Why most wellbeing and engagement strategies fail, and how to build a thriving organisation instead

Why most wellbeing and engagement strategies fail, and how to build a thriving organisation instead

Restore and revitalise by having conversations that matter in Nature

In boardrooms and HR teams across the world, leaders are pouring time, money, and hope into wellbeing and engagement programs. Yet stress, burnout, and disconnection remain stubbornly high. Why? Because too many of these strategies scratch the surface and leave the real causes of disengagement untouched.

At VitalOrg, we believe it’s time to stop trying to rescue people from their work, and start creating work worth showing up for.

The fatal flaw in most wellbeing programs

Modern workplaces love stress management workshops, mental health first aiders, “company happy days,” and wellness apps. But research shows these individual-focused wellbeing initiatives rarely improve outcomes. A landmark 2024 study from Cambridge University [1] found minimal evidence of lasting benefits and even potential harm.   This is perhaps not surprising, as when we focus on the individual, not the system, the inference is the problem is with you. Volunteering days were a rare exception, likely because they give people meaning, autonomy, and connection, and possibly because they offer a day away from the workplace that may be demoralising them😉

When the day-to-day reality of work is overwhelming, asking people to meditate or attend yoga classes during lunch is like putting a bandage on a broken bone.

Employee engagement: why perks and parties miss the point

When energy is flat or turnover spikes, many companies respond with perks, away days, or celebrations. But these gestures, however well-intentioned, often amount to little more than organisational PR. They distract from the deeper need to transform how work itself is experienced.

If your organisational culture lacks trust, meaning, or shared purpose, a free pizza lunch won’t fix it.

No one ever left their company because it lacked desk yoga…

…plenty leave because their innovative ideas are ignored, or they don’t feel heard, or because they loath being micro-managed …

The Real Opportunity: Redesign Work Itself

True employee engagement and wellbeing are not about doing more to people but working with them to create a healthy, empowering organisational culture.

Our research at VitalOrg shows that when you redesign work so people can flourish, you unlock not only wellbeing but also higher organisational performance. Here’s how:

✅ Trust people with meaningful work and agency.   Give employees real influence over how they do their jobs and how their teams operate.

✅ Cut bureaucracy.  Reduce rules, approvals, and paperwork that drain energy and kill initiative.

✅ Enable real participation.  Create structures for collaboration where people experiment, solve problems, and innovate together, guided by leaders who set clear intent and boundaries and get out of the way, enabling the team to deploy the very best of themselves.

✅ Make improvement everyone’s job.  Invite every employee to help make work better, not just do the work. 

Organisational performance only comes from flourishing Employees

These aren’t soft ideals,  they’re proven levers for creating an organisational culture where employees feel alive, engaged, and committed. When people experience meaning, autonomy, and connection at work, they don’t just stay, they thrive. And that vitality translates directly into better performance, innovation, and resilience.

Ready to move beyond superficial strategies?

If you’re tired of initiatives that fail to move the needle on employee experience, let’s talk about how to redesign your organisation for true health, engagement, and performance. Because when work is designed for human flourishing, everyone wins.

[1] Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions: Cross-sectional evidence from the United Kingdom

William J. Fleming

First published: 10 January 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12418

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Great performance comes from flow

Lionesses celebrating

Great performance comes from flow

Lionesses celebrating
Picture credit BBC News

Sometimes teams just click.  Most of us would recognise that those virtuoso performances come from a place of deep mutual understanding, connectedness, and alignment to a shared goal or purpose.    However, there are some other vital ingredients which, are universally important and often neglected.

In your teams, have you ever noticed…

  • Conversations not being as equal as they might be, a view or individual dominating
  • Resorting to “decision by exhaustion” or “decision by senior status / authority”
  • Constant, unhelpful critisism being all too usual from some quarters
  • Conversations in deadlock; cycling round and around much in the way of progress and not really being resolved.
  • Relationships being unnecessarily tested, often through misunderstanding
  • Lots of views exchanged, not so much objective data or progress
  • People feeling they’ve not been heard and understood
  • Some people holding-back valuable contributions

And then wondered why there is a lack of buy-in to the process, the output, or even the team itself?

Introducing Teams in Flow (TiF)

What could your team achieve if…

  • There was a positive and cohesive climate
  • The atmosphere around them encouraged everyone’s creativity, and collaboration is a default condition
  • Decisions got made with more speed and less friction.
  • There was greater psychological safety; more innovative ideas, energy and engagement
  • Buy-in to decisions was improved, even by those who offered alternatives

What is the magic ingredient?

TiF is all about improving our interactive skill in conversations.  It is well proven with a rigorous research base.

TiF is a unique blend of two threads of research and our own subsequent in-use refinements that span decades.  One thread is behavioural, it relates to the conscious skill set that enables participants to engage with others in conversations which flow, are generative, equal and engender psychological safety.  The other essential ingredient is a guide-rail to structure the conversations – idea generation, decision-making and problem-solving are structures that apply most often in the work of organisational teams.  Both threads are necessary, neither one is sufficient.

