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If Happier People Means Better Performance –What’s Stopping Us?

This last point plays to the heart of the issue. We don’t give people freedom at work that would likely make the workplace a whole heap better. That can start by allowing people to make decisions for themselves about aspects of their day… whether that is to check their social media accounts or track a major sporting event, as long as the job gets done and gets done well. I pay people to be professional and do their job – how, where or when they do it isn’t really that interesting to me, and it hasn’t escaped me that if I tell everyone exactly how to do the job, rather than what outcomes I’m looking for I will always be more than a little responsible for the outcome and won’t ever get the best from the people I work with nor will I know what they’re really capable of. My job is to provide the tools, the environment (where appropriate) and the input where it’s required to ensure the best possible job gets done in a way that is consistent with our values.

Throughout my employed career (the bit before Stonepoint), goals were largely set for me by other people – that’s pretty normal I suspect. They come from the top and gradually cascade down through the business until they reach every employee and we each have some reference to the overall strategy in our scorecard or objectives. Now, this happens in most companies, and to surprisingly senior levels too. They were never my goals, and when I did set them in the annual planning cycle they would come back with “stretch” added. The review that followed was almost always equally pointless – whether I had done a good job or not seemed just about as arbitrary as if I’d had no goals and more about my ability to argue my value.

Instead of cascading the objectives and tasks down the organisation until they reach individual scorecards, we think firms could be making this process much more engaging for employees and a lot less onerous for managers. This is something we’re testing with one of our clients.

Having determined where we’re going (in this instance a 5-year Ambition, supported by robust alignment to what we stand for, a detailed understanding of and commitment to what needs to change, where we choose to compete and how we will differentiate), we determined the critical priorities that we believe will get us there. From that position, we identified some focused metrics – a single leading and lagging measure for each of our four priorities (and yes that was difficult). For each measure we worked out how we would measure it, how frequently we would measure it and what we needed to happen to that measure for us to consider it a success – this created our “dials”. Now, this is the bit that is different. Rather than try to translate this into individual tasks and measures for each part of the business – we’re taking where we are out to teams in the business and inviting them to fill the gaps.

Here’s where we’re going, here’s how we think we’ll get there, here are the dials we need to move, how can you help?

Allowing teams around the company to play an active role in determining what they can do to help deliver the ambition creates a rare level of involvement that we think is fundamental to achieving sustained engagement. It respects employees as adults with an interest in their own future. It recognises our need to feel that our work is meaningful. It also gives employees ownership of both the problem and the solution and in doing so puts to work the management structure in the business in the way it is intended – to help ensure we achieve our goals.

Will it work? Almost certainly. Will it work quickly? Probably not. It will take time to learn new habits and will require significant confidence and belief from leadership to stay the course. Many of the bad habits that we’ve established inside companies have been developed over a long time, we shouldn’t expect to fix them overnight.

Since I started with a quote, let me finish with one that plays precisely to the point I’ve discussed here. So if your organisation is serious about getting the best from its people… what’s stopping you?

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

–Daniel Pink

David Bellamy
David Bellamyhttps://happinesslab.co/
DAVID Bellamy is Founder and CEO of Happiness Lab, a business dedicated to helping organizations to unlock the benefits of happiness at work. Happiness Lab’s unique technology platform offers companies a totally different lens through which to view the day-to-day experiences of employees - and represents his first venture into the world of technology development and disruption. Prior to Happiness Lab, David spent 18 years as a management consultant working on projects associated with “every conceivable organizational challenge”. His first book “Cultivating Organisational Happiness” is due out later in 2018.

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3 CONVERSATIONS

  1. I hope you challenge as many CEOs you know/think of with this piece David. But apart from cultivating a caring culture and happy vibe, CEOs also need to deflate their egos and also get their feelers on what really goes on in the workplace. Jealousy across the board is another huge spoke in the wheel and a poisonous one at that.

    • Thanks Kimberly – i appreciate your comments and of course you taking the time to read the article in the first place.

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