GABRIELLA COSLOVICH AND BENJAMIN PREISS
03 Apr, 2012 03:00 AM
Article from Stock and Land
''Happiness is surely among the simplest of human emotions and the most spontaneous."
SO BEGINS David Malouf's gently meandering and deeply philosophical 2011 essay, The Happy Life, in which he contemplates why it is that in our comfortable, cosseted, and affluent Western society happiness still eludes so many of us. It's a big question with no easy answers and Malouf probes it in his typically thoughtful and engaging style.
In sharp contrast is a document that has gained notoriety in the past week, RMIT University's lumberingly titled "behavioural capability framework". It, too, is about happiness of sorts - it spells out in exhaustive detail how RMIT staff and academics should be enthusiastic about their jobs.
While it stops short of asking them to "whistle while they work", it does expect them to "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative," to quote the famous Johnny Mercer tune. If only the "BCF" were that catchy. Instead, it's a product of the latest trend that's sweeping the business world - an emphasis on ''positivity'' in organisations.
But so far all RMIT's 12-page, dot-point cajolement to be happy at work has succeeded in doing is raising the ire of its academics, who resent being told to be "passionate", "positive" and "optimistic" at a time of budget cuts, increasing workloads and student numbers, and where casual workers do 40 per cent of the teaching. They also resent the implication they are not already committed to excellence and passionate about their work.
"It's a lot of HR claptrap … on the ground we just think that it's a complete joke. I'm glad it's being ridiculed … but the more serious thing about it is the money that's gone into it," says one RMIT academic, who does not want to be named.
RMIT paid external consultants Mercer $147,895 to create the BCF, a process which took a year and involved "focus groups" of RMIT staff and "stakeholders". In it, staff are urged to "leverage relationships with stakeholders", "think ahead of the curve", "contribute to areas of strategic importance", "implement initiatives", "facilitate a culture of commitment", and "champion the relentless pursuit of excellence".
Even RMIT's Human Resources executive director, Marcia Gough, agrees that the BCF, despite its emphasis on passion in the workplace, is not a particularly ''passionate'' document. ''No, that's not a word I would use to describe it,'' she says.
''I think it's a really useful document, it's an extremely useful document and will clarify a lot of things for staff.''
Bollocks, says Australia's chief warrior against weasel words, author Don Watson. ''It's just managerial trash and there's nothing more to be said about it, really,'' says Watson, to whom The Age emailed a copy of the BCF.
"If I were working in an organisation and this were put in front of me, I would seriously consider training for social work; I would just leave. It must be humiliating for staff to read this, unless the next generation has been raised on this stuff and they think it's OK.
"What's crazy about this is that RMIT is a very good institution. The question is, why would it bother. What possible advantage is gained by this?"
While RMIT has drawn flak for its all-too-easily ridiculed BCF, it is by no means the only Australian university or organisation that has caught the positivity bug. Fostering positivity in the workplace is a mushrooming management trend - one that has its roots, ironically, in academia, and that, like many fads, can be traced back to the United States.
About 10 years ago, the Centre for Positive Organisational Scholarship was established at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. As explained on its website, the centre for POS is "devoted to energising and transforming organisations through research on the theory and practise of positive organising and leadership" and is "passionately dedicated to the development and dissemination of POS research".
Another man intent on spreading the good vibrations is Professor Martin Seligman, the much-hyped father of the "Positive Psychology" movement, and author of several books including the best-selling Authentic Happiness and the more recent Flourish, which spells out Seligman's new and improved theory of positivity.
His original theory of "Authentic Happiness" has been jettisoned in favour of the "Wellbeing theory", which, according to Flourish, has five elements: "positive emotion, engagement, meaning, positive relationships and accomplishment. A handy mnemonic is PERMA".
Seligman is the director of the Positive Psychology Centre at the University of Pennsylvania, which has been providing resilience training to US Army soldiers. He's also promoting resilience Down Under, as one of Adelaide's ''Thinkers in Residence'' this year and next.
According to the South Australian government's website, he ''will join forces with partners from government, business and community to drive action on wellbeing and resilience for the citizens of South Australia''. Among the South Australian citizens privy to Seligman's counsel are the students of St Peter's College, an Anglican boys' school in Adelaide, where the psychologist is spending part of his residency.
Dr Kim Cameron, a co-founder of the Centre for Positive Organisational Scholarship, and the author of Positive Leadership, says the positivity movement has been growing in US organisations for the past six to seven years, and in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, for the past five years - and that includes Australia.
"In Australia, the last five years have seen a major increase in positivity in organisations. At the University of Melbourne, a new centre is about to be created in the School of Education, and St Peter's College in Adelaide has incorporated amazing positive practices in their school with dramatic results," Cameron says, via email.
The service industries, such as retail, hospitality and banking, have long required employees to be genial and accommodating, and to punctuate interactions with the public with such insipid catchphrases as ''how's your day been so far?'', but now the concept of positivity is spreading even to universities and high schools, places where a healthy scepticism to platitudes would be expected.
Certainly, the positivity movement is not without controversy and has spawned sceptics as well as advocates. But laying scepticism aside for a moment, could there be merit in trying to encourage positivity at work, even among scholars who are trained to be doubting and inquiring?