TiF results in enduring behavioural change

Skills are only learned, embedded and become habitual through cycles of practice and feedback.  The TiF intervention is all about creating a safe place for the team to learn together through practice.  It is vitally important that the content of the discussion is real and meaningful to the team.  The happy consequence of this is that the “real work” of the team gets progressed at the same time the team is acquiring the new skills.  By virtue of working with every-day teams peer-to-peer feedback and support endures long after the learning experience, sustaining the behaviour change.

Extraordinary results require a radically different approach

Here at Organisational Vitality our purpose is to help leaders and their teams liberate their full potential; to have fun doing their best, most rewarding work; and to enjoy ever-improving performance.

We are very comfortable being an outlier to the majority of providers in the Organisational Development space.  We don’t follow the crowd. Challenges in organisational dynamics are, by definition, wicked and messy, and yet most providers offer simple, unresponsive solutions that are incapable of dealing with that inherent complexity.

We have optimised to serve organisations that are purposeful, progressive and those that are scaling.  We offer highly personalised service, value the relationships we hold with those we serve, and based on our unique diagnostics and interventions co-create healthy participative change in organisations.

Curious to know more?

We would love to hear from you.  The conversation could change the flow of your team – forever!

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Is it time you cleared out the “deadwood” in your organisation?

Cutting out deadwood

Is it time you cleared out the “deadwood” in your organisation?

Cutting out deadwood

Springtime is the right time to get out in the garden with the pruning shears and reshape your fruit trees ahead of their next phase of growth.  We imply something similar when we talk about “deadwood” in the context of organisations.  Only we are talking about people not vegetation.

What or who is for the knife?

Deming observed that 95% of performance (good or bad) results from the system and only 5% from the people.  Following that theme this post will present the idea that it is “the system” that we should be attacking with a sharp instrument, not human beings.

Why change the system?

When we first completed the research that underpins the Vitality Index it was way back in 1990.  In 2010 when we reran the research, on aggregate and based on the organisations in our samples the Vitality of UK organisations had dropped by something like 5 percentage points.   

“Vitality” is an umbrella term that we use that encompasses employee experience, adaptability, and ability to innovate. 

We package these three things together because they are the unavoidable consequences of a set of 26 practices that our research identified.

If you adopt the practices, you will get these outcomes – all of them; you can’t pick and choose – sorry.

What changed between 1990 & 2010?

The rate of change, that’s what.

A lot happened between 1990 and 2010.  The internet happened for a start and brought with it entirely new ways of doing business, building relationships, communicating as well as opening-up a whole new world of easy-to-access information.  This combined with a whole heap of other new technologies meant that the rate of change in the external environment accelerated to a whole new level.  And yet in the same intervening time the ability of our organisations to adapt deteriorated.  And that in spite of the zillions of words written on the subject of how to manage change in a VUCA world.

If the world was speeding up, why were organisations slowing down?

This is the $6M dollar question.  Our research was able to indicate and broadly quantify the slow-down but was not designed to identify the why.  

Based on our observations however, we have a hunch.   In this time organisations seemed to get taller, with more layers of management, and wider with much more functional specialism (i.e. in these two decades procurement became widely professionalised, the ratio of HR people to numbers employed exploded).  So much more of everyone’s work was done within the constraints of an IT system (great for visibility, efficiency and consistency, not so good for continual improvement and adaptation).    Industrial regulation widened to affect more sectors and deepened in its complexity and implications.  A net result of all of these, and other factors, is that organisations became much more cumbersome, getting things done was rarely straight forward. The risk aversion of leaders also infected the mindset of anyone in the organisation with decision authority . Thus, to “prevent the worst happening”, processes, procedures and rules proliferated, and decisions got slowed by passing them up to the boss.  

Sorry for the loaded question, but what do you think the net effect of all of these factors might be on an organisation’s ability to offer a great employee experience, to be nimble, adaptive and to innovate?

What is bureaucratic drift?

Processes, procedures, rules and authorisation levels all have their place, but have you ever noticed how much more common it is for process and procedure to get added and for rules and authorisation requirements to tighten than it is for them to be removed or relaxed?   In the absence of this removal / relaxation activity, year on year, the level of bureaucracy grows without anybody really noticing, a bit like boiling a frog. So, unless there is a routine and deliberate effort to prune back the ever-expanding bureaucracy, we should expect our organisations to fall into a state that we call bureaucratic drift, becoming more and more bogged down in resource sapping and unrewarding activity which is of questionable value.  

How might we go about the job of pruning? 

