Why is this important: Because trust plays a big role in your overall performance. Be it at work, at home with your loved ones or in any team sport. One of 1 Cloud Hub’s greatest corporate values is trust. The other being integrity. Almost all successful companies have trust as a company value. While at HP, Trust is given and its for you to lose, at AWS for example, trust has to be earned. There’s a difference in the two approaches and that impacts behaviours and culture within the company. While onboarding new employees at HP, I’d ask : “At HP Is trust given or is it to be earned?”. 90% would reply, its to be earned. Because that’s how the world behaves towards strangers. You have to earn someone’s trust. True but at HP, Bill and Dave Packard had the foresight and the opposite recommendation for HP’s employees. We trust our employees. It’s for them to lose. So whats the diff: In AWS’s case an employee would constantly be looking into earn everyone’s trust. i.e. you are off the trust boat and have to climb into it. In HP’s case an employee would constantly be looking to not have people lose their trust. i.e. you are on the trust boat and need to ensure you don’t fall off. Questions for you to answer and a fun self-assessment tool. a. In which of these scenario are you like to be more open. b. In which scenario do you think teamwork is likely to flourish c. How and when would you ever know that now you have earned everyone’s trust... read more
One of the rare times the YouTube algorithm pushes something that is deeply interesting. To say Robert O’Neil and his bunch of buddies up at SEAL are awesome, would be crass. Words cannot do justice to what he and his fraternity across the free world do every day to protect the vulnerable and the weak. If you need a refresher on what SEAL means, here’s some help. For the benefit of some of you, who are in a rush, I’d not want you to miss out on the powerful learnings. Just remember as you read this: We are talking about a SEAL saying this. Here are some gems. There are many more hidden in the video like the one on fear. I’ll leave that for you to dig thru. “Nobody wants to work for a jerk”. “I had a boss who said please and thank you for normal work, not all the time, but to let you know you’re part of the team” – People skills. When morale is high the team will work harder”. “The perfect plan only exists in the planning room, the moment you leave the room Murphy shows up and everything seems to change. Life is happening around you while you are planning this stuff and 95% of the plans that you worry about never happens any way. “What’s the worst that can happen” ” the helicopter could crash in the front yard” and it happened.” “Know the difference between over-planning and being prepared” – Preparation over planning. “Your initial reaction is the wrong reaction. Its important to take a second even if a second... read more
Whether its new employee orientation programs or leadership programs, at some point during the course there is an explicit or a subliminal call to bring your “whole being” into the job. That’s what every CEO wants. Everything else stems from there. I’d like us to explore that a bit. What is “whole being” ? Why is that important? Who does it benefit? How can you do it- sustainably? Is it even achievable? Why do corporations struggle with this. Are they really serious about this or is it one of those desirable holy grails whose cause is lost even before the journey to find it starts? Lets start with the what. What does leadership mean when they ask of employees to bring their “whole being”? Merriam-Webster dictionary has a plethora of definitions and meanings for the word ‘whole’. We’ll settle for one:’constituting the total sum or undiminished entirety’. We human beings are complex. The being is the sum total of our physical, mental, social, financial, environmental and spiritual states and all permutations and combinations of interactions among ourselves from a manifestation of all these states within each of us. Bring your ‘Whole being’ would mean “Bring your total sum or undiminished entirety to work”. The whole being needs to be focused on producing results for the corporation. Why is that important? The oft quoted recent Gallup poll comes to mind. 87% of the global workforce is disengaged and these include all variations of disengagement including presenteeism and absenteeism. If any one of the 6 dimensions called out above are compromised, it impacts the “whole being”. Hence if corporations are serious... read more
What is Presenteeism Presenteeism has been called “working while unwell,” and is meant to refer to the lack of productivity, and cost to employers, when employees show up to work at less than full steam. It represents disengagement with the task at hand for whatever reason, not just during cold and flu season. Simply put, it is a multi-billion dollar global concern and your company is more likely than not, contributing to that statistic. Yet, try dropping the word presentee or presenteeism in your day to day conversations with your leadership team and you’ll typically get a bewildered look. I get that half teasing statement even, ” You made that word up, didn’t you”. I didn’t but Prof. Cary Cooper did in the mid-nineties and it is now a mainstream term. Dictionary.com defines pres·en·tee·ism [prez-uhn-tee-iz-uhm] as a noun: 1.T he practice of coming to work despite illness, injury, anxiety, etc., often resulting inreduced productivity. 2. T he practice of working long hours at a job without the real need to do so. Do the factors that cause people to be presentees resonate with you? The modern day Presenteeism is a result of barriers to an employee’s wellness. In a seminal study, “The Well-Being Assessment for Productivity: A Well-Being Approach to Presenteeism,”James O. Prochaska, et al, captured a holistic set of well-being related performance barriers. Their study revealed two distinct clusters—personal barriers and work-related barriers. Each of these barriers were chosen from many other factors based on how strongly they co-related with productivity loss. In the end, 11 factors were cited between the two clusters. One cluster cited personal related... read more
