 10′ list of important ideas, usually they don’t mean anything. There was no systematic process used to identify the ‘Top 5 ways to manage stress’ or the ‘Top 7 habits of successful employees’. This is not say that those 5 ways to manage stress or those 7 habits are unimportant. But, they typically only represent the author’s opinion, not some sound, systematic process.

Lesson #2: Experts often make up much of what they say! I know it sounds odd, but most experts know only so much. They have a particular field of study or expertise, and they fill in the gaps with things that sound logical or intuitive, rather than being based on anything scientific. They typically over-generalize from previous research (meaning they read more into research results than are actually there). This is especially true when something major happens, like a school shooting, a terrorist attack, or a plane crash. We all do this: speaking on topics based on what we know and filling in gaps based on what sounds logical. Remember that before you make a major life decision based on the work of one ‘expert’.

Lesson #3: No major innovation was developed by playing it safe! Every major life innovation over the last 100 years (and more) resulted from someone (or a bunch of someones) taking huge risks, being willing to experiment and meet with a series of failures before they found success. I would never suggest that we all go out and take a series of major risks, but we always need to remember that if we want to innovate, we have to take some amount of risk (read, calculated risk). Most of the good things in life require some risk: marriage, parenting, love, hope. Without the risk, you will not get the reward.

Lesson #4: Most people want to enjoy their work! Believe it or not, most people do not hate to work. However, they want to have fun while they work because the more fun we have, the more camaraderie we develop in our jobs, the less it feels just like something we have to do, and the more it feels like something we want to do. Add to that the feeling that you are doing something meaningful, and you are set for a productive, engaging work life. It’s getting to that point that can be difficult. But, if you are not there now, keep learning, keep reflecting, and keep searching, because there is something out there for you. But, remember Lesson #5.

Lesson #5: Change is really damn hard! And, the bigger the change, the harder it is. Don’t ever let anyone try to convince you that change is easy. Whether it is getting a new job, changing your eating habits, quitting smoking, or changing your outlook on life, it’s going to be difficult. But, if you keep trying, if you learn from failure, and if you can generate some small wins early, you will increase the likelihood that your ultimate goal will be reached.

These are just a few of the things I’ve learned along my life journey. What have you learned? Are you willing to share?

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According to a recent news story, Generation Y (A.K.A. Millennial) employees are more likely to expect to make high salaries, while simultaneously avoiding overtime and having access to and using lucrative vacation packages. A greater percentage of this age group, as compared to their older generational counterparts, was likely to state that “work was just to make a living.”

Before we jump to the conclusion that this age group is lazy or that they have a sense of entitlement (as some others have done), I would offer up a different explanation. I believe that perhaps more workers in this age group have idealistic expectations about what their careers are all about. After all, they are continuously bombarded with concepts like “having it all” and “work-life balance.” This terminology is strictly person-focused, failing to even remotely hint at what the organization receives in exchange for that big paycheck and infinite vacation time. As Jack Welch so vehemently argued, there are “work-life choices” to be made. Typically, lucrative benefits that only indirectly benefit the employer come with a consequence – in the form of lower pay or fewer career paths.

That is not to say that younger workers are wrong for valuing a fulfilling life. In fact, the Organizational Health Initiative at Saint Louis University emphasizes the importance of work flexibility practices as a way of creating benefits for employees and employers. Work flexibility practices – like flextime, telecommuting, and compressed work weeks – allow employees to work non-traditional schedules. These non-traditional schedules allow employees to more effectively meet work and non-work demands.

Yet, people should keep in mind that different jobs, different careers, and different employers come with different levels of work flexibility. Successful utilization of work flexibility requires higher levels of conscientiousness, self-control, self-accountability, and other characteristics that vary among employees. Therefore, greater flexibility sounds great in an idealistic way, but an individual’s ability to successfully use flexibility depends on very realistic factors.

Some of the same criticisms used against Millennials were lobbied at members of Generation X in the 90s, and look how we turned out. We now spend our time criticizing the next generation of workers, simply because they don’t start out “just like us.” Perhaps this time, our concerns about this new generation will prove valid (which didn’t happen for Generation X workers), or perhaps this new generation of workers will mature and develop expectations that more closely match our own.

I would suspect that as many of these younger workers make their way into the workforce, they will begin to take stock of (a) what it takes to be successful, and (b) what it takes to make them happy. It would not surprise me to see some of these workers change their attitudes after 5, 10, or 15 years in the workplace. What it takes to make you happy at 20 is not necessarily the same as at 30…or 40…or 50. Obviously, though, something will have to give because great pay at a slow-paced job that provides you with lucrative vacation benefits defines a job that I have never been privileged to encounter, and I suspect that it defines a job that few, if any, of these younger workers will encounter either.

But, hey, maybe I’m wrong! Tell me if you think so.

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