Having been involved in a few conversations and undertaking a fair bit of learning around this subject recently I thought I would capture a few thoughts.
A challenge I keep hearing over and over from C-suite level leaders relates to the recruitment and retention of good people. This, is a real concern for leaders right now. It’s easy to think about this as an easy fix as if there are jobs we will surely get people into them. This doesn’t seem to be a given anymore.
How we understand organisational health matters
If we want to be able to recruit good people and for them to stay and grow with us, we are going to need to foster the right working environments. Thinking about how healthy the organisation is, is going to matter more in current context.
Any conversation around health is naturally going to go straight to the balance sheet. What do the key numbers say?
How profitable?
Cost to sale ratio?
How turnover is trending?
Regulator performance incentives?
These, along with all of the other financial instruments cannot be ignored BUT we mustn’t stop there.
You could say these our lagging measures. They demonstrate an output that we get from how we run the organisation. If this was a car we would know how fast it was, if it got to its destination, but we wouldn’t really understand what was under the bonnet.
Organisations are run by people
Getting under the bonnet naturally means figuring out how to optimise for people. Say what you will, all of the IT, the processes, the systems that are created and implemented, they all come from people.
So it would stand to reason to develop a sophisticated lense to go alongside the financials that tells us about health in a different way, a more 3D view.
The financials are one thing and employee engagement surveys can give you some clues but we are in the 21st century and we are still talking about workplaces that aren’t great places to work.
Studies have shown a correlation between employee engagement and tenure. Generally, employees who are more engaged tend to stay longer in their job roles. According to Gallup’s research, engaged employees are 59% less likely to look for a job with a different organization in the next 12 months. Additionally, engaged employees are more likely to be productive and contribute positively to their organization.
We need innovative ways of thinking about organisation health through a people centric lense.

One lense could be that of connection
Can you remember the last time you felt really connected to something? Maybe you booked a holiday and you have a vision of how that’s going to go? Maybe you connected at work?
If you feel a connection it’s easier to be all in
If an organisation is healthy I would say that it’s people would be connected and aligned. Wouldn’t you?
We ran a survey a while back around how connected people were to organisation vision. The results were quite worrying. Here’s a couple of stats. I’ll try pull out something more substantial down the line:


We could talk about this all day, but the a couple of stand outs could be…..
– We aren’t as connected as we should be to the reason the organisation exists and where its heading
– The further away we get in the hierarchy, it’s possible we get more disconnected
– Depending on your role, it can be easier/harder to feel connected (based on the role types we can see)
Whatever we are doing, it’s not always working and typically it seems to me we keep doing a lot of the same things in coming at this.
Some organisations are great at this by the way, and by great I mean I would expect those people to be scoring connection at 9 or 10 levels across large numbers of their workforce.
Is it that we are blind to this kind of stat OR is it that we don’t see it as a problem?
This is but one factor in what I would view as organisation health. I’ll save the others for another blog.
Rethink what connection means for people
Visions and Values are often used as corporate wallpaper, but ultimately it is what people do when nobody is looking that is key to understand. I think it is so important to understand that truth is observed and not spoken, especially if those words are just plastered over your walls.
If we want people to connect, we need to think People.
People connect to people, it just happens they work within an organisation together.
So, let’s have a think around how we might measure the level of connection within our organisations so that we can begin to understand the health levels a little better first of all and then…
Let’s be prepared to change our own approaches to how we help people top connect and make people want to join our journey and stick around to see it through.
What is the level of connection with the organisations vision, with each person on your team?
How do you know this is true?
What did you do this week to help make that connection stronger?