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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted corporate life in previously unimaginable ways. While many businesses adapted quickly to stay afloat, others have found it a challenge to implement new ways of working.
As we emerge from this crisis, many business leaders are recognising it as an opportunity to reboot their companies, redefine values, and implement new ways of boosting workforce happiness, inclusion, and success.
Fostering a happy workforce is not a new idea, but it is one that has often been deprioritised in favour of productivity and other easier-to-measure or more practical goals.
However, data shows that happy workers deliver significantly more business success, in terms of increased productivity, motivation, and team engagement.
Research published in 2019 by Oxford University's Saïd Business School in collaboration with telecoms firm BT, found that happy workers were 13% more productive, over a six-month research period. That figure is on par with the findings of a University of Warwick study in 2015, which determined that happy employees were 12% more productive.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-10-24-happy-workers-are-13-more-productive.
Happiness depends on a number of factors, but at its core results from staff feeling appreciated for their contributions, as well as included and represented according to their gender, race, values, and beliefs.
A report entitled “Ensuring Inclusive Working Cultures” from Business in the Community (BITC), notes that “workplace inclusion…represents a fine balance between employees feeling that they belong and that their differences are acknowledged and accepted.”
The BITC report found that “in addition to policies and practices, the actions of leaders are central to creating a culture of inclusion,” noting that “where employees are accepted and validated by a leader, they are more likely to be accepted by their fellow employees too, affecting perceptions of inclusion.”
INCLUSIVE RECOVERY
In the second #ChamberBreakers podcast series, Verizon Business and Yahoo Finance UK invited a selection of CSR leaders, management pioneers and diversity-and-inclusion experts to discuss how companies can emerge from the pandemic with fresh purpose and renewed focus on human wellbeing.
“If ever recovery needs to be inclusive, it's now,” Sandra Kerr OBE, the Race and Equality Director for Business in the Community, told #ChamberBreakers. “If we want to draw on the expertise so that we can really build back better and collaboratively and responsibly…we need everybody in the UK to feel like ‘I've got a part to play.’”
“What we need is leaders who have a vision for the future… that can really bring people along with them,” Kerr said. “We are living in times where we need leaders with empathy, who care, who can take perspectives from other people and not just see everything through the way that it has always been.”
“I think what we also need is leaders who have a vision for the future, and can help to paint a picture of what does new look like, what does difference look like, what does change look like, and how are we going to get there, and what is the role of everybody in our team.”
According to Kerr, effective leadership starts with self-awareness—including recognition and control of our own emotional triggers— as well as humility, empathy, and openness.
“You ground yourself in your values,” she said. “So that you're ready and able to respond in a calm manner even sometimes in the face of what can feel like extreme provocation.”
Now more than ever, EQ, or emotional intelligence, is essential in business. Kerr believes it should be a mandatory training within companies.
“For me, emotional intelligence is about being empathetic and being authentic,” Kerr added.
“I think there's a sensitivity there to be able to read cues that aren't explicit — it doesn't have to be some magic trick where you're expected to read everybody's minds. It's about being aware of yourself and of others.”
That self-awareness and openness to other perspectives goes hand-in-hand with fostering diversity and inclusion in the workplace, which ultimate leads to more creative problem solving.
The Race and Equality Director urges entire sectors to collaborate to set high standards of behavioural respect, and tackle issues such as the lack of diversity and inclusion together.
“We know that the more diverse a workplace is, the more innovative it is, and the more innovative a workplace is, the more profitable it is,” Kerr said.
Boosting happiness for business success
There are few executives who have studied the link between happiness and business success in the same depth as Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer at Google X, author of international bestseller "Solve for Happy," and host of hit podcast "Slo Mo.”
Gawdat told the #ChamberBreakers podcast that happiness is not a complex science, but is in fact “highly predicable.”
“It's events minus expectations. At the very simplest level, happiness is equal to or greater than the difference between the events of your life and your expectations of how life should be,” Gawdat said. “Happiness at work is that the events of work meet my expectation of work.”
