Speaking at the Good Day at Work conference in London, Cary Cooper, distinguished professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University Management School, asked: “Do we believe that engagement is actually working as a consequence of the wellbeing and engagement agenda?
“Unless you get buy in from the CEO, your employees don’t feel trusted or get autonomy and permission to fail. How can you create a new culture without that?”
Cooper, voted fourth on HR magazine's HR’s Most Influential UK Thinkers 2012 ranking, added that HR needed to be more assertive or risked being seen as "impotent" in the organisation.
He was joined by Will Hutton, chair of The Work Foundation's Big Innovation Centre and principal of Hertford College at Oxford University, and John Timpson, CEO of shoe repair business Timpson, in discussing the state of wellbeing and engagement in organisations today.
Hutton said although smaller businesses might find it easier to change their cultures to be more democratic, he believed CEOs of major corporations were beginning to speak a different discourse, one of values and engagement.
“Antony Jenkins, the new CEO of Barclays, speaks about being accountable to stakeholders, not shareholders, and Elizabeth Murdoch has said firms that don’t have a declaration of purpose lose their moral compass,” he said. “It’s a sign when a Murdoch and a bank CEO say that.”
Timpson said his business had achieved engagement through organisational democracy. His company’s unusual ‘upside-down’ management structure gives employees the freedom to behave as they see fit, as long as they abide by a couple of basic rules.
Tom Nixon, ambassador at WorldBlu, a global network of organisations committed to democracy and freedom in the workplace, said it was important to raise the question as to whether the relationship between organisations and employees was "a peer-to-peer or a paternalistic relationship".
The event was run by Robertson Cooper, founded by Cooper and fellow psychology professor Ivan Robertson.
