Practical Solutions to Employee Engagement- September 2018

Samin Saadat at Vancouver Startup Week, Vancouver, BC, Practical Solutions to Employee Engagement

As Peter Senge says “Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space”

As managers, we tend to believe that the world works the same way as in our childhood. If there is a problem on the manufacturing line, we look for a cause in manufacturing. If salespeople can’t meet targets, we think we need new sales incentives or promotions. If there is inadequate housing we build more houses. If there is inadequate food, the solution must be more food.

Systematic thinking offers a language that begins by restructuring how we think. Systematic thinking is a technique for seeing the whole of an issue. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things or people. What we need is a shift of mindset from seeing parts to seeing wholes, from seeing people as helpless reactors to seeing them as active participants in shaping their reality, from reacting to the present to creating the future.

Today systematic thinking is needed more than ever because we are becoming overwhelmed by complexity.

We talked about how we can solve employee engagement problems at a fundamental level by learning how to analyze the entire system.

The human brain, behaviour and interactions with their environment never fail to intrigue Samin Saadat . After spending long hours in psychology labs at UBC and completing her Masters at the Sauder School of Business, she entered the workforce and observed a gap between what research suggests and what companies actually do to increase productivity and profitability. Now, Samin is on a mission to bridge this gap through Jalapeño Employee Engagement — leveraging technology and professional human services to bring research findings to life to help companies save invaluable dollars and to help individuals enhance their quality of life.