What you do needs to matter, it needs to have a value to yourself, and that value has to be recognised.
That would be the biggest take home from a two hour talk hosted by Guernsey Mind at Les Cotils, featuring a talk by Rob Baker, the Founder of Tailored Thinking and author of ‘Personalisation at Work’.
“Life’s too short to be doing work that we’re not engaged or energised by,” said Mr Baker.
“We all, as humans, want to feel that we matter. It’s part of our DNA. So life’s too short to be doing work, and to be showing up, and doing things that don’t matter.”
It wasn’t just the mental health and wellbeing of employees that Mr Baker was discussing, with a large focus on the benefit of a happy workforce being a major boon to businesses.
Mattering matters
“When people feel that they are valued and they’re visible in terms of what they’re doing, they are more likely to show up with energy, feeling motivated, and with high levels of wellbeing and high levels of performance,” Mr Baker said.
“Organisations that are looking to have a performance advantage in what they do, having a strong sense of mattering across their population really makes a difference.”
The two-hour talk to a packed room involved a lot of audience participation, and was aimed mainly at business leaders and managers, with those joining showing a clear interest in understanding how they can best improve the lives of their staff.
There was a focus on why people work, what passions drive them to slog out the working week, and what can be done to make working more palatable and less of a grind.
Exercises included a focus on what actions help foster a feeling of “mattering” for both the individual, in feeling valued, needed, and supported, but also in how their work matters, and that there’s merit in the task at hand.
Making work “better, healthier, happier”
There was also a focus on what people are passionate about, and how that ties into the workplace.
Mr Baker praised the attitude from those at the talk.
“I think what I’m seeing from them is that there’s a curiosity, which I think is fantastic.
“To be in a room with people that have a shared commitment about trying to make work better, healthier, happier, is my kind of crowd, and I feel that that’s what I’ve seen today.
“It’s wonderful to see people in Guernsey really interested and curious about how they can make work better for themselves, but also for the colleagues and the people that they lead within their organisations.”
What do you do?
Mr Baker prides himself on being outspoken in improving people’s day-to-day working lives. The company founder and published author uses a variety of tools to help try and equip businesses to better treat and understand their staff.
However the best description of what he does came from his son, and a backseat dialogue with one of his peers.
“My son was in the car talking to his friend about, ‘what does your dad do?’ and he said ‘he makes people smile at work using science’, which I really liked.
“I’m not sure where he got that from, but that’s in a nutshell, what we do at Tailored Thinking, is question how we can make the world of work better, by actually building on the vast resources of research that we have in that space.
“Often, there’s a gap, though, between knowing something and actually applying it to workplaces, and we spend our time really working with organisations to think practically about actually how we can bring some of the research evidence based ideas, and actually practically apply them on a day to day basis.”
So what does a staff member or employee who doesn’t feel valued, and doesn’t feel like their work matters look like? How do you pick out a person who is struggling with finding the importance in their role?
Mr Baker offered some tips for spotting them among the workforce.
“When I see individuals who are feeling like they don’t matter, they’re taking a step back from work, so less visible, and so they might be contributing less in meetings.
“They might be showing up with less energy, they might be not able to do their work at the standard that they’ve done in the past.
“You might also see this as a trend in terms of absence level. People are more likely to not come to work if they don’t feel that they matter.”
Making the world of work better
Tailored Thinking is based in the North-East UK, but works with businesses around the globe who are looking to improve the relationship people have with their work.
When asked if the company would work with businesses based in Guernsey, Mr Baker said, “we’re always open to it”.
“What we’re looking for is projects where individuals and organisations are genuinely curious about making the world of work better for the people that they lead.”
The event worked as a launching platform for Guernsey Mind’s ‘WorkWell’, a new “proactive support service” aimed at early intervention.
It’s a service that’s been rolled out nationally among other ‘Mind’ organisations, but has been tailored to fit in and ‘Guernsey-fied’.
Lisa Ingrouille, Guernsey Mind’s Workplace Lead said they’ve opened the programme up to organisations across the Bailiwick.
She said the service is built around “13 specific pathways”, each providing a workbook containing various strategies and tools designed to “improve confidence and performance within professional settings”.
One-to-one sessions with a trained practitioner are at the core of the service, with the standard structure for any individual starting with a one-hour introductory session, and two subsequent 25-minute follow-up sessions.
These can be at either Guernsey Mind’s Lion Centre, opposite the Fire Station, or at workplaces.
It does come at a cost though as interested businesses need to buy credits to interact with the service. The more credits purchased per package give a bigger discount on each individual receiving help.
Ms Ingrouille said the cost of leaving issues to stagnate is greater in comparison to using an early intervention service like WorkWell.
However, because requirements vary between businesses, Guernsey Mind says staff are happy to meet with individual employers to discuss effective setups and the best access routes for their staff.
Amanda Hibbs, who leads Communications, Events and Digital for Guernsey Mind, explained: “It’s very much about some new materials that we’ve got that have been produced in conjunction with national minds.
“It’s all about early intervention and how you can support people in the workplace, maybe before workplace issues escalate into being something a little bit more serious and heavy.”
Ms Hibbs said leaving workplace issues to fester can cause a snowball effect, resulting in impacts felt across businesses.
“If things are left, then they can escalate into bigger issues, and that’s when people have to take time off work, and of course that affects productivity, and affects the rest of the workplace, and the rest of the team.”
You can find out more about Guernsey Mind, and the WorkWell program, through its website HERE.