Prof. Sir Cary Cooper invented the word Presenteeism more than a decade ago. It’s a word that few had heard. That was, until Hillary Clinton made it famous a couple weeks ago. But for researchers and authors on the topic, Presenteeism has been well known. They look at it as a serious and significant opportunity for organizations to boost performance and productivity. One of the corporate world’s biggest strategic omissions. This was not the new shiny object that entices and makes organizations vie with each other to adopt. But all that may change very soon as CEOs begin to wonder, ‘Could this be happening in my company?’
So read on if you have become more aware of the need to know how you can benefit from addressing presenteeism. Presenteeism is defined as the phenomenon of people who are unwell going to the workplace. Researchers look at tackling presenteeism as a serious and significant opportunity for organizations to boost performance and productivity, in ways that are fundamental to the ‘human’ in the human resource.
That approach is not to send the unwell employee home, or asking the unwell employee to take leave. The approach is a lot more strategic. Its about proactively assessing and actively managing the 11underlying barriers that could make an employee ‘unwell’. Researchers in Rhode Island came out with a study titled, Well-Being Assessment for Productivity A Well-Being Approach to Presenteeism in July 2011 wherein these 11 factors are called out. See the pix below taken from the study:
(Reproduced with permission from the publisher)
The study indicates that the current approach of focusing on physical health alone is flawed and only address 1 i.e. Health, out of 11 factors that can cause an employee to become a presentee. Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia must have been attracted from the environment. Preceding her pneumonia were damaging media coverage and her opponent openly calling out her health as weak. Neurologically this does not go un-noticed and would have resulted in higher cortisol levels thus lowering the capabilities of her immune system. Adding on to this may be financial i.e. generating adequate funds for her fund-guzzling campaign and the sheer physical strain of running the campaign trail. So we just called out 4 dimensions of wellness that are under strain. i.e. Mental, Environmental, physical, financial out of 6. The other two being Social and Spiritual. (Ref: The 6 Dimensions, Overcome Presenteeism: Excel in work and life, Black Card Books, 1st edition). Companies that have somehow partially figured a way to help employees manage some or all of these 11 factors land up being called out as the best places to work.
There is now a more robust and implementable strategy to tackle Presenteeism. No its not to convert it to absenteeism. That’s a rather dumb approach. Peakism is a brand new approach to an age old problem that has been begging a solution for several decades. http://www.hrmasia.com/content/exclusive-presenteeism-peakism
The article details the entire implementation approach. If you’d like to know more on how to make a start for your organization reach out to me for a free consultation.
Gurunath Hari is the author of Amazon International Best seller “The 6 Dimensions, Overcome Presenteeism: Excel in work and Life”. He has over 25 years of corporate experience, including leadership and management roles. His working life started at the end of the pre-computer era and continues to the present ‘everything-mobile’ era.
The kindle and hardcopy version of 6 Dimensions book is available at Amazon.
What breaks the camel’s back almost always is when a dilemma is converted to a problem and ‘solved’. This and the fact that there exists of a myriad of dilemmatic constructs within corporate philosophy and culture in every organization, makes for a disaster waiting to happen.
It happened in Wells Fargo recently. On first pass everything about corporate strategy, values, mission and vision looks fine and in place. Then you get this:
Wells Fargo, will be the poster child of what is actually happening in some shade or form, in almost every tech and banking and sales driven organization today i.e. not everyone in leadership in the organization are aware or adept at recognizing, calling out and managing these dilemmas daily. If you think about that for a second, you’ll know its scary. On the other hand, reading a situation as a dilemma and not a problem – and managing it as such- is the one sure way to get ‘out of the box’ and start thinking.
The purpose of this post is 2 fold.
1. To remind the esteemed users of Linkedin about recognizing dilemmas. (You guys are smart and you can go and do your learning on what a dilemma is. Please don’t guess)
2. Attempt to pinpoint a couple of ‘seat belts’ that were not worn – for whatever emotional reasons or otherwise, that the referenced article alludes to.