When teams in organisations use the Vitality Index, we help them make changes in the form of safe-to-try experiments.  Thanks to the research-based diagnostic capability of the Index, the teams are directed towards specific areas of practice that have the greatest potential for each individual team.   Drawing on the knowledge contained in the Vitality Playbook, and the tacit knowledge in our heads, we offer some ideas to stimulate their own suggestions.  We always encourage the team towards changes that lighten the bureaucratic load, rather than add to it.  Here are some examples:  

  • Rather than adding a new report, meeting or agenda item, how about removing something that seems to add no value and see what happens?
  • Search for and scrap processes / systems that have become institutionalised – the ones that may have had some value in the past but have outlived their ‘see-by-date’.
  • Locate processes that are justified under the name of ‘control’ and check to see what actual control there is.  Or do we just have the ‘illusion of control’ but none in reality?
  • Check the ‘earners and spenders’ ratio.  Earners are the people who generate the organisations income and add value to customers.  Spenders do not.  Shift spenders to more added-value roles, especially those that add value to customers.
  • Crowd source to find out what is currently most difficult for and frustrating to employees and what they would like to see changed.  And then engage them with the change process, from the why to the what to the how.
  • Check to see how time is occupied with routine, repetitive activities – that are a bit like running hard on the spot, but don’t generate forward movement.  Then engage people in stuff that will improvement performance in some way – the one-off tasks and events that will create movement
  • Search for opportunities to replace tight, prescriptive rules with broad guidelines – and work out with the people involved what they should be.

Be bold; unlike the work of secateurs, pruning bureaucracy is reversible

“Safe-to-try” is the key here, all changes can be made in some way partial, time bound or reversible, so in way there is nothing to lose and learning is guaranteed.  So no need to be timid, be radical.  Unlike other forms of pruning accidents you wont be left trying to re-graft limbs onto trees or losing the wrong people. 

Be bold, explore, experiment, have fun and whatever you do, don’t drift into a place you don’t want to be.

This post was written by Ben, he likes nothing more than helping with teams as they bushwhack their way through the bureaucratic entanglements that frustrate them and stifle the organisations’ performance. 

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Can we survey our way to better employee engagement?

Unhelpful reports

Can we survey our way to better employee engagement?

Unhelpful reports
Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash

From a Gallup report issued in 2022, there was this conclusion: “Employee engagement levels in the UK are one of the worst in Europe with fewer than one in 10 UK employees feeling enthusiastic about their job.”

In the old days there were attitude surveys, and they just about always resulted in some sort of report.  Today they are called employee engagement surveys, and now sometimes employee experience surveys, but little has changed except the name.  Otherwise, the issues remain – including one over-riding thought.  If employee engagement surveys are such a good idea, how come there is still a problem?

Time for an explanation and some thoughts on how to do better?

Just get some data and make some changes

The logic is fine; survey our people, get some data, use data to change some stuff, employee engagement improves.  Except, in practice, according to Gallup at least, it doesn’t.  “Employee engagement levels in the UK ranked 33 out of 38 European countries, and suffered a two-point drop in score compared with last year’s survey.” If anything, it looks like it might be getting worse.  The good news, and goodness we need some, is that more and more organisations are taking this issue very seriously; the fact that we haven’t “shifted the needle” has in no way deterred us from trying.  Also encouraging is the recognition of the need for good data to guide decision-making.  However,  employee engagement is a complex output formed in an emergent way from many complex inputs, and will never be resolved through simple, one-dimensional actions.

But what data and what changes to make?

What are reports for?  If this is not clear, known and accepted by all, from the outset, and nailed down through some sort of charter, then it is highly likely that the purpose will either get distorted or forgotten completely.  In those circumstances, it sounds like another heavyweight report consuming loads of storage space and producing little in return.  Defining a clear purpose might seem like an indulgent use of time, but it is essential to staying on course.

Once purpose is clear, it will probably be possible to answer some more key questions: Who is in the target audience?  What are their goals?  How is the report supposed to help them achieve their goals?  Clarity here will help with making important design decisions, not only about the survey itself and the report generated but even more about the process by which the data is reviewed, analysed and used to design and implement improvement action.  Without that action there is little or no chance of anything actually getting better.

If the response rate to your current survey is in decline, take this as a strong indication that a fundementally different approach is required.  

And who should make the changes?

Another key question to help with those design decisions: is the report something that is ‘done to people’ or is it something that helps the employees themselves to identify and address the issues that need attention?  If the target audience is only managers (or even worse only select managers) don’t expect a lot of improvement action.  The ‘iceberg of ignorance’[1] will strike here.  As a generalisation, managers do not know what the key, operational issues are in their organisations – and they will know even less about the causes of those issues.  More of which later.

Then there is the risk of the report’s existence becoming an end in itself – another box ticked every year or two.  And the longer and more glossy the report is, the less likely that action will result.  Managers are busy people – however pretty the report may be, if it is long, there is little chance that it will be read and studied – and even less that it will stimulate improvement action.  And if the report does not result in some sort of improvement, then what is the point of the report?

