ALLY MCBEAL, SPIN CITY and all those other workplace dramas that crowd our television channels are hoaxes. In reality, working life is far more mundane. For the average person, one-third of their life is reduced to a few dull maxims: the office is where they work; their colleagues are the people they work with; management is who they work for. Clear and simple, with little talk of the company being like family and the office a second home.
But all that may be changing. Increasingly, companies - particularly multinationals operating in Hong Kong - are aware of a need to recognise employees are human beings with feelings and social needs, as opposed to robots prepared to slave their life away.
This change in attitude comes at a time when job dissatisfaction is on the rise. A recent pan-Asian survey shows Hong Kong employees feel less loyal to their bosses than any of their Asian counterparts. Only 21 per cent of Hong Kong workers questioned said they feel 'truly loyal' to their employers (truly loyal being defined as 'wanting to and willing to stay' with the company), compared with 51 per cent in South Korea, 49 per cent in Taiwan, 45 per cent in China and a regional average of 38 per cent.
The main reasons for the widespread dissatisfaction appear to be pay freezes, job insecurity and other symptoms of the economic downturn, but employees also lack a sense of belonging in the workplace. It is no coincidence that Hong Kong also had the highest proportion of employees who did not feel 'part of the family' at their organisations.
'In a typical Hong Kong firm, two people might work next to each other for a year and still know nothing about the other's personal life,' says Christine Woo, associate director at Asia Market Intelligence, the market research firm which conducted the survey.
Tim Oliver, chief executive of CIGNA Worldwide Insurance (Hong Kong), is trying to change all that. Since joining the firm last July, Oliver has been working to implement his vision. Entitled 'Great Place To Work', his project attempts to instil a culture of unity and employee satisfaction in the company. 'An organisation should realise that its only real asset is its people,' says Oliver. 'My goal is to create an environment where people want to join and want to stay.'
One of the key aspects of this is creating a sense of togetherness within the company. When Oliver first joined CIGNA, he noticed there was no unity between its various divisions. 'I wanted to create a mechanism to bring all the internal functions together,' he says.
