Exceptional, unprecedented, extraordinary! Our future and our future workforce!
It’s a paradigm shift. Re-engineering our teams for the future starts now.
Never before has this need been greater, with the rapid advance of technologies and with shocking new stats revealing that our jobs could be killing us! Read the details at: Warning: Your job could be killing you.
Desmond Tutu saying “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”, couldn’t be more relevant for us to remember. This is the very truth that we need to come back to. When working with one another, no matter what part we play in our teams, we need to remind ourselves that we are all human and each team member has their own unique and exceptional talent. We need to value each other properly and look after our people. We have a duty to help all our team members harness their unique skills to become exceptional.
How do we do this? One of the key ways is to look after our employee’s overall wellbeing rather than ignoring it. In the past, this area was incorrectly regarded as an ‘expense’ or ‘unnecessary luxury’. However, recent studies are proving that taking care of employee’s wellbeing decreases both the rate of sickness and resignation within organisations. This is leading to huge cost savings.
Accenture conducted a study last year on Creating the future workforce and they found that ‘emotional factors like engagement, quality of life, and status are equally if not more important to workers than income or benefits.’ In last week’s FT article, Keep calm and meditate: welcome to the mindful office, the operations of an LA based electric van manufacturer, Chanja, was discussed. This company has experienced talent retention beyond the industry norm. It’s key differentiator, which is thought to result in its high retention rate, is that it requires 20% of employee’s time be spent on personal development, including regular meditation. This personal development information is then included in scorecards which feed into quarterly and annual bonus-linked reviews. Bryan Hansel the founder and CEO, says productivity is higher than at any of the four previous companies he founded during his 30 years as an entrepreneur.
It can be seen that properly looking after and valuing employees is no longer just about pay and perhaps also having a wellness department, but is now evolving into having robust wellbeing programmes as well. It really is too late if employees are already sick, if they are already disengaged, as the costs (sick leave, medical costs, low productivity, resignation, replacement) are already being incurred.
Putting a wellbeing programme into your organization would include regularly providing activities such as in-house meditation, yoga, resilience workshops, mindfulness training, fitness and nutrition coaching and lifelong learning. All these activities have been shown to raise levels of happiness, rewire the brain, lower stress and improve immune function. They have proven to increase employee engagement, productivity, creativity and retention.
It’s really all about bringing the smiles back to work in authentic ways and sometimes getting our teams to have a good laugh through it all.
“But when you’re in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you’re guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.’ – George Carlin
All the exceptional, unprecedented and extraordinary organisations of the future are being built by their exceptional employees right now. Why not transform your organization today into being exceptional, unprecedented and extraordinary?