Recently farmers in Indonesia set alight large swathes of forest land in order to clear the land for expanding palm oil plantations. The result was an environmental hazard for not just some fellow Indonesians, but for all people in the neighboring Republics of Singapore and some cities in Malaysia. How it should be: For days this week the Pollutant Standard Index (PSI) hovered between 100+ to 400+. Singapore’s worst environmental crisis in more than a decade saw acrid smoke seep into people’s homes. How it is: Pic Courtesy: Straits Times Environmental wellness is often under valued. How important is the air we breathe? How often do we even stop and think and feel grateful for the excellent quality of air that Mother Nature has bestowed on us. This is a good time to bring home the value and importance of environmental wellness and make it touch down in our individual private lives. At goholisticwellness.com we defined Environmental Wellness as “Environmental wellness is a state in which a person realizes the need to alter his/her dwellings of work and living to bring about harmony and efficiency in a way that does not pollute other people’s environment and utilizes environmental wellness to drive his/her other wellness dimensions.” If every individual were to adopt the above definition in the way they go about their lives, would it have prevented the situation that we started out this post with? Wouldn’t it have automatically encouraged innovative thinking on the part of the farmers who are slashing and burning forests and their keepers for years now? The current happenings can serve as a good way... read more
Hi folks– i was caught up with a series of classes i had to run for Enterprise Services. Time for reflections. One of my goals of a Wellness pursuits for mind and body has been Archery. I got my chance at professional archery practise for the first time at the HP clubhouse this friday. i believe some pictures were posted. i’ll upload them once i have them. Share with the team how you have been these recent... read more
Sarah Darling’s life got seriously plunged into an a imperfect life when she discovered she lost her most loved diamond ring. She almost never took it off, but it was giving her a bit of a rash so she did, zipping it in her coin purse for safe keeping. Later, she absentmindedly emptied the contents of that purse into the collection cup of Billy Ray Harris, who is homeless and often stays under a bridge in Darling’s hometown. — A good deed– that gave her happiness. It wasn’t until the next day that she realized her ring was gone. These were her words then. “It was horrible. It was such a feeling of loss,” Darling said. “It meant so much to me beyond just the financial value.” Was she happy after losing the ring? Billy Ray Harris, who is homeless and often sleeps under a bridge, however noticed the ring in his bowl and instead of pawning it off and making a few extra bucks, kept the ring safely, hoping for the owner to return for it. How usual is that for a homeless man to do? Darling however went back to the place she had given her money to Mr. Harris, He was gone. But she returned the next day and found Billy Ray Harris there. Sarah Darling asked him … ‘I don’t know if you remember me, but I think I gave you something that’s very precious to me,’ and he said, ‘Was it a ring? Yeah, I have it, I kept it for you “. Imagine how Happy Sarah would have been when she heard this?... read more
We talked about the 6 situations or circumstances our social circumstances, our financial circumstances, our physical circumstance, our mental circumstance and our environmental circumstance. A newly evolving circumstance is our spiritual circumstance. Circumstance is a fact or condition connected with or relevant to an event or action; An event or fact that causes or helps to cause something to happen, typically something undesirable Lets talk a bit about the last one..Spiritual Wellness. VIktor Frankl invented what’s called Logotherapy. What might be the connection between Logotherapy and our group’s theme? A lot. Logotherapy is the powerful psychospiritual wellness aspect of existential psychology that was developed by Dr. Viktor Frankl who was the successor to Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler in the Third Viennese School of psychiatry. The core of this therapy lies the belief that besides Maslow’s Motivational theory of Needs, there is one other need i.e. to live with a consistent sense of meaning. You can find more practical resources here;http://www.logotherapy.fulfillmentforum….Next week we’ll touch on more ideas to maximize our Spiritual wellness. Before i go i share a story My Son, 11-year old, was going thru his growing years and was out of school last week overcoming mild case of chiken pox. As we did not want him to miss out i called his form teacher and let him know what’s going on. We talked about options to get his home assignments to reach him. After assessing various options the form teacher suggested the following: He will swing by my apartment twice a week and drop this assignments in our letter box. My son will complete these assignments and... read more
