a better world Archives - Sajith Mathew

Is that possible? If it is, why are we not doing it?

Yes, it is possible. But I’m not so sure why are we not doing it.

We can all agree that being healthy is an aspect that we all can benefit from – regardless of our age, gender, career, or demography.

Becoming healthy is an aspect any human being can benefit from

I’m taking this example to illustrate what I’m talking about.

Let me show you how certain people are already doing it as it’s part of their lives.

I’m talking about celebrities. For them, eating right, doing exercise, and being healthy are part of the process. They just need to do it to stay in the game.

That’s how that particular industry is incentivized.

Athletes, movie actors and actresses, and sports players have to be healthy to be in the game. It becomes a necessity for them.

Now, It seems to be a distant dream for most of us to think about integrating habits like these into our lives.

Probably because our professions don’t demand it in the first place.

If we are doing it, it’s because we are internally motivated and prioritizing it.

I get it when most of us cannot do this.

When we have a work deadline and a family to run, being healthy in all aspects takes a backseat.

It’s part of normal human psychology.

When it comes to corporate employees or any other 9-5 profession, multiple priorities come on top of ‘being healthy’, and hence this aspect takes a backseat.

But how can we design better systems that progress along with taking care of individuals that are part of the system?

The keystone here is that it should be a win-win situation.

I’m taking a single scenario where 90% of the cross-section of people are part of – a 9-5 profession

If we can integrate good habits into this system, then that can change people’s lives.

Take for example, if having a healthy lifestyle – eating right, exercising, good mental health – is prioritized and integrated into professions, then that alone can change things around.

I’m not stating that such habits are not promoted, but it is not really prioritized.

A majority of us would do anything to get that promotion or more clients or better sales because that’s where the incentives are – we need this kind of thinking on this new system as well.

If a healthy lifestyle is incentivized in some way, most people tend to do it.

Now, how does this benefit the system?

Research says that healthy people are more productive. You do much more work and faster when you’re healthy.

If you think about it, corporations are moved in directions where a few key people make decisions for the benefit of the organization.

Taking a scenario – Infosys has roughly 2,70,000 employees.

I’m going with a calculation that puts a maximum room for any error.

If 2 lakh of these employees started inculcating better habits for a healthy lifestyle – because the profession demands it. And each one of them saves 30 mins a day becoming more productive due to which they can do 30 mins of extra work, just think about the total productivity increase for Infosys as a company.

2,00,000 employees * 0.5 hours = 1,00,000 hours per day (number of extra productive hours for the company)

Think about a week, a month, a quarter, and a financial year.

Now, the system is benefited hugely as you saw just now.

Now, how do the employees get benefited – they’re living a better and healthy life.

When incentives are placed in such a way that the employees trying to live a healthy lifestyle are benefited, things start to move in the right direction.

Implementing systems like these are hugely beneficial for our society.

Whenever we think about making changes, all we have to do is to understand where the incentives are.

Things will move only according to the incentives on a larger scale – wherever it is.

If all the tax rebates that governments provide for the corporates go into stuff like these, there’s no reason why they don’t do it.

Changes can happen bottom-up – where an individual starts the change and it slowly builds up into a bigger one – when others see the positive impacts and start taking up the baton.

The change here works better with a top-down approach.

If the governments decide and come up with a policy enabling tax rebates on these terms, corporates will be glad to implement them because that’s where the incentives are, and the individuals will be benefited in the larger picture.

The intention of all these is to make individuals happy. If people are happy, then we can assume that society is progressing in the right direction.

This is just a scenario of how the systems and individuals can grow and progress together.

I believe this is possible in a wide variety of scenarios than we can imagine.

All we have to do is to move the incentives in a direction that benefits the system and the individuals at the same time.

And time will tell you the positive impacts it is going to bring around us.

if you have any ideas on other scenarios where we can do this, I’d love to hear them.

Wishing you the best.