This theory was developed by event strategist, workplace “fixer,” and CEO and Founder of RDC Robyn Duda. She saw how many organizations created wellness initiatives to mask the real problem. The workforce at large is overworked, underequipped, and rarely compensated fairly. These are all massive stressors. Unfortunately, you can have all the wellness initiatives and so-called health perks, but it doesn’t make up for workers feeling undervalued.

Duda’s number one piece of advice? We should be looking at the “Return on Energy.” What does that mean exactly? Well, think about the time spent in meetings, the number of emails, drafts of presentations, and the toll it takes on an employee. But also (and likely more important) the number of moments that elicit epiphanies, connections deepened and even innovations uncovered—the more motivating moments. There is a diminishing return when the toll outweighs the motivation. That is where we need to be looking versus an EOY result. 

“Return on energy is the idea that energy spent has value,” said Duda. “Companies should measure this to understand the toll an output has on their human capital. People do not have an infinite amount of energy to expend, meaning there must be a value placed on their energy relative to the thing they are using it on. 

For example, we should look at the number of emails, time spent in meetings, drafts, v1s v2s, and the psychological toll something takes on an employee. And, we should compare that to the number of innovations created, epiphanies had, connections made, etc. 

What does a return on energy look like in action? “The first step should be showing your employees you value them,” said Duda. “It is a way of exercising personalization in the workplace. It’s an indicator of the potential burnout of top talent, as well as overall culture and workplace improvements. Mindsets and emotions are real in the workplace and a variable to growth for every employer.”

She added, “While work is a transaction—output for money—it’s affected by many outside variables. So having a pulse on key metrics like hours spent in meetings and number of emails in a day versus how someone is feeling (their emotion) could help employers understand where potential vulnerabilities lie in the overall employee experience.”

Duda’s energy hypothesis comes from her award-winning event strategist and experience designer work. She’s created event strategies for some of the most recognized brands in the world, including Coca-Cola, Spotify, Visa, and IBM. As a result, she has become known for thinking differently and creating bold change. And the goal at the end of the day is to harness growth for her clients. 

It’s this experiential touchpoint Duda found throughout her events career that she believes can make a difference in every workplace. 

“I’ve been on the strategy side of events for many years, exploring the intersection of design thinking and experience psychology,” said Duda. “Understanding more about the humans we design for, their motivations, their mindsets, and their emotions has opened my eyes to the impact of an experience.”

The post The One Thing Companies Should do to Increase Employee Loyalty appeared first on Grit Daily News.

After two-plus years of living through a pandemic, a lot of us are starting to feel it. We’re exhausted. We’re overwhelmed. Many of us are overworked and stretched thin. So why are we ignoring our mental health? Why aren’t we paying attention to burnout?

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and while most people are aware that mental health is a “thing,” they don’t really know how to address it or treat it—or even how to stay mentally healthy. While mental illness is a serious medical concern, it isn’t treated with the same urgency as a broken arm or chest pains. Oftentimes, mental health concerns are ignored or downplayed—and it’s becoming a problem.

That’s why mental health apps are now such a big trend, and why they’re paving the way to better managing burnout in the workplace.

According to the World Health Organization, burnout is a syndrome resulting from workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It’s characterized by three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one’s job or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy. Pandemic-related stressors like work-from-home complexities, social health needs, childcare concerns, and teammate turnover likely won’t stop anytime soon, so stress-reducing measures should be top of mind for employers.

We’re managing multiple things at once, from the usual family and friend-related responsibilities to work schedules, to a prolonged and potentially life-threatening health scare—and all while pivoting regularly based on changing global health recommendations and dealing with the Great Resignation. It’s a lot to handle, and sometimes we simply can’t do it alone.

That’s why we need to think of mental health holistically, not just in terms of work-related burnout, but in terms of how every component of our lives plays into stressors (or stress-relievers), and they all need to be taken into consideration. One solution to help get a holistic picture of one’s mental health is to track mental health patterns 24/7. It seems impossible to do without having a personal psychologist following you around, but one company is using tech to try to accomplish this goal. 

The Behavidence Android app takes advantage of modern consumer technology (your smartphone) to accurately diagnose mental health flare-ups. Behavidence uses machine learning-based tools to detect and assist with remote monitoring and management of mental health conditions through passive digital biomarkers. 

The app is designed to predict disorders such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and more by assessing patterns in consumer behavior. The digital phenotyping measurement-based outcomes of the app are the first of their kind, and Behavidence hopes that having a wealth of data to measure in relation to mental health diagnoses will improve psychology and psychiatric research—leading to more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans.  

From a consumer perspective, the app can be used by individuals to monitor their own behaviors, making them more self-aware, and empowering them to seek medical attention as they see negative trends. Employees can monitor changes in their mental health by reviewing their daily mental health similarity scores. As an employee experiences mental decline, the app will begin to show changes in the digital behavioral metrics, in some cases, before the employee even notices the symptoms.

