Our Top Tips To Boost Care: The Overlooked Commodity In Your Organisation.

Why we need to care about care.

Younger employees are feeling more and more detached from their work.

That’s pretty significant. What do we do about this?

In the US alone, not engaged or actively disengaged workers account for approximately $1.9 trillion in lost productivity.

And irrespective of the economic impact, the fact that a huge proportion of our workforce, our future leaders no less, don’t really care about what they spend most of their time doing is a sad state of affairs.

Let’s explore this further.

Why should we care about care?

Millennials and Gen Z have seen the greatest drop in feeling:

• cared about by someone at work
• connected to the mission
• that they have opportunities to learn and grow
• that they can have progressive conversations with managers
• that their opinions count

These feelings, provided by Gallup, touch significantly on the 5 primary cultural elements for high performance in our diagnostic model - INTENT: Authenticity, care, empowerment, presence and purpose - all intimately connected.

For now, let’s focus on the simple, but too often overlooked, element of Care.

Do your people really care?

A simple but essential element of a high performance culture.

It’s important not to over-complicate it.?

So often, a key factor contributing to a drop off in quality of work, or communication,? or leadership is the simple fact that people don’t quite care enough.

We’re called in to help upskill teams all of the time only to find that the skill and technique are there in abundance. The genuine connection to each other and what they’re looking to achieve together are not.

Why would you go that extra mile for something that’s just a job? Why would you suffer the short term pain of having that challenging conversation? If you don’t care about their personal development and you don’t connect to any collective mission, you’re better off leaving it.

High levels of care in an organisation certainly doesn’t mean that everyone has to be willing to die for their work, or that people don’t have outside interests and passions. Absolutely not. And of course, every workplace needs to support and enable this healthy balance.

But you do want people to care about what they do and feel good about it.

A significant sense of meaning in our lives is a fundamental human need. We don’t operate well without it.

Victor Frankl brilliantly outlined that meaning in our life could come from 3 key sources - love, courage in the face of adversity and purposeful work. We need to create environments where people feel that they are truly valued, beyond their simple output, where people feel supported and cared for, and where people feel that what they do matters, contributing to something bigger.

When an organisation is full of people that don’t have any of this - that don’t care enough, everything else in the culture suffers - the energy, the communication, the trust, the engagement levels, the creativity - the performance.

Some important questions to ask:

So, what can be done about this?

Dialling up the level of care in your organisation isn’t really about skills or technique.

There’s also no shortcut, or simple programme that you can run.

But that doesn’t mean that you should just leave it.

Clearly, there’s something pretty fundamental missing from peoples’ day to day experience at work. And clearly it’s having a pretty huge impact on the bottom line as the opening stats reveal.

Here are some important questions that you should ask yourself right now as a leader:

1. How can you get to know and understand your people, their wants and needs better?
2. Have you considered coaching or mentoring schemes for them?
3. How often do you get the team together to simply connect, away from the pressures of the day-to-day?
4. How much guidance and feedback does everybody get?
5. Are there clear paths to career development for the people in your team?

The answers to these questions will be an excellent start on raising the culture of care in your organisation.

So, can you make a difference, and right away?

Of course you can. The work in relation to the above questions could be widespread, will need to be intentional, planned out and committed over the long term.

But don’t let that daunt you into inaction.?

Showing up authentically and investing in the people around you doesn’t actually require too much planning. Just consistency. The impact of your care will be felt over time.

How can you factor in more space for meaningful conversations with the people in your team, gradually building up the trust?

We fully understand that this is sometimes easier said than done over the course of a busy week where almost every second of your time is accounted for.

Our simple recommended action is the following:

• Carve out time for one more meaningful conversation with someone in your team this week. Do the same next week. And the week after, until it just becomes habitual.
• On top of that, on days when you’re in the office, be intentional about leaving space in your day for simply being about - available, open and accessible. Building a culture of care can’t always be planned or diarised.

If you’d like a deeper conversation about all of this, we’d love to help. To inform our conversation, why not take 5 minutes to do INTENT: our free of charge diagnostic organisational performance tool. It will give you valuable insight into your organisational needs right away.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Author: Christopher Wickenden FRSA , Chief Creative Officer at FROM:TODAY