[1]     The “iceberg of ignorance” is a concept popularized by a 1989 study by Sidney Yoshida. It posited that front line workers were aware of 100% of the floor problems faced by an organisation, supervisors were aware of only 74%, middle managers were aware of only 9%, and senior executives were aware of only 4% of the problems.

The presenting problem is rarely the one that needs to be fixed…

Symptoms of problems may be useful, in that they may help identify a cause or causes, but in themselves the have little value.  And the one thing that is for sure is that tackling symptoms alone is never going to solve the problem.  Try giving aspirin to someone suffering with a headache.  The symptoms may be controlled, but the person may die because of a much more serious ailment, the symptoms of which were being covered up by the aspirin treatment.

Employee engagement surveys will seldom produce any really valuable insights into causes, which are generally hidden from view.  In the absence if any diagnostic capability, they produce a description of the current state as it is experienced by the employees – but they are just symptoms.  Part of the issue here is the nature of the questions used in the surveys.  Generally, they are questions calling for some sort of judgement.  And direct, judgemental questions may identify symptoms but will never identify causes.  And so valid improvement action becomes an impossibility.  They also invite conscious and unconscious bias….

The opportunities to improve reside in your organisation, not anyone else’s

Finally, how does anyone know what constitutes a good result?  Comparisons with other organisations or aggregated statistics showing norms are not going to help identify whether or not the organisation is a good performer, against a researched model of what good looks like – except in merely relative terms.  “We are better than the average”.  Is the average itself good?  Or rubbish?  “OK, so the average is getting better and so are we”  Does that mean approaching close to perfection?  Or climbing out of the pit of ‘deplorable’?  (Whatever that might mean.)

What are the research data being used to identify an external standard for ‘good’?  If there is one, to what degree does the research identify individual management practices that can make the difference between success and non-success?  Back to symptoms and causes! 

What if we enabled our people to lead the change?

What if there were an alternative approach?  A very different means of generating data, one capable of providing insights into both symptoms and causes.  What if that diagnostic processes also identified top priority, key causes, with no need for long reports.  What if those insights were specific to each and every team in the organisation, thus bypassing the ‘iceberg’ problems.  What if those teams were supported by external facilitators to define their own safe-to-try improvements, to improve the climate in their own team.

Moreover, high levels of diversity and psychological safety in decision-making groups guarantee high levels of inclusion.   These groups always generate higher quality decisions and improvement where it is needed most – that is, where the problems are.  And guess what happens to levels of engagement?

Enabling each and every team in the organisation to work on those areas of practice that will have greatest benefit to their Employee Engagement is the essence of The Vitality Index. You can read more about it here.

If you are curious about shifting the approach to improving Employee Engagement or if you can’t bear the thought of commissioning another report or if you’d just like a thinking partner to help you nail that purpose statement, then we’d love to help.

This post was written by Denis Bourne, co-founder or Organisational Vitality.  Denis ran the research that the Vitality Index diagnostic is based upon.   He has over 40 years’ experience helping organisations become more autonomous, innovative, and change enabled, and, as a happy consequence, also enjoying fantastic employee experience.

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OrgScan, enabling you to innovate management and enhance your culture

OrgScan, enabling you to innovate management and enhance your culture

OrgScan is for you if:

  • Your organisation’s culture is not what you’d like it to be; you are losing good people or worse still they are burning-out
  • Your performance as an organisation is not what you’d like it to be; you are losing customers or competitive advantage
  • You are about to embark on a journey of organisational change; here OrgScan helps because knowing where you are starting from is as important as knowing where you are going
  • You are looking for something with rich insights to base your people strategy on; something more robust that an employee survey or more sensitive to your context than the latest OD fad.

What is OrgScan©?

OrgScan© is a rapid diagnostic that has been developed to identify the underlying system conditions (cultural, structural, process, resource etc.) at play in an organisation and some of the appropriate levers for change.  The approach is unique to VitalOrg and can be completed within a week. Whether planning an intervention or facing a challenge, the OrgScan© diagnosis gives an objective, evidence-based analysis of the current reality of the organisation.  In doing so it avoids the pitfalls of change challenges that address pseudo problems and not their causes, or perhaps attempting to address problems that are perceived by those with a voice but not really the priority.

How is OrgScan©

different?

Like many discovery processes OrgScan© uses structured conversations between facilitator and respondents.  It has, however, some key distinguishing features; these have been developed to address five requirements of discovery interventions where understanding the whole-system perspective of the organisation is important.