Yes say the proponents of POS, an acronym you can expect to see more of. ''Rigour and interrogation are not inherently the opposite of adopting a positive approach to research and investigation,'' says Cameron. ''One can be an excellent scholar and still be positive.''
A paper written by Cameron and three of his peers, Effects of Positive Practices on Organisational Effectiveness, published in The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science in January last year, noted that "evidence exists that positive practices (e.g., respectful treatment, personal development) produce positive effects in employees (e.g., satisfaction, wellbeing), which produces positive individual behaviour (e.g., retention, engagement), which in turn, produces organisational effectiveness (e.g., profitability, productivity)".
More study is needed, though, before the last link in the chain - that is, that positivity is also good for profits and productivity - can be empirically confirmed.
Interestingly, the paper also notes that it's important to keep in mind that "some of the greatest triumphs, most noble virtues, and highest achievements result from the presence of negative occurrences".
"In fact, common human experience and abundant scientific evidence support the idea that negativity has an important place in producing positive outcomes," it says.
Experience and common sense tell us that whingers and malcontents can sap the energy and morale of a workplace and that, conversely, enthusiasm is contagious. A positive workplace is intrinsically better to work in than one infected by low morale. But can suppressing negative emotions be equally detrimental?
Workers in many fields are required to express emotions contrary to their true feelings to conform with workplace expectations. Psychologists have called this practice ''emotional labour''. Assistant Professor Catherine Leighton, from the University of Western Australia, has studied the subject for the past seven years. She says ''emotional labour'' can take a heavy toll on workers and lead to burnout, poor job satisfaction and a desire to quit.
Leighton says managers might reasonably expect their workers to display ''appropriate emotions'' in fields such as sales or nursing. ''You don't want your employees to get grumpy at customers.''
But in other fields, such as academia, staff might feel resentful if they're told to put on an emotional front. ''We need a little bit of flexibility in being ourselves and not a robot in the workplace.''
Organisational psychologist Peter Cotton says emotional labour can make workers very unhappy. Disturbed sleep and tension are some symptoms of emotional labour, he says.
''You're actually brooding and ruminating and not able to sleep because you're dreading going to work the next day.''
Cotton says building a more resilient workforce that can withstand pressure and stress has become one of the latest management trends. Resilience has become a ''buzz word'' and managers hope this corporate philosophy can help to reduce absenteeism, he says. Cotton believes it is possible to foster resilience but this requires a strong and genuine commitment from managers.
''People can learn to increase the level of positive emotion they experience but you have to build that up over time,'' he says. ''You don't do that in a whiz-bang one-day seminar.''
As a lecturer in RMIT's school of Media and Communication, Dr Philip Dearman is finely attuned to how language can be manipulated, and as part of his teaching he alerts students to the incursion of management speak and methods into everyday life. "And that's precisely what the BCF is an example of," he says.
But while he finds the language of the BCF "banal and ordinary", he thinks there's a bigger issue at play here, and it's the politics behind the code.
"This isn't a question of whether the language is accurate, or not, and this where I think I depart from the kind of language-focused analysis of Don Watson and his ilk. It's actually about the politics of the situation we're in, and how we go about negotiating our way through growing student numbers with no guarantee of more resources.
"The document is just one example of many forms of communication that signal an attempt to very deliberately anchor responsibility for outcomes - for student welfare, for learning outcomes, for research incomes and 'output', and so on - to the individual worker.
''And when you're in a situation where funding is short, where casual workers now undertake about 40 per cent of teaching roles, where working weeks average around 50 to 60 hours or more, where there's constant change in procedures, changes in IT interfaces, 'reforms' in policies and so on, then any moment where we become explicitly aware of the politics of individualising responsibility, can cause people to get pretty upset."
The BCF has been so divisive that RMIT University was forced to go to Fair Work Australia last month to stop the National Tertiary Education Union from telling its members that the code was in breach of the university's collective agreement and encouraging them not to sign it. Fair Work Australia ruled that RMIT had not breached its workplace agreement with staff by introducing the framework. The NTEU has appealed the decision.
NTEU Victorian secretary, Colin Long, says tight budgets mean university managers are under increasing pressure. But he believes they still need to earn their workers' respect and cannot demand loyalty through behavioural codes forged by external consultants.
''We don't think universities or any employer have the right to tell staff how to think and feel,'' he says. ''If they want the sort of allegiance and enthusiasm they're demanding through these measures they should earn it by being good employers.''
RMIT staff have also been concerned that the code could be used against them, but HR head Marcia Gough assures that "not one single sentence in the BCF can be used to terminate an employee".
She says the BCF was introduced in response to a 2010 employee survey that had an 88 per cent reply rate. The message was loud and clear, says Gough. Staff wanted more feedback on how they were performing and how to plan their careers more actively, and they also mentioned concerns about conduct.
But for Don Watson, the BCF just doesn't make sense and is yet another ''puerile'' and ''asinine'' case of management speak insinuating itself into everyday life.
"Why would you talk to educated, competent people in this way? I think the big test is, would you talk to your mother in this way? And no, you wouldn't, unless your mother's in HR."
Article from Stock and Land
