December 23, 2020
5 min read
The opinions of the employees of Entrepreneur they are personal.
Agility and organizational well-being go directly hand in hand. We mainly refer to agility for people management as it focuses on caring for employees, collaborating and achieving more productive and agile businesses by increasing the happiness of their teams.
How do you do it? As we said before, there is a specific framework for it HR Agile, as one of the organization’s world leaders Agile people, directed by Pia-Maria Thorén, and Helgi Gudmundsson, who are also among the professionals who Agile Manifesto of People Management.
This manifesto is composed of values and contains 36 principles including: Transparency, Trust, Say why and what and leave the how to people, know people deeply, increase happiness, learning and continuous improvement, increase safety Psychological, etc.
So is there a link between organizational well-being and agility? Yes, clearly. Why did we bring up this topic and how does it align with the ranking of Hero Companies? They are linked by the values, principles of this framework and with the purpose of this ranking: to find ‘the best in Latin America, the ones who were resilient this 2020, reinvented themselves, maintained their productivity, but above all protected what most valuable thing they have: the well-being and happiness of their employees ”.
The relevance of this does not only lie in the fact that the sense of belonging is increased, turnover is reduced or retention is increased; As the organizers of the ranking point out, sales increased by 44%, productivity by 31%, among other things.
The experience of a multinational
We go to a specific case, taking into account one of the above principles, “psychological safety”. First, what do we mean by this? Experts in the field define it as: “An individual’s perception of the consequences of interpersonal risk-taking, or the belief that a team is safe to take risks without being perceived as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological security, colleagues feel safe to take risks along with the rest of the members. They are convinced that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or coming up with a new idea. “
Google was the company that discovered that among the keys that make its best teams successful and effective, psychological safety comes first … as we see below.
- Psychological safety. Team members feel safe to take risks and are vulnerable to each other.
- Reliability. Team members get things done on time and meet Google’s requirements for excellence.
- Structure and clarity. Team members have clear roles, plans and goals.
- Meaning. Work is personally important to team members.
- Consequence. Team members consider their work important and bring about change.
These results were achieved by the company through the Aristotle Project, which grouped the best performing employees.
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Finally, it is worth taking into account the clarification provided by one of the professionals who has studied this topic the most in the world – Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson – in her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth: “Psychological safety is not about being nice or just creating a pleasant environment, but it has to do with concrete practices, such as being open to new ideas, thanking everyone’s contributions, explicitly admit mistakes, give positive feedback on them and learn from each other about those experiences.In his opinion, this applies to both employees and people in leadership roles.
Given all of this, it makes perfect sense to be part of a ranking like Empresas Heroinas that aims to recognize and strengthen companies – from 12 Latin American countries – who are committed to their employees and maintain their competitiveness despite a challenging year.
* Jorge Ulsen is CEO of Decides and Chairman of the International People & Players Association.