Even seasoned CEO’s like John Stumpf could be blind-sided or lead to believe that the tactics are right. The dilemma for Wells Fargo’s CEO would have been:
“How do we expand revenue and profit while adhering to our ethical values”.
Here is the 3-point corporate strategy of Wells Fargo that will help drive business results- The WHAT:
Deepen relationships and attract new customers
Seamlessly serve our customers – anywhere, any time
Consistently earn customer trust through sound risk management
Looks alright. There’s more print in there ofcourse. Things start getting dilemmatic as we go deeper. Here are the 6 points of Priorities:
Putting customers first: We want to be the first provider our customers think of when they need their next financial product. Warning: Please wear your Seat belt when you drive this. How about if it was re-phrased, “Create the experience for our customers to want us first when they need their financial product”. — This will force the question, ‘How do we do that’ and…that’s where innovative thinking begins.
Growing revenue: Wells Fargo is a growth company that believes the key to the bottom line is the top line. Thank you. This is basic finance 1 o 1. Warning: Please wear your Seat belt when you drive this.
Managing expenses: When we find wise ways to reduce our expenses, we free up funds to benefit our customers, invest in the future, and reward our shareholders. It gets interesting with the next: Here was THE seat belt:
Living our vision and values: Every day when we come to work, we have the opportunity to bring our vision and values to life. ” . . There’s an old saying: Actions speak louder than words. We need to show people what we believe. They need to see our vision and values come alive in everyday actions, not just in posters on the wall. Our customers need to see us doing the right thing and helping them succeed financially. Our team members need to see us respecting, honoring, caring for, and appreciating one another. Our communities need to see us taking part and investing in projects that are important to them. That’s how we truly bring our vision and values to life.” “Our reputation extends from our character, not the other way around. . . . If it’s the right thing to do, it will be good for our reputation”. How true, and….you did..?
Connecting with communities and stakeholders: “……And our financial performance has been recognized by individual and institutional investors alike, who through their investments have made Wells Fargo one of the most valuable banks in the U.S. and the world”. Here’s a dilemma. Does this sentence belong here?
Managing risk ;”We understand that to continue our success and meet the heightened expectations of our key stakeholders, we must excel in all types of risk management, including credit, market, liquidity, operational, information security, compliance, model, and reputational risk”. Whose. . . (and perhaps in retrospect should it be called: Managing dilemmas)
Oh! yeah. All this is great. Good to know. And how exactly is this supposed to help when you are loading me with ‘Eight is Great’?.
Here are Wells’ five primary values that are based on their vision which is “We want to satisfy our customers’ financial needs and help them succeed financially.”
People as a competitive advantage
Ethics: . . .”We have to earn that trust every day by behaving ethically; rewarding open, honest, two-way communication; and holding ourselves accountable for the decisions we make and the actions we take”.
What’s right for customers ( Eight is Great. “The analytics called these out. For over 2 million unauthorized customers” they might say. There’s more in the referenced article. Our interest is in the learnings)
Diversity and inclusion and,
Leadership
So what’s the remedy:
Ask yourself:
Can we achieve this
Can I and every employee, list our company’s values by heart
Do I and every employee understand how these values help or hinder each one of us to achieve this.
If there are values that are likely to hinder us, “How many of my company’s values will I need to break to achieve this”.
If your mind starts throwing out ideas of the values that you see yourself needing to break, Don’t balk, call it out! Call for a brainstorming session immediately! and make it happen. More the values that are likely to be compromised the more the significance of your brainstorming results are likely to be — in protecting you, and the company.
If your mind starts throwing out ideas of the values that you see yourself needing to break, Don’t balk, call it out! Call for a brainstorming session immediately! and make it happen. More the values that are likely to be compromised the more the significance of your brainstorming results are likely to be — in protecting you, and the company.
In summary:
The pressure to perform from CEO downwards is immense.
Getting financial results at any cost is an insidious risk.
Even tho companies have well-written vision, values, priorities and strategy, its not worth the paper its written on unless it is learned and practised.
