MindFit: How to Create a Kickass Workforce to Achieve Long-term Business Excellence

By Kristopher G. Harold, Alexis Ee-Khem Aw and John K. Williams

Workplace stress and burnout is a multi-billion-dollar problem affecting organisations.

The impacts of workplace stress and burnout include low productivity and profitability, rampant presenteeism and absenteeism, alarming workplace safety performance and workers compensation claims, poor quality assurance, high negative staff turnover and even, sometimes, work-related suicide. How do you solve such complex problems when the root cause is often nebulous or emotionally-charged?

Workplace mental fitness is the answer.

MindFit introduces Link:Flow:Grow, a breakthrough organisational design and development toolkit that puts workplace mental fitness first. This practical, field-tested solution empowers your workforce to:

●     skyrocket productivity and increase revenue

●     improve workplace safety and reduce workers compensation figures

●     reduce negative staff turnover and restore employee engagement

●     transform organisational culture and address other chronic business challenges.

MindFit introduces a transformative business management paradigm backed by mental fitness stretches, relatable stories, practical insights and handy checklists to empower your Company, your Team and your Self. It’s idealism made practical, complex made cheeky and education made entertaining. Don’t leave work without it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780730357025

Book preview

Preface

Billions of dollars are wasted annually across Australia.

In the world of work, poor mental health and wellbeing exact a tremendous cost to industries. Work stress and burnout fuel a loss of billions of dollars:

$11 billion per year is lost Australia-wide through absenteeism ($4.7 billion), presenteeism ($6.1 billion) and compensation claims ($146 million), estimates a 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study.1

$718 million was lost in all stress-related claims in Western Australia in 2015–16 alone according to WorkCover WA, reflecting a 25 per cent increase over four years.2

In 2015, the Minerals Council of Australia found that $320 million to $450 million is lost to mental health issues in the resource industry every year (this means $300 000 to $400 000 for an average worksite of 170 people).3

Nobody should be getting hurt, mentally or physically, on the job.

The numbers tell us that the current focus on mental health is not improving worker wellbeing. Ironically, it’s causing increased stress and job insecurity.

There are complex problems in businesses of every kind that current management theories have not yet solved. This is because everyone is trying to fix mental health issues in the workplace without first addressing a foundational issue — the lack of workplace mental fitness.

I (Kris) wish I had been taught the key components of mental fitness earlier in my life. I believe this would have made me a better manager, father, son and husband.

Fortunately, in the ten years I’ve led large enterprises in the mining, manufacturing, transport and construction industries, I figured something out that helped me produce results such as these:

90 per cent reduction in workplace safety incidents in an organisation with 450 staff

up to 48 per cent decrease in workers compensation premiums per annum in an organisation with 190 staff

30 per cent to 50 per cent improvement in productivity and quality in organisations with teams of tens to hundreds of people

transformation of a high staff turnover (value leaching) workplace to zero staff turnover.

Yes, you heard right: zero staff turnover.

Remember the old adage: people don’t leave the company, they leave their manager. When the manager gets it right then nobody leaves. (Unless they leave to pursue personal goals, which isn’t negative staff turnover but positive life progress.)

In writing this book, I want to share a perspective and system that I truly hope can improve your work life. The system is called Link:Flow:Grow. It will provide the missing MindFit link that will show you how to create a kickass workforce to achieve long-term business excellence.

It doesn’t matter if you are a senior or junior manager, white-collar or blue-collar worker. I know our program has empowered many people I’ve worked with, and wish the same for you: in your Company, your Team and your Self (CTS).

Remember ‘CTS’, because change has to happen at all three levels: Company, Team and Self. Also because CTS is the acronym for my co-author John’s training and workforce development business (Combined Team Services), which has been instrumental in helping me achieve what I have as a manager.

As a senior manager, I see too often that leaders put other priorities above mental health and mental fitness. Conditioned left-brain thinking puts these concerns at the back of the line.

Mental health experts are very clear in recommending goals but, judging by the results, neither they nor business leaders know exactly what needs to be done, and how. It’s complicated.

You’ll read more about mental fitness further along in the book. For now, keep in mind that the work of managers and mental health professionals may interact but are not the same.

I’ll stick to talking about what I know best: workplace mental fitness.

It’s expected that any idea worth sharing will be subject to scrutiny and debate. While my team and I work directly and successfully with businesses to establish workplace mental fitness in practice, we acknowledge that the term ‘mental fitness’ itself has never been precisely defined after it was first suggested in 1964 by developmental psychologist Dorothea McCarthy as ‘a more appropriate term to describe the positive aspects of mental health’.

