Corporate responsibility
It’s a loaded word and becomes more loaded by the day.
What its often mistaken to mean is that companies are or should be obligated to make their staff happier healthier people.
What it actually means is that a company has a unique access to data around their employees.
It can see sickness and absence and performance and it to has the ability to respond to this data and attempt to impact it for the better.
This is in essence the companies job. Happier healthier people perform better, assuming of course that they have time left to do the work after becoming happier and healthier.
A companies standard response at the moment is to provide access.
Access to mediation training, access to better food, access to exercise programmes, access gym discounts, access to knowledge.
Access to things that the world is undeniably flooded with.
At present companies are attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. We are using a cosmetic solution to an internal problem.
Keen to get to the bottom of this I asked one hundred people:
Do you A struggle knowing what to do or B struggle consistently doing it.
I asked this question as it related to stress, to nutrition, to exercise, to sleep.
The results came back the same every time.
90% of people struggle to consistently get themselves to do the things they already know how to do.
30-40% of people however already consistently do what is needed. Not the same people in all 4 categories. Some in just one and some in more.
Access isn’t the problem, knowledge isn’t the problem.
The answer though is hidden unsurprisingly in two areas both for the company and the individual.
It begins with responsibility.
Just as each company has the ability to respond to its data, so do the individual.
Our health, our happiness, our job, our relationships, our home, our adventure, our play, our finances, our knowledge are all our responsibility.
If we are not happy with them we and we alone have the ability to respond, and until we take responsibility for all of it we are powerless to change it.
The second is self awareness, the ability to step outside of ourselves and and ask ourselves the important questions.
Questions like:
Why do I work here?
What is important to me?
How do I love to feel?
What do I believe?
What change do I want to see in the world?
What are my core skills and am I getting the chance to share them?
Am I happy with my health?
What would I love to learn?
What would I love to experiment with to improve my experience of life and what change am I seeking to make?
How do I want to be seen by the people important to me and is that how they see me?
Here is the big question though.
What is corporate responsibility?
I believe that it is to bring forth the change it wishes to see in the world.
To get really clear on what that means and to attract people who believe in the same cause.
People who take responsibility, people with self awareness people with the ability to be flexible and think critically.
People who see that what this company is doing aligns with who they are.
People who would site the work as a significant part of the reason they get out of bed in the morning.
It is these people working together as a collective that both self evaluate and help others to do the same.
It is these people who eventually, slowly but surely do the work to build happier, healthier lives.
A companies responsibility is to the companies objectives.
It is our national responsibility to start teaching self awareness, responsibility, critical thinking, disrupting the state quo, making art before those without it get left behind or replaced by computers.
