It’s often said that your people are both your strongest asset and greatest liability. Most organisations accept certain levels of productivity and risk factors like churn, but how many are actively measuring its people?
It has long been appreciated that effective human resource and safety management systems are an essential part of organisational success, however what has been lacking is the intelligence to assess and quantify the causes of human behaviour.
Even apparently well run organisations can be found to have significant people risk exposures – often because they lack the necessary knowledge and expertise to manage this complex and diverse area of risk.
Errors, acts and omissions causing reputation and financial loss are all well known, but what about reduced productivity outcomes like presenteeism (the act of showing up to work without being productive), leavism (working evenings, weekends and on leave because of workload) and burnout?
These examples all have significant short, medium and long term impacts on your business. It is not what is often simply reported in post incident analysis as “human error”, it is People Risk.
Did you know that in 2020;
60% of UK workers reported suffering from presenteeism
51% worked outside of contracted hours
52% felt burnt out
44-48% of gen z and millennials reported feeling anxious or stressed all the time.
Working with a global client we recently uncovered that 20% of a high performing team were on the path to burnout. Additionally, several key individuals were experiencing leavism. Overlay this with over 60% of individuals trending downwards in overall resilience, we saw a sharp rise in the risk of churn within this team. Before there was a chance for the business to act two senior leaders did in fact leave.
So, what exactly did we discover and more importantly, would it have changed the outcome?
We discovered 3 significant areas requiring development for their people. Firstly, that compound stress and the impact it has on productivity when sustained is the single most common challenge for individuals.
Secondly, realising your potential and inner purpose by identifying what’s important to you and more importantly, acting on it, is a significant determinant of an individual’s contentment both at work and home.
Finally, with the changing work environment it is inevitable that how we communicate personally and professionally becomes more important. The building and maintenance of positive personal and professional relationships helps us feel in control.
These 3 insights focussed our clients’ internal people development program by targeting exactly what was needed. They now link this data (gathered bimonthly) to their internal people programs with the business imperative of reducing churn and increasing people program efficiency.
This is how you can turn people risk into people advantage.
Within the current return to work and post Covid horizon the businesses who thrive will be the ones who quantify people risk by regularly measuring the health of their people and aligning that data with programs and action.
Your challenge is to take the first step today.
About yppah
yppah exists to help clients turn people risk into a competitive advantage by identifying and tracking reduced performance indicators, such as Presenteeism, Leavism and Burnout.
As a business, monitor trends and gather insights to ensure people systems and structures are working, at a global, office and team level. As an individual, assess where you’re at to better understand why you feel a particular way and track your progress over time.
Using our tools, businesses identify, understand and address previously unseen problems. We enable them to assess, measure and track the Resilience, of their people, at scale.