If we don’t have a well-defined term, managers can’t be expected to know exactly what it is and how they should be trained in it. Therefore, my company LinkPADD, in collaboration with Meeting for Minds, has also commissioned research at the University of Notre Dame to advance the understanding of mental fitness as a concept.

While anticipating the results of this research, this book will serve as a beacon to navigate the way to workplace mental fitness.

The concepts in Part I: Setting the Scene are distilled from over a decade of hands-on gritty management work. Deep in the trenches of real-world organisations, I observed, analysed, hypothesised, discussed, executed, reviewed and improved my management techniques in a continual cycle of progress.

I am excited that this book shares my methods for success with more people than I could personally meet. More importantly, it invites academic institutions to involve real-world organisations in their research on the leading edge of workplace mental health and fitness.

The seeds of each chapter in Part II: Making It Real come from the people and organisations my co-author John and I encounter in the course of our work. I would often be inspired after a client meeting, thinking, ‘This is exactly what’s happening in the real world! I must add it to the book!’ John, an ace trainer who knows our system inside out, provides substantial explanatory content as well.

We would share these gems of thought with our co-author Alexis, who then adds her word alchemy. She turns our words into gold to make our ideas shine, and weaves in quite a few eloquent gems of her own.

There are new ideas in this book that some readers may find disturbing, insulting, or politically incorrect. If that’s what it takes to jolt you out of your stupor, it’s doing its job. If you are easily offended, please put this book down and get a golf magazine or something. However ...

If you want to know how to create a workforce that’s on fire, not burnt out, stick with us.

Let’s build organisations where people love to work, where success loves to live, and where growth in many forms loves to thrive.

I look forward to providing thought leadership in this space to contribute something of value to education and training.

I leave you with the inspiring words of Rhonda Brighton-Hall, CEO of mwah. (making work absolutely human):

Work is a core component of our existence, our identity, our financial independence, and, ultimately, our overall wellbeing. A happy workplace where people feel valued can increase productivity and innovation and reduce unwanted outcomes like employee absenteeism, workplace grievances and staff turnover.

‘Link:Flow:Grow’ is my mantra for manifesting happy workplaces. I welcome you to join us, and explore the possibilities with honesty and courage.

Kristopher G. Harold

Perth, Western Australia

January 2018

Notes

1 PwC commissioned by BeyondBlue, National Mental Health Commission, and The Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance (March 2014). ‘Creating a mentally healthy workplace: Return on investment analysis’. Retrieved from https://www.headsup.org.au/docs/default-source/resources/beyondblue_workplaceroi_finalreport_may-2014.pdf

2 WorkCover WA (October 2016). ‘Stress-related claims’. Retrieved from http://www.workcover.wa.gov.au/content/uploads/2016/11/Stress-Related.pdf

3 Minerals Council of Australia (February 2015). ‘Submission to the Western Australian Government inquiry into mental health impacts of FIFO work arrangements’. Retrieved from http://www.minerals.org.au/file_upload/files/submissions/15_78_SUBMISSION_TO_THE_WA_GOVERNMENT_MENTAL_HEALTH_AND_FIFO_INQUIRY.pdf

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to share a new and effective way to overcome critical workplace issues that have not gone away despite the best efforts of leaders and expert consultants.

We’re talking about big challenges that affect revenue growth, productivity, profitability, employee engagement, staff turnover, quality, compliance, safety, performance culture and more.

If your organisation takes action on what this book recommends, you can start a new momentum that cascades results in three months, six months, 12 months. And you can apply this practical leadership guide to your own workplace straight away. All levels of management and staff can participate in creating a self-sustaining workplace with long-term business excellence.

As business expert Peter Drucker famously said, ‘Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.’ So what are the ‘right things’ that we recommend, and will help you implement? Taking stock of where your organisation truly is right now (with brutal honesty), and laying a strong new foundation of high performance by developing workplace mental fitness.

We also resonate with Michael Abrashoff’s view that ‘When leaders explore deep within their thoughts and feelings in order to understand themselves, a transformation can take place.’4

This book is a resource for business owners, directors and managers (and useful reading for anyone who works with others, whether you play a white-collar or blue-collar role) to explore deep within. We invite you to look at old issues from fresh new perspectives. Think differently, then do things differently to get the results you