  1. The first is to develop a valid understanding of the organisation involving only a short time-scale and low commitment of resources. The speed of the discovery process is important, since the system that is the organisation is always changing as is its external environment, thus invalidating any analysis that is slow.  Additionally, short timescales and low resources also lead to low costs.
  2. The second is to develop an understanding of the organisation that reaches into the hidden and obscure, as well as those features that are ‘visible, and on-the-surface’. This includes all the ‘soft systems’ and cultural dimensions, as well as the harder, process and structure orientated characteristics of the organisation.
  3. Associated with this is the risk of data contamination occurring. The OrgScan© uses indirect, non-judgemental questions that reduce this risk to negligible levels.  The insights generated are grounded in reality, not in miss-interpreted questions or “party-line / personal agenda” responses.
  4. There is clear evidence that mono-dimensional initiatives (like “digital solutions” that fail to address the human side of change) seldom deliver significant gains in performance. The need is to capture all of the issues that are currently impacting performance, and then design an intervention that addresses all the priority issues.  The OrgScan© is configured to provide breadth as well as depth.
  5. Finally, there is the happy consequence of the ‘intervention effect’ – that which gets measured gets changed. A very normal consiquence of the OrgScan© is that respondents are positively motivated towards expecting change, and they spread that expectation within their networks.  By adjusting the approach, this effect can be built up or reduced depending on the objectives for the project.  If desired, the effect can be targeted so that the change is in the direction that is needed.

How does it work in practice?

Alongside the sponsor and their team, we carefully select a representative sample from the overall population of employees, every function / team / location needs to be represented, within the various levels of hierarchy need to be represented also.  Also, be aware of character; think about those people who will be open & honest and aim to have a healthy mix of enthusiasts and sceptics. For most organisations 12 – 25 respondents should be sufficient.

The conversations are held by a facilitator, and follow a semi-structured approach, they take between 40 and 80 minutes, the vast majority of participants report that the conversations are enjoyable and helpful to them.

The indirect questioning technique means that it is not the specific content of the individual responses that brings the insight, but much more the patterns and consistencies / inconsistencies that aid understanding.  These are identified when the responses are brought together and analysed.  This means that we can guarantee absolute confidentiality; we never quote any statement, unattributed or otherwise.

 
Slide1

 

What is the output?

The output is typically a set of main themes which are the key factors that the organisation needs to work on (the “what”) each with underlying, more specific addressable aspects impacting the organisations behaviour and performance (the “how”).  These factors are almost always interrelated, thus are typically represented in a mind-map format and used to structure the feedback conversation with the sponsoring team.

How does that help?

Before embarking on any journey of change or improvement, we believe that it is really important to have good data about where you are starting from, the nature of the system and the sorts of things that are driving behaviour.   Regardless of the nature of change (technology change, integration, reorganisation, merger etc.) or type of intervention (coaching, training, leadership development, continual improvement, introduction of new technology and the like) having this understanding helps optimise the intervention design and highlights the potential pit-falls.

If suitable individuals can be made available, we encourage the client team to put forward their own people to become acquainted with the process of running an OrgScan©.  That way they can re-run the diagnostic themselves (with support from us doing the analysis) after a suitable period, thereby better understanding how things have changed and what the next set of improvements might be.

 

“I highly recommend Ben and Denis for the change they can make in your ways of working, and improvements to your business. They have such a personal approach, and genuinely care that you achieve your goals.”

Martina Arnold – HR Manager at Ventrolla

At VitalOrg we actively promote The Vitality Index (VI) ahead of our other diagnostics for the simple reason that for progressive, purposeful or scaling organisations it is the only diagnostic they need.  OrgScan has a place for organisations where a more “open” and holistic perspective is deemed to be useful.  The nature of the questions enables OrgScan self-configure, thereby identifying the priorities for the organisation.  

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Is experimentation the key becoming a more human-centric Organisation?

Experiment your way to a more human-centric culture

Is experimentation the key becoming a more human-centric Organisation?

Experiment your way to a more human-centric culture
Photo by Hans Reniers on Unsplash

I’ve been reflecting on a day spent with the wonderful people at Mayden recently. For those that don’t know them, Mayden are a Corporate Rebels bucket list organisation who have flattened their hierarchy and embraced agile across all their activities. Needless to time spent with them is always thought provoking.

Are there only two types of Organisation?

Sweeping generalisation alert: I wonder if there are only two types of organisations.  Those that have recognised the folly and toxicity of the command and control approach to management and rejected it, and those that haven’t. 

Now here’s the thing.  Most leaders of most organisations would feel that their approach to management was not “command and control.” yet it is only a tiny minority of organisations who are, genuinely, committed to a path where the tacit assumptions that underpin command and control are entirely absent.  Indeed, many accepted best practices are built on one or more of those assumptions.

Another way of framing it is to consider which of the following open questions better describes your organisations’ approach to people: 

  1. How do we create the conditions where people find great intrinsic reward in giving the best of their whole self at work? or
  2. What are the best levers, carrots, sticks, perks and coercions that we have to give us the best return on our salary bill?

These two questions set you on very different paths, so is there any middle ground?  A question I’ll return to.

