Performance and wellness were key themes that appeared in the 2023 Performance Improvement conference by the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI). Topics like happiness, health, mental health and wellbeing were woven into workshops, sessions and conversations in and around the conference, including in Ringorang Chief Vision Officer Robert Feeney’s opening keynote: Breaking Down the Locked Door to Performance and Wellness.
Watch Breaking Down the Locked Door to Performance and Wellness
Presenters were not the only performance practitioners at the conference making the connection between performance and wellness. Attendees recognized the obvious gap and sought strategies to fill it by addressing people’s wellbeing as it relates to performance for their organizations.
In his keynote, Robert positioned “wellness” as a requirement to achieving performance and “performance” as a requirement to achieving wellness. However, to accomplish either of these states at work or in life, he provided the missing piece that opens the door between them: readiness.
Defined, readiness is a state in which we’re prepared for or to do something or in which we’re exhibiting a willingness to do something. When it comes to opening the door to that something, that readiness can feel hard to come by. Say you’re preparing for a marathon, becoming ready looks like practice, practice, practice – hundreds of miles logged to prepare for that 26.2-run on race day. Or, say you’re a manager of a team, and you need to walk through the door into a team meeting ready to lead. You have to help this team perform. If you’re not ready, what’s going to happen? How do you get ready?
“Familiarity is the key.”
Ringorang Chief Vision Officer Robert Feeney
Ringorang, our clinically proven behavior-change technology, activates a decades-old model driving familiarity in consumers around the world: advertising. Advertising is a strategic method of reaching an audience to call them to take an action. Part of that strategy requires frequency to increase awareness – and that frequency leads to familiarity.
When you think about an actor, an athlete or a musician, in preparation to perform, what are they doing? Running their lines over and over again. Practicing their sport until every move is second nature. Playing their instrument until each note is muscle memory.
Repeat exposure makes it familiar. Taking repeated actions makes it even more familiar.
As performance practitioners, we need to create the same sense of familiarity in our people, so they can walk through the door ready for whatever is expected of them, whether that be a new process or a new way of thinking. Our responsibility is to create an environment of readiness for our organizations and the people who work with them. Without repetition, there will not be sufficient familiarity for people to take reliable actions.
In practice at Goodwill Industries of Kansas, our technology is used by people coming out of incarceration to help develop familiarity with what employers will expect of them. We’re working with Level Communities in Pennsylvania to shift attitudes of people who see themselves as life-long renters toward homeownership by creating familiarity with resources available. The U.S. Forestry Service, a division of the USDA, has tapped into Ringorang to provide familiarity with in-the-moment decision-making for frontline firefighters across the country.
Right now, we’re repurposing this same technology in school districts and two-year colleges to prepare graduating students with what is expected of them in the workforce. School districts in Kansas, Louisiana and Arkansas have just delivered the first round of results we’re excited to share.
It’s a model that has been used to shift habits in consumers for decades through advertising. Now, adapted in Ringorang, this model is making a difference at Big Tech companies, schools, national non-profits and other organizations seeking to develop this environment of familiarity to develop readiness for performance and wellness.
