Horizon Point Consulting

Search results for: “productivity”

  • 3 Ways to Meet Survival Needs in the Workplace

    3 Ways to Meet Survival Needs in the Workplace

    I will never forget reading Arianna Huffington’s account of her personal experience that forced her to focus on wellness and wellbeing, namely sleep.  In one of her books, Arianna talks about how she woke up on the floor after hitting her head on the way down. She had collapsed due to utter exhaustion. 

    Arianna went on to found Thrive Global and wrote another book, The Sleep Revolution. The mission at Thrive Global is to “end the burnout epidemic with sustainable, science-based solutions that unlock employee performance and enhance well-being.”  They are tackling wellbeing through employers, helping us see that these issues are not an “employee benefit” but a business “strategy”. 

    At Horizon Point, we couldn’t agree more. Much of what Thrive helps people focus on is small behavioral changes that end up creating habits at the individual level.  If the majority of employees adopt these strategies and change habits, then it ends up impacting workplace outcomes at the organizational level. Doing this successfully demands that organizations understand and adopt ways of working that support these behavioral changes. We can’t demand people change their habits when we don’t support organizational structures and cultures that allow the habits to take place.  

    We need to help people meet their “survival” needs. When we do so, that allows them to “thrive” by being able to meet higher-order needs and impact business results. 

    So what do we need to support to meet survival needs? 

    1. First, as Huffington points to, SLEEP is foundational and critical. According to the CDC,  “Insufficient sleep is associated with a number of chronic diseases and conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression.”  In order to consider sleep, we also must consider people’s natural circadian rhythms.   This necessitates that we look at how our bodies function naturally as Daniel Pink says in his book, When.  Taylor focused on this book in a recent blog post.   Here are a few concrete steps for workplace implementation: 

    a. Get rid of anything that requires people to go against their circadian rhythms.  Hello rotating shifts – and to a lesser extent, night shifts. Get rid of them if you can. If you have to operate on a 24/7 structure, then at least keep people on a consistent shift that does not change. There is study after study about how detrimental this practice is to people’s health.  Here’s one: Shift work impairs brain functioning.

    b. Get people to do a time audit. (Here’s a good time tracking spreadsheet download to do so.) I particularly like this one because the notes column helps people to jot down how they are feeling, not just what they are doing. I would encourage using the notes section to also note when attention seems to be waning. In other words, how long have you been focused on a task when you notice it is harder to stay focused? Research suggests that this point is usually about 50 minutes to an hour for most people. Helping people track their natural peaks and troughs of energy, attention, and productivity helps them to understand their natural rhythms. It also can help them discern what is getting in the way of a consistent time to go to sleep and to wake, which research has shown is critical to performance. You can then take this and apply some general parameters around meeting times and workday structure for your team.   For example, our team at HPC did this and we found that mid-morning was almost everyone’s peak productivity time. Because of this, we try to reserve this time for individual work on important tasks as opposed to meetings. We also seek to eliminate other distractions and time-wasters during this peak performance time block. 

    2. Next, know that you have to aid people in completing the stress cycle. Stress is a natural part of life. It is adaptive and helpful in many cases, but we need to monitor the fine line between boredom and anxiety, as we’ve noted before in a blog post. Like dealing with a chronic lack of sleep, dealing with consistent high levels of stress leads to the same type of health risks and reduces cognitive functioning, thus negatively impacting workplace outcomes. We’ve compiled 7 Ways to Help Employees Complete the Stress Cycle. Check out some of the concrete steps to actually do this in the workplace in this blog post. 

