Health and happiness help profits

Take a holistic approach to company goals

THE economic environment has been putting pressure on growth targets and the feasibility of meeting original projections. Organisations often respond with massive restructuring and retrenchment exercises to help the bottom line.

The exercises are usually technical, completely ignoring the human side of the process, which often undermines the very financial performance that the whole exercise was intended to revive.

People often become anxious or panic, but this can be mitigated if companies give as much thought to maintaining organisational health as they do to maintaining financial health.

I am noticing an increasing number of requests for assistance from companies that failed to take the mental wellbeing of staff into account during the design of a restructure; many executives only wake up to the effects on the organisation’s health when the process is already well advanced.

Maintaining a healthy organisation, especially during times of massive change, can go a long way towards creating a financially sustainable business.

Organisational health is what makes possible the delivery of the superior financial performance that the organisations were trying to achieve when they made the changes.

This is similar to the relationship between mind and body. When we put significant strain on the mind, but neglect to eat healthy food and get enough rest and exercise, the body eventually gives in and starts screaming for attention. This is how burnout, mental breakdowns and other similar challenges manifest.

The challenge of ensuring the mental health of employees is one that not only those leading large corporations and departments face. I have noticed that entrepreneurs and the owners of small businesses suffer from the same blind spot.

This is especially the case when times are tough, which is quite often in the early stages of the business, coupled with the additional pressure that comes from trying to ensure that the business survives in a lowgrowth environment.

Impossible financial targets become the priority, which results in tremendous pressure being placed on staff. Quite soon these businesses lose their best talent because employees cannot cope with the demands placed on them. They leave because the pressure is harming the organisation’s health.

It is hard enough to attract good talent as a small business, and even harder to retain that talent in an environment that is toxic.

Health needs to be top of mind when we make key business decisions. With every major financial goal we set, we need to take into account how it will impact the organisation’s culture and the existing ways of working.

The reason these factors are often ignored is because many people rise within an organisation thanks to their record of meeting financial targets, and not because they show any ability to create and maintain a healthy work environment for themselves and others.

This is sometimes referred to as the “soft” or emotional intelligence side of leadership, which is often poorly developed in business leaders today.

It is a pity that even today, business management 101 still does not place enough emphasis on this topic. Only a few programmes are championing it.

As such, we need to constantly remind ourselves and be aware of the unconscious biases that come from having learnt and implemented leadership through a one-sided approach.

It is high time we started giving as much priority to taking care of organisational health as we do to taking care of the company’s financial performance — we need to stop this tendency of waiting until the organisation’s environment has become so unhealthy that intervention becomes unavoidable.

If you look at the organisations that continue to survive the test of time, despite significant challenges in their markets and economies, you start noticing that these are often the ones with organisational health and strong cultures that are continuously reinforced.

We also need to stop regarding the maintenance of good health within an organisation as something for the human resources department to take care of; it should be among the top priorities for all of a business’s leaders.