When it comes to managing stressful situations for those that do not currently suffer from a mental health condition, prevention is key. Cue: Mindfulness, which may just be one of the hottest trends of 2022. Through meditation—breathing exercises intended to center your body and mind—mindfulness can be achieved. But you can also practice mindfulness simply by being present and not allowing your mind to wander to past or future worries. Once you learn how to clear your mind and focus on being in the moment, you’re one step closer to avoiding burnout.

New to the mindfulness movement? There are apps for that, too. Apps like Headspace and Calm partner well with Behavidence and offer employees guided meditations and tools to support them through burnout moments. With calming sounds, peaceful visuals, and centering your thoughts, you’re able to get to a better mental space—and that’s good not just for employees but for everyone around them.

Employees are going above and beyond to avoid the burnout and stressors of past years. But tracking and understanding mental health is a science, and we need to start treating it like one. Apps that use digital phenotyping to track patterns over time allow users and their physicians to better understand the intricacies of mental health. With the right data in hand, and an urgency to achieve mental wellness, we can all make proactive decisions to improve our quality of life and to better support those around us. 

The post How Mental Health Apps Are Helping Employees Better Manage Burnout appeared first on Grit Daily News.

Part of this disconnection is likely due to the requirement for employees to learn more new skills than ever before in order to attain an advantage over other candidates for specific job roles, as well as the base requirements for higher-paying, more rewarding employment opportunities. Similarly, lackluster onboarding processes can further foster feelings of confusion and dissatisfaction in new employees, leading to higher churn rates for organizations, whereas better onboarding processes can help retain more than two-thirds of all new employees for some 3 years into the future.

When employees feel more disengaged and disconnected from their work, organizations suffer from the reduction in productivity, leading to a drop in sales volumes and/or revenues. Similarly, employers who are able to increase the engagement of their employees by at least 10% can boost their profits by some $2,400 per employee each year.

These issues facing hiring managers and other HR leaders are precisely what one entrepreneur has focused on mitigating — if not outright solving — through his company’s innovative new process for attracting, onboarding and retaining to allow more employers to boost engagement, lock down valuable employees for longer periods of time, as well as help them learn new skills.

Challenging recruiters and candidates to improve engagement

When David Botos founded Helix in February of 2020, his mission was simple: search for and create transformative ways to help his fellow upperclassmen college students engage more meaningfully with (and solve more complex real-world for) leading organizations and businesses while still enrolled in university. Now, nearly two years after testing out his company’s initial offerings, the evolved iteration of Botos’s solutions come in the form of two programs: HelixChallenges and HelixCases. 

“HelixChallenges are micro-problems that can be run by paid clients, clubs, or universities to see the way that a candidate thinks,” Botos says. “HelixCases are micro-case competitions run by paid clients or clubs that delve deeper and test important career skills as students investigate and pitch their ideas for cash prizes.”

In working alongside HR leaders at major businesses, Botos and his team at Helix work to construct and conduct case study competitions for those leading organizations, granting those businesses and their HR teams unique access to a growing number of skilled student candidates at universities throughout the US through Helix’s online platform.

According to Botos, HelixCases act similar to short-term “hackathons” — case competitions that better replicate the format of hackathons with cash prizes attached as an incentive for people to engage with a problem with real freedom and range to solve it creatively, using their unique skill sets, as well as new valuable skills they can learn from participating in these competitions, and then transfer into an employment role in the future.

“For business careers at college levels,” Botos continues, “HelixChallenges and HelixCases can help employers learn how to reduce their churn rates and have better retention via onboarding, assessments, and continued employee engagement.”

Scoring and attracting candidates developmental skills

What sets HelixChallenges and HelixCases apart from other similar programs or solutions tailored towards hiring managers’ and HR professionals’ ability to successfully scout for the most skilled and talented candidates as potential employees lies in these programs’ ability to score participants on their performance during these competitions.

For example, participants of Helix’s innovative programs are scored off of 8 intangible factors; curiousness, observation, creativeness, analytic capabilities, numeration, empathy, confidence, and resiliency. These factors and their scores are visible throughout the length of each program to the participants and the recruiters working alongside Helix to host them, with final scores being made available to the public, as well, to generate interest from other recruiters outside of the competitions themselves. Each participant’s final scoring of each intangible factor is then grouped into specific categories related to job-specific functions, such as Strategy (scored the by primary factors of curiosity, observancy, and creativity), Finance (scored by confidence as well as numeration and analytical ability), or Customer Service (scored by empathy, resiliency, and curiosity).

“Participation in events on HelixCases such as our HelixChallenges, HelixCases, workshops, and events help to build a student’s functional skills that can be most attractive to recruiters,” says Botos. “The scores of participants’ functional skills evaluate the amount of time and effort a specific candidate puts into their professional development in certain skill sets.” 