There will always be dilemmas between improving financial performance and adhering to values. See these as great opportunities for innovative thinking!
Doing the above would cost you a fraction of : what is costs to open 2 million unauthorized accounts, fire 5,300 low level employees and pay $185 million in fees along with loss of trust with the public and shareholders.
If this made sense to you, reach out to someone you trust to vet your corporate culture implementation.
Gurunath Hari is the author of Amazon International Best seller “The 6 Dimensions, Overcome Presenteeism: Excel in work and Life”. He has over 25 years of corporate experience, including leadership and management roles. His working life started at the end of the pre-computer era and continues to the present ‘everything-mobile’ era.
The kindle and hardcopy version of 6 Dimensions book is available at Amazon.
In corporate America sacking 54 poor performers would hardly make the news, but this is Singapore.
Barely two weeks into the new year, Surbana Jurong- a Temasek Holdings-owned infrastructure consultancy, let go 54 employees over a period of 2 weeks. Of the 54, 26 were professionals, with nine in senior positions, including managers, senior executive architects, principal architects and principal engineers. So it does look brutal. The press got to know of this. Given the uncertain economic outlook and a lacklustre labour market the company clarified that these were not retrenchments but they had been let go purely for performance reasons.
All hell breaks lose
The matter got onto the radar of Singapore’s Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say. Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday (February 7), he said, “I spent many years with the labour movement and now MOM. To the best of my recollection, this is the first time an employer has conducted such a major termination exercise and announced publicly it was due to the workers’ poor performance,”. If the organisation cannot substantiate claims that the affected worker’s performance is below the required level, the employer may be ordered to reinstate the worker or offer compensation. How could Surbana have avoided this?
A reconstruction of events
What lead Surbana to this situation?
First, Group chairman Liew Mun Leong reportedly speaks ‘vehemently’ about poor company performance, which will drastically affect the bonuses of those business units that operated below par last year, despite efforts to grow the projects pipeline.
Then, Surbana Jurong group chief executive Wong Heang Fine sends staff a strongly-worded e-mail. With extracts reportedly stating: “. . .More importantly, for those of us who want to do great things, why should our rewards be affected by a small group of colleagues who don’t care about how their poor performance affects our performance negatively?“. Another excerpt from the message read “How can we be the best in class and build a great organisation when employees are not concerned with how they are performing relative to their peers?”
Then came the axe.
“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.” — Stephen Fry
Now if we were to pause and ask, What if Mr. Wong could have read and acted on this article. There’s a lot of pressure and people managers tend to focus on what’s most near and pressing. This can result in frustration and a loss of purpose among employees. The concept of “peakism” provides a rallying point for organisational leaders to recalibrate how they should nurture performance.
Why is Peakism important to avoid another repeat
CEO Wong is portrayed as a Peak performer. More here. “I have gone up the mountains, and have descended into the depths of the earth. I have flown in a helicopter without doors to film marketing videos. I have worked for both men and women, in the public and private sectors. At each place, I learnt to adapt to different environments. I find pleasure in doing different things and doing the same things differently,” Mr Wong Heang Fine is reported to have stated. Clearly there are several high performing CEO’s like Mr. Wong out there. The problem is there is a massive blind spot gradient in motivation and productivity, coined as motivity gradient in the space between the CEO down to the employee in the trenches. This is similar to the social gradient of health which refers to the fact that inequalities in population health status are related to inequalities in social status. CEOs need to acknowledge this and address it. Old surrogate methods to find this, do not work.
A group of social scientists have provided a validated understanding and acknowledgement of personal and workplace related barriers that could create insidious poor performers also called Presentees. Good news is there is a well tested way to move good performers to greater ones and poor performers to good in a matter of days. The complete methodology to achieve this was published in HRM magazine 15/12. Referenced here for your convenience. If you need help to implement a pilot in your company please feel welcome to reach out to me.
Gurunath Hari is the author of “The 6 Dimensions, Overcome Presenteeism: Excel in work and Life”. He has over 25 years of corporate experience, including executive coaching, leadership and management roles. He is a Peakism principal Pursuer.
