Picture credit: peasap
Fall off in business levels, may be due to the financial recession but we must also recognise that reduced personal productivity, due to worry, is now a major risk to organizational performance.
These are turbulent times and many people are uncertain of their future employment. This will mean that their minds are increasingly on the job, but mostly on keeping the job, not necessarily on doing the job.
Pretty soon this creates a vicious circle: worry about job security leads to poor performance which translates to diminished returns and reduces job security.
Of course, by construction, every vicious circle is also a virtuous circle. In this case, if we can reverse the polarity of the ‘worry’ factor, less worry about job security leads to better performance which translates to better returns and increases job security.
sleepwalking towards disaster
This may appear simplistic but sometimes the simple perspectives need to be expressed, or we risk sleepwalking towards disaster.
Virtual absenteeism
Not all of our headcount will be ‘present’ unless we adopt heightened awareness of ‘virtual absenteeism.’ If we are to mitigate this risk effectively, everyone in the organization (employers, managers, colleagues and individuals) needs to be proactive in promoting and sustaining staff morale and wellbeing. This may be hard in difficult times but we ignore the risk at our peril.
look for the ghosts in the machine
How do we know if the risk is there? Look around and think carefully: do we have any ghosts in our machine? If there are, then we need to understand what we can do to bring the ghosts back to life.
I think this is an important [but unspoken] issue for many organizations and I would really like to hear how others have addressed the problem. Please leave a comment or mail me offline.