In early careers, candidates that are dedicated to investigating their career interests and learning more professional skills are the most valuable assets to a company. By grading function skills across programs specifically tailored to fit the recruiting and talent-specific needs of leading organizations, Botos’s hope with Helix and its innovative programs is to capture which candidates have both the best intangible skills and care for each recruiter and their organization’s core functions, thus reducing churn rates while simultaneously boosting employee engagement to develop and retain a higher portion of talented employees.

The post The Search For Passion: Keeping and Developing Young Talent appeared first on Grit Daily News.

You heard right, Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States and more recently in the news for his racist legacy was given a gift of a very big block of cheese in 1835. It was an ode to democracy, and a gift from the people, to the man of the people. It was the idea of Colonel Thomas S. Meacham, a dairy farmer, to create it by using milk from all the dairies from Oswego County, New York. Before you say ‘Wait! As gift ideas go, that one stinks’, I should mention that cheesy gifts have been a thing with American presidents and politicians from the time of Thomas Jefferson.

However, even among similar fragrant favors, this was the biggest by far. And, within two years it became apparent that a cheese block that was four feet in diameter and two feet thick was not just a touching-but-impractical gift, but also a problem of mammoth proportions. Think about it. Where do you put it? Even after gifting away portions of the wheel Jackson still had, let’s see, 1375 lbs. left. A man of the people could hardly regift a gift of the people. So, Jackson did what any self-respecting politician would do. He put the people’s gesture on display. It was thus placed in the hallway of the White House. Unfortunately, that made matters worse. Imagine the Washington DC of 1835. It was hot, humid, sticky and of course perfectly uncomfortable in the summer, but without the redeeming services of air conditioning. Soon, residents who lived several blocks away started to get constant pungent reminders of the largesse of the dairy farmers from New York.

With his second term ending in 1837, in an attempt to end the nightmare, he came up with the idea of throwing a party. Ten thousand people showed up. And despite a few weak-willed individuals losing consciousness over the odor, the party was actually a grand success. Finally! The score read, Jackson 1: Cheese 0.

Or did it? When his successor Martin Van Buren moved into the White House, the whole place reeked of cheese. White-washing the house, airing the carpets and changing the drapes helped a bit, but the overpowering legacy of the previous resident remained for some time. And, in the best tradition of horror movie endings, Van Buren soon discovered that Col. Meacham, had also gifted a smaller 700lb wheel of cheese to Jackson, which the decorated general decided to abandon on the battlefield for the next leader to deal with.

Sometimes, things are just not what they seem to be. There are rumors that Col. Meacham was not supportive of Jackson’s politics. Is it possible that this was more than just a grateful gesture from him to the President?

Corporate conspiracy theories

Most people think that conspiracy theories don’t affect private companies. There’s also widespread belief that social media is responsible for the current proliferation of conspiracy theories. Many people, including myself until I researched the topic, believe that anyone who’s convinced of these stories must be a few cards shy of a full deck. That’s incorrect.

Firstly, as research by Jan-Willem van Prooijen of VU Amsterdam and Karen M Douglas from the University of Kent has shown, the tendency to believe conspiracy theories goes beyond the specific theory itself. So, the tendency to believe that the earth is flat may be less about believing that the earth is not round that about a powerful outgroup who is able to harm you, and therefore must be checked.

This insight is important to understanding and dealing with corporate conspiracy theories. These rumors are about notions that powerful groups (e.g., managers) within the workplace are acting in secret to achieve some kind of malevolent objective. For example, managers may deliberately conspire to hire a preferred candidate for a job, or work together to have an employee fired. Whether in a societal setting or in an organization, these beliefs are simply the desire for certain people to make sense of something they feel is beyond their control. Blaming a powerful outgroup happens naturally.

Second, despite the deluge of conspiracy theories in recent times, research has shown that the phenomenon is not new. People with certain personality traits and cognitive styles are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. And, of course, these people are also part of the workforce. The concept of Occam’s razor, the idea that when faced with several competing explanations for an event, the simplest explanation that requires the fewest “leaps of faith” is usually correct, applies to them. It’s more complex to believe that if your career is not advancing in the desired direction or if your department or company seems directionless, there might be a problem with your own management style, versus resources being diverted to a secret ring of executives plotting the demise of humanity.

How to manage corporate conspiracies

Understanding social rumor management can help manage this issue in the workplace too. Knowing that rumors reflect the desire of people to better understand the world around them, and that some people have a stronger desire to control their lives, helps with tailoring communication plans. Research about rumors in the workplace has shown that creating open communication channels for subordinates to bring their concerns to management first, without broadcasting them on the corporate airwaves, helps significantly.

So, 5G will not cause coronavirus, Elvis is not alive, Paul McCartney didn’t die in 1966 and get replaced by a look-alike, and Prince Charles is not a vampire. And yes, Finland does exist; it wasn’t made up by Russia and Japan. However, the tendency to want to believe these rumors will always be there. Similarly, opinions about companies being involved in evil world-domination, and most rumors about managers engaging in nefarious plans, are equally incorrect. However, they are all understandable and can be managed. That is all, except the one about Elvis, I’d really like him to be alive.

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