Ashish Kothari, Founder and CEO, Happiness Squad
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TechTranscript
00:00Friends, I'd like to invite us to just start a bit differently.
00:04We've been hearing lots of content.
00:06So let's just start with taking one minute.
00:09And we're going to take five or six breaths together.
00:13So just plant your feet.
00:15I invite you to dim your eyes.
00:18And just follow your breath.
00:20Take a breath in and breathe out.
00:27Take another breath in and breathe out.
00:34Take two, three more cycles of breath.
00:38And then we start.
00:49I'll connect back to this simple one minute of a mindful start
00:54and why I had us try that.
00:58But before we do, let me start you with three simple questions.
01:03Raise your hands if this year's target
01:06that you're being asked to deliver
01:07are higher than last year's.
01:10Keep them up if the conditions under which you're
01:14asked to deliver them are harder than last year.
01:16You can raise them even up if you want.
01:19And finally, think about if at the end of four years coming
01:27out of the pandemic, with all the curveballs
01:29that you've been thrown, maybe you're
01:32feeling at the edge of all that's possible,
01:38maybe even a bit exhausted.
01:42Yeah?
01:43I've asked this question to 200-plus executives
01:46in the last 12 months.
01:48And I hear consistently the same.
01:52We are working harder than ever.
01:55We feel the need to continuously be on.
01:58And we're trying desperately to keep things in control,
02:02even in the face of volatility, uncertainty, complexity,
02:06and ambiguity going through the roof.
02:10Today, I want to offer you a different path,
02:14a path that allows you to truly take yourself
02:17and your organizations and be able to rise
02:20to the challenge of higher targets
02:22under harder conditions, not by doing more, but by being more,
02:27by truly discovering what I'm calling your fifth gear.
02:32And we do that through the science of flourishing.
02:35Because here's what we know over the last 20 years.
02:39We know that happier employees, we
02:42know happier individuals are more creative.
02:45They're more resilient.
02:46They're more adaptable.
02:48They live longer and are healthier.
02:52We also know that happier companies have 2x higher stock
02:57market returns, are 20% more profitable,
03:02are 12% to 30% more productive, 3x more creative,
03:06and 65% lower attrition.
03:09That's the business case for flourishing.
03:13Now, this is not just numbers.
03:16These are realities, because these companies
03:19who are achieving these levels of performance
03:23have truly learned something.
03:26They have learned how to unleash that human magic that often
03:30lies untapped in organizations.
03:34You can read all about it in The Best Buy Transformation,
03:37written by their former CEO, Hubert Jolie, a former McKinsey
03:42colleague.
03:43You see, I grew up in the world of operations.
03:49I led many of our largest transformations
03:52at McKinsey in operations.
03:54And I learned something during that time
03:57before I pivoted to the topic of human flourishing.
04:02I realized that we had a playbook
04:05that we have deployed over 50-plus years
04:09to drive scalable and sustainable transformations.
04:12We did it with Lean.
04:15Millions of people, many blue collar,
04:18upskilled in new ways of working, new mindsets,
04:21and new management systems that enabled
04:26them to drive productivity up to 80%, safety down to almost 0%,
04:30and quality down to almost minuscule levels
04:34in terms of errors.
04:36What if we could apply that to human flourishing?
04:40Because our current approach, despite increased investments,
04:44is not working.
04:47Despite all the engagement surveys that many of you
04:49probably run, global engagement is stuck at 20%.
04:54Stress and anxiety are 40% to 60%.
04:58They're not moving.
04:59So let's think a little bit about how do we actually apply
05:02what we know, what we already know, to this challenge.
05:07Number one, we need to truly take flourishing
05:11and put it at the heart of our strategies.
05:16GE didn't take Six Sigma as a productivity initiative.
05:21Six Sigma became the heart of how they transformed
05:23and disrupted industries.
05:26Toyota did the same with the Toyota production system.
05:30We have to stop treating well-being as a side hustle,
05:34as seminars, employee benefits, and really put it
05:37at the heart of how we run operations,
05:40how we incentivize leaders, and how we grow.
