Are Americans working too much?

With many people currently enjoying or looking forward to their summer holidays it is sobering to consider some of the differences in expectation that workers in different countries will have about how much paid time off they can enjoy. Statutory minimum leave varies enormously by country, from zero days in the US, through to 5 working days in China, 10 working days in Canada, and all the way up to 25 working days plus public holidays in countries like Denmark and Norway. Of course, variations in legislated minimums give plenty of scope for more explicit CSR type policies in low-regulation countries such as the US, but even looking at the average leave taken across countries, Scandinavia and most of Europe far outpace North America. Sure, a lot of the talk now is about Americans not having enough jobs, but another way of looking at it is maybe some Americans are simply working too much.

We have been interested in debates about working hours, flexible work arrangements, forced overtime and the like for some time. In the first two editions of our Business Ethics textbook we included cases on young professionals and excessive working hours.  In the most recent 3rd edition, this changed to a case about forced labor, which is a related but quite different issue. These are complicated problems, especially when much of the excessive hours worked by professionals is, in principle, voluntary. Even in sweatshops, some argue that workers choose to work long hours for low pay, because it is better than the alternative - which is no job and no pay.

Anyway, arriving in the inbox today was a nice infographic from onlinemba.com, the fruits of whose labors we've featured before in our survey of the best and worst corporate responsibility infographics. It tells an interesting, and well documented, story of the problems of excessive working hours in the US. We're not sure the call for a return of a 40 hour week will be heeded in the current climate, but it certainly helps start an important conversation. And with many in the CSR world apparently uninterested in working hours in the developed world as a relevant topic, it provides a decent business case for changing that perspective.




Infographic source: OnlineMBA.com
Photo by LaPrimaDonna. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

Corporate responsibility infographics - the good, the bad and the ugly

Data visualization, or the creation of "infographics", has been gradually seeping into the corporate responsibility world. And its no surprise. When their designers get it right, infographics can tell you an important story in a wonderfully accessible way using cool, hard facts. But when they get it wrong, it's just, well..... a mess. Too much data and it is confusing; too little and it risks being banal. And using the wrong data can simply discredit the whole enterprise from the beginning.

So what does a good corporate responsibility infographic actually look like then? We've been taking a good look at the craze for infographics, and picked out some of the best and the worst that relate to corporate responsibility issues. There are more and more appearing every day, so we're not claiming to provide anything like an exhaustive review, but here are a few examples that we think give a good flavor of the potential and pitfalls of turning business ethics into pictures. And if you don't agree with us, then please tell us why in the comments field ..... or better still, create an infographic to explain it all!

The Good

There has been a few corporate taxation infographics doing the rounds in the last couple of months. What we like about this one from onlinemba.com though is the funky design (you've gotta love that faux factory styling), the solid citations, and the clear storyline. Yes, it takes a fairly hardline anti-business stance, but it doesn't pretend the answers are obvious or simple.



Another powerful infographic is this one detailing the role that pharmaceutical companies play in influencing doctors to prescribe their medicines. We like it because although it is a little on the long side (click on the image for the full image) it tackles an important question; it is controversial without being sensationalist (again, the referencing is pretty tight), the design is smart, and it rounds out the story with advice on what you can do to make a difference. Let's call it activism meets journalism.

Of course, infographics can be a lot more than just simply static visuals. And they don't have to be critical of business! Videos, animations, music and all kinds of possibilities are out there to tell corporate responsibility stories in interesting ways. We like this one from Fortune and CNN because it offers some nice simple interactivity about something all of us care about - what makes some places better to work in than others. Based on Fortune's annual 'Best companies to work for' survey, it not only shows which companies score well, but also lets you search the kinds of words that employees use to describe their companies - the top ones being "people", "time", "family" and benefit". But some of the cross-company comparisons are really interesting. Whilst top spot holder SAS includes words like "care", "life" and "health", Goldman Sacks at 23 emphasizes words like "best", "firm", "people" and "individual". Just goes to show that what makes a firm good to work for is very much in the eye of the beholder.

