EI Tip for The Day: Simple Math--A Quick Business Case for Emotional Intelligence

Looking for a quick business case for developing emotional intelligence in the workplace? Try this simple math exercise. Estimate the number of minutes that the average employee in your client organisation spends per day, reacting to unemotionally intelligent behaviour? Reacting in a way that creates a negative emotional response, and by virtue of that, is unproductive time. Twenty minutes? Ten? Multiple this estimate by the number of employees in the organisation and you will quickly calculate the lost productivity per day that results from a lack of emotionally intelligent behaviour. In a 10,000 employee organisation, that amounts to 100,000 minutes per day—or almost 1,700 hours of lost productivity. Every day. (See full story below).

“How many minutes does the average employee spend per day, reacting to the unemotionally intelligent behaviour of a colleague? A boss? A customer?”

This question was posed to me a couple of weeks ago by Anthony Palombit, Genos’ master trainer for the Americas region, during a business trip to the U.S.. Anthony and I (along with Jackie Ramirez, our US head of Sales and Marketing) were designing an EI leadership program for senior managers at a semiconductor manufacturing firm in Silicon Valley—a tough audience who were sceptical about the value of developing their emotional intelligence, and who wanted hard, cold data as part of the business case for attending the 2-day course.

I thought about my own typical day, and the varied situations—conversations, phone calls, e-mails, where emotional intelligence was lacking or not present at all, and surmised out loud—’15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes a day.’ ‘Minutes,’ I thought to myself, where I wasn’t concentrating, wasn’t focused, wasn’t being my most productive self.’

To be conservative, we estimated the average number of minutes spent in this unproductive state to be ten minutes. Ten minutes a day having a negative emotional reaction to unemotionally intelligent behaviour in the workplace. Ten minutes of lost productivity. Each and every business day.

Now this particular client has 9,500 employees and if you do the math, that’s the equivalent of 95,000 minutes a day—or approximately 1,600 hours of lost productivity per day. Or 8,000 hours per week. Or 416,000 hours per year.

What would be the result, if each of us worked on one behaviour, one unemotionally intelligent behaviour that we sometimes demonstrate at work (and if we’re honest, we know we ALL have at least one)—a behaviour that creates a negative emotional response in our colleagues, or worse still, our customers?

The post script to the story was the leadership program was a big success, and the business case proved to be a potent and very real reminder of the cost of unemotionally intelligent behaviour at work.

What’s the business case for EI? The next time you’re asked, remember it’s just simple math.