05:44Second, as operators, we love data.
05:48We measure it continuously.
05:50We benchmark within units.
05:52We benchmark across units.
05:54We benchmark across companies.
05:55Why?
05:57We are constantly looking for every basis point
06:00of improvement that we can from our physical investments.
06:06So why are we OK measuring our human assets once a year,
06:12maybe every six months, and then using one-size-fits-all
06:17interventions?
06:18We're going to have everybody go through a meaning journey.
06:21Why?
06:21If there's somebody who actually finds meaning
06:23in what they're doing, it's a waste of their time.
06:27So here's the insight I had.
06:30The same losses that apply for machines apply for people.
06:35Availability losses for people show up
06:38in absenteeism and attrition.
06:40In machines, they show up as unplanned downtime.
06:43Performance losses show up because only 20% of frontline
06:49and managers are engaged, and they find meaning at work.
06:54Stress results in lower productivity.
06:57How many of you spend 80% of your time
06:59in back-to-back meetings?
07:02Did you know back-to-back meetings drive 40% higher risk
07:05of errors and result in 8% to 12% lower productivity?
07:10Because we are multitasking, because we've
07:12got to get work done.
07:14Psychological safety and trust is another driver.
07:17Keith talked a lot about this, around how we are not
07:20collaborating enough.
07:21We might have high engagement scores,
07:23but we all know those meetings where
07:25we keep talking about the same thing over and over again.
07:29And then quality losses show up in terms
07:31of poor errors that show up, or quality decision biases,
07:36because we don't have the right information, right?
07:39So the second big thing that I want to introduce for you
07:42is these five pillars, similar to Lean,
07:44that we can apply to this data, data around losses
07:48that we measure.
07:49And those are purpose, energy, awareness, relationships,
07:54and life force.
07:56We call this the Pearl Model.
07:58Dream with me for a minute.
08:01Imagine if every employee at your organization showed up,
08:06and they found work as a source of meaning and fulfillment,
08:10not just a way to earn a paycheck.
08:13Think about what becomes possible.
08:15Imagine if work wasn't a grind, but left you with more energy
08:22at the end of the day.
08:23It was because gratitude and compassion
08:25was weaved into how we work.
08:27And we taught people how to have conflicts the right way
08:30rather than avoid them.
08:33Think about what becomes possible
08:35if we truly trained our leaders to navigate in complexity.
08:42Only 20% of leaders today, according to work at Howard,
08:45are at a stage of development that allows
08:47them to thrive in complexity.
08:50For the rest of us, we can just survive.
08:53Imagine if the fabric of your organization
08:57was so psychologically safe and deep in trust
09:02that people were afraid, not afraid,
09:04to give you their best ideas, their most creative ideas.
09:09And finally, life force.
09:12Imagine if we could train our leaders
09:16to redesign their work in neuro-friendly ways
09:21and truly make stress an ally.
09:23That one-minute breath is a powerful way.
09:27It's a moment when we are in back-to-back meetings
09:30accumulating stress to give ourself a recharge,
09:34just like we charge our phones.
09:35Somehow we feel we don't need to do that with our human bodies
09:39and our brains.
09:42So it's about choosing the right interventions with our teams,
09:46just like we do with Lean, so they
09:47can choose the right intervention for that team.
09:51And the last, excellence, performance is a mindset.
09:57We do that with Lean.
09:58We don't have to tell people what to do.
10:00We help shape identities, and they take action.
10:04We do Kaizen events once a month, if not every other week.
10:08When was the last time we ran a Kaizen on our own ways
10:11of working, using the data to come up with small experiments
10:17that we can try to improve our efficiency, our effectiveness?
10:23And friends, this is what we are finding with this work
10:25as we use this model to deploy it.
10:28When we do this, we can truly make
10:32flourishing our competitive edge.
10:35And here's what we unlock.
10:392% to 3.5% higher alpha year over year
10:43for our shareholders.
10:45We can truly use flourishing to grow the pie
10:49and not worry about splitting the pie
10:51and how much goes to employees versus shareholders.