Now, sure, there are situations in which the bogusness resides with the author rather than with the word itself, but either way that red squiggly line serves as a warning. ‘Wrong way’, it says. ‘Go Back’. And finally, exasperatedly, ‘Do I need to spell this out?’

‘Embeddedness’ is a red-squiggly-line word. My version of Microsoft Word takes exception to ‘embeddedness’; I’m telling you, it is underlining the word’s dubiousness as we speak.

My personal view? Microsoft Word has a point. I’m not too sure about ‘embeddedness’. I have my doubts about its bona fides. To be frank, it seems like a word that might have stolen its way into the lexicon under cover of darkness, with the help of a dodgy passport and a comically obvious false moustache. Perhaps it passed itself off as ‘embedded’ and smuggled the last few letters in by hiding them in the lining of its suitcase? The point is: I just don’t believe it. It’s a noun-event, if you ask me.

And yet ‘embeddedness’ is, er, embedded – at least in certain circles. According to Wikipedia, it refers to ‘the degree to which individuals or firms are enmeshed in a social network’. Meanwhile, ‘job embeddedness’ apparently describes ‘all the factors enmeshing employees in their jobs’. (Think John Travolta in any straight-to-DVD movie.)

So embeddedness is really all about enmeshment, it seems. And while I am not questioning the credentials of the word ‘enmeshment’, I must admit that I half-expected it to generate a red squiggly line.

Ryan Wallman is embedded at WellmarkPerspexa as a Senior Writer where he works to un-enmesh red squiggly lines from his communications to achieve clarity of brand and message.

He painted a convincing picture: ‘Marketers may take the view that they are providing vital information but that is only part of the story because the purpose for providing that information, the reason they get paid, is to influence a consumer’s decision to buy their client’s product or service. Using recycled paper or organic packaging or whatever other greenish tricks in the marketing phase looks to me like trivial window dressing, a diversion from the fundamental issue of unsustainable patterns of consumption. Does anyone else see the irony in marketing depicting Eskimos unpacking their new air-conditioner? We can indeed sell ice to Eskimos – pity we need to!’

It’s true that marketing can fall into the trap of reactive ‘window dressing’ but a less cynical viewpoint perhaps is that used in the right way, marketers can be valuable allies in the push for sustainable development. Marketing is a fact of modern life and, like it or not, has a role to play (however peripheral) in the direction our society takes.

The greater challenge for marketers (and what many marketers struggle with) is the foresight to position sustainability alongside other more traditional brand attributes such as price, quality and performance, thereby enabling it to function as a natural (rather than artificial or contrived) extension of their brand offering. In time, ‘green products’ will no longer be a relevant differentiator. The concept will become redundant because in order to compete in a market, you’re going to have to ‘be green’ – it will be an expected rather than an augmented product feature (just like seatbelts were once an augmented product offering but now are an essential feature of any car). Or so I hope. The marketers worth applauding are those that put sustainability at the core of their brand strategy. That is, it’s a consideration when deciding any and all of the 4Ps – it’s written into the DNA of their product and therefore influences every product decision made, from whether they might use palm oil as an ingredient to how they transport their product to whether they use FSC-accredited paper for direct-mail marketing.

Pleasingly, there is a growing movement of marketers that see it as part of their role in society to help make sustainability desirable. Indeed, if you believe that marketing has a role to play in shaping consumption patterns, there is an argument to be made that marketers can help ‘steer’ society to make better choices. We can do this because marketing isn’t always just about selling a product or service – we’re also in the business of selling ideas. We might even be able to help people realise that Eskimos don’t need ice!

So is my defence of marketing’s role in sustainable development valid, or just a load of greenwash, uh, I mean hogwash?

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a communications agency that believes marketing can play a significant role in generating behaviour change for the good of the greater community.

Today, as ever, businesses ignore the needs of customers at their peril. Indeed, without a ‘market orientation’, marketing activities potentially become little more than exercises in hubris: ‘I will provide what I want my customer to have’, rather than ‘I will provide what my customer wants’.

You will notice that there is a parallel here with the kind of thinking that, until recently, was de rigueur in the medical establishment. Paternalism, it’s called – a tendency for doctors to act on the assumption that they know best and thus to largely ignore the wishes of their patients. The comparison is apt in more ways than one; this approach to ‘service’, if you will, just doesn’t suit a modern audience.

But hang on, you may be thinking, surely doctors do know best most of the time? They didn’t go through all those years of training simply to ask their patients what they think, right? And for that matter, shouldn’t businesses know their products or services better than anyone else? Is it really to anyone’s advantage if providers, broadly speaking, are merely sycophants to their patrons?

These questions, though valid, seem almost facetious in the current ‘consumer’ milieu. The fact is that most people these days do not respond to didactic service. Whereas once – a generation ago, even – people were more than happy to take a doctor’s or company’s pronouncements as final, modern consumers are far less acquiescent.

And this means that the focus has necessarily shifted from one-way communication to genuine conversations. Just as doctors now routinely make decisions in collaboration with their patients, progressive businesses recognise the importance of dialogue, and even use the phrase ‘conversation management’. Suffice it to say that you wouldn’t have heard that from Henry Ford, who famously quipped that ‘a customer can have a car in any colour that he wants so long as it is black’.

So that’s the end of the story, it seems. Or is it?

How much credence should a business really give to the every whim of consumers who are, almost inevitably, a diverse group? When should a business take customer feedback with a grain of salt and focus on what it does well? And, as Ford might have asked, how many colour choices do customers really need anyway?

Ryan Wallman is Senior Writer at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency that gets its customer focus right.

Here are three simple but important tips to keep morale and productivity high.

1. Be approachable, listen carefully and seek input: keep your door open (metaphorically) and make time for each person so he or she feels like a valued team member
2. Invest in staff development: provide your employees with opportunities to study or take on extra responsibilities and watch them grow professionally and personally
3. Give regular feedback in a constructive format: get into the habit of letting your staff know if and how they’re doing a good (or perhaps not-so-good) job – and don’t just save it up for the annual performance review.

So that’s the tried-and-true and, we hope, fairly intuitive approach to engaging staff. But what about the really little things that don’t require a whole lot of planning and don’t sound like much in isolation but can really make a difference on a minute-by-minute (rather than quarterly) basis? How about:

• Buying your employee a coffee to get them going if you know they’ve come in early to meet a tight deadline for you
• Letting your employee go home early … just because
• Paying for your employees’ parking in a secure facility so they don’t have to walk a long way to their on-the-street park in the dark
• Bringing in a cake for morning tea
• Making a long weekend out of Cup Day by giving your team the Monday as well as the public holiday Tuesday off (only applies to Melbournites I’m afraid)
• Sending a drinks trolley around on Friday afternoon
• Acquiring a company bike for the team to share to help them get errands done in their lunch hour or to travel to nearby meetings …

We’d love to hear what other ideas you’ve got (we might even steal a few of them!).

Brandy Munro is a Writer at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency that knows how to engage, inform and inspire from the inside out.

According to Beyond Blue, undiagnosed depression in the workplace costs $4.3 billion in lost productivity and accounts for more than 12 million days of reduced productivity each year.

And presenteeism – Gary’s practice of showing up for work but running on empty – costs workplaces twice as much as absenteeism, according to The Economist.

When you consider that more than 3 million people in Australia reportedly experience depression, anxiety or related alcohol and drug problems each year, creating a culture that respects and protects mental wellbeing becomes a business imperative.

Early diagnosis and intervention can increase employee productivity and lead to a five-fold return on investment, according to Beyond Blue research.

And there can be flow-on benefits for your team and workplace culture … if it’s done right.

Talking about mental health

Discounted gym memberships and free fruit in the kitchen are common ways for employers to promote good physical health in the workplace, but many organisations are yet to talk as freely about mental health.

Companies as varied as BT and Rolls-Royce have now introduced mental-health programs, which include running wellbeing projects for employees and training managers to help staff deal with stress.

In general, organisations are not handling mental-health issues as well as they could; many current management practices, such as coercing people into taking leave, can even make matters worse.

There’s more to mental wellbeing than team meetings on happiness or a news alert on the intranet about the workplace counsellor.

Caring for your employees’ mental health means ensuring respect for human rights and balancing this with your business objectives.

Privacy, respect and protection

How many of your previous employers would you trust to respect information about your own mental wellbeing?

What if your private information got in the way of a promotion, or people started to gossip? And would you trust your boss to help you through a relationship breakdown?

Done carefully, corporate training programs can help staff deal with stress and can raise awareness about depression. But it’s a sensitive issue and must be treated as such.

Creating a culture where it’s implicitly safe to discuss mental health is one way to respect and protect your workers, particularly when it comes to their privacy.

With this kind of culture, it will gradually become easier to:

• recognise some of the causes of depression
• spot depression among colleagues
• understand the consequences of untreated depression on workplace performance
• act sensibly, sensitively and responsibly in managing people with depression
• know where to go for help and guidance
• draw a link between workplace mental health and business performance.

When employers create environments in which their people know how to respect and protect their own and their colleagues’ mental wellbeing at work, their organisational culture and performance improve.

For more information and tools to help you deal with depression in the workplace, visit En Masse. Other useful resources can be found at Beyond Blue and Lifeline.

Mark Dean is Managing Director of En Masse, a provider of human rights online education and training.

Accessibility can be loosely defined as the degree to which a product or service is readily available to all users. In the online context, this means that websites need to account for slow internet connections and/or small displays, and cater to the needs of users who may have impairments in literacy, dexterity, hearing, cognition or vision. For most of us, the web is experienced via one of the common web browsers – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc. – and we take ease of use for granted. But for many others, accessibility considerations, assistive technologies and speciality software are absolutely critical to their being able to use the web effectively or even at all. And, unfortunately, most current websites are not well geared for these people.

Current guidelines

It is with these issues in mind that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for review and adoption by the global community. According to the four principles of accessibility that underpin the entire standard (and under which there are numerous specific directives), websites should be:

• perceivable
• operable
• understandable
• robust.

It should be noted that the guidelines specify three levels of compliance: A, AA and AAA. Level A compliance is now the standard recommended in the Australian Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and endorsed by Vision Australia.

It’s really not that hard

Generally speaking, none of the directives in these guidelines is particularly onerous, and once understood they are readily implemented at the building stage of any well-conceived website.

The broader adoption of accessibility standards hinges on greater awareness by stakeholders, an acknowledgment that accessibility is integral to good design and a willingness to incorporate these standards into professional practice on every new project. Once we do away with the erroneous idea of accessibility as an unachievable, time-consuming and expensive ideal, the web can truly evolve and become a more equitable environment for all concerned. To this end, I recommend two excellent articles on ‘inclusion’ and ‘universal design’ at A List Apart.

P.S. I also challenge the developer of this blog to bring the site up to AA compliance and display the accreditation logo.

Michael Smith is Director of Digital Media at WellmarkPerspexa, where he keeps his finger on the pulse of the latest developments in electronic communications.

Though the psychology of personality is complex and well beyond the scope of this discussion, the essential reason for behavioural change’s being difficult is not the stuff of dense theory. Put simply (if a little simplistically), you and I are creatures of habit. We resist change, especially when it’s externally imposed.

Which probably leads you to think, quite sensibly, that a belief in being able to change another person is fundamentally misguided. You would not be alone in this regard. For the most part, mainstream psychological literature still considers personality (and, by extension, its attendant behaviour) to be more or less fixed from young adulthood onwards.

So if that’s the case at the individual level, what about changing entire communities or societies? Logic dictates that it must be near impossible – surely?

Certainly, it’s not everyone’s bag. An agent of social change must offer more than just determination, or conviction, or altruism. To change the way a group of people think – which is, at least to some degree, a determinant of how they behave – requires a truly remarkable message. One that generates insight. One that forces people to question the status quo.

Eco-design consultants, Ecoinnovators, are trying to do exactly that with The Secret Life of Things project, a series of short, animated videos exploring the hidden environmental impacts of everyday things. Their first animated video, Life Psychl-ollogy, is featured below.

What we refer to in marketing speak as ‘cut-through’ or ‘a tipping point’ is what psychotherapists call a ‘breakthrough’: a rapid change in mindset after a period of resistance. Unfortunately, as psychotherapists will attest, these are exceptionally rare events. It may take years, even decades, of therapy before an insight of this magnitude is achieved. Sometimes it never happens at all.

So is this kind of change really possible on a macro scale? That is, does it represent profound insights and lasting behavioural shifts? Will the YouTube clip shown above result in real behaviour change? Do people like Al Gore have a rare gift for guiding whole sections of society towards a new way of thinking and doing? Or is their popularity just a passing fad that will lapse at the first sign of self-interest and human fallibility?

Are those who pursue social change a force for good – or just unrealistic zealots?

Ryan Wallman is Senior Writer at WellmarkPerspexa, a strategic communications and design agency that believes in the power of social marketing.

Indeed resource companies can, and must, play a role in the broader and more sustainable development of society in general, including attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to improve social and economic conditions the world’s poor.

A number of countries are struggling to meet their MDG targets, including our closest neighbour, Papua New Guinea (PNG), which ranks last among the Asian Development Bank’s Pacific developing member countries on both the Human Development Index and the Human Poverty Index of the United Nations. In PNG, the proportion of people living under the national poverty line has increased and many health indicators have deteriorated in recent years. Yet, while the country struggles to meet their MDG targets, a resource boom is occurring in parallel. There must be a way to create lasting social value from this economic growth.

Some sceptics say this is the government’s responsibility. However, the job of the government is to ensure that the people have their basic needs met – it doesn’t necessarily have to supply the services itself. In fact, almost half of all health services in PNG are effectively sub-contracted to churches to deliver. Resource-sector companies already provide a range of health services to their employees and local populations. We just need to make this more systematic and in concert with national programs.

Speed, efficiency, innovation, creative marketing and leadership are urgently needed to achieve the MDGs. The resource sector has these capabilities in spades. Furthermore, companies also have assets (premises, equipment, transport and delivery systems, and money), business networks (workforce, customers, other businesses, access to governments, international reach) and a skill base (management and communication skills, monitoring capacities, information-technology skills and employee knowledge) that would contribute significantly to reaching these goals. For instance, consider the following examples.

• MDG 4 (reduce child mortality) – resource companies could support immunisation programs by providing vaccines and cold-chain transport; support antibiotic drug supplies by providing transport and supplementation; support female-literacy programs; promote exclusive breastfeeding and birth spacing.
• MDG 5 (improve maternal health) – companies could assist in obstetric emergencies by providing transport and communications; help local health facilities deliver emergency obstetric care; ensure family-planning methods are available; expand antenatal care; train village health volunteers in remote areas; support female-literacy programs.
• MDG 6 (combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases)
  • HIV/AIDS – companies could implement HIV workplace policy and education; distribute free condoms; provide access to voluntary counselling and testing; deliver programs on how to prevent mother-to-child transmission; assist in active management of sexually transmitted infections.
  • Malaria – companies could support the distribution of impregnated bed nets; increase availability of diagnostic tests and treatment; institute vector-control measures.
  • Tuberculosis – companies could implement the Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (TB DOTS) program and provide diagnostic testing.

It is also in the interests of resource companies to assist efforts to reach the MDGs where they operate. A healthy workforce leads to improved productivity. Healthy villages improve business–community relations and the social license to operate. Certainly, there are growing expectations that these companies will support local social- and economic-development initiatives – something promoted by organisations such as the International Council on Mining and Metals, the Global Reporting Initiative and the International Finance Corporation. While investors do not necessarily reward corporate social responsibility, announcements of socially irresponsible events are invariably followed by significant downturns in a company’s stock value.

The challenge is how to create a facilitative environment, which systematically encourages and enables business participation in the MDGs. We need to start dialogue between resource companies, governments, NGOs and donors about ways to engage the resource sector for lasting social benefit. Relationship issues can impact on the success of extractive industry partnerships, so all parties need to better understand the differences in private- and public-sector motivations, expectations, methods of ‘doing business’ and other ‘people issues’. There must be clear expectations in relation to industry social commitments. Fiscal instruments, such as the tax-credit scheme and distribution of royalties – to create incentives for such participation – should also be broadened.

To date, the experience with partnerships involving the mining sector in PNG has been encouraging. Involvement of resource companies in social development initiatives, while not a panacea for poverty, is a legitimate and valuable asset in the journey towards achieving the MDGs, and will benefit the private sector, government and community alike.

Jane Thomason is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Queensland and is part of a global collaboration to develop a framework for measuring business contribution to development.

But as careers progress and responsibilities grow, these instances of rest and reflection become increasingly infrequent. Add in a child or two and the care of an aging parent, and downtime can soon become the stuff of nostalgia.

Such a lifestyle has become accepted in our society, but is this norm really normal? With work commitments encroaching on our time, what else is being eroded?

Do Australian professionals have a problem with work-life balance?

Research by Beaton in collaboration with Linda Duxbury, a work-life balance expert, and Beyond Blue has found that Australian professionals are working harder than ever – and it’s not necessarily doing them any good. So how sustainable is our ‘workaholism’?

In this 2008 study, close to 12,000 professionals answered questions relating to work-life balance. The results showed that professionals in Australia are particularly time-poor. On average, they spend 9.5 hours at work each day. A large majority (70%) worked an average 6 hours of unpaid overtime each week.

Nearly half (42%) of respondents cited they felt overloaded within their role – that is, their workload was approaching or had surpassed a level with which they were comfortable. Not surprisingly, nearly a third (29%) of respondents felt their work was encroaching on their family life.

So why do we do it? Why would we willingly take on more work when we already feel overloaded? Prior research by Linda Duxbury found it was due to:

1. Downsizing
   • ‘Jackson was made redundant, now I have to do his work as well as mine.’
2. Corporate culture
   • ‘If I don’t work harder than the guy next to me, I won’t advance. If he does overtime, I have to do more, because I’m more committed and more loyal.’
3. Increased use of technology
   • ‘If you need me I’ll be contactable on my iPhone/Blackberry/laptop in the hotel lobby/plane/taxi /restaurant.’
4. Global competition
   • ‘It’s always happy hour somewhere in the world, and Johnson & Co. need their report by 9 am GMT + 10:00.’
5. Wanting to do a good job
   • ‘It’s not perfect yet. If I just spend a little more time on it, it’ll be perfect. Then I can go home.’

What these reasons boil down to are expectations – those of others or of ourselves. Just as opportunities multiply as they are seized, expectations increase as they are met. And to continually meet rising expectations, the relationship between work and life must inevitably be strained. So what effect does this have?

Depressing figures: the impact of work-life imbalance

In 2007, a collaborative study between Beaton and Beyond Blue of over 7,500 professionals in Australia found a significantly higher prevalence of depression within those working in professional service firms as compared to the general population. Lawyers in particular were the most prone to depression and were also more likely to use non-prescription drugs or alcohol to mitigate feelings of sadness.

Such a statistic begs the question of causality: ‘does working in the professions cause depressive symptoms or do the professions attract a typically more morose individual?’ Neither of the above studies intended to answer that question. However, four facts from the work-life study collectively highlight a grave concern for the Australian professional services industry:

1. Those overloaded within their role (49% of Australian professionals) are significantly more likely to express the view that they are not satisfied with their job.
2. Those who feel their work interferes with their family life (29%) are even more likely to be dissatisfied with their job.
3. One in four (25%) miss work due to physical or emotional fatigue.
4. Absenteeism due to physical or emotional fatigue is often a precursor to episodes of burnout.

Is it any surprise lawyers are the most prone to depression, when anecdotally we know they work some of the longest hours in the professions?

The link here is not between depression and hours spent at work per se; rather, it is between depression and a sense of not being in control, something often cited by those experiencing feelings of intense sadness. Growing expectations can make us feel trapped, especially when those expectations are rigidly defined. The work-life study found that, more than anything else, flexibility of work hours and location help Australian professionals balance their lives better. This relatively simple measure may drastically reduce mental health issues, absenteeism and burnout.

So is our ‘workaholism’ sustainable? For the sake of our collective mental health, is it not time to concede that the answer is a clear ‘no’? Surely the question to ask now is ‘how do we change our expectations?’

Phillip Sargeant is an Associate at Beaton, a research and consulting firm that works with professional service firms and has previously collaborated with Beyond Blue.