Learn how to increase your levels of performance by controlling stress. Hear about the seven themes that emerged from the project and how you can get the report today with the link below.

Topic – Wellness and Wellbeing Study

Mentor – Jet Xavier

• The leadership model must change
• The dollar return can be 1 in 15
• Good retention and recruitment will result
• Get the report here

Transcript:

Kevin: There are many benefits that will flow from looking after your people, and that’s a report that’s been highlighted, sorry, that’s a finding that’s been highlighted in the report from Jet Xavier, the Inaugural Study of Wellness and Wellbeing under the Australian Real Estate Industry, which is available now as a free download on anyone of the sites here, if you just follow the links beside our mentor, Jet Xavier. Jet joins me again. Jet, we’ll look at another couple of themes that emerge from the project itself, and we’ll talk about leaders now and how important they are, particularly wellness and well-being leaders.

Jet Xavier: Yeah. I think there’s a certain type of leadership in the industry that doesn’t include wellness and well-being, and I think what we fail to understand, what the report’s highlighted is that if we have more wellness and well-being leaders in the industry, there’s actually an upside of better return on investment for that, I think upwards to $15 for one dollar spent on wellness and well-being initiatives in businesses, but there’s also … It makes a company or an office an attractive employer brand, and so talented people want to work for a business that has wellness and well-being practices.

Jet Xavier: If we have more leaders who are wellness and well-being focused and understand the ROI with that, and also understand that this is a good retention and recruitment tool, we’re going to have more thriving offices with better leadership in place, rather than just a one-dimensional type leadership that is occurring across real estate offices.

Kevin: Jet, can you give me a practical example of what it would look like? What does a leader need to be doing to focus on wellness and well-being?

Jet Xavier: Well, I think that the new breed of leaders, whether they’ve been in the industry a long time or just got into the industry, they’re leaders who take care of their own wellness and well-being. They look after themselves. They’re very focused, they’re well-trained, they have great attitudes. They have high levels of emotional intelligence. They put wellness and well-being as a very important part of their own individual lives, and therefore, they set that example.

Jet Xavier: The second thing is that taking wellness and well-being seriously in the workplace, and saying that wellness and well-being is important, and this is how we do wellness and well-being in our workplace. For people to work here, do you align with this value? I think that’s really important as well.

Kevin: Yeah. I think the point you made, too, earlier in this morning’s chat was that this can be a tremendous attraction tool for getting good people into your office. The environment itself will attract them.

Jet Xavier: Yeah, well, what’s happening is people that are coming into any type of industry are starting to look at, well, how is this business going to take care of me? How is it going to nurture me? How is it going to support me? How is it going to help develop me, protect me in a lot of ways? I mean, there are people looking for organisations that have strong wellness and well-being practices and look at the Googles, the Zappos, Amazons of this world and how they take care of the people that work for them.

Jet Xavier: Well, they’re very progressive and innovative, and real estate needs to be the same. We need to have good workplaces build on good wellness and well-being practises that are going to draw people and help them have good sustainable careers. I think that’s an attractive proposition for anyone trying to get into real estate.

Kevin: Yeah, and the points you’re making here are quite relevant, too, in terms of how we measure success. I mean, we’ve measured it purely, in a lot of cases, on financial results, as opposed to health and well-being, balance, community, what we do and how we build relationships.

Jet Xavier: Well, this is another theme that came up, the include theme from the round tables last year. It seems that the only metric for success in real estate is financial, when the real estate offices of brands of the future, they’re going to have a little bit more depth than that. Success will be how we look after our people, the resources that we provide those people, how we act in our community, how we deal with stress, how we train our people on emotional intelligence or dealing with stress or customer service, even. These things are going to be far more important than just a financial metric.

Jet Xavier: Financial metrics is important, too, because we’re in a commercial business, and you have to measure that, otherwise everyone would be going broke, but it can’t be the only metric. There has to be other metrics as well. Arianna Huffington talks about money and power being the two metrics that we all live by in business, but she says we need a third metric, and that is thriving. We need a metric that helps people have vitality and boosts happiness and makes the experience more enjoyable and something that we want to be a part of, rather than disengaging from. In a Gallup survey recently found 85% of people are disengaged in the workplace, which is trillions and trillions of dollars of impact, so we want to try and avoid that, definitely, by making different metrics around what success is in the real estate office.

Kevin: It’s really amazing, isn’t it, that we can measure success in real estate from the relationships that we build with our clients, yet your survey, one of the key findings was that 46% of people said that it impacted on their ability to make personal relationships outside of work. Yet here it is, inside of work we’re meant to build those relationships, but in our own personal lives we can’t do it.

Jet Xavier: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. I mean, the 46% often felt work impacted on their personal relationships. Like I said at the start, real estate can take the best of you so there’s nothing left to give to the most important people that are in your life. It’s definitely happening all the time. Using this theme of include, one of the metrics of success is how are your personal relationships? Is the job doing a good thing for your personal relationships, or is it not? That sort of change has to happen as well.

Kevin: Yeah, I think it was Doug Driscoll, CEO for Starr Partners has made the point in one of your round tables that we put people on pedestals, and we ask the wrong questions. We’re not focused enough on balance as one of the issues to get really good performance.

Jet Xavier: No, and I mean, we’re talking about integration these days, and how we can integrate work and life. So a successful agency, rather than saying, “Okay, success looks like a million dollar GCI here,” that’s fine, but success also looks like how much time have you had off? How much time have you had with your family? How good of a team player are you? What type of attitude do you have? How is your health? That’s what success also looks like, so we need to change those measures of success so we have a broader holistic view of what success actually is in the real estate office.

Kevin: Well said. Jet Xavier, my guest this week. That full report is available for you. Use any one of the links on any one of the pages here on REUNCUT and that’ll take you straight to Jet’s website, and you can download that report. It’s absolutely free. We’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll round this series out with Jet Xavier. Talk to you again in the morning, mate. Thank you.

Jet Xavier: Thanks, mate. Bye.