Smile and be happy, it’s free therapy
Do you know what are the top drivers of employee engagement? 1) The interpersonal relations with coworkers and managers, 2) an interesting job. Come after criteria like autonomy, salary, benefits, career, working hours… And if you think twice about it, that is quite true! At least for us, we agreed with this at daphni!
We have been concerned by the subject of employee engagement for a couple years now. In fact, one of our first investments, Butterfly.ai, has been working on this crucial topic since 2015. Did you know that 75% of employees don’t feel engaged in their job? And the turnover costs a lot of money for companies. So we better invest our time and money in employees well being in order to make most people happy to work and motivated! Easy to say, not that easy to set it up in reality! According to a French Public Health survey, the number of French people in a state of depression doubled between late September and early November. According to this survey, 49% of employees declare themselves in psychological distress, and around one million in severe burnout. Covid 19 didn’t help at all in 2020…
Almost one year ago, our investment team member Stan wrote and shared his point of view regarding an important topic that affects some founders: burnout. Let’s face it, even though the issue is obvious, founders don’t want to talk about mental health problems, and especially burnout.
Startups are a world with a lot of uncertainty, and even more these days. I reassure you, on our side, everything is fine — and we hope the same goes for you folks! But as Stan mentioned it in his article, the thing is: “We all have health capital, which we cannot exceed, but we are definitely not equal on this matter. Some people will fall into a burnout after a few days in hyper stress, while others can stay in the hyper stress phase for more than a year.”
You may now want to dig deeper into Stan’s last article. He had the opportunity to discuss with Dr. Patrick Legeron, one of France’s most renowned specialists on burnouts. Dr. Legeron is the author of “Stress at work”, co-wrote a report on burnout for the French Medecine Academy and helped a lot of entrepreneurs and executives.
Here are some key lessons that we remembered from our last chat with him:
- RECOGNITION: Give feedback and celebrate 🎉
- MANAGERS: Be exemplary, but take care of yourself 🛀
- CULTURE: Focus on it 🔎
- COMMUNICATION: Over communicate with your team 📝
- ENGAGEMENT: Super important to put in place a tool to measure commitment 📊
Da yours,
