Have you ever felt that a system in your organization was negatively effecting your experience at work?
I was recently in Ireland giving a keynote at a workplace wellbeing conference. It was a great event with lots of interesting talk, but one particularly stood out for me. It was Clare County Council who had been invited as they had won a CIPD award for wellbeing and good working practices.
The speaker was one of their HR executives and instead of talking about their wellbeing programme she focused on how they had created better and easier systems which not only improved data capture but also reduced the amount of time that people spent doing admin by over 30%.
It’s a great example of a real win-win. I can imagine that many professions – such as teaching and health professionals – would be delighted to regain a large portion of their time in this way.
In fact I recently came across a study of health professionals in the US where the researchers particularly focused on their use of electronic health record (EHR) systems. It showed that typically physicians spend more time doing admin than seeing patients and have to do extra hours unpaid overtime a day to just keep up. Unsurprisingly this led to an increased risk of burnout.
I was discussing these insights with the CEO of one of our clients, Lucy Beck of A2Z Cloud. Lucy is passionate about creating seamless business systems for her clients and she used a quote that that I really liked:
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
She wasn’t sure where it came from, but I was delighted to discover that it was actually from one of my late father’s favourite management thinkers W. Edwards Denning. Edwards Denning was an interesting man who spent a lot of the 1950s helping Japanese companies rebuild after the second world war and, of course, the Japanese became world class at creating great systems.
Lucy and I had such a good discussion about all these issues that I invited her to join me on one of our monthly webinars, so that we could continue the conversation. Lucy discussed her journey as a female leader in tech and how she got fed up with a lack of opportunities – so Lucy decided to set up her own business. A2Z Cloud has now grown considerably and Lucy said it is her focus on creating good systems that make for happy clients and happy employees that have been the foundation of its success (and cash flow!). You can watch our conversation below.
Earlier this year research from Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre showed that the vast majority of organisational wellbeing programmes did not have any impact on employees’ mental health. The authors concluded that “that organisational interventions … appear more beneficial for improving well-being”.
In other words, creating good systems is key to creating good work experience.
Broaden your understanding of emotions in the workplace with more comprehensive articles on the science of happiness.
It's been an up and down few years to say the least. To stay competitive in challenging times, leaders need to ensure they have the right people. And, while the eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) can help track whether teams are working well together, it is not a headline indicator of employee experience, and it should not be how companies think of wellbeing.
Whilst the pandemic is over, the way we work has been permanently impacted. Over 50% of people in the UK now work remotely at least one day a week, with 15% being fully remote. But how did the pandemic impact our happiness at work?