    3. Finally, paying a living wage and/or helping employees maintain financial wellbeing is critical. We’ve written about examining wage practices (how to do it) and why what you pay does matter. You can check those posts out for practical tips and advice on addressing this survival need. But I think the podcast from Adam Grant titled Why It Pays to Raise Pay  (listen about 4 minutes into the podcast to hear the MIT professor talk about this) drives the point as to why we have to focus on this survival need because when we don’t, we are actually “making people dumber”.  We reduce people’s cognitive functioning when they are constantly worried about how to make ends meet, whether it is because their paycheck does not support their ability to survive, or because they have made financial decisions that trap them into not having enough to pay their debts. So first, examine if you are paying living wages (check out MIT’s living wage calculator). If you are, great. Then second, coordinate with your banker or financial advisors to offer classes to employees about how to maintain financial wellbeing.  Most of them will do this for free for you, just make sure you’re reviewing the curriculum that will be used and selecting something that has been research-backed. 

    As the previously mentioned podcast says, we really need to think about these survival issues because when we don’t, we literally make people “dumber.”  Not meeting survival needs reduces cognitive functioning. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the ERG Theory, we know survival needs as “existence needs”. We can’t talk about helping people thrive until we create workplace conditions that are conducive to people existing or surviving. 

    Interested in learning more about how to help people survive and then thrive in the workplace? Check out and sign up for our Illuminate Workshop. 

  • 2021 Book of the Year

    2021 Book of the Year

    It might seem odd that a company with a core value of “productivity” would choose a book of the year titled Do Nothing. But in a year of seeing people’s mental and physical health deteriorate due not just to issues a global pandemic continues to cause, but also because of the phenomenon of overworking and under living, we found the book captured the essence of putting productivity, and work, in perspective.   

    As the author, Celeste Headlee states, “The question is not about whether you are productive but what you are producing.” And we would go on to say that the question also expands to examine the method in which you structure your production and whether or not it leads to healthier, more joyful lives and more meaningful output. 

    Over the course of the year, we watched ourselves and our clients attempt to be on two to three virtual meetings at a time, catch up on work emails over the weekend because the work week demanded forty hours of meetings alone, and watched as story after story was brought up about people’s mental health crashing and therefore causing a complete meltdown of physical health.  Emergency surgeries were needed, trips to the ER for chest pains took place, and people cried at lunch with us because they were so exhausted and did not see a way out of their current state of life revolving around the need to meet “productivity” demands at work and at home. 

    But as our core value of productivity intertwines with the value to put people first and to foster passion with an end goal of innovating the workplace, we found that many of us don’t have the bandwidth or the energy to innovate anything as we constantly chase the next goal or metric, all while trying to multitask as we are chained to our phones and computers. 

    We’ve lost sight of the goal of work with purpose and replaced it with work towards some endless pursuit that creates exhaustion and insanity. This narrative may not be something you’ve personally experienced, but we’d venture to guess you know and love at least one person that has been impacted by this conundrum. 

    So, we all took or are taking sabbaticals in 2021 and 2022 to think deeply about what this means and to develop training and insights to shift the paradigm for ourselves and our clients on what it means to work, to be productive, and to think deeply about just how we got to this point where enough is never enough. 

    Do Nothing provides a history and research lesson about how, over the past 200 years since the industrial revolution, we’ve gotten here and gives us six “life-back strategies” on “how to break away from overworking, overdoing, and under living.”  

    And although we as a team may not agree with everything Headlee postulates in her narrative which may be more based on how she defines work (something for pay) versus how we do (something for pursuing purpose), we agree with its method of the scientific practitioner approach by taking sound research and applying the learnings of that research in our own lives and workplaces to experiment and learn.  Then, we can follow the information and data our learning provides to make better decisions. 

    And as Headlee suggests, in our metric obsessed world, sometimes the information provided doesn’t come in the form of numbers but in the way we feel.  We need to be paying more attention to how we feel and what that means for us to be productive in a way that leads to creativity and innovation. This book provides us with the opportunity to think about how to do that.   

    In fact, one method of feeling should be tied to our ability to have time to think, not just do.  Our ability to think, apply, and learn is what separates us as human beings.  It’s what makes us human and it’s what produces great work.  It’s what produces innovation. 

