What your boss is getting completely wrong

Most businesses are obsessed with the bottom line, but they’re missing a vital aspect of workplaces. By changing focus they might actually find greater success, writes Derick Borean.

In Australia we are obsessed with measuring the wrong things: how we look, how much we weigh, what school we go to, who we know.

In business, we are obsessed with measuring short-term profit.

Like the other meaningless measures, the relentless pursuit of short-term profit carries a devastating human cost.

As a rehabilitation and corporate health provider working with people and organisations suffering from illness and injury, I see first-hand how damaging losing purpose and meaning in one’s work and personal life can be.

It starts with disengagement. Australians are among the least motivated workers in the world. Only 14 per cent of us are engaged in our jobs, while an overwhelming 86 per cent either don’t care or are actively disengaged.

That leads to stress and anxiety — both have skyrocketed in the workplace to the point that mental health injuries and illness are now the number one reason people visit their GP.

And then there’s depression. One in six women and one in eight men are likely to experience depression in their lifetimes. We know that suicide is also tragically on the rise, and is now the single biggest killer of Australians under 44.

The human cost is clear, but there’s an economic cost too.

Workplace stress can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Picture: iStock

All up, mental health concerns are costing Australian businesses a staggering $10 billion per year.

Not all of society’s ills stem from a too-keen focus on the corporate bottom line, but it is naive to think our obsession with short-term financial targets isn’t affecting the physical and psychological wellbeing of women and men in the workplace.

As a business community in a progressive society, we must overcome the plague of short-term thinking and create long-term value for our people and our companies.

We can do that in three ways.

First, create stable leadership teams focused on executing a long-term vision. That starts with longer than the average CEO tenure (currently at 4.2 years), and longer-term incentives for executive teams and managers that incorporate broader indicators of performance than just bottom-line growth.

It also means getting serious about the diversity in our leadership ranks to include people who will think differently about solving the mental health crisis in the workplace.

Second, broaden company reporting to include non-financial metrics that are proven indicators of individual health, company performance and sustainability.

Google proved this with its now famous Project Aristotle, which was designed to uncover why some teams fumbled, while others flew. It found that psychological safety — that is, a mentally healthy work environment — was the number one predictor of high-performing teams.

Looking after mental wellbeing of workers can help people perform better. Picture: iStock

Third, understand that the long-term health and prosperity of our people — and, by extension, our companies and communities — is more important than endless “optimisation” to boost short-term profits.

Healthy people and healthy bottom lines go hand-in-hand.

Gallup, the world leader in predictive employment data, has spent decades proving this point. It found the more employees that agreed with the statement: “My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person” the higher the profit, productivity, customer services levels, and employee tenure within the company.

What Google and Gallup and others have taught us is that when companies are too focused on short-term results, they lose sight of the experiences that drive success — the emotional interactions and complicated conversations around how we want to work, who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel.

Bosses should encourage their employees to be as calm, purposeful and stress-free as possible — not to worry about the things they can’t control, but rather to enjoy and value the work that they do, and to be present when they are doing it. That will bring out their best, and enable success.

I’ve heard business leaders say time and again, “our people are our business”. It’s time we proved it by changing our definition of success. By measuring and valuing what really counts.

Derick Borean is the NSW President of the Australian Rehabilitation Providers Association, which promotes and advocates for best practice, cost-effective and outcome-based workplace health, return-to-work and rehabilitation services.

Originally published as What your boss is getting completely wrong