NTT Data Corporation is a Japanese multinational information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan with an annual revenue of 2.3 trillion Japanese yen. They offer an advanced portfolio of consulting, application, business process, cloud and infrastructure services to businesses and governments worldwide.
The Challenge
NTT Data team members were experiencing significant burnout resulting from working consistently long hours, and this was having a severe impact on their health and wellbeing and on the team’s efficiency and effectiveness. Working unsustainable hours was largely the result of an expectation deeply entrenched in Japanese society, so it was a difficult habit to break.
Burnout was becoming such a widespread problem nationwide that the Japanese government developed an initiative to create better work-life balance by encouraging employers to take initiatives in cultivating a culture that encouraged employees to take work-life balance more seriously. NTT Data took this initiative seriously and knew that improving the health, wellbeing and work-life balance of team members would improve their effectiveness at work. However, they didn’t know how to achieve this objective, especially as it would involve an employee mindset shift and workplace culture transformation. Consequently, NTT Data executives met with Dr Sakhaee from Inspirational Management Australia (IMA) to discuss a potential workshop for their employees to address employee commitment to work-life balance and wellbeing in order to improve health, wellbeing, efficiency and effectiveness.
The Solution
After conducting a needs analysis to gain a deeper awareness and understanding of the prevailing challenges, Dr Sakhaee designed a practical workshop that would specifically address the challenge of promoting adequate work-life balance, wellbeing and effectiveness. The three themes of the tailored workshop were:
- Leading Self,
- Leading Others, and
- Leading Change.
Delivered over four days to over 100 NTT Data employees at the NTT Data Tokyo office, the workshop included several practical activities designed to impact individual practices post-workshop. To enhance individual engagement, participants were broken up into five groups of 20 with sessions run concurrently by accredited IMA facilitators.
A special session was also delivered for the graduates at NTT Data who had recently joined the organisation. The sessions covered wellbeing, productivity and effectiveness with practical tips on how to cultivate gratitude and empathy towards each other while maintaining and enhancing personal wellbeing and effectiveness. Practical tools were also provided to participants of this session. The idea here was to instil qualities like gratitude, empathy and compassion in employees as they entered the organisation for ongoing benefits.
The Outcome
Extensive research on participants was performed in collaboration with NTT Data executives immediately following and two months after the completion of the workshop to assess its immediate and sustained behavioural impact on participants. More than half of all participants said they were sustainably changing their behaviour and actively utilising the topics taught in the workshop, particularly those relating to time management, empathy, compassion and gratitude. They were considering others’ feelings more and expressing gratitude more frequently.
The results showed an overall sustained positive impact on employees, including the younger graduate employees, two months after the workshop. Participants and NTT Data executives agreed that the workshops had strengthened relationships between team members and engineers and that all team members were more engaged and had developed more positive relationships with their peers. Furthermore, because they were working more sustainable hours, they enjoyed better work-life balance and were more effective at work.
If your team struggles to achieve the work-life balance that promotes overall health and wellbeing, which flows into greater effectiveness at work, contact Dr Sakhaee to learn how he can assist.