    Given the thinking and learning we’ve done over the course of 2021 and into 2022 on the topic of workplace wellness and wellbeing and in an effort to innovate the workplace through people practices, we are excited to be offering workshops- one on a cruise ship, yes on a cruise ship!- to help you come to understand the research, design experiments at your workplace, and help follow the data and the feelings to help not only yourself but also to help your workplace build a culture where people thrive.  To not just create change at the individual level, but to create it through organizational systems and structures.  These workshops will also provide an opportunity for relationship building and fun.

    The premise of our book of the year and our workshops is not to literally “do nothing” but to realize we’ve gone so far to the opposite extreme that we need to find a way to focus on doing nothing so that we can center ourselves so that we can find balance and pleasure not only in leisure but also in work, and to realize that sometimes they are both so integrated that you cannot have one without the other. 

    We are so appreciative of the opportunity to pursue purpose with you this year.  Thank you for your business and your friendship.  Blessings to you and your organization as we all strive to build workplaces where people thrive and enjoy doing work worth producing and have the health and mindset and permission to enjoy leisure.  Both are noble goals, and both require one another to happen.

    If you are interested in learning more about how to create organizations where people thrive, please visit our Illuminate website at: https://horizonpointconsulting.com/illuminate/

  • Show Compassion, Save Your Empathy

    Show Compassion, Save Your Empathy

    “What the world needs more than empathy is compassion. Empathy is feeling the pain and suffering of others. Compassion is acting to relieve the pain and suffering of others.” – Adam Grant

    A couple of weeks ago I was listening to Adam Grant’s podcast while driving and the topic was mental health and how organizations can make an impact. At Horizon Point we’ve been having candid conversations about our own mental health in the last few months. As Mary Ila mentioned in her blog post Taking a Walkabout we have all been dealing with health issues as a result of our own stress and anxieties over the past year or so. For us, it all came to a halt during our first quarterly meeting of 2021. And as a result, we have each agreed to take a sabbatical to focus on ourselves. But at the same time, it has led us to conversations on how we can do the next right thing for our clients as well and help them focus on the mental health of their employees. 

    The podcast with Adam really hit a chord with me. I am an empath, and this is where I really struggle with my mental health. As Adam explains it, having empathy means that you feel the pain and suffering of others. And I agree with him, empathy is exhausting. 

    As Adam mentions in his podcast, when employees are struggling with their mental health, it has a significant impact on their performance. So how can employers show that they care about the mental health of their employees without exhausting themselves in the process? According to Adam, it’s through compassion, not empathy. 

    I had never really thought about empathy and compassion together before. I think we often use the terms interchangeably, I know I did. But now I understand they are very different. 

    Empathy is aimed at an individual and allows for a lot of bias. You will have more empathy for an individual you like than one you don’t. You may have more empathy for that star employee than you do for the one who struggles to meet deadlines. You have more empathy for the employee that reminds you of yourself. 

    Compassion isn’t about how much you feel someone’s pain, it’s about how well you respond to help alleviate that pain. You can have all of the empathy in the world, feel someone else’s pain immensely, but not do anything to help them relieve that pain and suffering. Compassion is all about helping them move through that pain to the other side. 

    So how can organizations create a compassionate culture? 

    • Allow sick days to be utilized for mental health- As Adam puts it allow “sad days.”
    • Make sure your health plan covers mental health, or offer an EAP. 
    • Take two minutes to ask employees how they are. If you notice an employee seems to be having a rough day, show them you care, don’t just try to avoid them. 
    • Ask employees if they need help, don’t wait for them to come to you. 
    • As Brene’ Brown would say, you have to be vulnerable. Be willing to put yourself out there too. At Horizon Point we have all been very vulnerable with each other, both before and now during our rejuvenation period. 

    Creating a culture of compassion helps to keep your employees from the exhaustion of empathy, can increase productivity, improve employees’ mental health which can decrease your healthcare costs, and so much more.

    How can you help your organization create a culture of compassion?  

  • Is it Time to Kill the 40-Hour Workweek?

    Is it Time to Kill the 40-Hour Workweek?

