With the world as it is now, I can only hope that you share my vision of vibrant, productive cultures becoming a benchmark for success. The block can't be profitability - the proof is out there in abundance that happy workforces make more money, not just in my mind's eye. Nor would logic prevail in an argument that puts time ahead of forming a strategy, especially when many of you will yourselves retire relatively soon. These years being the baton that you pass on to the next generation - well, I hope you cherish the thought of making changes while you can. Perish the thought that you can't.
Or won't. Sorry to be blunt; that's just the way I am. I'm hoping the warring faction in you splits logic in two, and that a desire to lean on the mantlepiece for a couple of years while the young bloods sort it out is fighting against some inkling that this is your watch, and shift handover has never been more on the line than it is now.
The undermining of engagement could be likened to the war against Woke. That word alone is enough to spark an emotional response and possibly even attract a Bot [laughs quietly as computer shuffles audibly}. People are either awake or they're not, and with the world as it is, that matters in my opinion. Let's avoid getting carried away with gender fluidity and public conspiracies here. One is either awake, or one is asleep.
My reason for aligning the principles of wakefulness and engagement is that in their most genuine contexts, both rely on empathy to make them work. Without listening to rhetoric, you know in your own heart what is real and what is most likely not to be. Some version of 'real' will align in your mind with mine. That's good enough; if you want to make a difference to people's lives and increase the value of your company into the bargain, you have to be alive to the possibility that everyone involved could benefit from this in ways that ricochet across industry. You need a sense that tells you more is at stake than a salary.
The illusion that piles of money are going to make for better things has to die sometime. Whether it dies on Snowpiercer or on the train home is one for personal consideration. I don't know what will come of my life's work, or if it will have made any difference. All I know is that the world is changing fast and hard, and precedents have to be set... hard choices need to be made.
You can vote for yourself in this one-horse race, or you can grant dozens, hundreds or thousands of families an opportunity to flourish as this unprecedented era takes hold. You can safeguard the mental welfare of countless people by lifting your workplace above the inertia and despair that typifies traditional industry, and nobody can truthfully say it's not like that. They can argue that it's always been this way, which proves the point made by the Industrial Revolution - keep people afraid, and they will do as they're told. In modern parlance, "if they don't like it, they know where the door is."
The ball and chain of industrial history has indisputably carried itself past the point of logical encumbrance as human beings clutched to vestiges of humanitarianism over the last hundred years, desperately clawing their way to some perceived version of freedom against walls that continue to be built. Whichever side of the wall anyone believes they are on, the damage is going to be done and we don't know what that will look like, only that if it's in our power to limit damage, we should. And it is, so we could - do that very thing.
If you have come through life with a history of hardship anywhere at all, you are able to empathise with all the people in your employ. That means you are fully equipped to turn tides of despondence into rays of hope that become real working environments; shining examples of community where people love to be and enjoy feeling loyalty. Is that not an experience worth passing on to your children? Seeing the effects first-hand, they'll like what they see, so they in turn will stand for a version of humanitarian leadership that makes sense - against the odds perhaps, but only against odds of our own making. Everybody profits when transformation happens; it takes a certain kind of leader to see through blocks.
So here is Choice. Continue to support the undermining of engagement by doing nothing, or do something about cultural dysfunction today - sow the seeds for a profitable harvest that hurts no-one, and does what it says on the tin.
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