Using Human Design to Maintain a Highly Productive Workforce While Lowering Stress
According to the American Psychological Association, “Stress is a normal reaction to everyday pressures, but can become unhealthy when it upsets day-to-day functioning.”
Unnecessary stress or what we refer to as Conative Stress often results from someone acting outside of their natural instincts or in misalignment with how they naturally perform. In the work environment, prolonged Conative stress can hinder productivity and interfere with day-to-day functions.
How can we identify the cause of unnecessary stress and what can we do to prevent it?
Psychologists and philosophers have identified three measurable mind activities: Cognition, Affect, and Conation.
Cognitive Function
Cognitive Function assessments are most commonly used in educational environments to measure aptitude. In the workplace, they help predict job performance and whether a prospective employee has the experience and technical aptitude to exercise their skill set. It can also uncover the ability to learn quickly. Online platforms such as LinkedIn help employers identify candidates who have the academic and experiential skills required. It’s important to note, however, that cognitive skills change as an individual develops new skills.
Affect Function
Affect Function assessments are becoming mainstream in hiring. Affect Function reveals some degree of a person’s personality type, including likes, values, feelings, and motivations. Like Cognitive Function, it can change in response to time, and a person’s motivation at the time of their assessment.
Conative Function
Conative function is about understanding how an individual will perform, not so much, if they will perform. While Conative assessments are not common in hiring or in team building, they can be useful in discovering innate behavior in problem solving and action taking. It can also reveal work style and how cognitive and affect skills will be applied. The Kolbe test, useful for assessing instinctual ability is a commonly used Conative function test.
Personality Testing
It is not uncommon for employers to seek candidates with whom they feel a sense of familiarity or like-mindedness. For predictability of performance and fit into a corporate culture, employers rely on tools such as Myers-Briggs, DiSC, The Enneagram, and others to determine communication styles, behavioral tendencies, and characteristics that can meet a corporation’s culture and job requirements.
Due to the fact that behavioral tendencies are apt to change and candidates can be enticed to alter their responses during assessments, these methods have met with criticism.
Productivity Trends
There are high costs associated with stress-related issues in the workplace. We need to create conditions that minimize unnecessary stress, maintain productivity, and create an engaged and happy workforce. Just because a person has the cognitive ability (skill), and positive attitude (affect), this does not mean employees are fit to perform tasks to expectation (Conative). It is critical to highlight that the knowledge/skills and the motivation/attitude, does not directly result in relevant action or direction. Further, it does not always lead to consistent low stress and high productivity. But it can lead to Conative stress.
Conative Stress is when an individual must operate in opposition to their natural tendencies. It can sometimes result from employers, with good intentions, focusing on improving employee weaknesses rather than cultivating strengths. Investing in improving skills can be costly, as is the stress of encouraging employees to function in a way that opposes their instinctive preferences.
Stress resulting from mismanaged expectations can lead to mismanaged project budgets, disengagement, low retention, missed deadlines, a lack of communication, low collaboration, and more.
Employers can reduce Conative stress and better fill in the gaps to meet business needs by facilitating employee engagement and focusing on employee strengths and natural behavioral tendencies instead of weaknesses.
In team building a focus on how team member’s Cognitive/skills, Affect/motivation, and Conative/behavior complement others can lead to increased engagement, and reduced stress.
Human Design as a Viable Alternative
In recent years, some companies have turned to Human Design since it offers insights into innate strengths and skills (Cognitive); motivation and emotional reaction (Affect); and instinctive patterns of behavior, communication, and work style (Conative).
Human Design does not depend on input variables and yet it leads to a reduction in overall stress. Companies can recalibrate a corporate culture rife with burnout. And they can better navigate the shifting workplace paradigm, since its principles enable teams to work in harmony and increase productivity.
It can also help individuals in all roles, whether they are entrepreneurs, leaders, or members of a team to:
- Enhance motivation, engagement and productivity by nurturing innate strengths while removing personal and professional friction.
- Uncover teammates’ innate tendencies and develop strategies to remove stress and improve communication and collaboration.
- Make better decisions that align with, and not against, one’s natural instincts and work style.
- Develop a deeper sense of self-awareness and connection while improving presence and developing a holistic awareness for leveraging each team member’s contribution.
If you’re ready to reduce stress and create a more productive and comfortable work environment for you or your team, book a call here.
The Rework Sessions offers Professional Transformation Coaching to help you and your team map your innate professional skills and strengths and improve the quality of your working style and culture. To learn more about how The Rework Session can help you or your team, send an email to info@reworksessions.com or book a call here.
