Principle 7: Enthusiastic People (Item 9)

Potential of an organization is realized through its people's enthusiasm, resourcefulness and participation.

Why this is important

You should measure how your employees feel about your company. We believe that you never know very much until you measure it. You should measure the perceptions of all your stakeholders. Employees are a very important stakeholder group. You need to know what their perceptions of value are, what are their dissatisfiers (in priority order of importance) and how you are going at addressing those dissatisfiers. You need to know

• that your employees get value from being part of the company
• that they are provided with sufficient skills, knowledge, resources and authority to carry out their work
• that they are given space to have their say
• that you show you care and keep your promises
• that there is a climate of trust.

You should measure all the dissatisfiers listed in the previous section.

Measuring safety

Safety is often a workplace issue that goes unaddressed. Because it shows lack of caring, it is a huge dissatisfier.

Most companies have a policy to kill or maim a specified number of their employees each year. Are you shocked? You can easily recognize these companies. They keep statistics on lost time accidents and are trying to reduce them. What is wrong with that? This approach, regardless of its best intentions says that "accidents happen, when people come to work some of them get hurt, no body means it to happen, they are accidents". However, when you consider it from a systems viewpoint, those `accidents' are generated by the system. Put another way, most companies have designed (albeit inadvertently) their systems to kill or maim so many of their employees each year.

So what should you be doing? Your picture must be NO accidents, incidents, near misses or work related illness! A huge ask? Or a different picture? Many companies give it up as too hard. It is hard, because we have had the thinking for so long that death and injury are normal in the workplace and it is not our fault. Well it is.

Beware when you measure your progress towards this picture. Let's face it, you can't get those systems that generate the deaths and maiming fixed overnight. While you are fixing, death and maiming will still occur. Companies have found that if you measure "numbers of incidents" - especially deaths, people give up when they the first one happens. A better measurement is time between failure — measure the time between incidents. The goal is to make it as long as possible. Some companies have hundreds of thousands of hours between near misses and hundreds millions of hours worked between incidents.

Another goal is to send employees home in better condition than they arrived at work. If you do this, you will certainly have enthusiastically volunteering employees who may not want to ever go home. If you don't try to send them home in better condition than they arrived, you are showing that you don't care – regardless of how much you say you do care – and your employees will stop volunteering.

This concept includes that plague of the modern office worker — `stress'. Most companies have created such stressful environments with respect to time and performance demands that employees leave the workplace far more stressed than they arrive. Companies that do this are failing their duty to care for their employees. Their employees know it and withhold their enthusiasm. It is difficult to be enthusiastic when you are stressed.