Author: Wouter Torfs
The Torfs shoe store chain is a well-known concept in Flanders. Grandson Wouter sees his book ‘Working with Heart and Soul’ as a tribute to the founders of the renowned business. Many of their principles remain intact in the realization of “a Great Place to Work.”
The message is clear: “What is important is the rose.” And, of course, lots of fun at work… Happy people simply function better. The trick is to trigger that happiness.
As every CEO in this world knows, the workload of employees is increasing, and many employees also work more distantly, less engaged. This respectively promotes both burnout and bore-out. Many people wear a mask of who they are when they go to work. As a result, they have too little time at home to be themselves. The book offers a number of ideas that can serve as risk mitigation measures, although this term, which might cause allergies for many people, is not used anywhere in the book.
For preventing burnout, it’s important that a person engages in what they love to do, what they are good at, and that they can be themselves. As for bore-out, the measure is that the employee must be involved with the organization from the heart, something that can be promoted with a flat hierarchy and self-managed teams.
At Torfs, there are still supervisors to a certain extent, but employees are also involved in developing the mission, strategy, and values of the company. It even goes so far that every Torfs store sponsors a child in the Cunina project. The employees have chosen this themselves. Among other ways, this is how the organization consistently implements its values. They do what they say and they say what they do.
The book is interesting for every CEO who has employees suffering from stress at work, burn-out, and bore-out. Of course, every business leader must search for and implement their own formula. And of course, self-managed teams do not solve all frictions with customers.
At the end of the book, the author yields to the die-hards who keep asking during presentations, “How do you tackle it?”. For this, the author provides a number of practices. These are:
- Be present as a leader!
- The land of smiles
- Spread the word
- Listen, observe, and… trigger
- Keep up with your digital age
- For a good bad-news conversation
- The figures from SD Worx: about seniority, health costs, sickness absence, and turnover
- Distinguish yourself by things you don’t have
- Invest in trust and get rid of that time clock!
- Be reasonable and show understanding!
- Co-workers, with an emphasis on together! The power of ‘together’ in business
- Create magic moments!
- Little acts of kindness
- Not only appreciate your employees, but also thank them!
What’s missing, in my opinion, is “Take your time to realize this – work on maturity”. Haste and rush are rarely good. Because if you aim for a completely flat hierarchy by chopping it away hastily, you create a power vacuum. Then, the maturity of the employees is important to avoid the risk of anarchy.