The kindle and hardcopy version of 6 Dimensions book is now an Amazon International Bestseller.
(Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s own)
If you are like me you’d have taken many courses this year already. You typically look at the title and the content and if these 2 pieces of data interests you, you make a choice to attend or not. You may look for additional input such as dates, speaker profile, venue, past participant testimonials etc. and that’s it.
I have often felt challenged with the idea of “how do i communicate the value of a course i design in a way that the stakeholder ‘will get it’ at least at an instructional level in a succinct way.” i.e. going one level deeper than what i contextualized above.
I was recently hit with a bunch of competing programs/courses. They all looked good and similar. The only way i could make an informed first level choice was costly, both time wise and money wise. I had to either call the provider or physically go to the provider’s office to get “oriented”. In today’s world that is a luxury few can afford.
What if instructional designers could adopt a global standard to measure instructional design and communicate course content in a quantifiable, fun and meaningful way, with input from the consumer or staying faithful to the business course objectives? Ah! why didn’t i think of that before!
Here’s one possible approach.
1. All courses, be it professional skills, leadership and sales or technical, intend to provide ideas for transforming the learner’s behavior.
I opt to use the Wikipedia definition of behaviour as: Behavior (American English) or behaviour (Commonwealth English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems, or artificial entities in conjunction with themselves or their environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as the (inanimate) physical environment. It is the response of the system or organism to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary. This takes care of technical courses and soft skills.
2. All courses are designed to provide input which i call Advocacy and scope for some interaction- Activity.
3. All courses provide for some breaks, which i call Rest, re-energize and breaks (RRBs)
Here’s what you get for a 4 hour (half a day) leadership/professional skills program.
Here’s how the communication would go: Learning and Talent partner (LTP) to stakeholder about a bespoke program:
LTP: Here’s what we’ve got for you. It’s a half day program as you had requested. We’ve tried to incorporate all the learnings you’ve wanted for your team.
S. What’s the course looking like.
LTP. We believe its pretty well balanced. MOL- RRB ratio is 80-20, Its got 23 BTIs- these are what we counted from the things you wanted your staff to get.
S. What’s MOL-RRB ratio!
LTP: MOL stands for Minutes of learning and RRB stands for Rest, re-energize and breaks. To break it down further, MOL includes the total of the ‘teaching’ part plus the activities part in the course. Its everything other than the time allocated for RRBs.
S. Will it be interactive?
LTP. Yes its got a good balance of advocacy and activity. We call it MAD MAcs ratio. In this case we’ve gone for a MADMAcs ratio of 3:1. This means for every 3 units of concepts being taught, we’ll have one round of activity to embed the concepts.
Q. Is 3:1 Madmax as you call it good enough, Is there an optimum ratio standard?
LTP. Yes there is and its subjective. It takes into consideration things like the overall duration, the complexity of concepts, the energy of the audience, the time of the day when the program is being delivered etc. Its this balance that differentiates one design from another!
Q. Is there a range for MADMax?
LTP. Yes there could be a wide range. Example, if its a course for middle management, we may want to have more experiential and case based learning. In this case the MADMAcs ratio could be flipped to more MAcs than MADs.
In summary:
Remember Madmax ratio. Stakeholders and Instructional designers would like to adopt a global standard to measure instructional design and communicate course content in a quantifiable, fun and meaningful way, with input from the consumer or staying faithful to the business objective. If done, stakeholders can combine the title and the content and look at these additional metrics on the side, to now be able to:
Adopt a language that more supports efficient dialog between learning and business
Participants could get a much better sense of and get even more motivated to, attend the course.
Participants could be mentally and may be physically as well 🙂 better prepared
Make a better choice if they have to choose between 2 competing courses.
Use it as a sanity check to see of the course is well balanced.
Further Research
With new ways of delivering learning, I hope the concepts here are useful in triggering learning organizations to research optimum ratios among RRBs, MADs and MAcs and BTIs for various types of courses to maximize the ROI for courses.
