About 2/3 of U.S. workers aren’t engaged at work. 87% of people worldwide. That’s a huge and troubling number.
With big problems to solve and visions to achieve, we need more people engaged and sharing their ideas, insights, and skills. In all ventures, whether they’re big or small. No matter where they’re located or what their culture is like.
How do we get there? In his book, “Drive” author Dan Pink outlines three components of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
In this mini-series on implementing a betterness portfolio, we’ve been focusing on the purpose side of the equation. Ways to invest your enterprise resources to create different kinds of wealth beyond short-term profits. Plus specific tips for folding these viewpoints into your regular decision-making process.
Building financial wealth was about growing the bank accounts of businesses, customers, and communities so that they can exchange that money to create new value. Protecting natural wealth covered conserving and restoring natural resources so that they’ll be available over the long-term.
What’s human wealth?
Fostering human wealth means improving individuals so they can better contribute their energy, skills, and wisdom to society. In this article, we’ll focus on the health and education aspects of it. How organizations can support healthy and wise global citizens who are equipped to take action.
To economists, building human capital means that individuals will be able to make more money. Either for themselves by earning wages or for their employer by being more productive. Improve the engine and you’ll get more output.
But the global community has decided that a base level of human wealth is also a human right and a core component of our shared goals.
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlines a human right to a standard of living that’s adequate to support the health and well-being of their family. Along with the right to access education, participate in cultural life, and enjoy the results of art and science.
The Sustainable Development Goals (for 2030) refer to human needs like zero hunger, good health and well being, quality education, clean water and sanitation, and access to decent work. They also outline a number of specific targets for each goal.
These goals set the minimum level of human wealth that we’re aiming for. All improvements from there add to an individual’s capacity to contribute. Whether in the formal economy or outside of it in their families, communities, and politics.
A personal bank account that’s depleted doesn’t have anything left to invest. Think of projects to address the sick, malnourished, or underserved as helping people get out of debt. And projects that improve health and education as investing further in our global bank account of 7 billion individuals who have the capacity to take action.
Addressing human wealth is also a good business investment
Investments in human wealth can keep paying out over time. Training in one area can be applied over and over again. And good health impacts our emotional state, productivity, and energy levels in all areas of our lives.
Improving human wealth also not only benefits the individual, but also the people around them. Healthy people can serve others and educated people can share their knowledge. An investment in one individual can end up impacting many others.
Focusing on human wealth within your business can also reduce employee turnover and attract high performers if you build opportunities for mastery and connect their work to a bigger purpose.
Some ways to create human wealth with your portfolio
- Share solutions that help people achieve their physical or mental health goals.
- Review the toxicity of the inputs to your products and find replacements for toxic components.
- Examine the impact of the work environment on your employees including the physical space and mental or emotional pressures.
- As you apply a business change, consider what customers would learn and how that knowledge could benefit them in the future. (Tip: think about all aspects of the customer experience, from marketing to the packaging and customer service.)
- Structure projects so that people have the opportunity to learn something new while completing the work.
- Schedule interactive workshops where employees can learn new skills while getting work done.
- Create cross-functional teams where members are exposed to other disciplines.
- Curate and share knowledge with your customers.
- Tweak the format of your product or marketing to fit your customer’s learning style and life situation. (ex. short videos for busy parents vs. semester-long classes for university students).
- Provide healthcare or education access to populations that are otherwise overlooked.
- Support the third parties that help people achieve their health and educational goals. (ex. medical professionals, caregivers, or educators)
- Work on projects that specifically address one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals related to health or education.
How to incorporate human wealth generation into your portfolio process
You can fold a human wealth perspective into each of the portfolio essentials with a few tweaks.
Current State
Whether you’re focusing on your employees or customers, surveys are a good way to collect anonymous aggregate data. Start by learning about where they are right now from a health and education perspective. Also look at the health and educational options available to them, why they chose the options they did, and the benefits or gaps they perceive. Running some interviews could be helpful to provide more context.
To identify some leverage points in your business, examine your customer journeys, value streams, and processes. Consider the environment that people are in and what they interact with (ex. products, equipment, materials) at each step. How are you impacting human wealth (positive, neutral, or negative)?
Future State
Some questions to ask when you’re brainstorming the future state are: What does the desired state of health and education look like? How will you know if your design will get people closer to that target? Where does it make sense for your company to help, given your resources, connections, and business strategy?
You may have captured some customer goals in your Current State research. But since customers don’t always realize what’s possible, you could also consult with experts to learn more about what an ideal state could look like.
And don’t forget about the people you work with. Look at employees as assets that can build new value in the future, instead of resources or commodities that can be easily replaced. What would they need to add value now and in the future? How might their needs shift over time? How might the company’s needs shift over time?
You could also look at what other departments, organizations, countries, and communities are trying out. You may want to invite your HR department along with your marketing and product development teams to a few portfolio meetings to share insights and brainstorm ways to build human wealth.
Value Framework
It can be tricky to figure out which projects will create the biggest impact on healthcare and education. Especially if you work outside of those industries. Consulting with a couple of different subject matter experts outside of your company could be beneficial to determine which actions are more likely to make a positive difference.
One way to hone in on the better projects is to eliminate options that create adverse effects. It sounds obvious but many companies still create toxic products that hurt their customers in the long-term, in the name of short-term profits. They also routinely contribute to burnout, chronic stress, and sharing misleading information that gets passed along as fact. “Do no harm” is a good portfolio mantra.
Portfolio Allocation
The amount of money spent on categories of human wealth like healthcare and education does not typically correlate with improved outcomes. The specifics matter a lot. Getting prescribed a pill doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be healthier. And taking a course doesn’t mean you’ll be able to apply those insights to future problems.
Therefore a portfolio focus on these areas will need to include other monitoring and metrics of success beyond setting aside a percentage of the budget.
And since the payoff of the investment could happen any time in the future, avoid setting a specific cut-off of positive return and instead track outcomes regularly over time.
Execution Support
Your design teams may or may not be familiar with common approaches and metrics in the educational or healthcare space. Besides sharing your portfolio findings, you can help them succeed as they work out the details by connecting them with resources like books, training, or access to subject matter experts. A little bit of work up front to better understand what is more likely to make an impact can save a lot of time spent on iterating the product.
Research & Experimentation
Pilots and workshops are great ways to test ideas related to human wealth without going all in. Send a small group through a workshop and track the before and after. Run a short challenge or experiment related to behavior changes like diet and exercise and track health indicators before and after.
Obviously, for anything more invasive related to health, you’ll want to follow rigorous R&D and human testing procedures. It also might make sense to outsource testing to another company that specializes in evaluating the effectiveness of healthcare or educational changes.
Intake Process
Your customers and employees probably won’t all have the same healthcare and educational needs. And people’s life situation shifts over time. Make it easy for individuals to share their current questions, needs, and ideas so that you can create solutions that fit their life and career goals.
This could also be a great opportunity to connect with local universities for insight into the latest research and thoughts in the fields of medicine and education (which can also be great publicity for your organization so a win-win).
Dynamic Views
Show how your portfolio investments are helping individuals, either through a private and personalized view, or an aggregate view that can be shared with other stakeholders.
With 7 billion+ people in the world, investing in human capital means more ideas, collaborators, customers, services, art, and science. It’s an investment that pays off both within your business and beyond it. Over the course of this series on implementing a betterness portfolio, we’ll continue to discuss other sources of wealth to fold into your portfolio process.
How will you incorporate these ideas into your business? Do you have other ideas of how to build human wealth with an enterprise portfolio?