The Human Everything Solution
“Putting people first is the difference between the way things were and the way things will be in the new normal.”
Wiley.
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash
We believe that organisations who truly put names before numbers on a spreadsheet will have the edge as the world embraces a more person-centric approach.
As we’ve said before, this is not a new idea. Loads of fabulous organisations have been doing this for yonks – but it feels as though the world is waking up to the idea that being good for people is also good for business.
In our article, ‘The 5 Biggest People Challenges for Employers’ we listed out the biggest challenges in our opinion to be:
Employee retention
Rethinking engagement
Wellbeing
Supporting line management capability
Workplace Flexibility Expectations
The Human Everything approach is a holistic one, and meeting the challenges listed above isn’t simply a case of knocking each one off the list until you get to the end and hey presto, you’ve finished. They are all intimately intertwined with one another, the culmination of which creates a sum that is greater than its parts.
That’s great news for you!
The steps you take that work with all of these elements can add up to build a workplace culture that improves human relationships, drives collaboration and creativity and enables organisations to become ecosystems where people are able to thrive.
The start, middle and end of all of this, is understanding people. That begins with understanding yourself, and then radiating outwards to begin to understand the other people in your universe. They may be colleagues, people who report to you, customers, stakeholders or your next-door neighbour; we are 100% committed to the fact that whatever the future brings, we know people are going to be at the centre.
Photo by Jack Gisel on Unsplash
What is our solution?
We use workshops and individual sessions to get people talking. Being able to have a deeper understanding of yourself and those around you means that you can start to have really productive conversations. While we bespoke our sessions to fit your needs, we use the Everything DiSC Workplace® assessment to get the ball rolling on individual learning and understanding.
The assessment is a fantastic tool taking only a few minutes to complete online, that produces an individual and personalised report taking you through what your own working style is, where your workplace priorities lie, what motivates and stresses you out all the way through to showing you how you are likely to react to the styles of other people. This allows you to clearly see how you can best engage with others in a number of different scenarios.
As a standalone report, that in itself is invaluable.
The real magic lies in how we use this information to start working, collaborating and communicating with others. We’ve seen people light up as colleagues they have worked with side by side for 10 years finally realise what that other person really needed from them. We’ve seen people understand why they have struggled to communicate and understand someone from another team who they had all this time thought was just being awkward and difficult on purpose.
Ultimately, the insight brought to you by the Everything DiSC Workplace® report gives you a framework for understanding behaviours – yours and other peoples, which means you can then start to develop strategies for how to interact.
How does this tackle my workplace challenges?
Let’s bring this into perspective. We can start to use this information when we are hiring new talent. Will the new person fit well into the team? This is an important question that interviews struggle to reveal the answer to. While we can train for technical skill, sometimes a person just isn’t a good fit. We can’t give you a crystal ball, but we can give you some great insight into how this person is likely to behave, where they sit on the DiSC map (yes, there’s a map and you can put EVERYONE on it) and all of a sudden, things start to make sense.
If we are looking to enable your team to work side by side and to achieve greater things together, again, having this insight and understanding is crucial.
Parker and Gerbasi 2017 [2] examined the impact relationships had on the numbers of people leaving businesses and looked specifically at relationships in the workplace between people. They were interested in looking at those relationships that energised or de-energised people. We’ve all been there. Some people feel as though they are sucking the life from you, others leave you feeling like you are walking on sunshine. For Parker and Gerbasi, energy was defined as a feeling of vitality, vigour or enthusiasm in the workplace and noted that this energy can be transferred through interaction. Conversely, low-energy and low enthusiasm also travels between people (misery really does love company, after all).
Research revealed that:
Those who are energised by their relationships were less likely to voluntarily leave an organisation.
Those with many de-energising relationships were likely to leave.
This doesn’t sound surprising, yet interestingly, the high-performers with de-energising relationships were 13 times more likely to leave. Have a think about that. Your average or low performing people, with the same number of de-energising relationships as your high performers were more likely to stay than high-performers who got the heck out of there. The problem you get when all your high-performers leave, is that you are left with… well, the average or low-performing people.
This demonstrates that the employee experience is largely built on the ability for an organisation to build strong, healthy working relationships. How much time does your organisation spend helping people to build better relationships?
The Human Everything solution helps you to understand the primary areas of focus for your energy. Is it spent being supportive and collaborating or are you more results driven and like a challenge or would you rather a quiet space to carry out work with accuracy and precision? Understanding how your priorities shape your workplace experience means that you can start to understand why certain activities (and people!) drain you or energise you.
Once you understand yourself, you can start to look to understand others, and how the interplay between the two works out.
How do you typically react to other people with the same or different styles and preferences to you?
Do you understand what motivates other people or stresses them out?
How do you connect with other people?
When you need to be more effective, how do you get the best out of a person with a different style to you? When you need to get your heads together for some problem solving, how do you go about it?
If things get tense between you, how do you approach them to sort it out?
What strategies do you have that will help you to work more effectively with all of the people in your workplace?
We can help you to answer all those questions and more.
Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash
The really great thing is, is that when you start to have authentic human connection, workplace interactions become more enjoyable, more effective and you end up with a more engaged workforce. Putting this new, shared understanding into the context of remote or hybrid working, now you can see who may need more support, who is in danger of over-cooking the hours and as a manager, how these people are likely to respond to your management style and what their needs as people are.
By using Everything DiSC Workplace® to begin this journey of understanding, you also get access to an online platform where you can see and learn more about everyone in your organisation who has taken the assessment. Whether your workforce is remote, in the office, or somewhere in between, they can access each other online and learn about how best to connect. We think that’s pretty amazing.
If you would like to have a great conversation about how you can improve your workplace relationships and performance while engaging every individual in building more effective relationships at work, simply get in touch:
lucy@humaneverything.co.uk
1. Keep Your People: How to Navigate the Great Resignation, Wiley, 2022
2. Energy: It’s Role in the Workplace – Andrew Parker, Alexandra Gerbasi 2017