The convergent evolution of progressive organisations

Bill Gore set up W.L Gore to create an organisation entirely free of bureaucracy. Jos de Blok set-up Buurtzorg to reconnect nurses with the job that they loved and to give their patients the best, personalised care. Chris May developed Mayden with a desire to do something better for its people than follow the herd with conventional management.  Although very different in size, sector, era and geography there are spooky similarities in the norms and everyday practices you would find in all three organisations.   And I guess we shouldn’t be surprised; if you set-out to create your organisations to fundamentally “work with the grain” of humans; our psychology, sociology, and anthropology we will, by iteration and emergence, arrive in a similar place.

If we set out now to invent the norms and mechanisms of our organisations based on what we know about humans and human performance, what we’d come up with would bear no relation to what we see in most organisations today. 

But many of us are not starting our organisation from scratch

Bill, Jos and Chris all bore the scare tissue of experiencing command and control management and that galvanised them to create something different.  Those different “somethings” were all built on very different and better informed assumptions about people.  Most of us are not in that situation.  The organisations that most of us lead are work in progress, not a blank sheet of paper.  Many of us feel that we have inherited a situation which is not of our design, very likely there are bits about it that we don’t like and perceive those bits to be hard to change.

In reality we are all on a journey

No start-up has ever scaled and flourished into an organisation and got everything right first time.  Snags, glitches, wrong calls and failures are inevitable and essential to finding the right path for your unique situation.  Even the poster child progressive organisations have had these set-backs along the way, they are quite open about them. 

This is perhaps where we find the middle ground, every organisation will have its own level of comfort or discomfort with the conventional approaches to management.  The more discomfort there is, the more rapid the evolution will be.

What determines how quickly your organisation will evolve?

So, assuming you ascribe more to Q1 (How do we create the conditions where people find great intrinsic reward in giving the best of their whole self at work?) than Q2, how do we get started and how quickly can we progress?  Here I’m reminded of something that Margaret Heffernan said when speaking with Lisa Gill on her excellent Leadermorphosis podcast.

“…do not think you can think your way to the answer. You can’t, it’s impossible. You have to do something different and see how the system responds. From that you’ve learned something that you can build on. But absolutely, none of us can solve these real world problems in our heads. It’s not physics, it’s not math. It’s human beings working together. And the way people learn to work together, is by working together.”

Is experimentation the difference that makes the difference?

The practice of experimentation is the key. Experimentation is largely absent in command and control organisations, and woven into just about everyone’s roles in progressive organisations. Based on our research into change-enabled organisations, experimentation is the “how” that applies to the majority of the 26 areas of practice that our research identified.
Experimentation is also, in and of itself, a practice that helps people find great intrinsic reward and creates opportunities for them to give the best of their whole self at work. It is also the engine-room of ever-improving ways of working. So, both the process and the output are accelerants to the evolution.

Two types of organisation?

Absolutely not. Some are more command and control than others, some more human-centric. But if you are committed to a journey from the former to the later, giving people the time, the safe climate, and the autonomy to develop their own safe-to-try experiments will really help build momentum. What’s stopping you from experimenting with it?

Afterword

The Vitality Index (VI) engenders the habit of experimentation in every team in the organisation. Based on our research, The VI is able to identify the three (out of 26) areas of practice that, if changed will be most beneficial to that specific team at the current moment in time. These insights, in combination with some independent facilitation from us and some inspiration from the Vitality playbook get the teams started on their journey towards ever-better ways of working. This is not just experimentation, this is change that the team own, change that is emergent and responsive and most importantly change that people feel good about.

 

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How to engender higher performance and happier people – for free!

Hertzberg - motivators and hygiene factors

How to engender higher performance and happier people – for free!

Hertzberg - motivators and hygiene factors

The research is over 50 years old – but with the challenges of today – employee engagement, talent retention, remote working, well-being, old ways of working being rejected – it is just as valuable for line managers today as when it was first exposed to the public gaze – back in 1968.

That was when Frederick Herzberg first published his motivator-hygiene theory in HBR, the article being entitled “One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?”

The Herzberg model

The argument goes that within each of us, operating singly or in groups, there is norm of work output to which we will achieve.  Some aspects of the work environment may drag actual performance below that norm, while others will boost it far above.

What are hygiene factors?

The hygiene factors, below the line “norm of work output”, have to be appropriate.  If any of them is significantly adrift from what is needed and reasonable, then performance will suffer.  If employees are at odds with any aspect of the reality of their context as listed in the chart, then they will perform less well.  But, and it is a very big but, the indication is that how ever well the organisation delivers on the hygiene factors, performance is unlikely to rise above the norm, unless something else and different is also as it should be.

We simply can’t “hygiene factor” our way to high performance

Just to illustrate this there is some evidence that changing salaries will produce a short term up-tick to performance, but the improvement does not last.  We very soon shift our expectation (and our spending) to the higher level of disposable income, at which point higher pay has stopped being a motivator.   The same is true of other perks and bolt-ons. Strangely, it is with these hygiene factors that so many organisations try to motivate, attract and retain their people.   But if there is a war for talent, we can do so much better than trying to outgun rival employers by raising the stakes through our hygiene factors.

