Name: COO Summit 2024: Come On, Get Happy - Mental Wellness And The Competitive Edge
Uploaded: 2024-10-08
Duration: 11 min 3 s
Description: Ashish Kothari, Founder and CEO, Happiness Squad

Ashish Kothari, Founder and CEO, Happiness Squad

COO Summit 2024: Come On, Get Happy - Mental Wellness And The Competitive Edge

Conferences

Friends. I'd like to invite us to just start a bit differently. We've been hearing lots of content. So let's just start with taking one minute and we're going to take five or six breaths together. So just plant your feet. I invite you to dim your eyes and just follow your breath, take a breath in and breathe out, take another breath in and breathe out. Take 23 more cycles of breath and then we start. Thank you. I'll connect back to the simple one minute of a mindful start and why I had to try that. But before we do, let me start you with three simple questions. Raise your hands. If this year's targets that you're being asked to deliver are higher than last year's, keep them up. If the conditions under which you're asked to deliver them are harder than last year, you can raise them even up if you want. Right? And finally think about if at the end of four years coming out of the pandemic with all the curveballs that you've been thrown, maybe you're feeling at the edge of all that's possible, maybe even a bit exhausted. Yeah, that's I have asked this question to 200 plus executives in the last 12 months. And I hear consistently the same, we are working harder than ever. We feel the need to continuously be on and we're trying desperately to keep things in control even in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity going through the roof. Today. I want to offer you a different path, a path that allows you to truly take yourself and your organizations and be able to rise to the challenge of higher targets in the harder conditions, not by doing more, but by being more by truly discovering what I'm calling your fifth gear. And we do that through the science of flourishing because here's what we know over the last 20 years, we know that happier employees, we know happier individuals are more creative, they're more resilient, they are more adaptable, they live longer and are healthier. We also know that happier companies have two X higher stock market returns are 20% more profitable, are 12 to 30% more productive. Three X more creative and 65% lower attrition. That's the business case for flourishing. Now, this is not just numbers, these are realities because these companies who are achieving these levels of performance have truly learned something they have learned how to unleash that human magic that often lies untapped in organizations. You can read all about it in the best by transformation written by their former Ceo Hubert Joly a former mckenzie uh colleague. You see, I grew up in the world of operations. I led many of our largest transformations at mckenzie in operations. And I learned something during that time before I pivoted to the topic of human flourishing, I realized that we had a playbook that we have deployed over 50 plus years to drive scalable and sustainable transformations. We did it with lean millions of people, many blue collar upskilled in new ways of working new mindsets and new management systems that enable them. It enabled us to drive productivity up to 80% safety down to almost zero and quality down to almost minuscule levels, right? In terms of errors, what if he could apply that to human flourishing? Because our current approach, despite increased investments is not working 20%. Despite all the engagement, surveys that many of you probably run global engagement is stuck at 20% stress and anxiety are 40 to 60% they're not moving. So let's think a little bit about how do we actually apply what we know what we already know to this challenge. Number one, we need to truly take flourishing and put it at the heart of our strategies. Ge didn't take six Sigma as a productivity initiative. Six Sigma became the heart of how they transformed and disrupted industries. Toyota did the same with the Toyota production system. We have to stop treating well being as a side hustle as seminars, employee benefits and really put it at the heart of how we run operations, how we incentivize leaders and how we grow. Second, as operators, we love data. You know, we measure it continuously, we benchmark within units, we benchmark across units, we benchmark across companies. Why we are constantly looking for every basis point of improvement that we can from our physical investments. So why are we OK, measuring our human assets once a year, maybe every six months and then using one size fits all interventions, we're going to have everybody go through a meaning journey. Why if there's somebody who actually finds meaning and what they're doing, it's a waste of their time. So here's the insight I had the same losses that apply for machines, apply for people availability, losses for people show up in absenteeism and attrition in machines. They show up as unplanned, downtime, performance losses show up because only 20% of front line and managers are engaged and they find meaning at work stress results in lower productivity. How many of you spend 80% of your time in back to back meetings? Did you know back to back meetings, drive 40% higher risk of errors and result in 8 to 12% lower productivity because we are multitasking because we got to get work done. Psychological safety and trust is another driver. Keith talked a lot about this around how we are not collaborating enough. We might have high engagement scores but we all know those meetings where we keep talking about the same thing over and over again. And then quality losses show up in terms of poor errors that show up or quality decision biases because we don't have the right information, right? So the second big thing that I want to introduce for you is these five pillars similar to lean that we can apply to this data, data around losses that we measure. And those are purpose, energy, awareness, relationships, and life force. We call this a pearl model dream with me for a minute. Imagine if every employee at your organization showed up and they found work as a source of meaning and fulfillment, not just a way to earn a paycheck. Think about what becomes possible. Imagine if work wasn't a grind but left you with more energy. At the end of the day, it was because gratitude and compassion was weaved into how we work and we taught people how to have conflicts the right way rather than avoid them. Think about what becomes possible if we truly trained our leaders to navigate in complexity, only 20% of leaders today according to work at Harvard are at a stage of development that allows them to thrive in complexity for the rest of us. We can just survive. Imagine if the fabric of your organization was so psychologically safe and deep in trust that people were afraid, not afraid to give you their best ideas. Their most creative ideas and finally life force. Imagine if we could train our leaders to redesign their work in neuro friendly ways and truly make stress an ally that one minute breath is a powerful way. It's a moment when we are in back to back meetings, accumulating stress to give ourselves a recharge, just like we charge our phones somehow we feel we don't need to do that with our human bodies and our brains. So it's about choosing the right interventions with our teams just like we do with lean. So they can choose the right intervention for that team. And the last excellence performance is a mindset. We do that with lean, right? We don't have to tell people what to do. We help shape identities and they take action. We do Kaiser events once a month, if not every other week, when was the last time we ran a Kazan on our own ways of working using the data to come up with small experiments that we can try to improve our efficiency, our effectiveness and friends. This is what we are finding with this work as we use this model to deploy it. When we do this, we can truly make flourishing our competitive edge. And here's what we unlock 2 to 3.5% higher alpha year over year for our shareholders. We can use, truly use flourishing to grow the pie and not worry about splitting the pie and how much goes to employees versus shareholders. Thank you.