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

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.

3. 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

Read the text about different types of listening techniques. Complete the paragraphs using the sentences below. For each gap (1-6), mark one letter

(A-I). Do not use any letter more than once. There are three extra sentences you don’t need to use.

Nobody likes to think of himself as a bad or inattentive listener. Yet, according to Marina Shakalova, executive director of Management Training International (MTI), somebody who thinks that he or she is an effective listener is probably fooling himself. Becoming such a listener is a skill that requires time, she says, and one in which there is always room for improvement. 1 . And the chances are that no matter how good you are at it, you could always do better.

Varying social professional cultures view effective listening differently.

2 .Yet many human resources managers see this as a very serious mistake indeed. For one thing, not listening to others – to colleagues, to subordinates, to office personnel – causes others to do the same. Soon it becomes part of company’s culture. This not only creates an atmosphere that is intolerable for working, says a senior-trainer consultant at MTI, it also a disastrous way to operate in general. He claims that in the most successful companies managers listen to their employees (which does not always mean agreeing with them): ‘In the most effective companies, the most effective information comes from inside, the information for managers to make key decisions. From the people who directly deal with the clients, from everybody. If a manager pursues the way of ineffective listening he just loses money – and that’s a pretty good reason to be a good listener.’

Shakalova also sees substantial benefits for many people on the Russia’s job market. She has recently analyzed the profiles of individuals with commensurate educations and qualifications and has tried to determine what factors separate those who did not find jobs. ‘I would say that the people who have the skill of effective listening find jobs easier than those who do not,’ she says. Sometimes it’s not the problem of your qualifications or your background. 3 . Only through effective listening it is possible to develop this skill,’ she says.

Landing good jobs and running successful companies are indeed good incentives to work on becoming an effective listener, but consultants agree that the advantages are in no way confined to your professional life. Developing and improving your listening skill improves your ability to communicate with your children, your parents, your spouse and your friends. In fact, it benefits all of your interpersonal relationships, whether serious or casual.

Since it’s natural enough for most people believe mistakenly that they are effective listeners, there must be many widespread misconceptions of what effective listening in actuality really is. Maxim Ilyin, also a director of program development and senior-trainer consultant at MTI, has developed a theory in which there are four levels of listening. The first level, or the lowest one, is ignoring someone with whom you are communicating (whom we call a ‘partner’). Since this is not listening at all, it does not need much explanation. But consultants are quick to point out the immediate disadvantages of ignoring a partner.

4 __________.

The next two levels carry the same disadvantages and missed opportunities, though they are much more subtle than simply ignoring a partner – so subtle, in fact, that at times they can make someone believe that he or she is effectively listening when they really are not. The second level of listening is ‘pretending’ to listen. 5 .

Aside from being disrespectful, it makes a partner uncomfortable. The person who pretends to listen becomes somebody others try to avoid.

The third level is ‘selective listening’, or hearing what you want to hear, though not always what is actually being said. The fourth level is attentive listening, the point at which you really have become an effective listener.

Pretending and selective listening are often the unconscious result of coming to a dialogue with an existing set of expectations and ideas, and even an unwillingness to bend to what your partner may be saying. ‘We have a tendency to understand what we want to understand and ignore what we don’t like,’ says Shakalova. Sometimes we enter into a dialogue too eager to offer advice, ready to offer solutions before we’ve even heard the problem. Sometimes, she says, we don’t think we need to hear what a partner has to say because we ‘know‘ what he or she is going to say. ‘We think we are mind readers. But most of us are not very good mind readers, and the first step is to understand this.

Experts agree that there are specific techniques that one can use in order to develop listening skills. But before these can be employed, certain fundamental preconceptions and barriers need to be moved aside.

The main preconception is that people are often afraid to listen to others because they fear that it carries some form of tacit approval of what is being said. ‘There is a common fear that when you start listening you start agreeing. People mix the two things up. If you are listening it means you are showing respect though you may even hate what you are hearing’.

‘You can only influence someone else if you open yourself to be influenced from interlocutor’s side.’ Demonstrate to your partner that you are listening with non-verbal, unobtrusive gestures. 6 .

Effective listening requires certain maturity and open-mindedness. It takes time, patience and resolve. But in the end, within any profession, its benefits are unquestionable.

A. In effect, this is completely ignoring what is being said while adjusting your eyes and posture only to look as though you are paying attention to your partner.

B. In business, for example, some managers see listening to subordinates as a sign of weakness.

C. For those who sincerely want to develop effective listening skill, there will be a perceptible change the very first time they begin to employ this technique

D. So like other difficult talents and facilities, effective listening requires constant practice and development.

E. You cannot attempt to rephrase unless you have been effectively listening.

F. It’s how well you can understand what the company wants from you and how you can communicate your own expectations.

G. When you partner pauses do not assume that he or she has finished talking.

H. First, it creates an insupportable working or social environment; second, it can mean eschewing potential business opportunities, or foregoing access to important information.

I. Nods, for instance, needn’t necessarily convey agreement.

TEXT 3

Read the text about the measurements of happiness at work. There is one extra word in most lines of this text. However, some lines are correct. Write the extra word on the right. If a line is correct, write ‘correct’ on the right. The first line has been done as an example.

Happiness is the precursor to a success, not the other way around. 1 a

In fact, happiness and optimism fuel performance and achievement. 2

55% of employees are unhappy at work, which results in enormous 3

HR costs and a huge impact on productivity. A recent ground-breaking, 4

in-depth study by Jessica Pryce-Jones makes a solid business case for 5

having by happy employees. Her extensive study came up with very 6

precise measurements of the tangible, tremendous impact of happy 7

employees:

1. Challenges and goals. Happier employees embrace challenges 8

and goals to a much greater extent than unhappy employees: 18% more 9

in the case of challenges, and 33% more in the case of goals. 10

2. Productivity. People who are happiest at work are 47% more 11

productive every week than those who are less happy. That’s the 12

equivalent to working an extra day and a quarter of a week. 13

3. Sick leave. There is a clear relationship between sick leave and 14

happiness at work. People who are happiest at work take 42% less 15

frequent sick leave than those who are the least happy. 16

4. Energy. The happiest people at work have 180% more energy 17

than their least happy colleagues. This has a big impact not only 18

on what they will do, but also on the relationships they have with others. 19

5. Engagement. Engagement is often measured and managed: the 20

happiest employees are 108% more engaged than their least happy 21

colleagues. And they have 82% more of job satisfaction. 22

6. Motivation. Employees who are most happy are 50% more 23

motivated than people who are least happy at work. 24

7. Respect. Happier employees report that they have experience 25

28% more respect from their colleagues and 31% more from their 26

bosses than their least happy colleagues. 27

8. Efficiency, effectiveness, and self-belief. People who are 28

happier are 25% more effective and efficient than those who are least 29

happy. And they have 25% more self-belief, too. 30

9. Working environment. One’s working environment does not 31

contribute meaningfully to how happy people feel in their jobs. Shiny 32

new high tech offices, beautiful carpets, just like pay raises, 33

cause a temporary hike in the happiness, after which people return to 34

their usual level of happiness.

10. Overall. People who are happiest at work experience 23% more 35

Contribution, 31% more Conviction, 30% better fit with their Culture, 36

38% more Commitment, 40% more Confidence, and think they are 37

achieving their potential 40% more than their least happy colleagues. 38

They also have 33% more Pride and Trust, and 50% more Recognition. 39

SUMMARISING

TASK: Summarize the article with a plan drawn up. You have 10 minutes to prepare the task. Speak up to 5 minutes.