Building resilience in the workplace

Building resilience in the workplace

Karen Rayner Health & Safety, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

Resilience is the ability to adapt and recover – to bounce back – following a challenge or problem. Resilient people respond well to a changing environment, deal with obstacles and move on quickly. Resilient companies do the same. As we work on ways to cope with the impact of Covid-19, it’s the perfect time to ask: how do we build resilience at work? Why is workplace resilience important? You can’t plan for everything.  Take workplace health and safety as an example. The traditional approach is to analyse possible emergencies, threats and hazards, and to document the things people need to …

Genesis launching in lockdown

Launching in lockdown: Genesis

Karen Rayner Engagement, Feedback, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

The world’s changed a lot since we first started working with Emma-Kate Greer and Tamara Sallis from Genesis, an energy company in New Zealand. Genesis has over 1,000 employees spread across the country in a wide range of roles including retail, wholesale operations, delivery and customer service. It’s an essential service provider, so work continues for the Genesis team even under lockdown conditions – the electricity must flow. This week Emma-Kate and Tamara launched Joyous across Genesis, and used the launch as an opportunity to send Covid-19 check-in questions to the entire team. So to see how well the launch …

Employee engagement: we need better answers

Employee Engagement: it’s time to demand better answers

Jason Lauritsen Engagement 1 Comment

One of the things that makes me crazy about the work of employee engagement is the sloppiness we allow around how we define and approach it. As I talk to leaders within organizations who are currently spending enormous sums of money on measuring and attempting to improve engagement, they struggle with basic questions like “How do you define employee engagement?” and “How does employee engagement drive your organization’s success?” If we can’t clearly define this work and why it matters, how can we ever expect to make a huge impact, let alone be taken seriously? We have to do better. …

Lightspeed Graphics #EX18

#EX18 Initiative of the Year: Lightspeed Graphics

Samantha Gadd Employee experience, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment

“The benefit of entering the awards is that it’s like a disciplined review – it enables you to pause and reflect on the programme with your team on how it’s all working.” Steve Martin, Lightspeed Graphics Lightspeed Graphics’ Operations Director, Steve Martin, said they were ‘over the moon’ when they first heard their name announced as winners of the EX Initiative of the Year at the Humankind Employee Experience Awards, EX18, in November.  Because they are a relatively young company (they’re just about to celebrate their 2nd birthday), and they are in a highly competitive industry, winning an award like …

The EX Genome Project

The Employee Experience Genome Project

Karen Rayner Employee experience Leave a Comment

In December 2018 we launched a little something that’s really going to help companies measure and manage employee experience and engagement. It’s quite exciting. It’s definitely comprehensive. But before we get into it, a bit of background on why it was so necessary. A little history of the employee survey industry In engineering terms, a black box is a device defined only by its input and output; you don’t need to know what’s going on inside it. This is how the employee survey industry has historically worked. You put in a long list of employee questions, and out of it …

The business case for measuring and managing employee mental wellbeing

Laura-Jane Booker Employee experience, Organizational culture, Wellness Leave a Comment

This is the second part in our employee mental wellbeing series. If you haven’t read it yet, check out part one: Encouraging employees to flourish. Here’s a quick recap. Employee mental wellbeing Mental wellbeing is a continuum. At the positive end you have flourishers. At the negative end you have languishers. The goal of any organisation is to enable all of their employees to be flourishers. Why? Because flourishers drive positive business outcomes such as engagement, productivity, organisational commitment, and organisational citizenship behaviours. Flourishers also take fewer sick days, are more resilient, and are less likely to seek employment elsewhere. …

Encourage employees to flourish

The business case for employee mental wellbeing: encouraging employees to flourish

Laura-Jane Booker Employee experience, Wellness 1 Comment

People tend to associate the term mental wellbeing with illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and bi-polar disorder. As a result, organisations tend to think it’s not relevant to everyone and shy away from addressing employee mental wellbeing. But what if I were to talk about stress, anxiety, and burnout? Suddenly, mental well-being becomes highly relevant because these are common work-related terms and issues that affect many employees. The languishing-flourishing continuum If employee mental wellbeing is a spectrum, at the positive end we have employees at their peak mental state – or flourishing. An employee who is flourishing is filled with …