It is said that workplace productivity is a fraction of what it could be. What do you believe will increase workplace productivity?
Dawna Jones: You know, that’s an interesting question because it depends on how you define productivity. Productivity is a fraction of what it could be because people aren’t engaged. If they were engaged, then obviously you’d have higher productivity. It goes back to the previous question. Fundamentally, there’s a need to rethink purpose to go beyond ‘we exist to make money’ and stretch into being of service to the world. Those that do achieve higher profitability without making unethical decisions that compromise systemic health. The great illusion of business efficiency is that if you focus narrowly on profit, you think you will increase profit. But in fact, when you focus very narrowly, you ignore everything that creates the bottom line, including engagement. If you re-shift the lens to ‘why do we matter in the world?’ ‘What’s important about our contribution as a company in the world?’ Then ask, ‘what do we want to do to make the world better?’ That’s the level of thinking and perceiving where not only engagement increases, but consequently so does workplace productivity. So, we like to think it’s about business process, but more about what lies at the heart of the matter.
With regard to your chapter, “How Companies Create Costs by Ignoring Workplace Health”, what costs are companies creating by ignoring workplace health?
Dawna Jones: It’s a complicated interaction, but short and simply the high costs of stress related illness is a by-product of the workplace culture. That is not to suggest that if a company becomes more conscious of its actions and decisions stress would disappear, but certainly negative stress would. Companies would like to think that’s not the case and in the case of depression there is a tendency to blame the person rather than look at the context and understand the forces. But if you’ve got high costs of stress-related illness, it means you’re putting your people under a lot of pressure and not dealing with the pressures, just passing it on to people. The other one is around innovation. When you’ve got a company culture that is based on ‘do what we say, just get this done’, very operationally do-do-do-do-do, then you disengage creative initiative completely. Then in the next breath, company executives will say: ‘Now we need you to innovate.” But meanwhile, the initiative has been killed off, and creativity has actually been suppressed. Bouncing forward requires a deeper understanding about how things work at a human level to move from let’s just plug this human machine in and make it work. More insight and less rote behavior is needed. So, there’s a lot of interplay between the formal processes and the informal social interactions that define results. Innovation suffers because the creativity has been put offline, along with the initiative that people have and bring to work every day. Restoring it means understanding the profound needs of being human and creating a safe environment where risk-taking is natural. Right now, many companies are increasing risk by assuming a business process will save them.
That’s a great share and very good point. Wow! Can you share a success story for a company that you worked with and helped achieve an outcome?
Dawna Jones: When I listen to the feedback I get from clients, the work that I do allows them to see through very complex situations more successfully, make better decisions and sometimes that directly saves money. In one case, with a construction project I had, they felt they saved about a million dollars off the cost of their project by cleaning up the risk-laden language that created higher cost and lower trust. It amounts to people sitting down and working it out, seeing each other differently, building some empathy around: How did we make those decisions? What assumptions did we make? To sharpen the decision-making process and bring the unconscious to the surface where it can’t sabotage relationships or performance.
That’s excellent. Thank you for sharing.
For more information about Dawna Jones, visit www.frominsighttoaction.com.
