Monkey Puzzle Blog

It’s one thing to know you want change to take place, it’s another to see that change become reality. Awareness is only the start, you need to be able to take action - congruent, consistent and real action. And if you are a leader, you’ll only see the change you want if you can take your people with you.

As we close another turbulent year in the world of work, it is increasingly clear that the biggest challenge for organisations next year will be retaining their exceptional people. 

We started to read about the ‘great resignation’ in the summer with research from Microsoft predicting that up to 40% of the global workforce were re-evaluating their careers.

Despite the pressures of the pandemic on home and work-life, especially impacting on mental health, new research finds that actual take up of wellbeing programmes is running at 23%. (HBR/Gartner 2021). This is despite much higher numbers of employees admitting to mental health issues.

Burnout has been one of the most talked about organisational topics throughout the pandemic. As business and government press for a return to office life, the organisations that stand the best chance of successfully managing burnout will be those that recognise what has happened to their people while they’ve been away. There’s a lot more behind the problem than workload.

The high profile of sustainability in business means you may be thinking this is another blog about doing business without negatively impacting the environment. It’s not - although minimising environmental impact is an important consideration for any business.

One of the benefits of remote working has been the ability, at least to some extent, to set and protect our personal boundaries. We were able to keep at a distance those intrusions which caused a drain on our time, brought unwelcome criticism or were just downright nosy.

Once again, Gareth Southgate is winning plaudits for his leadership style. And this time, it’s taken England all the way to the final of Euro 2020.

While his famous waistcoat from the World Cup 2018 has been dropped, there’s been no change in the effectiveness of Southgate’s leadership, both off and on the pitch.

Many of the stressful situations we get ourselves into happen because we don’t have as good a grasp of our time boundaries as we thought - if we’d even considered them at all. As a consequence, interactions with others can end up being frustrating and unfulfilling, and what we really want to achieve doesn’t get done. Sound familiar?

Much has been made of the impact of the pandemic and the effects of remote working on the wellbeing of employees this past year. As we tentatively return to some semblance of normality, it will be the resilient organisations that will recover the quickest.

Could it be that predictions about the end of office life have been a little premature? New YouGov research shows a sizeable percentage of the UK wants a return to office life just as it used to be before the pandemic. With lockdown restrictions lifting, the topic of exactly where we’ll soon be working and how much time we spend there is very much a current talking point.

We are all trying to manage and deliver more, at work and at home. With so many demands on our time, it can be difficult to know how to ensure everything receives adequate attention. Invariably something crashes. Increasingly as we cope with the fallout from the pandemic, the risk is it’ll be us.

Mental health and wellbeing are now urgent leadership priorities. Failure to tackle the problems caused by the pandemic isn’t an option for any organisation that wants to do the right thing for its people and also remain productive. With growing incidents of workplace stress, burnout, isolation and loss of engagement, every organisation will have encountered at least some of these issues first hand.