research

New research from Celerant Consulting suggests that over half of UK business leaders find winning the hearts and minds of employees the most difficult aspect of delivering change within companies.

A survey of over 600 senior executives across Europe and the United States, carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit, suggests that the majority of change programmes - structured approaches to implementing and managing change within a company - fail. 64% of UK leaders questioned said that half or fewer of the change programmes they have undertaken in the past five years have been successful.

The most significant challenges faced by UK companies in executing change programmes include winning the hearts and minds of staff (51%) and overcoming a lack of buy-in from local management (36%). UK bosses recognise that 'effective communications' (25%) and 'employee buy-in' (21%) are the most important factors in successful implementation, compared to global averages of 19% and 17% respectively.

Despite the high possibility of failure, the survey suggests that UK leaders spend more on change initiatives than their counterparts in any other country. The average expenditure by UK leaders in the last year (£5.43m) was 36% higher than the global average. This comes against a background of an estimated UK spend on consultants of £10bn in 2007, according to the Management Consultancies Association.

The survey also reveals that 57% of UK business leaders say their planned change programmes for the coming year are a direct response to the credit crunch. Accordingly, over a third (40%) of UK leaders plan to increase their spending on change initiatives over the next 12 months, while only 12% intend to spend less.

The quest for operational efficiency is driving change programmes. Almost two-thirds (64%) of UK business leaders say that improving their company's operational efficiency is the top issue on their agenda. In a further sign that the credit crunch is impacting on the corporate agenda, reducing costs (58%) is seen to be significantly more important than increasing revenues (43%).

Ian Clarkson, chief executive at Celerant, said: "A slowdown always put the question of 'how do we respond?' on the table - and frequently the answer becomes 'we need to change'. Yet, as leaders themselves admit that the majority of initiatives do not work, what should they do to ensure they successfully manage the process of change? "Our survey shows that companies fail in the execution of change initiatives because they are unable to win the hearts and minds of employees at all levels of their organisation. This happens when people do not trust their managers or understand what values the management team stands for. Too often a change programme is seen as an excuse to make people redundant. In order to successfully deliver change, leaders need to inspire people with a sense of urgency, have a clearly communicated vision and plan and continually motivate staff. As change management becomes part of day-to-day management, only those leaders who can successfully execute it will survive and flourish."

Ralph Hargrow, global chief people officer at Molson Coors Brewing Company, said: "Change for the most part is personal. You have to speak to people personally, to have them understand and embrace the promise of change. That requires a lot of work. Broadly speaking, the easier it is for individuals to understand and embrace the personal benefit of a change for themselves, the easier it is to win their hearts and minds. The more difficult it is to paint a vision, the more difficult it is to effect and embrace such change."

Consulting Times July 2008

New Zealand's transformation into a lean and competitive economy could be at the cost of the health of Kiwis when they should be in the prime of their life.

The University of Canterbury's Geohealth Laboratory contributed to a landmark international study, published this week in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), that found the gap between rich and poor was one of the most powerful indicators of the health of young adults.

The study is based on mortality and income figures for New Zealand and 125 other countries, covering nearly 95 per cent of the world's population. The link between income inequality and poor health was found to be true in both rich and poor nations. The study authors concluded that social inequality seems to have a "universal negative impact" on health, particularly in the ages from 15 to 39.

"Humans are social animals and are not well constructed physiologically to survive in uncooperative surroundings – particularly in the prime of life," it said. "Income inequality is associated with higher mortality rates in all nations worldwide, not just affluent ones. Although the direct mechanisms that operate are likely to be different between different countries, there does not seem to be a beneficial impact on health anywhere."

Rodney Routledge, chairman of the Community Employment Initiatives Group in Christchurch, said the study's findings matched his own anecdotal observations from dealing with the city's poor and disadvantaged in the wake of the radical restructuring of New Zealand's economy in the 1980s. He found the gap between rich and poor was widening, and that had a clear impact on health and well-being. "One of the observations is that social isolation has become a major problem right across the board," he said. "Families need two incomes to get by, and people don't socialise with neighbours like they used to. Time with their family is cut back. "But for all this Government's faults, they've done a lot to increase access to primary healthcare for low-income people. They've tried to make it a preventative community focus."

He said access to healthcare despite income had significant benefits to the wellbeing of the poor and disadvantaged. Low unemployment levels hid the reality of the hidden unemployed, who do not feature on Government statistics.

PEOPLE on Australian Workplace Agreements earn an average of $106 ($NZ123) a week less than their counterparts on collective agreements, the biggest study of the new workplace laws has found.

The study of 8343 people, half-funded by the Federal Government, shows workers on AWAs earned an average $1069.57 a week, compared with $1175.97 by workers on collective agreements, with both groups working an average 44 hours a week.

The Australia@Work report, by the University of Sydney's Workplace Research Centre, shows why the debate over wages and working conditions has been ranked by voters as a major election issue since the March 2006 Work Choices law began to take effect.

