Your future arrived yesterday, but it’s in three pieces

The future of business and its social, moral and commercial decisions

In January 2018 Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish business genius behind the flatpack furniture giant IKEA, passed away at 91 leaving a business empire turning over $30 billion annually.

In this article

In the 1950s, when IKEA first decided to step away from just selling pre-assembled furniture and introduced a flat-pack assemble-at-home-yourself design, the revolutionary effect of this change was not instantly recognised by the community.

Only later would its flat-pack design become synonymous with the brand IKEA.

The frugality of the flatpack (and later the IKEA catalog) would in 5 short years become a dominant force influencing consumer behavior, supply chain dynamics, and long term consumer identification with a commercial brand.

And so the future arrived, in a flatpack of ideas the customer happily paid to take home and assemble in their own lives.

Knock Knock

You don't have to go far today to find business owners hiding from change in their own commercial environments.

Some try to ‘opt out’ of the process by ignoring changes believing if they can weather the storm, it will pass them by. Still, others hope a 'wait and see' approach might be their best refuge against the winds of change.

The error of the latter approach is perhaps better understood in the comment from one frustrated business owner building a business case for wait and see; ‘When we get a disabled customer, then we'll put in a wheelchair ramp to the showroom…’

When slow ideas change fast

While many social ideas progress incrementally over time, often the broader community’s attitudes towards them don't.

They’re often slow to embrace change and resistant to large-scale new ideas until they reach a tipping point in the national conversation (usually around 16% community acceptance). And then, if you’re not ready for it, watch out.

It will be like the future arrived yesterday, and you’re not part of it.

Tough commercial choices aren't always commercial

Often the toughest changes to manage in business are the ones that don't involve product, packaging, placement or performance. The really tough ones often end up being those involving people and the commercial impact of a moral choice.

Decisions around these types of issues can often, for many, feel ‘icky’ because until you can measure the value in the choice being made, you first need to recognise the value in the people you are choosing for.

Knock Knock. Your future is here — in three flatpack pieces

In case you missed it, today there are three key societal (and therefore business) attitude shifts, now here to stay. And like a classic IKEA RÖNLID (3-seat sofa), they too come in three interconnected but inseparable pieces.

Piece one - large scale public acceptance about the importance of good mental health in the workplace

• The emergence of large-scale public acceptance about the importance of maintaining good mental health and the expected workplace response to the conversation.

To those born before the 1980s, this is a particularly big change from the traditional view of ‘if it can’t be measured it can’t be managed’ that silenced many earlier conversations about workplace stress. It didn't exist and was ‘just all in your head’.

Until business was able to quantify the economic cost of the yet to be discovered stress hormone cortisol, and then chart its now proven costly effect on the health of staff, any suggestions to better manage workplace stress were dismissed as comments of a malinger, lazy or incapable voice.

Today the number of employees seeking compensation over workplace-related stress is increasing, with $273 million paid out during 2013-14 in Victoria alone with an accepted stress injury claim likely to be more expensive (and remain open longer) than a physical injury claim.

Piece two - acceptance of the value and demand for diverse and inclusive workplace environments that create safety and belonging

• The acceptance of the value and demand for diverse and inclusive workplace environments. When talking about diversity, I’m describing a wide range of differences and similarities which make individuals unique – some are visible, some are not.

Diversity in its own right is a source of talent. The simple premise is talent has no gender, age, race, nationality, or sexual orientation. Today's inclusive workplace cannot justify paying a female staff member 30% less than her male counterpart for the same work.

The 2017 report Economic Return on Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace, quantifies

For every dollar spent on improving a business’s diversity there’s an economic return of 2.3 dollars value.

Piece three - the effect of Marriage Equality and other things that should be equal too

• Today it's impossible to have a commercially accurate conversation about good mental health, diversity, inclusion, and belonging without addressing the impact of Australia's recent voluntary Same-Sex Marriage Equality postal survey, and its pre and post effects on businesses, our customers, and more importantly, our people.

The national optional plebiscite on gay marriage damaged many personal and commercial relationships and polarised the community in ways exercising political leadership could have avoided. While the country was pulled into having public conversations about the relevance of a person's private relationships and their value when weighed against non-LGBTQI individuals, those same LGBTQI individuals continued to come to work, throughout the process.

What was the impact of such an invasive public conversation (and at times heinous social commentary), about people's lives and its effect upon our staff?

Now as employers we have to deal with the terrible mental stress such an unnecessarily corrosive process has inflicted upon our staff and the mental health issues are now part of the history of the Same-Sex Marriage (SSM) plebiscite process.

Marriage Equality & employees

Why this matters?

Regardless of your personal stance on this issue, as business seeks to get closer to their customers and relying progressively more upon discretionary support of our staff, we’re going to be increasingly faced with questions about our commercial responses to many social conversations.

So what's the commercial return to a workplace supportive of LGBTQI staff?

PWC reports a direct performance increase to better innovation, effectiveness, and customer service in workplaces where LGBTQI people feel supported and safe to be the best possible version of themselves.

The last word

Businesses only exist within the context of the environment of our customers, our staff, and suppliers. Some even suggest businesses actually don't exist outside our brand story, our people, and our list of procedures and processes they implement.

As the conversations in the community become the scaffolding of our business environment, we need to recognise these three large-scale conversations have passed the tipping point and are already in the process of becoming an expected part of both our social and business infrastructure.

If you don't have an opinion of how you will assemble these three pieces of your business story, you may risk others deciding whether there’s a place left for you in their future.