As an essential component of the 7 Question - 7 Promise Framework that I put together to help business owners, I advise employers to ask their employees the essential question “Do I have balance?” and I considered it essential for business owners to attain and maintain a “Yes” answer from their employees on that question. When I pose this question of balance, it is generally thought of in two ways: Balance as a way to help people negotiate the demands of work and life, and also making sure that team members have the most productive days they are capable of.

Dear Clients and Friends,

I wish I were not writing this, I am cognizant of the situations and extremes I may be writing to and I pray for the best as soon as possible. We are in this together, and I want to take some time to share some guidance I have seen work in past recessions.

In the pages of The Patient Organization, I laid out the 7 Question-7 Promise Framework, which allows everyone within your company to align themselves with your mission by deciding if they can answer “yes” to questions of belonging, belief, accountability, measurement, communication, development and balance. The ultimate benefit of this process is the creation of the type of workplace environment that can power an Organizational Operating System (OOS).

When it comes to questions about why human beings are present on Earth, a wide array of belief systems have been developed over several millennia by different individuals, groups, and cultures in an effort to produce satisfactory answers to those questions. Yet, when it comes to matters of business, arriving at an answer to the question of why your organization exists can be every bit as difficult to produce.

If you visit the website of the Executive Education department of several major universities and look at the class listings, there is a very good chance you’ll find an offering for courses promising to educate you in perfecting your “Executive Presence.” As I write, there is an Executive Presence course offered by the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, and it promises to educate “...business leaders at all levels who want to become more self-aware, improve their ability to establish genuine connections, and deepen their ability to communicate, influence and lead positive change.”

The idea of developing your employees can lead you into tricky territory if you’re a business owner. On the one hand, there are reasons to not take formal steps to develop your employees that might make logical sense on a very superficial level. After all, you probably have employees on your staff that entered your workspace solely because you advertised very specific employment opportunities that they responded to.

Measuring your employees is a simple necessity that is made unnecessarily complicated by the misguided assumption that employees don’t want to be measured. In light of this erroneous supposition, many business owners - often under additional coercion supplied by their HR departments - opt to measure their employees by a set of wholly business-centric metrics that fail to account for the realities of the jobs the employees are asked to do, and the environmental limitations to performing those jobs.

In most hiring situations, the first time a candidate comes across the radar of a business is when the job seeker submits a resume to the HR department or HR representative. If the applicant appears to check all of the necessary boxes - an impressive education, and years of employment that indicate how the candidate has acquired experience and demonstrated expertise with the requisite skills - then the applicant is brought in for an interview.

In order for your organization to transform into a Patient Organization through utilization of the 7 Question - 7 Promise Framework, it is essential for you to identify and codify the real core values of your business. If you have already taken the steps to establish core values for your company, you are undoubtedly on the scent, we want to make sure you are on the correct path. Unfortunately, there is a strong possibility that the core values of your company have been misidentified, and if this has happened, the effects can be disastrous when it comes to solidifying the culture of your company and summarily applying those values to your organization’s hiring and firing practices.

When it comes to balance in the workplace, several different explanations are employed to describe what it means, and many of these definitions are correct in one respect or another. In fact, the most complete description of workplace balance incorporates multiple elements from the popular definitions of balance. This ultimately means true employee balance combines considerations of work-life balance with opportunities for thought and reflection within the workplace, while also understanding that keeping employees productive is not immutably connected with keeping employees in motion.