Satisfaction does equal higher returns

A fairly common statement heard these days in organisations is “high employee satisfaction translates to higher earnings”. Gautam Gosh pointed me to a recent paper by Alex Edmans, a Finance Professor at Wharton which compares;

stock returns of companies with high employee satisfaction and compares them to various benchmarks — the broader market, peer firms in the same industry, and companies with similar characteristics. His research indicates that firms cited as good places to work earn returns that are more than double those of the overall market.

What I found interesting is the investment market seems to ignore public available report, such as the Fortune “Best Places to Work” when there is statistical evidence of companies with higher employee satisfaction have higher returns, 14%. This just seems so obvious to me, or am I missing something?

The abstract is below:-

This paper analyzes the relationship between employee satisfaction and long-run stock performance. An annually rebalanced portfolio of Fortune magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For in America” earned 14% per year from 1998-2005, over double the market return. The portfolio also outperformed industry- and characteristics-matched benchmarks; controlling for risk, it yielded a four-factor alpha of 0.64%. These findings have three main implications. First, employee satisfaction may improve corporate performance rather than representing inefficiently excessive non-pecuniary compensation. Second, the stock market does not fully value intangibles, even when independently verified by a publicly available survey. This suggests that intangible investment generally may not be incorporated into short-term prices, providing support for managerial myopia theories. Third, socially responsible investing (“SRI”) screens need not reduce investment returns.

The paper is heavy reading but there is a good summary available on Knowledge @Whartons, How Investing in Intangibles — Like Employee Satisfaction — Translates into Financial Returns.

Quiting your job?

Here is a bit of humour.

When most people quit they hand in a resignation letter and tend to speak with their boss. Try this for an approach, link.

Maybe not :-),

It is not real, but it is real funny.

If you did get a resignation letter like this you would certainly wonder about the satisfaction of your workforce. Which sets the stage for tomorrow’s post on employee satisfaction.

Too busy for balance?

Work life balance seems to be one of those things everyone is always searching for but no one really has, ok except for Markus Frind. There are never enough hours in my day to do everything I want or need to.

Today I read a great post from Kenny Moore, who got me hooked with a great first line:

Work-Life balance is, at best, a fabrication. At worst, a cruel hoax.

Even though I personally don’t agree with some of the points but I do agree with one of his main points, you can’t have it all and expect work life balance, instead you will have stress.

  • Want a high-flying business career? Go for it.
  • Might you desire to get married, raise a family and live in conjugal bliss? Good for you.
  • Maybe you’d prefer to use your artistic talents and create a world of new possibilities? God bless.
  • Perhaps you’d want to be independent and care free? I’m envious.

But if you expect to have it all, get ready to play center stage in your own exciting Greek Tragedy.

Another interesting point that really resonated with me was around making choices and requiring a focus on “being” rather than “doing.”

A final though Kenny mentions “The Good Samaritan Experiment” from Princeton Theological Seminary, where even “men of the cloth” were not a good Samaritan when they were in a rush.

In the Princeton experiment, when the seminarians had their homily prepared, they were asked to walk to another part of the campus and deliver their sermon to waiting students. Half were told to hurry, because they were running late. The others were informed there was no rush, they had plenty of time.

As they journeyed across campus, the experimenters arranged to have an actor slumped as a “victim” strategically positioned along their route so that the seminarians were forced to step over or around the man.

So, who stopped to help … and who didn’t? They were all budding “men of the cloth” on their way to deliver a sermon on just such a situation.

What the experiment revealed was that those who were in a hurry passed the “victim” by. Those with time to spare, stopped and helped. It seems altruism and our commitment to our fellow man is less connected to our religious beliefs and more closely aligned with having some free time.

Enterprise Search

For me one of the keys to being a productive knowledge worker is having access to the right information at the right time. This gets even more important as workers begin to self-publish, basically share their knowledge, behind the firewall using blogs, wikis, forums etc. A organisation needs to leverage this data to turn it into information and subsequently knowledge, this can only be done if others can find the data.

Enter enterprise search, which finally is becoming a hot topic. Sadly many organisations lack decent enterprise search tools, which is very concerning and limits their ability to compete.

Google announced an interesting addition to their search offering on Friday, the ability to integrate both internal and external search result.

Related Web Results allows users to see public search results from a Custom Search Business Edition right next to their Google Search Appliance or Google Mini search results. This could be useful when searching for information that would also exist in public discussion groups, forums, or external blogs as shown in the picture below:

This new feature is available to Google Mini or Google Search Appliance owners and downloadable from Google Enterprise Labs.

Useless facts about Twitter

I was reading Twitter Facts during lunch and thought, “how many of us are in Australia?” so I spent a few minutes to find out. I used 2 different tools, first TwitDir and then Twitter’s in built search.

