Sustainable Support for your Workforce
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein.
So why do organisations repeatedly get EAP?
Imagine you're trying to lose weight, but instead of changing your diet or exercising, you keep buying new fitness gadgets. You get the latest fitness tracker, a high-tech smart scale, and even an expensive gym membership.
Despite having all these fancy tools, you're not losing weight because you haven't changed your eating habits or started exercising regularly.
Just like how buying new fitness gadgets won't help you lose weight without changing your lifestyle, pouring money into EAPs won't fix the underlying workplace issues such as poor leadership, high stress, or lack of support.
But, because buying gadgets is easy and gives you a sense of doing something productive, you keep doing it, hoping it will somehow lead to weight loss.
Similarly, organisations keep investing in EAPs because it's a straightforward, known solution, even though it doesn't address the root causes of employee dissatisfaction and stress. It's like expecting a new fitness tracker to make you fit without actually putting in the work to change your habits.
So what do you do?
Here are two solutions that are future fit.
Sustainable Workforce Leadership Development
This is all about equipping leaders with the right skills to create sustainable environments and people in those environments.
What it looks like.
Training your leaders in these things to mention a few:
· Psychological safety – what is and is not and how to actually do it.
· Workload management – how to actually organise work.
· Hybrid work – How to lead a hybrid team.
· Mental health, DEI – you don’t have to be a specialist but there are a few tricks of the trade here.
· Job design – The ability to understand how to design a job fit for the modern worker.
And there is more.
Professional Supervision Program
Instead of providing support to workers after the fact. Provide it before.
This is what we do in our field, and this is how we are able to sustain high performance over a long period of time with out burning out.
What it looks like:
· Instead of getting counsellors for when your people hit the wall. You get them professional supervisors trained in supervising professionals and the types of issues they face.
· These sessions can be individual or in small groups.
· Frequency every 4-6 weeks.
· Support outside of sessions when things start to escalated
· A personal development and wellbeing plan
And there is more to this too.
These are just two things that organisations can do straight away if they want workforce sustainability.
"It's time to stop just pulling people out of the river and start going upstream to prevent them from falling in."
If you want to create a sustainable workforce.
Please get in touch.