Prevention is better than cure- do we care!

Every time you came running into the house and looked to grab that icy cold bottle of water from the refrigerator, your mom would yell at you, trying to save you from falling sick with a sore throat and fever...

Your mom telling you not to eat that roadside treat or you may end up with an upset stomach...

Your dad telling you to drive carefully on your return from that late night get together with friends...

        ...these are just some manifestations of the age old adage- “Prevention is better than cure”.

Like all the parental wisdom, you actually realize the truth behind those words only when you have gone through most of your life or when you end up with a not so pleasant experience in life.

Now if we were take this thought- “ Prevention is better than cure” a little further and extend it to an organizational context, I think we would be hitting a sweet spot of “SIMPLE TO UNDERSTAND AND EASY TO IMPLEMENT” advice. Most organizational initiatives or strategies (for lack of a simpler word) fail or do not achieve the desired success because of one simple reason and that is – that they are just too complicated to understand and warrant a whole lot of effort in implementation. Imagine sitting through classes on competency definition and identification for three days and then being faced with a super complicated performance appraisal system which utilizes complicated behavioural algorithms to map individuals competency scores to the skills required. Sure does sound very scary!!

So, the point is, that if you want something to be done make sure you keep it “SIMPLE TO UNDERSTAND AND EASY TO IMPLEMENT”.

 I digress, now coming back to topic at hand...

This simple piece of advice – Prevention is better than cure, if followed by our managers, would go a long way in helping them overcome most of the challenges that they may face in their day to day activities such as attrition, falling productivity, negative talk in the team, failing customer service etc.

If we just take attrition as an example, Google throws up nearly 25, 10,000.00 (25Lac+) search results when you type the phrase-“cost of hiring a new employee”. Similarly, if you type the phrase- “cost of employee attrition” it flashes about 583,000 results (nearly 6.0Lac). There is so much being said about the financial impact of attrition and how it affects the bottom line. If only our managers remembered that- Prevention Is Better than Cure, we would have been looking at a different story. A self aware manager i.e. one who understands his/her managerial style (& pitfalls) and at the same time understands his/her team members better would not need so much research to understand what he/she loses every time a team member walks out of the door. A self aware and sensitive manager can identify the team members’ hot buttons and work towards creating a work environment which challenges and adds value to them every day. Thereby, impacting the employees’ wellbeing at the workplace & beyond and creating a work environment which creates an internal pull and thus prevents an employee from attriting.

Similarly, falling team engagement and/or poor role fitment could be a cause of dropping productivity and poor customer service and hence if our manager is pro active in understanding his/her people, makes sure his people have adequate support to carry out their duties effectively and provides regular positive reinforcements to them, the situation will be very different. These very people could be utilized to their fullest potential in jobs that they love. Once again, creating an environment which prevents negativity and leverages a pro-active approach to team management, which in turn ensures that we have a set of engaged people looking to delight their customers every time they touch them.

These little pro-active and positive strokes which just require some conscious doing on the part of our managers could go a long way in helping us create teams, organizations, communities and subsequently nations of people who follow an approach to life which prevents negativity and creates a positive impact in every life it touches.

So next time your team mate comes back to you and tells you that he could not meet his number for this quarter, just before you decide to wear your ass hole hat, remind yourself- Prevention is better than cure, prevent feeding your negative side and ask him why he could not meet his target and you may actually see a different story in the next quarter.

Advice for life: Prevent negativity and you will cure your life of all ills, till there aren't anymore ills to cure and you have a life full of positive energy.