Core Principles

PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST:
Gender as a Resource for Employee Well-Being and Human Resource Effectiveness

The gender-nomics of business is changing:

• The balance between the number of men and women in the workplace is shifting.
• Their professional roles and responsibilities men and women assume are becoming less distinct.
• The frequency of interaction between men and women at all levels of business is growing exponentially.

As a result, understanding the unchanging essence of men and women is more important today than ever before for addressing your company’s people management needs, challenges and effectivenes

Men and women are different. Understanding those natural, inherent differences is key for generating the strong professional relationships that corporate success depends on. Failure to acknowledge this reality represents a lost opportunity for business. Understanding gender differences and managing human resources accordingly, is a powerful business strategy for elevating:

1.    effective intra-office communication
2.    employee satisfaction and engagement
3.    managerial effectiveness
4.    corporate performance and profitability
5.    sales staff competence
6.    client satisfaction
7.    staff productivity

With this understanding of gender, managers and team leaders also benefit by becoming proficient at handling human resource challenges including:

1.    staff retention;
2.    office politics;
3.    gossip;
4.    disruptive employees;
5.    the intimate relationships that can develop between co-workers.

Having failed to place adequate importance on the natural and deep-seated differences between the genders most professional development programs train staff to interact with people, not men and women. They instruct, “If you want to handle a disruptive employee do this,” rather than, “If you want to handle a disruptive male employee you need to know this. But if you want to handle a disruptive female employee you need to know that.”

THE 21st CENTURY PERSPECTIVE

Building the strong relationships that promote success in life and in business starts with having intimate knowledge of people, not just business principles. Every executive, manager, employee and client is either a man or a woman; and they are a man or a woman before they are vice-presidents, secretaries or purchasing agents. What’s more, their essence as a man or a woman is the same whether they’re at work or at play. Therefore, creating effective business relationships must start by understanding who men and women are naturally and what basic gender qualities they bring to every interaction in life, not just in business.

And make no mistake about it – men and women are different in every way. While most of us say we know they are different, we don’t understand the depth of those differences, how to use those differences and the consequences of ignoring those differences. In practice, the true depth, breadth and perfection of gender differences are almost completely overlooked, both in personal relationships and especially, in business interactions.

Why are those differences overlooked? Because we don’t know how to use them, so we revert to what we do know – how we would react in a given circumstance and then we assume the opposite sex would react the same way. That basic assumption is at the heart of the persistent 50% divorce rate and the so-called war between the sexes. It contributes to the feeling of disengagement experienced by approximately three-quarters of the North American workforce (Source: Gallup Management Journal, 2007).

Why should businesses care about integrating knowledge of gender differences into daily management interactions? First, interacting with men and women according to their specific differences is critical for creating effective professional relationships, relationships which directly affect employee proficiency. According to Richard Ivey School of Business researchers Gerard H. Seijts and Dan Crim,

“If employees’ relationship with their managers is fractured, then no amount of perks will persuade employees to perform at top levels.”

Second, understanding gender differences will help answer questions like:

• How do you motivate a man compared to how you motivate a woman?
• Under what conditions do men and women operate at their best?
• What do men want as distinct from what women want?
• How are men and women likely to respond in any given situation and why?

These are critical gender differences that directly impact office productivity in today’s gender-diverse workplace, and therefore, they should influence management style. Businesses are just starting to realize the operational necessity of understanding these differences. Gender equity in the workplace is no longer about being politically correct or fair. With more men and women working closely together at every level of business than ever before, understanding gender directly impacts corporate performance, team and managerial effectiveness and ultimately profitability.

THE GENERATIONAL SHIFT

As Generations X and Y assume prominence in the workplace demands employees make of their employers are shifting. Loyalty is no longer a given. Career is more than a steady paycheque or moving up the corporate ladder. Generations X and Y want their jobs to reflect their values and what’s important to them. Work is just one aspect of their lives. Generation Y in particular runs every experience through the filter of, “What will this do to help me?” Employees demand that managers treat them with respect.

When it comes to training and support programs Generation Y isn’t interested in just doing a better job. They want to live a better life. They expect employers to support them in both pursuits. That’s the nature of the “co-worldly employee” that has become an entrenched feature of corporate culture in the 21st century.

Employers that understand this demographic shift have an edge. Recognizing the differences between men and women and treating staff accordingly is an important contributor to having employees feel respected and valued. On the other hand, treating men and women as if they are the same guarantees that a certain portion of your staff or clientele will feel disconnected, alienated and misunderstood at any given time. As a result, businesses lose out in terms of increased employee disengagement. Potential results include:

1.    lost sales

STUDY: Businesses with an engaged workforce enjoy 27% higher profits than disengaged counterparts (Gallup 2006)

2.    higher staff turnover

STUDY: Highly-engaged organizations have the potential to reduce staff turnover by 87 per cent and improve performance by 20 per cent (Corporate Leadership Council, 2008)

3.    poor teamwork;
4.    reduced productivity;
5.    waning motivation.