He says the reason we fail to find happiness is simply because we don’t prioritise it: “At work we say happiness doesn't matter… If we achieve the target, we will make the bonus, and the bonus will make us happy. How often did that happen?”
“Business growth is actually highly dependent on happiness,” Gawdat said. “I think most leaders completely ignore that. The idea that we can push people, manage people, try to guide them and restrain them into success, is a very, very ancient idea of business.”
“In today's business, where so much of our success depends on innovation, engagement, interaction with customers and clients and colleagues, happiness is of paramount importance.”
Gawdat worked at Google for 12 years, as Head of Google Emerging Markets and then as Chief Business Officer for Google X. He attributes his success to creating a happy environment, where people could thrive, calling this “the ultimate leadership quality.”
The former Google executive believes that there is a “massive mix-up” between leadership and management: “Management leads from behind. It holds a whip and pushes people forward. Leaders, on the other hand, are those that can get people to aspire to make the dream of the leader come true.”
As a first step to creating a happy work environment, Gawdat urges leaders to embrace human imperfection. “The best way for a human to perform at work is to bring their whole human self to work with all of its upsides and all of its downsides,” he said. “If we're not able as leaders to create that environment, then what are we scared of? Maybe because we are insecure.”
He regards the COVID-19 crisis as one of the biggest leadership challenges that have happened in his lifetime. Even though bosses may not be able to physically walk around the office to check on staff morale or have in-person meetings, he recommends they still reach out to staff and check on their well-being.
Gawdat identifies simple happiness boosters for leaders like taking a walk with individual team members to see how they are coping, having a virtual coffee, anything that will “remove obstacles, to make them feel happier, to make them feel more productive, to make them feel more engaged, fairly treated, supported, and so on.”
His advice to leaders who are themselves feeling anxious is to “stop playing God.”
“Anyone who's been in business long enough would understand this is the most unpredictable, difficult, challenging time for businesses we've ever come through,” Gawdat said. “Your responsibility is to do the best that you can within this current environment.”
The golden 5G opportunity
Business leaders are already preparing for the arrival of 5G technology. The most forward-thinking see it as a great chance to increase diversity and inclusion as well as a powerful tool in the war for talent.
Ronan Dunne, executive vice president and group CEO of Verizon Consumer Group, believes that business has the opportunity to make sure 5G will be the most inclusive generation of technology ever, offering a “transformational opportunity” for both education and corporations.
Business must strive to make an influence in the education system “to make sure that we're preparing people for the jobs of the future,” Dunne told the #Chamberbreakers podcast.
Since 2012, the Verizon Innovative Learning program has been working to abolish the tech divide from a young age, by cooperating with non-profits, education, and technology experts to create STEM-focused programs in schools, especially in under-resourced communities.
https://www.verizon.com/about/responsibility/digital-inclusion/verizon-innovative-learning
“The intention is to make sure that teachers have what they need, parents have what they need, and students have what they need to participate, recognising that talent is equally and evenly distributed, but opportunity is not,” Dunne said.
Change on our terms
The phenomenal change that will happen when 5G connectivity meets AI and advanced analytics needs careful handling, according to Dunne.
“We, as community and society, should define the terms on which we want to harness those technologies in the service of our society, rather than the other way around,” Dunne said. “We have the opportunity to redefine the nature of work in a way that I honestly believe will make for more and more interesting jobs as we create more space for creativity in the workplace.”
Old structural hierarchies are likely to be upended, as a more socially and geographically diverse playing field emerges. Dunne urges leaders to seize this chance to dismantle hierarchical structures and commit to seeking out the best and most diverse talent.
“Organise around the issue and opportunity at hand, not around the structure,” he says. “Then what will happen is natural leaders will come forward for the situation at hand. Then you will start to create an environment in which talent recognises its opportunity within your organisation.”