Sustainable Organization

The Canadian Council on Learning recent report on the state of learning in Canada is a call to action

http://www.ccl-cca.ca/CCL/Reports/StateofLearning/StateofLearning2007.htm. But what is the action or what really works?

While 56% of Canadian firms offer training and development programs, the annual dollar amount per employee is low and going lower (about $800). Apparently, management is not sure of the ROI and employees have low interest in training. Mostly they are just too busy or the training schedule is not convenient or it costs too much.

At the same time the cost of mental health issues in the workplace are skyrocketing with every new study. It cost about $9000 annually for each employee with a mental illness and the number affected is getting close to 1 in every 20 employees. Probably more people than participate in training. No wonder employers are reducing the amount spent on training and development. Not only are they not clear on the ROI but they can’t afford it.

The mental health cost to employers in Australia just doubled to about $10 billion annually (Fed: Employers must combat $10b cost of mental illness: council. The comparable figure in Canada is over $3 billion at present and will likely catch up when new studies are completed. However, some research suggests that the real cost to Canada when you consider all the extras after company benefits have run out is about $33 Billion annually. And this does not count lost productivity (http://jenniferforbes.blogspot.com/2007/02/ipsos-reid-study-on-depression-in.html).

Other studies on empowerment suggest that about 16% of employees are actively disengaged at work as a method of coping with workplace stressors. About 1 in 5 of us will have a mental illness sometime in our life. And many of us suffer in silence making the true cost of workplace environments that are toxic for human beings much higher than is currently known.

Leadership obviously has a problem. Bureaucracy is bad for your health. Training, coaching, EAP services, and other human resource initiatives don’t seem to be enough (http://www.iveybusinessjournal.com/article.asp?intArticle_id=618). Only real employee empowerment with normal human dignity and respect will work in the long run.

And the way to do that is to change the genotypic design principle through a company wide participative design process. Learning and development initiatives help but are usually not sufficient. Once one understands that the fastest way to a radical cultural change is a radical structural change and that there is a relationship between structure and process, then one can see that real learning and development, and real empowerment only happen through ongoing organization wide conversation over time. What Fred Emery pointed out some years ago with reference to the Scandinavian democratic dialogue approach is that the design principles must be smack dead centre of this conversation. A conversation about more training will not suffice when one is stressed out and humiliated on a regular basis.