The Positive Energy Workplace

In our previous article, we shared insights around focusing on the importance of energy accountability with your leadership teams and workforce. 

With current trends showing that employee engagement and workplace culture energy will continue to decline in 2024, prioritizing a sustainable growth plan and company-wide approach is essential to the health of your organization, your people, and your well-being globally.  

How can you encourage the importance of energy, well-being, work-life balance, and modeling self-care in your organization while maintaining bottom-line results and performance standards? Fortunately, these two things, while seemingly competing priorities, work together to strengthen the sustainability and impact of the organization. One leverage point here is to create an eco-system that supports and inspires an inside-out approach enabling personal energetic accountability AND high performance for each individual. 

At Active Choices, Inc., we partner with executives to take a holistic view of increasing your overall business performance through culture optimization. Using our IEP Eco-System framework, we create a micro and macro view for executives to assess and create a plan for impact that addresses all the competing priorities.

Here’s a quick overview of the premise for the IEP Eco-System: 

In our previous blog post (Part 1), we shared indicators that your company may not be a Positive Energy Workplace. If you missed it, make sure to check it out because it's essential to understanding what might be holding your organization back from reaching its full potential.

But today, we're flipping the script and focusing on the signs that show your company is already a Positive Energy Workplace AND in growth and optimization mode! We recognize these indicators in the Positive Energy Workplace Initiative™ (PEW-i), and they are worth celebrating because they demonstrate that your organization is on the right track and creating an environment where your team can thrive.

So, let's dive into what a Positive Energy Workplace DOES look like:

At Active Choices, Inc., we've been in the business of helping organizations cultivate Positive Energy Workplaces for more than two decades, and during that time we’ve worked with many high-performing teams and organizational partners and gathered an immense amount of insights along the way. 

As we continue to reach more companies and expand our Positive Energy Workplace Initiative™ (PEW-i), we've noticed some common themes and symptoms that can help you understand where your organization stands on the positive energy spectrum and identify the support you may need. 

To get things rolling, we’re going to start by sharing indicators that suggest your company is NOT currently a Positive Energy Workplace.

Consider these as warning signs that you might be in (or headed for without even realizing it) what we call "triage mode." 

(But don't worry, in our next blog post, we'll dive into the indicators of a Positive Energy Workplace and share how you can transition to a state of growth and optimization.)

So, without further ado, here are 7 red flags to watch out for:

We've recently returned after several weeks on the road bringing our Positive Energy Workplace Initiative™ and IEP Method offerings to a variety of rooms — from group trainings for a Fortune 50 client, to mastermind sessions with former ACI clients, and finishing up with a keynote session for procurement leaders.

(View the timestamped transcript of this video here)

Here are some common things we heard:

“Why should I care about how I show up? (I'm so busy!)"

“How do I handle the person who always shows up so negatively?"

“What do I do if my leaders don't really care about culture (but say they do), or think this 'stuff' doesn't apply to them?”

“How can I help leaders understand how this work ties into the bottom line?"

Despite the fact that these groups were from different industries and levels of management, we heard a common theme:

Performance culture, workforce development, and employee engagement are hot — and it’s on everyone’s minds. 

3 Questions Corporate L&D Leaders Can Ask to Determine if there is a Stickiness Problem

Your organization is investing in training, coaching, and cultural transformation initiatives and spending a lot of time, energy, money, and “workforce trust equity” in doing so. It’s a big lift with lots riding on the success of these initiatives.

But are they working?

Are they sustainable? 

Are your people getting what they need from them? 

And are they actually helping you create the results you want from doing them? 

If you’re not sure, you could have a stickiness problem!

Here are three questions to consider when engaging in any kind of training, leadership, or cultural transformation initiative: