Word: cantors
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...turnover is affected by employees morale, too, and morale continually flows and ebbs, Cantor says. "It's not as if you'd go along with a stable temperature of 98.6 and then hit a fever plateau. Morale is always changing," he says. A recessed economy or student demonstrations such as those in the late '60s could trigger depression among employees, he adds...
...personnel director says he tries to capitalize on high employee morale. Two years ago one of the personnel office's efforts to combat "bureaucratic void"--what Cantor calls the frequent malaise among employees at large institutions who feel insignificant--was to issue a computerized statement to every employee listing each of his benefits, such as retirement and hospitalization. "That statement helped people know Harvard does care, even though it's a big place. We got literally hundreds of responses, and all but one were favorable. One woman wrote in to say she thought we should not be wasting money...
...Most Harvard departments don't have rows upon rows of people working in the same room. You have an entity within a department. But we've got to come up with policies to counter the feeling of just being a cog," Cantor says. One of his policies was to give a Harvard chair to employees celebrating their 25th year at Harvard. About 100 people get that chair every year, Cantor says, adding, "It's a neat ceremony...
Another way to improve morale is to liberalize promotions. Cantor says it is relatively easy for employees to move within non-exempt salary grades--one-third of Harvard's open positions are filled from within--but that the jump from secretarial or clerical work to administrative or professional jobs is a problem. "The trouble is that moving up in that area the number of positions becomes devilishly limited," Cantor says. A typical Harvard department might have ten office workers and one administrator, but an industry would have larger departments, with a foreman, three assistant foremen, six supervisors and many assistant...
...Cantor recently sent out questionaires to randomly selected support staff and supervisors asking their perception of how the personnel department was doing its job. An employee's perception of the personnel department's effectiveness can be used to measure morale, he says. The questionnaire culminated in an effort to make the department appear more accessible, Cantor says. "We got a report card of about a B," Cantor adds, emphasizing the personnel department has lots of room for improvement...