Management styles that are guided by respect for gender differences, however, contribute to a corporate environment characterized by:

1.    above average job satisfaction amongst staff;
2.    respect for its employees;
3.    high office morale;
4.    a reputation for customer satisfaction and care; and
5.    ultimately, a healthy and growing bottom-line.

THE PROCESS

Many professional development programs emphasize skills development, without adequately looking at the underlying factors, like gender, that affect how well those skills are put into practice.

Let’s take communication skills training as an example. Having effective communication skills is widely acknowledged as key for success in life and business. Many employee training programs, however, teach how to communicate with “people”. Nonetheless, there are certain ways women like to be communicated with that are quite different from how men typically communicate, and visa versa. For instance, a man speaking with a woman as he would another man might be met with polite acknowledgment. Under the surface, however, she feels misunderstood, disconnected, bored or even offended.

Communication skills in this case are less important than knowing what to communicate and how to communicate it. Knowing this is a factor of knowing who you are communicating with – is it a man or is it a woman? This knowledge is important whether you are speaking with someone of your own sex or the opposite sex.

Until recently, “who you are speaking with” was thought to be a factor of social conditioning. In other words, the differences between men and women were believed to be the result of what people learned from their experiences, as well as their societal connections and influences.

Today, however, scientists are discovering that many of the differences between men and women are actually natural, gender-specific traits rooted in the physiology of the male and female brain. The differences are innate to each gender and are set in motion before birth as the foetus is developing in the womb. Relatedly, men and women both secrete powerful hormones like testosterone and oxytocin. These chemicals, however, affect each gender’s behaviour very differently.

For instance, scientists have found physiological / neurological causes for:

• why men and women respond differently to stress;
• men being less skilled at articulating emotions than women;
• the importance women place on being safe and connected to others;
• each gender’s different relationship to goals;
• why receiving approval and trust is a key motivator for a man’s productivity.

These and a host of other natural gender differences are evident whether at home or in the office. How they play out in life is visible regardless of age and across socio-economic circumstances.

This research has supported our paradigm. Our work is not about physiology or biology. The recent findings, however, have evidenced what we say in our programs. We show people how to acknowledge and work with the innate differences between the genders rather than trying to change them. This is easier and produces better results than trying to re-educate people to live and work in ways that are unnatural. Acknowledging and working with what’s natural between the genders produces a way of being together that has been scientifically observed at Princeton University to produce extraordinary results beyond what occurs when men and women work apart.

THE TARGET

What kinds of relationships need to be strengthened to produce these results? The obvious targets are:

1.    relationships between co-workers;
2.    relationships between staff and management;
3.    relationships between staff/management and clients.

Often overlooked, however, are employees’ personal relationships outside the office. For most people, their role as husband, wife, best friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc. is more defining than the role they play in the office. Leaving the divorce, the family crisis or the argument over breakfast at home when you go to work is impossible.

That’s why it is critical that the skills learned through a people management training system be transferable between the office and the home. A gender-focused system is ideal because gender factors influence men and women both in and out of the office.

Addressing each of these relationships – staff-staff, staff-management, staff-client and staff-spouse – is key to maximizing managerial effectiveness, employee engagement and personal job satisfaction. Since everyone in these categories is a man or a woman, our gender-based relationship model produces transformative change in all these relationships. As a result, employers get:

1.    tremendous bang for their professional development buck;
2.    the ability to reach into the personal lives of their staff in a non-invasive and supportive way that provides a needed service for their employees while addressing a critical factor in workplace performance.

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR BUSINESS

Corporations spend millions of dollars each year training and supporting their staff. That’s a huge investment. The return on that investment, however, is not fully realized because much of that training doesn’t adequately address the very different needs, concerns, interests and strengths that are specific to men and those that are specific to women.

That failure represents a profit drain. It’s like paying a plumber to fix a leaky drain pipe, but he doesn’t have quite the right tool for the job. As a result, the leak is only partially fixed. You spent money, but the return on that investment is partially eroded by having to pay higher water costs than you would if the problem was eliminated.

Professional development training that fails to consider gender is an incomplete tool for addressing the important people management needs of today’s gender-diverse workplace. Incorporating gender into training and operation practices stops the profit leak by maximizing productivity, client satisfaction, as well as staff health and well-being.