The Bad


Corporate tax dodging again. But this time the infographic is less successful. Sure it has an easy to understand message, but it doesn't have the richness of data to be authoritative. For a start it doesn't cite its sources, which immediately threatens some of its credibility. Second, it doesn't look to explain any of the facts it presents, but instead relies on some slightly shonky political posturing. Good infographics should make you feel like you've read an informed newspaper article. This comes across more like a bumper sticker.


Source: US Uncut - No Cuts Until Corporate Tax Cheats Pay Up!


The Ugly


Sometimes, not even well researched corporate responsibility infographics hit the mark. Getting the balance right between telling a clear story and getting the facts on the table can be tricky. We wanted to love this incredibly informative infographic about the BP oil spill from 2010 by Carol Zuber-Mallison but frankly it just doesn't cut it like it should. It's simply too crammed with data. Sure, it tries to describe a complex situation of corporate responsibility, but if infographics are going to be successful they've got to render that complexity easily understandable in a single narrative. This tries to cover too much. Plus, given all the data, the referencing could be better. How else is anyone supposed to check the facts? So although this is an impressive effort in many respects - especially the crazily ambitious attempt to update it in real time - it's ultimately an infographic fail. Too much info, not enough graphic.

Ringing the changes at France Telecom?

Crane and Matten have both been spending time in different parts of Europe this week, and the big business ethics story of the moment here is the fall-out around the France Telecom suicides. The company has experienced some 24 suicides among its employees in the last 20 months, leading to a very public denouncement of the company's increasingly aggressive human resources policies. Many of the suicides have been accompanied by complaints or even suicide notes by the victims about extreme pressure at work, and the anxiety brought on by forced relocation, demanding targets, and insensitive management practices.

This week saw the announcement that the company's no.2, Louis-Pierre Wenes, has stepped down in response to the worsening crisis, as reported here by the BBC. Wenes had been responsible for pushing through the harsh cost cutting measures at the firm and had been widely regarded as a key architect of the new management practices at the firm, as well as the 22000 lay-offs that have befallen France Telecom employees since 2006. The company had earlier announced a moratorium on its controversial job reassignment policy.

The starkness of the personal tradegies involved is pretty much unavoidable. What can a company say when its employees are terminating themselves in the most extreme way and laying the blame directly on the work culture? Probably the worst way to handle it of course is to deny the problem and just hope it goes away, which is pretty much the strategy that France Telecom appears to have adopted before this week. Suicide is hardly an early warning signal that something is amiss in the human resource area. The company clearly should have dealt with the issues long before they bubbled up into this kind of crisis. Whatever the numbers of suicides - even if it was only a handful - there must have been a whole host of other indicators - absenteeism, poor performance, harassment etc, - that should have been picked up months if not years ago. To say, as Paul Betts does in the Financial Times, that the company simply "mishandled" the crisis, and that the government was in effect to blame for forcing the changes on the company seems woefully inadequate as an analysis of a seriously flawed ethical culture prevailing in the firm and the very real executive accountability that the firm's leaders will have to acknowledge.

Muddying the waters somewhat is the debate that has arisen around the typical suicide rate among any large number of people. Earlier suggestions by the FT that the per capita rate of suicides at France Telecom was no more than the national average seem somewhat disingenious when what we are talking about here is not simply whether this is a statistically significant number of suicides but whether the suicides have arisen from a common cause. We're not seeing anyone saying that in fact France Telecom was really a happy and friendly place to be, or that it was a successful nurturing culture that made people feel rewarded and respected. Employee suicides are just one extreme manifestation of a toxic culture - they naturally become the media story but they're not the beginning and the end of the story by any means.

Of course, all this is easy to see in hindsight ... though clearly the unions involved have been warning of problems at the company for some time - warnings that in the main have gone unheeded. You'd have thought that such a company would have been on top of the basics such as having an ethics hotline. What could be more natural for a telecoms company? As for companies watching the crisis unfold at France Telecom, they may well be sighing in relief that its not them caught in the maelstorm. The smarter ones though will be thinking its probably about time to check on the employee satisfaction ratings. The even better-prepared ones won't even need to check because they'll have been tracking them all along. There is no excuse for waiting until even one employee cracks under the pressure and takes their own life. Twenty-four is beyond any boundaries of acceptability. Whatever the stats on 'normal' rates.


Photo by Leo Reynolds. Reproduced under creative commons license