My mentor sent me a whatsApp with this above newsprint clipping. He must have been as shocked as the rest of us are by the massacre of innocent merry-makers by Stephen Paddock. Paddock graduated from John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in 1971,[13] and from California State University, Northridge, with a degree in business administration in 1977. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Paddock)
Before i thought of sharing with you the conversation i had with my son that followed, i wanted to check the veracity of this printed clip. It can be found here.
Do we need to take cognizance of this
With more and more humans populating the planet, the base of the social pyramid is getting broader and the pyramid itself getting bigger. More Paddocks are likely but can be minimized. Here’s the balance of the text of the photo-clipping:
…Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.”
After every inhuman incident, the mind, however briefly, wonders in bewilderment at what might have caused such monstrosity. One wonders what Paddock learnt at high school and at California State University that got so easily over-ruled by some other inhuman motive.
With this recent incident, at the back of my head, I was lunching with my 17 year-old son and asked him, “Did you have moral science or any other subject on human values?”. He tried to recall and said, ” We had VIA, values in action, we had social studies-which i sucked at” he said bashfully, “and some other stuff”. I told him, “During my education we had this thing called moral science. It was full of stories that were so engaging and made such tremendous sense”. He said, “Yes dad, i remember you had shared one of them– the boy who was trapped on a ledge. It was pitch dark and was afraid of jumping to his father’s arms, because he could not see his father who was calling him to do so, from below”. He said, “I would have loved it as long as in the end they don’t starting grading you for it”. That got me thinking.
I said, ” i recall we did have to answer questions, but the marks was not used to grade us”. He said, “That’s fair. It’s alright to test whether the story’s learnings stuck”.
And boy, did it stick. I must have told him the story when he was a 7/8 year old kid and i recall this story i had learnt 40 years ago. I said to him, “What you said makes me recall a quote, ” Not all that can be counted matters. Not all that matters can be counted”. He said, “Yeah i agree. Glad you think so”, winked and left.
” Not all that can be counted matters. Not all that matters can be counted”
Learning human values comes in the second but very critical category. Example, how will you measure an employee’s ‘adhesivity’ to values like Integrity, Other-centeredness, Trusting nature, respectful nature etc..?
The universe has a special way of navigating people’s thinking based on values. With the brain’s neuroplasticity now being accepted, there is less reason to resign to Paddock’s psychopathic behaviour as genetically pre-disposed. The real culprit is not our brain but our education, or gaps thereof -both at home and school.
4 Things leaders can never do enough of:
Given that employees and ‘talents’ come from varied social and value background every workplace needs to:
Teach values in a way that it can be recalled.
Practise it with behaviours- that becomes your company’s culture
Recognize and reward employees every time they demonstrate a value
Make it count even though it cannot be measured.
Values recall: DOT-UP:
Acronym for: Duty towards yourself, Other-centeredness, Trust and Respect, Uncompromising integrity, Peakism
The Mnemonic implies-Emineo Pursuits is just a DOT-UP. We are a small company (a dot) BIG in action, that’s above the best. We want to be humble hence we say we are perhaps just a dot above the best.
Here’s the meaning of these values:
Duty towards yourself: •The only person you owe what you do, is to yourself and your family.
Other-centeredness: •Happiness comes from within. The gratitude you receive from helping others in need of your help, is the fuel that keeps the flame of your happiness burning. This includes customers, partners, colleagues and your family.
Trust and Respect: •Have faith in your character and the universe and admire your colleagues and people around you for what they bring to your workplace and to the world.
Uncompromising integrity: •What’s yours you take what’s not yours you let go and give back. Your conscience is your guide
Peakism: •We practise PEAKISM™, this is where we take care of ourselves.
Peakism is the self-directed habitual behavioural pattern of coming to work holistically well, seeking to contribute sustainable peak performance for your own self-fulfilment. This includes giving yourself permission to rest and rejuvenate.
PEAKISM™ accelerates absorption of values. It is teachable and learnable. www.emineopursuits.com. Refresh your values, refresh your universe.
