Moral Leadership Builds Employees, Company Culture And Bottom Line Results

By Micah Solomon
Forbes
Originally posted August 4, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Moral leadership of employees involves, at a minimum:

• Involving them in the design of the work that will affect them
• Enhancing their pride in their work
• Enhancing their purpose, rather than using them only for their function
• Supporting their community and family involvement (however they define ‘‘family’’),
   in good times and bad
• Supporting their involvement in areas of the company outside of their strict area of assignment

The article is here.

How Danish Work Design Creates Productivity and Life Quality

Copenhagen Balance
By Camilla Kring, Vivi Bach Pedersen, and Andres Raastrup Kristensen

The future can be found in Denmark. In this report we show how some of the most successful companies in Denmark developed their business through an innovative, results-oriented focus on balancing employees’ work and private lives.

Denmark has a unique position in the world when it comes to balancing work and private life.

• Denmark has one of the highest participation rates for women in the workforce. (75% of women are in the workforce).

• Among all EU countries, Danish employees have the highest degree of influence over their work. (85% of employees indicate that they have an influence on their work situation).

• Danish employees have some of the world’s most flexible work conditions. (43% of employees can regulate their work hours to meet their private needs).

• Danish employees have some of the best maternity/paternity leaves in the world (combined one year leave per child).

The Danish model is known as ‘flexicurity’. In this model, it is easy for organizations to hire and lay off employees, while government subsidies assure a safety net if people cannot find jobs. Denmark is also known for a variety of public initiatives that make it easier to have children. For example, the state subsidizes parental leave for a year after childbirth. After the leave, parents can go back to work, while the children are cared for in subsidized nurseries and preschools. 92% of Danish children in the age group 3-5 years are in preschool. Thus, having a family can be combined with holding down a job.

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Introduction

In this report we discuss how six leading Danish companies innovate with work-life balance as an integrated part of their strategy. We provide you with a variety of concrete ideas and inspiration that work with Balance. These case examples demonstrate unique versions of the concept, and show how to implement such initiatives in order to simultaneously improve employee well-being and productivity. The report describes not only the current and new innovative best practices in the field, but also points to the new directions in which work-life balance is most likely to progress.

Balance is about Business

All the companies described in this report have worked with balance between work and private life for many years. In this process they have left the traditional understanding of Balance behind. This was an understanding built on the sharp dichotomy of the industrial era, during which work and private life were seen as conflicting entities in two distinct spheres that were to be balanced as if on a scale.

The entire work-life balance report is here.

The Ethics of Admissions, Part I: Graduate and Professional School

By Jane Robbings
Inside HigherEd - Sounding Board Blog
Originally posted February 13, 2013

I’ve been wanting to write a series of posts on the ethics of admissions and its connection to operating models since I began this blog a few months ago.  While there is lots of talk about one or the other, they are rarely brought together in the sense of recognizing how embedded the ethical choices of institutions—and their consequences—are in the construction of their program and college business models. Acknowledging the ethics of a business model—yes, business models are ethics-laden—implies a stakeholder, or corporate social responsibility (CSR) view.

For a long time, though, institutions of higher education have made their operational decisions largely on the basis of internal interests. We could argue about whether what is going on now in terms of business model collapse is essentially chickens coming home to roost—the inevitable outcome of blindedness and self-interest.  And maybe warn about what is yet to come in other areas such as medical research. But for now I’m most interested in looking at recent movements—some coerced, some bravely self-initiated, to consider the ethical connection between admissions and business models. So far, the most explicit has been going on in graduate and professional education.

In the “coerced” category, the poster child is law schools. One could say this is a case of the market, and in response the government, saying “enough” and forcing change. While it can seem sudden, like most sources of change the problems did not arise overnight, but are the cumulative effect of a gradual process. Law schools, like business schools, underwent a “Flexnorization”—a specific effort to become more scientific and empirical as a strategy to drive out lower, practitioner-driven forms—in the late 60s on; the reports from the middle decades of the 20th century, such as the 1968 Rutgers “Law School of Tomorrow,” reflect contentious debate and an awareness of what might be the negative outcomes; by the time of the 2007 Carnegie report with its meaningful title (Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Practice), many concerns had become a reality. And a funny thing happened along the way: the lower-tier schools were not driven out—indeed, like their business school counterparts they thrived by the promise of credentials and high earnings—and the upper tier schools have lost much of their market in the recession—a market that may never return, in part because the narrow tasks performed by even highly paid associates can be performed more cheaply overseas or through an agency (and, increasingly, by a computer), and because firms themselves are restructuring the way they practice.

The entire blog post is here.