Today’s organisations face new and very different operating conditions from the past: global uncertainty; rapidly changing technology; shifting expectations from customers and employees; the reality of globalisation; and the requirement to be connected 24/7…

These are just a few of the seismic shifts affecting society today.

Whilst these conditions represent a web of exciting opportunities and possibilities, they’re also impacting the way we work: how we lead; how we understand success; how we communicate and connect with each other.

Increasingly, the impact is on the people in, and performance of, our organisations:

• Stressed, burned-out leaders…
• Unhappy, disengaged employees…
• Underperforming organisations

This tricky scenario is increasingly being recognised as influential in economic performance. The term ‘productivity gap’ is used to describe the UK’s decline in productivity in comparison to our economic equivalents. Did you know that in the average week, many other countries have produced as much by Thursday lunchtime as the UK delivers by the end of Friday!

All this, even though we’re perpetually busy!

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts is currently undertaking a review on the state of the labour market on behalf of the government. Amongst other things, the report is expected to call for a new set of standards for how organisations treat their employees.
Taylor has already hinted that too many businesses are allowing ‘bad work’ to happen and failing to engage their employees and a focus on how organisations should be engaging their people.

“If you get people to work better, then they will be more productive and this will be better for your business” Mr Taylor has stated.

At Connection Matters, we focus on the importance of leaders creating strong and meaningful connections – with themselves, with their teams, and across their organisations as a way of combatting these challenges and achieving better results. Forging effective connections can create profound shifts in assumptions, beliefs, and behaviours, all of which contributes to improved performance.

The potential impacts are great. A report from 2012 entitled ‘Engage for Success’ recognised that organisations with top quartile employee engagement scores tend to benefit from:
• 12% better customer service
• 40% lower turnover
• Twice the net profit

So…as the world gets faster and smaller; as uncertainty and ambiguity becomes more prevalent; as resources are increasingly squeezed, so the need for us to rethink how we do things becomes more and more pressing.

Can you afford to ignore the potential and keep on doing what you’ve always done? After all, as Darwin noted, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”