Working Nights

Strategic Implications of Keeping Workers Safe from Harm – The Impact of Bullying at Work

Recently, the topic of bullying has hit the headlines in a big way. Painful stories of persecuted, harassed, and tormented high school and college students who have committed suicide, have shocked educators, parents, students, and the public-at-large. The emotional, verbal, and physical abuse that constitutes bullying is not anything new. But recent attention to adolescents’ cyber-bullying (e.g. harassing others using Facebook, Twitter, or Utube or by cell phone or e-mail) has taken concerns about protecting victims to a new level.

Last month the federal government told educators that civil rights laws obligated schools to prevent bullying. The “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the Department of Education to school administrators puts into clear words the fact that educators have a legal obligation to “protect students from student-on-student racial and national origin harassment, sexual and gender-based harassment, and disability harassment.” As a result, school districts and colleges around the country are cracking down on those students who terrorize and intimidate others who are supposed to be their peers. Society and workplaces change over time (Pynes 2009). Will the recent attention to student bullying have strategic management implications for the workplace? Clearly it will for schools. But, what will be the impact be to other employers?

Read this article…

Getting on the Right Team

So much of work these days is team–based, requiring groups of diverse people to work together on complex or risky initiatives. Consider the challenges that shift working groups face – like workers overseeing our nuclear power safety, emergency medical teams, miners working deep underground, shift workers on oil rigs around the world…..How can work be any more complex or risky than in these environments?

A recent study co-authored by MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Union College researchers, and published Sept. 30, in the advance online issue of the journal Science, addresses the cognitive capabilities of a team, as opposed to the intelligence of individuals. The study found that collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well is linked to the number of women in the group. The researchers reported that groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” were more collectively intelligent. The teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence.

So what is meant by the term socially sensitive? In the case of this study, it meant discerning emotions from looking at people’s faces. For an excellent book that will help you to improve your ability to read people’s faces, look up Emotions Revealed by psychologist Paul Ekman. The book shows how the following emotions are revealed through facial expression (including photos!).
1. Grief, sadness
2. Anger
3. Surprise
4. Contentment, Enjoyment, sensory pleasures
5. Fear
6. Disgust, contempt

Interestingly, the average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall. Having a lot of smart people in the group didn’t automatically cause the group to rise to the top. In the study, 699 people were placed in groups with two to five members. The groups worked together on tasks ranging from puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based assignments. Only later, when analyzing the data, did the researchers notice that the number of women in a group seemed to predict higher functioning teams.

Obviously, many men are also socially sensitive. The study researchers stated that they believed that having group members with higher social sensitivity is better regardless of whether they are male or female. Perhaps it would be good to study the social sensitivity of shift workers. After adjusting for the impact of sleep deprivation, shift workers are probably a pretty socially sensitive group. After all, it takes a certain amount of social smarts to work 24/7 and stay safe and healthy and connected with family and friends. And, these jobs do require a heightened amount of teamwork for success.

©2010 Circadian Age, Inc. ‘Working Nights’

Differences Between Men and Women at Work – We Need Both Sexes!

Women continue to be a significant force in the workplace; the numbers of working women are gaining on working men. The Bureau of Labor statistics reported this June that women held 49.8% of the U.S jobs. Here are some trends:

• Women have been gaining the vast majority of positions in the few sectors of the economy that are growing (health care, education, and government).

• Through June, men had lost 74% of the 6.4 million jobs eliminated since the recession began in December 2007. Men have lost more than 3 million jobs in construction and manufacturing alone.

• The gender hiring trend is really extreme in local government’s 14.6 million-person workforce. Cities, schools, water authorities and other local jurisdictions have cut 86,000 men during the recession – while adding 167,000 women.

• As a result, at the end of October the jobless rate for women was 8.1% compared to 10.7% for men.

What do these trends mean for men?
Read this article…

Knowledge of Brain Research will Separate Successful Operations from Others

Research about the brain is leading to amazing results. New discoveries can help us understand ways that the brain may restrict shift workers from maximizing their potential – and – give us more ideas about what can be done about it. Topics ranging from how training provides our brains with greater processing speed and an enhanced ability to multi-task to how our brains control our reaction to invasion of our personal space are covered in this post. Whether its figuring out how people from different cultures can get along better to why getting more stage four sleep is important to learning from training, each of these new brain related studies are important for human resources, safety, and health professionals in any shift work environment to be aware of. And, they are critical for shift workers themselves to understand, as well.
Read this article…

Workplace Bullying Increases Sleep Disorder Risk – Already a Problem for Shift Workers

Bullying in the workplace can range from one extreme – physical violence and homicide, to verbal insults, threats, teasing, ridiculing, and making false accusations – at the other end. Sometimes bullies use name-calling, talking about a person behind their back, ignoring a person, and making false accusations to set a co-worker up for failure. The targeted person may be a boss, insubordinate, or peer. No matter who’s being targeted, bullying in the workplace has been proven to decrease morale amongst all workers, and if allowed to continue, bullying will detrimentally impact business results, possibly in a material way. A new study has found that current or past bullying is associated with increased sleep disturbances. Makes sense, right? A person who is being bullied is probably a nervous wreck, so having trouble sleeping seems logical. But, it turns out that bullying has detrimental effects on sleep even when it’s being experienced indirectly – by observing it as a co-worker.
Read this article…

Working with People from Different Ethnic Backgrounds

In a short time, the current designation of “minority” will lose its meaning. By 2042 minorities are expected to become the majority of the population, and even sooner the majority of children will be minorities. This shift will bring increasing changes to the workforce, as even now some shift work fields have up to twice as many minority workers as white workers. Despite this, many of the managers of these companies are white. Understanding diversity and overcoming educational inequalities will remain extremely important for employee well-being and company productivity.
Read this article…

Redefining Shift Workers and Recognizing Common Themes Across Industries

Americans have been known to complain about picking up the phone to call technical support and being greeted by a voice that is clearly from the other side of the globe. But shift workers, especially those who work frequent night shifts, should recognize a common colleague on the other end of the line. As more and more companies set up call centers and tech support in India and China, workers there learn to talk with American accents, make hip references to American pop culture, and most of all, to stay up long nights because of the time difference between our countries. This Chicago Tribune article shows how India is accepting the excitement and the difficulty of a new generation of shift workers. Having come along way from the mills and assembly lines of the 1800’s, ideas of shift work continue to evolve and globalize. Read this article…