The Possible Secret Sauces of Return to Work (RTW)
Highlighting leadership and trust practices, inputs for employee engagement.
An Institute for Work & Health (IWH) resource shares the following message, return to work (RTW) delays, an aspect of disability management, depends on good communication. Poor communication for RTW includes the imbalance of information between parties (information asymmetry or communication bottlenecks), the failure to appreciate the specific challenges of a worker’s circumstances, inadequate support for a worker, and unawareness of organizational practices and policies.
The IWH encourages RTW to include focusing at the organizational level as shaped by the characteristics of different work environments, in other words, the internal state of an organization. To extract principles from change programs, which RTW can represent, greater than 70% of change programs fail from poor organizational health (negative employee attitudes and unproductive management behaviour).
Organizational health is the ability of an organization to align around a clear vision, strategy, and culture, to execute with excellence, and to renew the organization’s focus over time by responding to market trends. It’s not only about redefining how to connect, engage, and communicate with employees, it includes sharing a company’s vision and mission in a way that inspires employees to act in its best interests. Above all, it’s about adopting a more innovative and effective style of leading, executing, and innovating (McKinsey). The following image highlights the nine organizational outcomes and management practices of organizational health at McKinsey specifically.
Furthermore, organizational health is illustrated through Mr. Patrick Lencioni’s model for Smart vs Healthy organizations, revealed in The Advantage.
When organizational health is top of mind, and is a goal to strive towards, employees go the extra mile, not just try to move an inch. Aspects of this include leadership and organizational trust. Coincidently, leadership and organizational trust are also inputs for employee engagement. The presence of organizational health, and thus leadership and trust, and the coincidental benefit to employee engagement, are what can become assets for RTW and achieve all-important communication and minimize RTW delays.
More on employee engagement in a moment, after a wonderful resource is shared next.
A practical tool to help with accommodation and return to work is called Supporting Employee Success (SES). This tool creates criteria for the development of an effective workplace plan between the employer and employee. When reflecting on the following factors that are necessary for the success of this tool and the subsequent RTW, the themes of leadership and organizational trust seem to be embedded!
The three basic factors necessary for success are:
1) The workplace is committed to supporting employee success through an ongoing collaborative process
2) The employee wants to stay at work/return to work and will strive to do the job with necessary supports that are reasonable and acceptable to both the employee and the employer
3) The job expectations and the needs of the employee, with regard to accomplishing the requirements of the job, are clearly understood
How Supporting Employee Success works is it assesses 18 job expectations what act as stressors related to psychological, emotional, cognitive, and physical issues at work. For the different sections of SES, it is paramount for the employer to leverage leadership and organizational trust to accurately and truthfully state employer requirements to fulfill the respective job expectations. In addition, the latter sections for of SES require an employee to feel comfortable and a sense of psychological safety to state additional comments and collaborate with their employer on solutions.
Next, back to the aforementioned connection to employee engagement.
It is relevant to note that employee engagement isn’t what you fix, but rather, it is the result or by-product of what you are fixing, such as leadership and trust (the inputs). As problem solving best practices suggest, don’t be fooled by the symptom, but rather, understand the cause. It is refreshing to note the theme of leadership and trust as inputs in a world-class employee engagement assessment such as Gallup’s Q12. The following content and questions are sourced from Gallup’s Q12. The following image categories each question of the Q12.
Fulfilling best practices from employee engagement are within reach for all organizations, regardless of budget and/or size, because working healthy is doing what you are already doing but doing it differently, differently with leadership, specifically leader and coach mindsets for establishing empowered people as shown below, and trust. Thus, minimizing RTW delays for all organizations is within reach!
Book references: Tribal Leadership, Good to Great, and Conscious Capitalism.
When reflecting upon the employee engagement questions above, a number of the questions reflect opportunities for trust. FranklinCovey effectively highlights the power of trust with their following economics and tax/dividends learning models for trust.
Decreased Trust = decrease speed and increase cost
Increased Trust = increase speed and decrease cost
S x E = R
Strategy times execution equals results
(S x E)T = R
[Strategy times execution] multiplied by trust equals results
Tax (decreased trust): redundancy, bureaucracy, politics, disengagement, turnover, churn, fraud
Dividends (increased trust): increased value, accelerated growth, enhanced innovation, improved collaboration, stronger partnering, better execution, heightened loyalty
Relevant to note the inclusion of trust within the Great Place to Work survey for obtaining certification.
The key, Autonomy (Independence) + Still Support (Resources) = Trust = Happiness = Improved Mental Health.
This is why organizational health has the ability to improve RTW because of the connection to psychological health and safety in the workplace to augment employee mental health and help employees be successful at their jobs. Psychological health and safety is systematically put into a voluntary framework by the Standard, the Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace, and the associated thirteen psychosocial risk factors. Notice how each of the following proactive approaches do not require a budget-intensive program not implement, but rather, are a series of one-degree shifts that synergistically create change. Eventually, one small step can turn into a giant leap by learning, iterating, pivoting, and then after, discovering (Dr. Martin Shain).
With the images and approaches stated in this article, it is by focusing on the inputs of leadership and organizational trust that a cascade of results in RTW, organizational health, employee engagement, and psychological health and safety can be achieved. In doing so, organizations can realize the non-mutual-exclusivity of trust and high performance. If high performance calls for the capacity to learn and keep changing over time, trust is required.
Employees care more about how they feel at work than what they do at work. An organization doesn’t have to be everything to everyone, but leadership and organizational trust are the foundation of everyone.
Working on [organizational] health works, and trust begets trust, as outlined in Trust Factor.
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Nathan Kolar, www.reachworldwide.ca
