KnowledgeBrief Hot Topic

The concept of wellbeing in the workplace has been a major topic for years, but many organisations still don’t know all that it entails or why it is so important. This month’s Hot Topic is about how to protect and enhance wellbeing in our workforce, how to build resilience and how to create a basis for better performance.

A fundamental part of every leader’s and manager’s role is finding ways to solve problems. Good processes are essential when approaching a problem, to be able to solve them quickly and effectively. This month’s Hot Topic introduces a study about what behaviours to empower, as well as what behaviours to decrease, in our teams to give rise to good problem-solving skills. The research also explores psychological safety in teams to make us all better problem solvers.

Employee engagement is a barometer that illustrates the relationship between the employee and the organisation. It embraces all the factors that influence the extent to which employees are committed to organisational goals, mission and vision, and can have a significant impact on organisational performance. This Hot Topic explores how to manage, measure and strengthen employee engagement.

Ecosystem has entered the vernacular of everyday business. Terms such as “business ecosystem,” “collaboration ecosystem” and “economic ecosystem” are now being used universally as people seek to articulate the future of business and customer interactions. But an ecosystem reflects much more than a network and it differs fundamentally from a market.

The concept of organisational justice focuses on the effect that social relationships in the working environment have on performance. The theory behind this is that an individual’s perception of fairness, relating to aspects of their work, influences their behaviour. This, in turn, can lead to either negative or positive outcomes in terms of performance. This means that the adoption of fair principles has potential positive effects on both organisational performance and employees’ wellbeing.

Described by the Economist as “the trust machine”, blockchains have evolved into a variety of models that can be applied to different business problems, such as provide supply chain transparency and dramatically improve the sharing of information, whilst allowing a visible assurance of authenticity. It looks like, with the right mix of leadership, collaboration and sound governance, we can yield significant benefits from blockchain.

Our work and lives are increasingly interdependent, and networks have emerged as the way in which individuals communicate and collaborate across the planet. Yet, organisations still rely on ways of working created more than a century ago during the rise of industrialisation. Hierarchical systems, team structures and organisational processes are geared to efficiency and routine – and get in the way of knowledge flow, rapid learning and adaptability.

Change management can be a catalyst to help organisations react, flex and adapt by reviewing their own mind-set and capabilities about what it takes to make effective change happen.

How often have you presented an argument – backed up facts, figures and robust research – but have failed to convince people? The evidence should speak for itself, right? The simple answer is that facts and rational arguments aren’t very good at altering people’s beliefs. Humans’ are just too prone to adopt short cuts in their decision-making process to be persuaded by mere fact. This month’s Hot Topic looks into dealing with fake-facts and the art of arguing for the evidence.

Technology has revolutionised our workplace, offering increasing options and freedom for people as to how, where and when they work. Providing your employees with more control over the ways that they do their work can have beneficial effects. The dilemma is, however, the more choices that we give employees, the higher the risk of fragmentation. Individual levels of productivity may go up but cohesion and trust between employees and teams goes down.

In Spring 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect, which empowers EU citizens to move all the data they have at various providers, for example at Amazon, Vodafone, etc., to one place and ask other providers to erase their data. Companies will no longer get away with merely providing a binary yes-or-no consent at the initial point of collection and to ensure information exchange, companies must come up with new ways to do business with their customers.

Despite the increasing need for innovation, many organisations still struggle with the challenges of both generating creative solutions and being able to put them into practice. This Hot Topic research focuses on how to make sure your activities or processes are successfully realised, introducing a simple exercise to better free up resources, and provide you with a checklist to get the innovation governance responsibilities right.

To change people’s mindset and way of thinking, you have to engage with the most complex system in nature – the brain. The EY Edge journey will continue as an exploration of the brain behind thinking, motivations and purpose and how to achieve highest performing teams and a better working world.

We say that our most valuable asset is the knowledge of our employees. However, organisations can often become too focused on using data to create insight and miss out on the intuitive insights of their best managers and experts. According to Dr. Viktor Dörfler, University of Strathclyde, it is all about getting the best of both worlds: analysing data where appropriate (Smart) and using intuition of experts when that is more promising (Art), as well as how the two can help one another (SmArt).

Sometimes we are too close to our work and our business to understand the full potential for both unlocking hidden value and managing potential risk. We are often too engrossed in doing “legacy activities” – working the way we’ve always done. According to Professor Victor Newman, University of Greenwich, there is a technique based on a simple law of success in the business jungle: think ahead of your competitors, anticipate their arrival as well as their strategy to protect yourself from danger

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – so much that 90% of data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. When data sets get so big that they cannot be analysed by traditional data processing application tools, we have ‘Big Data’. Today, Big Data are woven into every sector, used to creating transparency, enabling experimentation, improving innovating, supporting decisions, increasing segmenting, etc. However, although organisations may hold an enormous amou

Augmented reality, or AR, has the ability to overlay the physical world with digital information, and have the two interact in real time. Pokémon Go is a famous recent example, but AR is more than a game. If used well, AR may have the capacity to deliver far-reaching strategic, service improvement and cost saving benefits. Whether in the private or public sector, AR is providing new opportunities for businesses and organisations to engage with customers, present and promote products and services

Computers are great at processing, storing and letting you search through huge amounts of information, but not so great (yet, anyway) at empathy, emotion, and being creative without human assistance. Digital tools offer the potential to exploit a range of different media or share information with people who can’t physically join a brainstorming session, but do these advantages out-weigh the potential downsides, including the time needed to learn new tools and their operational requirements.

A recession, a supply-chain disruption, a technology break-down, an industrial accident. These are all examples of crises that may have negative implications for organisations. Crises have been defined as low probability events that have severe consequences, generating ambiguity and decision-making time pressures for businesses. For this reason, the response of an entrepreneur or management team to a crisis can mean the difference between business survival or failure.

Cutting-edge research in neuroscience is highlighting the mechanisms underpinning decision-making and corporate performance. Neuroscience is an exciting, expanding field providing valuable insights into how the mind operates. The big question is: What are the practical takeaways for executives and great leaders?

Some industries are experiencing a switch from focusing on products and production, to service and holistic solutions for their customers, clients, citizens, etc. This focus is offering a new way to be financially sustainable and yet, despite this growing recognition, the adoption of servitization is still moving quite slowly. In part, this is because it involves not only business model innovation, but also organisational change and new technologies to be adopted.

When looking to embed high performance and change, and improve areas such as creativity and innovation, there are important distinctions for leaders to make between climate and culture.

Researchers from London Business School emphasise the significance, especially for established firms, of developing a new digital mindset to stay competitive. They describe it as a ‘fast/forward’ mindset. Fast, in this context, means alert, agile, experimental and capable of decisive action. Forward means proactive and searching, and it also means seeking to create a meaningful connection with customers and other business partners.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications refer to autonomous communication between devices or machines. Advances in these areas are well underway, and they bring major new and different leadership and management challenges.