The most recent Bureau of Statistics figures suggest workers on AWAs are earning 9 per cent more than those on collective agreements. But the bureau only measured the first eight weeks of Work Choices, up to May 2006, while this new study is based on data gathered until July this year. The study found collective bargaining has been disappearing for many years and that the trend is accelerating, helped by Work Choices and AWAs.

Common law contracts are also growing in popularity. Employees on these contacts are overwhelmingly managers and executives, and their average salary is $1584.29 a week.

The report also reveals Australians have some of the longest working hours in the world. More than a fifth work 50 hours or more a week. Miners work an average 55-hour week, and 21 per cent of all workers wished they could work fewer hours.

The Howard Government introduced AWAs in 1996 to encourage employers and staff to directly negotiate pay and conditions, but the report finds that direct bargaining is increasingly uncommon. Forty-six per cent of all people on AWAs say they had no opportunity to negotiate their contents. Of 177,000 people who moved onto AWAs this year, 56 per cent said there was no negotiation. The authors suspect employers are using "non-negotiated AWAs" to move workers from award entitlements to the cheaper minimum legal standards.

As this trend emerged early this year, the Government introduced a fairness test in May to stop employees trading away entitlements like overtime and shift penalties without fair compensation. The report is the first instalment of a five-year study in which the same people will be interviewed each year. It was jointly funded by the NSW Labor Council and the Federal Government through the Australia Research Council. The report also found high-skill employees on
non-negotiated AWAs are working more paid and unpaid hours than those on individual contracts. Staff on these take-it-or leave-it AWAs "earn the lowest hourly rate regardless of skill level," the report says.

James Chessell, a spokesman for the Minister for the Minister for Workplace Relations, Joe Hockey, challenged the conclusions of the study. "We think the ABS figures are a more reliable guide than a study cooked up by [Research Centre director] John Buchanan and his cronies," Mr Chessell said.

The rate of home ownership in New Zealand has continued to slide over the past five years, but is expected to tumble over the next 10, according to the latest research.  The Centre for Housing Research, Aotearoa New Zealand (CHRANZ) today released figures based on the 2006 Census which showed young people were hardest hit when it came to the housing market.

Analysts found that the overall rate of home ownership in the 2001-2006 period was 66.9 per cent, down from 67.8 per cent from 1996-2001.  The latest figure has New Zealand roughly level-pegging with home ownership rates in Britain (68 per cent), the United States (68 per cent), and Australia (71 per cent), well ahead of Germany (40 per cent), but lagging behind Ireland's 80 per cent.

Those aged between 20 and 40 saw the greatest reduction in their share of owner-occupier tenure across both periods.  The sting in the tail of the research findings is the forecast that home ownership rates are projected to drop by a whopping 5 percentage points, to 61.9 per cent between 2006 and 2016.

Within this figure are regional variations which predict that Gisborne and Auckland will have the lowest home ownership rates, at 57 per cent and 58.3 per cent respectively, with Marlborough the highest at 70.0 per cent, in 2016.  The number of owner-occupier households is expected to increase by 43,010 and renter households by 151,890 between 2006 and 2016.

The strongest growth in both owner-occupier and renter households is expected to occur in the Auckland region.  Over the past five years, the actual number of households owning their own home has increased, but has been outpaced by the number of households renting.

Auckland, Canterbury, Bay of Plenty, and Waikato experienced the greatest growth in the number of owner-occupier households from 200-2006, echoing the 1991-2001 period.  In the latest period, the percentage growth in the number of private-renter households was greatest in Auckland, Wellington, Marlborough and Bay of Plenty.

The projected growth figures do not include second homes (such as holiday homes) which are not rented to other households.  The highest proportion of multi-unit developments will continue to be in the Auckland and Wellington regions where the pressure on land supply is greatest, researchers said.

A Wellington study has found that more people get blood clots from sitting down for long periods at work than on long-haul flights.

Professor Richard Beasley, of the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, said researchers studied the risk factors of 62 people under the age of 65 admitted to Wellington Hospital with deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism.

One-third of them had been seated for long periods at work in the previous four weeks, and only one in five had been on a long-haul flight.

Professor Beasley was surprised by the length of time workers had spent sitting down. Some had worked in a desk job for up to 14 hours.

"Some of them were seated for up to four or five hours for a time without getting up to move around." Managers, call-centre workers and taxi drivers were among them.

But the results did not mean that sitting still at work was more dangerous than taking a long-haul flight. Other factors such as cabin pressure had been implicated as contributing to the risk on flights.

Researchers did not know the proportion of people who had desk jobs compared with those who travelled.

Professor Beasley said the public recognised long-haul flights as a risk factor, but there was less awareness of the dangers of sitting still at work.

Office workers should stand and move around every half hour to an hour, he said.

ACC had committed funding to further research on how the work environment contributed to the risk.

Professor Beasley is to present the research findings at the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand's conference this month.