Just to note both search tools have limits. TwitDir only searches public timelines, while both search Usernames, Locations and Biographical information as such they can generate weird results.

From TwitDir:-

  • Sydney – 1,002
  • Melbourne – 840
  • Brisbane – 282
  • Perth – 246
  • Adelaide – 136
  • Canberra – 88
  • Darwin – 67
  • Total – 2,661 they have 2,228 Twits who are listed in Australia, probably the location does not include Australia

From Twitter directly:-

  • Sydney – 1,353
  • Melbourne – 1,136
  • Brisbane – 407
  • Perth – 346
  • Adelaide -183
  • Canberra – 134
  • Darwin – 49
  • Total – 3,608 they have 3,017 Twits who are listed in Australia again, probably the location does not include Australia

More on censorship

A follow up post, I found a few more articles on this whole censorship issue in Australia from numerous sources and some more thoughts.

There has been a huge discussion on Twitter between social media and web folks who I personally consider experts in the online world but many of them seem confused. Not good. Some of the questions/issues raised, of course many may be overreactions.

  • Based on the current interpretations Second Life really should be banned in Australia.
  • Seesmic a micro video blogging tool would be banned if it had a dedicated porn feed.
  • If YouTube (of related service) had 1 offending video would the whole service be blocked until the 1 video was removed.
  • Why is pornography (opt out) more offending than crime or terrorism which has an opt in list?
  • What about VOIP tools (ie Skype) will they be banned because they could be used for pornography and cannot be blocked due to the traffic encryption.

Some links first up from The 463 “While You Were Out: Australia Makes Plans to Censor the Internet“:

However, as The Australian notes, “in Britain, only between 200 and 1000 child pornography sites have been included on a blacklist.”

And, Conroy is talking about potentially millions of general pornography sites (however defined) and other sites that depict violence (ditto). Plus, Australian sensibilities are hardly “European” when it comes to community standards.

An Op Ed piece by Dr Peter John Chen in The Age “Who’s afraid of the net?“:

The policy is reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ anti-panic glasses, which turned black when confronted with something that might scare you.

Second Op Ed from the Australian “Net-nanny state worth watching”

The plan risks giving parents a false sense of security because it will not be possible to block all offensive material. Equally, educational and other non-offensive sites will almost certainly be blocked in error. And research shows blanket restrictions can have a dramatic impact on the speed at which broadband services operate.

Finally a link from Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ “More on Australian online censorship“.

Mandatory censorship of the internet

The new Labour Government had announced there intend as part of the election campaign to introduce filtering of the internet and on Dec 31st they provided further details on what would be happening with mandatory filtering of the Internet by ISPs.

Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material.

Personally I am against any form of censorship. Its that simple. But with this I am also confused, you can opt-out and have an unfiltered huh?

Senator Conroy says anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service.

Now just because someone has a foot fetish and wants uncensored access means they could be put on a list of “bad people”, and who gets to store that information? An opt in list such as the one for crime and terrorism makes far more sense.

Further to this some of the content that is being banned on the Internet (X18+) is available for purchase on DVD in Canberra the nations capital!

Highly confused like lots of people.

There has been lots of discussion over the last day, I don’t know all the facts more research is required, here are some links if you want to read more.

Taking control of information overload

Something I have been struggling with for about 18 months is information overload, who hasn’t, especially with regard to email and RSS feeds and to a lesser extend podcasts.

To date my method of coping has been to unsubscribe (I removed about 500 blog feeds) or ignore the stream of information (which I do with email subscriptions), this works to a point. I still keep up with the big stories, using the assumption that the limited number of blogs I do follow will point me to the really important stuff, this I must say works well. However I am missing a lot of other interesting stuff and sometimes it takes a week or two for me to catch on that something big is going on.

This morning I found a great post from Steve Rubel (via Twitter from Techmeme) on how to be an information ninja, where Steve provides a run down of how to use Google Reader to control the information overload. The post has 5 key sections:-

* The Core Philosophy: Google Reader is a database and a feed reader
* Continually add tons of feeds in organized, methodical way
* Establish a taxonomy that makes retrieval and sharing easy using on-the-fly tagging
* Annotate your data by connecting Reader to Gmail or Blogger
* Putting it all together – sorting, searching and sharing

After reading it I realised why I was unable to keep up with the information flow, I was not managing it very well. I guess a new years resolution will be to sort out this information flow.

Listing of Top 100 HR blogs

Came across a list of the Top 100 HR blogs from back in September. An interesting read and well worth checking them out if you are looking to expand your feeds.

A couple of thoughts. First it is good to see some of the older blogs (2 year +) there and a lot of new ones. Secondly there are a couple from the southern hemisphere the now closed Now Hiring Blog and the Asia Pacific Headhunter.

It is also very good to see that there are enough HR related blogs out there that there can be a Top 100, at one point there were only 100 :-).