    Americans work an average of 41.5 hours per week, with 11.1% working over 50 hours per week. World Population Review

    Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers. International Labour Organization

     

    Based on data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. Meaning Americans should be able to accomplish in 10 hours per week what it took 40 hours to accomplish in 1950. Yet, we are still working 40 hours per week. 

    So where did the 40-hour workweek start? With Henry Ford. He implemented it in his Detroit factory it was an innovation in favor of employees. Most workers were putting in six days per week and Ford created the concept of work-life balance. He reduced the workweek to five days in order to allow his employees ample time to rest and be with their families. 

    Over a century later we still talk about a work-life balance, but we’ve lost the purpose that drove Ford to implement that 40-hour week. We’ve gradually climbed that hill back up towards longer hours and less work-life balance. We shun those who work only 40-hours per week and praise those who work 60-80 hours per week. We have become a society that brags about how many hours we put in at work each week. 

    I’ll never forget my first job out of college, I received my offer letter and it said that I was required to work a minimum of 45 hours per week. And rarely in the three years, I worked there did I put in less than at least 50, sometimes as much as 80. 

    We want to claim that certain industries just require at least 40-hours per week, such as healthcare, retail, or manufacturing, but do they really or are we just stuck in that “we’ve always done it this way” rut? Autonomy, an independent research group in Iceland, conducted a four-year study from 2015 to 2019 in which they reduced the workweek of over 2,500 employees from 40 hours down to 35-36 hours. The results were overwhelming. 

    • Employees were happier and healthier
    • It improved work-life balance
    • Productivity remained the same or increased

    The results were so positive that by the time the study was published earlier this year, 86% of Iceland’s population had either moved to a reduced workweek or added into their collective bargaining agreements to do so in the future. 

    The study by Autonomy is not the only study that has been conducted in recent years and as with the Autonomy study, results show that decreasing the workweek has a positive impact on employee health and wellbeing, work-life balance, and productivity. 

    So why do we continue to hold so tight to the 40-hour workweek?

  • The Cost of Sexual Harassment

    The Cost of Sexual Harassment

    EEOC reported sexual harassment claims have ebbed and flowed for years now. Some years it’s up and some it’s down. The “MeToo” movement gained momentum in 2017 and for the two years following we saw a rise in EEOC sexual harassment claims. Now the numbers are starting on the down curve again; I’m sure in part due to the pandemic and move to remote workforces. But being remote doesn’t protect any organization from the threat of sexual harassment situations. 

    A 2019 study conducted by Deloitte aimed to estimate the cost impact of sexual harassment on organizations. By creating a model algorithm to determine the average cost based on total cases, Deloitte estimated that in 2018 workplace sexual harassment cost organizations $2.6 billion in lost productivity and $0.9 billion in other costs, or an average of $1,428 per victim. 

    Sexual harassment in the workplace can have a huge impact on the organization, including increased absenteeism, decreased employee morale, higher turnover, and management time to investigate claims. Sexual harassment can have a major psychological impact on victims, causing such symptoms as anxiety, depression, insomnia, or headaches. All of these symptoms can in turn have a major impact on an employee’s ability to perform the duties of their position. They can also have a major impact on the employer’s insurance costs, as employees who suffer such symptoms often need to seek medical assistance to alleviate them. 

    In addition to the costs mentioned above, employers who have to fight claims of sexual harassment through the EEOC or the courts will spend a great deal of time collecting evidence, consulting legal counsel, and fighting the claim in EEOC mediation and/or court. Punitive and compensatory damages could cost an organization between $50,000 and $300,000, depending on company size. 

    There are multiple options available to employers to help them ensure their employees, and their leadership is trained on sexual harassment including online training that can be purchased on a per person license, LMS training modules that can be purchased for a flat fee, or outsourced training. 

    Currently, 18 states have some form of regulation on sexual harassment training for employers. Many employers opt-out of training because it’s not required in their state. Others put off training thinking “It would never happen here” or “I can’t afford training”, but it can happen in any organization and the cost of providing training annually is much less than the potential cost of not providing training. 

    To find out more about Horizon Point’s sexual harassment training, view our course outline.  

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