…how ever well the organisation delivers on the hygiene factors, performance is unlikely to rise above the norm…

 

If the hygiene factors don’t work…

… enter the motivators. These include meaningful and rewarding work; recognition; personal and team mastery; being involved and trusted.   Once these things are all in place, then performance will begin to fly.  This is even true if some of the hygiene factors are not totally ‘good’.  It is acknowledged that in those circumstances it is more difficult to motivate people to deliver starring performance, but it can be done.  We have seen plenty of teams deliver outstanding performance out of crumbling offices, and using IT that is well past it’s sell-by date.   Such de-motivators are no match for high-trust teams, engaged in meaningful work, in a climate that encourages people to experiment and give the best of themselves. 

What needs to change and what will it cost?

All of the above is conventional and largely as Herzberg had it, But what follows are additional and valuable insights from the model that don’t often get talked about.

First, we can think of an ‘organisation’ as an entity in its own right.  It has a structure, resources, processes and behavioural norms.  Then there is the individual manager.  This is the person who has a formal, structural relationship with the employees assigned to the manager, flowing from the organisation structure itself.  Complicated maybe, but able to be depicted with words, numbers and diagrams. We could call that the “Map”.

But there is also a whole set of interactions between the manager and employees, singly or in groups, and these exist regardless of the formal structure.  They are also highly variable and volatile, and operate on the basis of feed forward and feedback loops, each modifying behaviour in the next turn around, with results that are highly emergent in their nature.  Messy, unpredictable and intangible, the reality of the organisation is truly complex.  This we could call the “Territory”.

A quick glance at the Herzberg chart raises a simple question – who provides what?  The answer is that it is the formal organisation that provides the hygiene factors and the individual manager who looks after the motivators.  Hence the reason why even with deficient hygiene factors it is still possible for an effective manager to motivate employees to delivery great performance.

A second question is how much does it cost to meet these various needs?  The answer is that the hygiene factors cost mega bucks, whereas the motivators are totally free.  All they need is the investment of physical, intellectual and emotional energy by the individual manager into getting the motivators to be in a good place, and the superstars in all of us will do the rest.

If you believe that navigating your way around with only a map as your guide is OK, then good luck to you.  Our experience suggests that knowledge and understanding of the territory is also rather important!

 

…high performance is an outcome of good management practices by individual managers – and it’s totally free! 

 

Mirror, mirror on the wall…

So, the bottom line is this.  If you want to know why you are not looking at a team of highly motivated superstars, all pulling together, sharing information, solving shared problems and the learning that follows, don’t blame the organisation.  The organisation cannot deliver that.  Take a walk into the nearest bathroom – they all have one feature in common – and have a look in the mirror.  There you will find the cause of all your problems, along with the solution.

The fact of the matter is that high performance is an outcome of good management practices by individual managers – and it’s totally free!  Moreover, the effect is long-lasting since it is a change that feeds on itself.

No excuses – no budget required!

So no budget needed and a positive outcome for the business, its people, its customers and suppliers, and its local partners.  So why has the Herzberg approach not been adopted more widely?  And, especially now with the current focus on employee engagement, linked to ever better performance?

In the first instance, many people have not stumbled across the Herzberg stuff.  In the second is that nasty personal accountability stuff implied by the ‘bathroom mirror’ test.  Unless the managers in question acknowledge that they are part of the problem there is no way forward.  If there are performance problems, and the managers actions are making a difference, then they must be part of the problem.  If their actions are not making a difference, then they are part of the problem, by definition.

Then there is that physical, intellectual and emotional energy required to be invested in the organisation’s people, including the building of all-round trust.  And which can only come from individual managers.

So, how to get started?

The answer lies in the Herzberg model itself.  Check the entries for ‘Responsibility’, ‘Involvement’ and Personal Growth’.  Use these as the point of entry into the local system.  Go ask the people what needs to change to give them greater feedback ‘above the line’.  Including changes in management practices.  Run with whatever they come up with to get a process of never-ending experimentation and learning started.  Once through the pain barrier of getting started, it’s all great fun, for everyone.  What ever you do, make sure you are working “in the territory” not “on the map”

Sounds like better employee experience and better performance – at the same time – and it’s all for free!

Denis Bourne is a Co-founder of VitalOrg and has been helping courageous and curious folk bring greater autonomy to their organisations for over 40 years

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Is it time to rethink your employee wellbeing strategy? Part1: “do less”

Rethink Wellbeing

Is it time to rethink your employee wellbeing strategy? Part1: “do less”

Rethink Wellbeing

We think so…

We’d like to offer a fresh and challenging perspective on the hot topic of improving employees’ wellbeing, mental wellness and workload.  Controversially, in a world where leaders are being constantly sold must have services, apps and interventions in this space, our view is that in the main, a “do less” strategy will give greater benefit than launching yet more initiatives.

Achieve less by doing more?

