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Find the questions, define their types and function.

Compiled by

Goman Yu.V., Bychek O.V., Rogoza O.N., Bich M.Ya.

BUSINESS ENGLISH FOR MANAGERS (C1)

RESOURCE PACK TO BUSINESS RESULT ADVANCED

FOR THIRD YEAR GSOM STUDENTS

PART TWO

St. Petersburg, 2013

CONTENTS

 

  Unit pages
1. UNIT 8. PERFORMANCE 03 - 12
2. UNIT 9. RESOURCES 13 - 24
3. UNIT 11. VALUES 25 - 38
4. UNIT 12. PERSUASION 39 - 41

 

LITERATURE AND ONLINE SOURCES USED:

Textbooks:
1. Anne Wiliams, Louise Pile, Catrin Lloyd-Jones, “Pass Cambridge BEC 3”, Summertown Publishing Ltd, 2007
2. G. Brook-Hart, “Instant IELTS”, Cambridge University Press, 2009
Newspaper and magazine sources:
1. Guy Archer. Hear this: Listening is a harder skill than it sounds. Newspaper The Career Forum.
2. Karim H. Ismail. Is happinesss at Work Possible? White Paper. November, 2011
3. Tim Smedley. In pursuit of Happness. Sunday Telegraph. March, 27, 2011
Online sources:
1. http://elt.oup.com/teachers/busresult/readingfiles
2. http://businesscasestudies.co.uk/business-theory/people/human-resources.html  
3. http://www.tutor2u.net/business/strategy/resources.htm  

UNIT 8. PERFORMANCE

TEXT 1

Read the text about the pursuit of happiness at work. Enumerate advantages of providing happiness for employees. Elaborate on every advantage.

2. Explain how leadership is connected with employees’ happiness.

Find the questions, define their types and function.

We may not have to love our colleagues but experts increasingly agree that being happy at work is good for business.

Think of a place that makes you feel happy. Chances are, you didn’t just think about the office. But imagine if you did, you had a business full of employees who felt the same. It may sound fanciful but increasingly businesses and governments are focusing on happiness.

It’s not just the Buddhist state of Bhutan who measures ‘Gross National Happiness’ – as of April this year, David Cameron’s Happiness Index will begin a similar measure for the UK.

Business leaders are trying to make employees happy which all begs the question, why are they bothering and isn’t this just consultant claptrap?

Not at all; it’s just common sense, says Pryce-Jones, CEO of consultancy iOpener. Her theories on the importance of happiness are based on five years of research spanning 6,500 employees and hundreds of organisations.

‘Happiness is very closely correlated with performance’, she adds. ‘We found that people who are happiest at work spend 77-80 percent of their time on task – they are doing what they are supposed to be doing at work. But people who are unhappiest spend only 40 percent performing at work, only two days a week.’

So what is happiness in a work context, if it is not slacking on the job? ‘It’s crucial to say we are not dealing with an enormous high here’, says Pryce-Jones. ‘Happiness at work is actually a stable mindset’. This requires support, good feedback, role clarity, alignment with the company’s values, understanding the business strategy and one’s role within it, and essentially ‘feeling that you have some control and not just getting edicts from on high’. Get these things right, and you will have a happier, more productive workforce.

Providing further evidence is the annual Management Agenda report from Roffey Park, the workplace research institute. The 2011 report surveyed 1,555 managers from a similar number of organizations across all sectors in the UK and found ‘a positive relationship between employee engagement and organizational performance … for strategic success but also for financial success.

‘Employee engagement, another popular term in management and HR circles, is defined as closely related to the ‘general happiness’ of employees. Jo Hennessy, Roffey Park’s director of research, believes the link between happiness and performance is discretionary effort. ‘If an organization is coercive and demands a certain standard of performance then they may get that but no more, and it might take a lot of management effort,’ she says.

‘If you are able to gain the commitment of your employees and they give it willingly, it will take less management effort, and they might do more for you as well.‘

It’s an argument that won Jon Parker over, when leading Xerox’s developing markets function. Now head of learning and development at Xerox Europe he explains: ‘Happiness at work means achieving potential – getting people to achieve their potential is the single biggest performance lever that you can pull. It’s not related to money or reward, it’s linked to pride, trust and recognition.’

It’s also driven by leaders, according to Parker. ‘Leadership needs to have responsibility for the holistic happiness of the organization. It is critical that your values relate to how people want to work,’ he says.

Hennessy agrees that leadership is crucial. The Management Agenda found a direct correlation; where leadership was rated as ‘very poor’, the mean employee engagement score out of 100 was only 54; where the rating was ‘excellent’, the engagement score was 87. ‘Leadership feeds directly into the sense of purpose people feel in an organization,’ she says.

Yet it is the people who feel in control who are the happiest, argues Pryce-Jones, and so leaders will have to become used to leading collaboratively. ‘ Dissipated power is where we are moving,’ she says. ‘Leadership will be about how you facilitate rather than how you lead.’

Parker believes his own leadership within Xerox benefited from focusing on employee happiness: ‘I’ve seen definite improvement in terms of people’s performance. As a leader I use happiness as a measure on a regular basis.’

For those interested in leading a charge of the happiness brigade through their organization, Pryce-Jones offers this advice: ‘My starting point would be ask people the question ‘What would make you higher performing and happier at work – if I can make it happen - what would that be?’

For those still convinced it’s a claptrap, here’s a sobering thought. ‘Sixty percent of leaders fail,’ says Pryce-Jones. ‘So there’s something wrong with the old styles of leadership.’

Groupama offers home, heath and car insurance throughout the UK. Based in France, the company generated a £14.7 billion turnover and employs 39,000 staff.

According to corporate service director Paul Picknett, its UK arm is ‘the UK’S secret insurer: ‘No-one has heard of us and yet we are about £470m turnover with 800 employees.’

The UK division began focusing on happiness shortly after buying and merging insurance companies Lombard and Gan in the late 1990s.

‘We run regular surveys – initially weekly and now quarterly – to allow us to know how staff feel,whether they are proud of the organization, engaged with what they do, understand the strategy and are aligned with that strategy,’ he says.

Initially staff morale post-merger was low. ‘There was no use us sitting in an ivory tower thinking we had all the answers.’ Picknett says. ‘We became as much about listening as communicating.’

Even the more traditional French owners have been won over, inviting UK HR teams to present their initiatives. But Picknett adds: ‘There will be times when our leadership style has to be quite directive and authoritarian. But in general where we can be collaborative and seek opinion and it makes everyone happy, then why not?’

 

TEXT 2




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