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Could college application process be leveraged to check the health of the business in workplace?

Parents, with high school children, have different level of involvement in the college application process.  Most strive for the match of their children to the best college for their path.   There goes this industry of SAT preparation, college admission, and all kinds of consultation, with prices that could go as deep as an expensive consultant in the workplace.

Like many other parents, we soon find that we are hearing a bit of the same thing over and over again – GPA (Grade Point Average), SAT  and extracurricular.   Do these factors weigh the same?   They are all important in some ways.  GPA and SAT are more the entry criteria to be met, and extracurricular is relevant for those who meet the entry criteria.   If SAT is the more of an absolute standard, GPA is a bit relative to the peers in the school.  Unless your extracurricular is super unique, there is that entry criteria of GPA and SAT.   There is also that natural selection process where students would filter colleges based on their GPA and SAT to some extent.   Without the natural selection, the public and private Ivy would get far more revenue just from the admission application fee.

How does it relate to the workplace?   Many companies have strategies to sell in different markets. In health care, many companies would like to get the business of IDN (Integrated Delivery Network of facilities and providers that work together to offer a continuum of care to a specific geographic area or market.). In high tech, many companies may offer security products, cloud services or big data analytics.   In other companies, they may want to get business from particular customer segments, be in being SMB (Small & Medium Business) or Enterprise customers.  What are the GPA, SAT and extracurricular equivalent of the markets the company wants to get to?

Unlike college admission, where the GPA, SAT is well defined, it is not that obvious what their equivalent means in the workplace.  Yet, the similarity is that until it is clear on the entry criteria of the market, any effort to spare on “extracurricular like” is not going to yield much return on investment.

In the company you are in, how do they stack up?

• Does it know enough about the market segments to tell the GPA and SAT basic filter and entry criteria?
• Where is it in terms of those criteria? Is it a GPA 4 out of 4, SAT 2400 out of 2400 where it is r
  eady?  Or is it GPA 3, SAT 1800 while the market is expecting GPA 3.5, SAT 2000, and there is work to be done?
• For company not in position to meet the basic, are the next generation investments in line with meeting the entry criteria, or are they focused on improving the extracurricular areas?

When a company is clear and honest about what its GPA and SAT equivalent are for the markets, it is probably already winning half of the battle.

Just that happiness is a pursuit of so many, when I search books related to “happiness” on Amazon, some 39,453 matches are returned.

In his book “Flourish”, Martin E. P. Seligman provides a visionary new understanding of Happiness and Well-being.  Both Happiness and Well-being are the topic of Positive Psychology.  Martin E.P. Seligman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has led the Positive Psychology movement for fifteen years, where the goal is about raising the bar for the human condition.  In as much as the national wealth is measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Federal deficit, there is yet a well-known metric to measure the well-being of the countrymen.

What is the Well-Being Theory?  It has 5 elements:  Positive emotion, Engagement, positive Relationship, Meaning and Accomplishment (PERMA).  This theory has far reaching effects including the idea and implementation of “Strength Finder”.

How would such a “Well-Being” index look like for a company workforce?  My starter …

Positive emotion: the ratio of positive emotion (feedback) versus negative emotion (criticism) in a day’s work.  Culture, the interactions across functions, the interactions among teams, the management style and the team would have their influence.  Do co-workers give credits to others?  Or do they criticize on others’ work?  And how is the annual performance review being managed?  D
oes
it focus on the accomplishments and build on strengths? Or does it look more for areas of improvements?

Engagement: the frequency of leaders communicates such as employee meetings, informal chat with workforce in the o
ffice, or that the leaders are being seen in the office.  The workforce treats co-workers and customers in similar ways as how they are being treated.   Much of the company results depend on an engaged (and committed) workforce.

Positive Relationship:  # of people in the company to become friends when the employee is no longer in the same company.   What does he/she say about this statement – “I have a best friend at work”?

Meaning:  the extent the work matters to the individual and he/she is willing to spend extra effort.

Accomplishment:  the extent the employee feels that he/she has achieved something at work.

Well-Being of the Workforce:  all things considered, the probability to stay in spite of another better offer; or reciprocal of the probability to leave without anything equivalent.   If people are leaving a position without a job in this tough economy, it is a clear sign that he/she is neither happy nor well.

How would you assess the company with which you are spending majority of your waking hours?

If it does not bring well-being to you, it may be time to change.

Just that I have got stomach issue, for the last few months, gets me this question a lot: “are you stressed?” 

So what is stress?  In the dictionary, the definition goes from “importance attached to a thing”, “phonetics, accent or emphasis on syllables”, “emphasis in melody” to “physical pressure, pull or other things”.

It feels that it is something natural that would happen, yet many prefer stress-free life these day.  Is stress bad?   It depends on how you look at stress and whether you are looking for positive or negative.

What could be positive stress?

When we are nervous, tightened up, could not sleep well just before an important presentation, recital, competition and the like, that we just want to do everything to be at our very best.

• Tennis players playing in Wimbledon final or athletes competing in the Olympic games
• Job seekers attending interviews of a dream company or a dream job.
• Or presentation on topics that are important to you or the audience is important to you.

I think the physical body can take in the stress a bit, and earn the satisfaction of achievement after.

What could be the negative stress? Well, think of the stress in the following situations

• In a (company or country) culture that you don’t understand nor appreciate
• Tiring people dynamics that are in the way of your goals.
• Overwork on something that you don’t care about yet with unrealistic objective.

How to manage stress then?  Simply increase the positive and reduce the negative.

Assuming the stomach issue is related to stress, I am thankful that my stomach is offering real-time response to the state of my mind.  This is how the body and mind connect, isn’t it?

Some movies describe life in small town as everyone knows everyone else; how gossip goes quicker than laser, the power of personal relationship and then come the plot.  My upbringing in city does not lend familiarity to life in small town.   In a city, it is more like people do not know their neighbor, or after saying “good morning” to each other, we are busy with our doings of the day.  After years, it is a comfortable habit in such detached interactions.

This small company gives me the experience of townsman.  At meal-time conversations, they talk about individual co-workers and their years of history in the company – a bit like reading the People magazine.  And when things happen, they cite examples of “similar things happening in the past” and could get emotional. Behavior is not sophisticated and people could have open disagreements, yet there is a fair amount of intimacy, a bit like relatives who argue one day and reconcile later.  The decision making process may not be scientific nor result oriented, rather people oriented.  For people around in the company for a while and have the knowledge in the products, they could be pretty safe in the position no matter how ill-fitted they maybe for the current assignment.

If working in large company is like living in a big international city like New York, Hong Kong or Tokyo, working in smaller company echo living in a town.  If folks in big companies talk about organizations, folks in smaller companies talk about people.  And if big companies make decision based on data and process and too much, smaller companies make subjective decision based on people they trust.  If big companies make each employee feel completely dispensable, does smaller company give employees more sense of importance?  If employees are used to constant reorganization in big companies, employees in this company still talks about re-organization of the company more than a year ago.

Such contrast creates the subtlety and the adjustment required to traverse from a large company to smaller company.