Employers are doing lots more these days to try and improve the well-being and mental health of their employees – we are cheering them on all the way, for the intent at least.  However, we wonder if they aren’t addressing these issues from the “wrong end” and in a way that is “bolt-on” and not built-in.  We’ll try and explain:

“Wrong end” refers to strategies focused more on the treatment of symptoms as opposed to prevention.  E.g. providing a free counselling service or encouraging meditation practice whilst at the same time over-pressurising and micro-managing people.  Or offering resilience training; helping people cope with the stress and uncertainty of the latest top-down change programme where they will have to reapply for their jobs.  Or running financial wellbeing awareness training whilst not offering a living wage or wage increases that keep up with inflation.

“Bolt-on” by this we mean the universal layering-on of more stuff that employees are expected to engage with, regardless of whether they like the idea or not.  Having free fruit in the office, a laughter station, subsidised gym memberships, or having an app that bombards you with questions, tips and reminders will be great for some of us, but for others it can be impersonal, sometimes seen as tokenistic and by some, even disingenuous.

What is the evidence that the “do more strategy” works?

The providers of bolt-on interventions parade all sorts of seemingly compelling evidence about the human and financial benefits of adopting their services. At the same time, an independent review of all the academic research to date finds that there is little strong evidence that bolt-on initiatives make a significant or enduring difference. The headline finding is that “There is some evidence that workplace interventions can improve mental health and wellbeing outcomes, though the size of the effect is often small. Negative effects of interventions are observed in some instances.”

What do we know about the effectiveness of workplace mental health interventions? Kings College London. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/what-do-we-know-about-the-effectiveness-of-workplace-mental-health-interventions.pdf

Funnily enough, not too many instances of burnout are attributed to a lack of fresh fruit or insufficient desk yoga sessions

 

What are the causes of poor wellbeing that work creates?

Thankfully, much more is known about the causes of poor mental wellbeing at work than about the effectiveness, or otherwise, of the interventions intended to improve it.   Interestingly, none of the causes identified are a lack of the things that the “bolt-on” interventions provide.  They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, consistent with the causes of employee disengagement[1] and inversely correlated with the accepted conditions for high levels of intrinsic motivation[2].     

[1] https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-employee-engagement.aspx

[2] https://www.danpink.com/2010/06/whiteboard-magic/

Achieve more by doing less?

Doing less managing that is. Or less command and control managing to be more specific. By significantly reducing or removing the top-down imposition of programmes, initiatives, targets, coercions, superheroes, quotas, deadlines, reporting requirements, rules, ways of working, etc. and allowing more freedoms and autonomy you will be acting directly on the common causes of poor wellbeing and deteriorating mental health of your people. An additional happy consequence is it leads to the release of time, both for those making the demands and those following them. This, in turn invites the question of what to do instead?

 

Many of us experience being “overwhelmed”; simply too much to do and not enough time.
A direct benefit of the “do less” strategy is that it results in a lightening of the “bureaucratic load” imposed on people…

 

Devote the freed-up time to develop more human-centred approaches.

What we are suggesting here is not an initiative, it is better management “built-in” as opposed to accessories “bolted-on”.   It is not more work, it is different work, or perhaps “work different”.  Current research and our own observations point towards the following as good preventative practices:

  • Actively working to create a climate of ever-higher levels of psychological safety[1]. That includes people feeling comfortable saying no.
  • Humble leadership[2]. Power distorts relationships, therefore, leaders need to actively work on building open, equal and equitable relationships that put people first.
  • Autonomy and decentralised decision authority – Allowing more freedoms and enabling people to make more of the decisions closer to the action
  • Greater transparency. This is more than just relaxing the access to files and folders on the company’s servers.  It is about leaders and those with influence talking candidly about failures and their own hopes and fears.
  • Create awesome jobs – End-to end jobs where people have the opportunity to see things through to the point where they have an impact.
  • Encourage experimentation.  Creating an environment where there is space and time for “safe to try” experiments and where it’s okay to fail and learn.

But where to start and how?  Getting real change happening in each and every team in just some of these areas can feel daunting.  Added to which many of us have been conditioned to default to a programmatic approach to change, which is exactly what we don’t want to do.

There is another way.  The Vitality Index (VI) identifies for each team in the organisation the three areas of practice that if changed will have the greatest benefit.  Our external and impartial facilitation creates a safe space for the teams to explore the insights and commit to change. The Organisational Vitality Playbook inspires and encourages them to come-up with changes that they are truly bought into.  

What results is ever-better practices and management with the ingredients for your employees to experience better mental wellbeing “built-in”.  How about that for a strategy?

[1] https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/11/6/e044133

[2] Humble Leadership: the power of relationships, openness and trust. 2018 Edgar Schein, Peter Schein

This is a co-authored post.   

Mark Williams is Mark is a successful FTSE 250 HR Director turned consultant and VitalOrg Associate. 

Ben Simpson is a Co-founder of VitalOrg and leads on client operations in the UK.

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