It’s all about culture - we are being challenged right now to operate in a new world that we can’t predict but we can influence and adapt. Our actions, our decisions will be judged now and into the future, governing our long-term sustainability. The wellness and focus of your people are key elements that make the difference right now to productivity. How you lead your organisation drives the ‘human element’ and makes the different between treading water and moving forward up the beach.
Business Case
- You cannot run your business without your employees. The mindset of your employees is crucial to increasing revenue. Growth mindset cultures keep people well, productive and motivated
- Focusing on your people is the right thing to do - employees are humans with a thinking brain and a heart and need to be treated with dignity, fairness and feel valued
- Your customers have a social conscious and are increasingly making purchasing decisions based on your reputation
- Owners, Directors and their delegates are required by law to do all that is reasonably practicably to protect their employees from harm. That is foreseeable harm. We have many cases and will have many more to come that show that psychological/mental health is now foreseeable in our workplaces
- Every % point of reduction in sick leave, every % point reduction in absenteeism saves $
- Recent productivity commissions statistics suggest mental health claims costs $12.8 billion a year to industry. Mental Health claims are commonly 3 times higher in pay-outs than physical claims.
Indicators of a healthy productive culture
- Shared strategic purpose with a benefit mindset
- Clear strategic communication which gives direction and certainty
- Senior leaders visibly role model positive wellbeing activities giving their teams permission to follow suit
- Role clarity and accountability at all levels
- Leaders display backbone and heart leadership style
- Leaders actually know their individual team members
- Employees have some say in how their tasks are completed
- Employees are valued for contribution not hours worked, rewarded for quality deep work
- Collective intelligence and collaboration is intrinsic behaviour
- Innovation is a given, failure is ok, learning and adaption is fast
- Trustworthy, honest, empathetic and fair leader to team relationships
- Focus on ongoing learning and mastery to create sustainability and resilience
Key Actions by Leaders
- Believe that psychological safety and mental health is an issue societally, inside the organisation and has commercial implications. Take this seriously as an organisation and make your organisation human;
- Identify, articulate and commit to your organisations desired ‘healthy culture’ state;
- Get the real story of your organisations’ health and correlate it to your financial and non-financial metrics with instruments such as PS25 psychological safety lead indicator;
- Create a 90-day plan with targeted focus key areas;
- Create monitoring systems from Executive to Board and hold leaders to account for their strategic and operational decision making to achieve a healthy workplace;
- Have ‘people affect’ conversations and include them in leadership mentoring and decision making;
- Drive your desired healthy culture through your workplace language by embedding it into your processes and systems e.g. communications, meetings, KPI’s, feedback;
- Recruit and develop leaders with backbone and heart beliefs, that see people as human and trust them to do their work;
- Create systems for sharing e.g. giving employees voice, sharing concerns, errors etc;
- Review work practices: ask whether they are achieving the output wanted or creating errors, injuries or burnout?;
- Use real time feedback with employees not annual performance reviews. Remove the anxiety and improve real time performance.