IAM2037 – Founder Helps Organizations Address Employee Absenteeism, Disengagement & Rising Health Care Costs

In this episode, we have Nancy Sajjadi, the founder of Life Quality by Design LLC. Nancy shares about her work helping organizations address issues of employee absenteeism, disengagement, and rising healthcare costs.

She discusses the process of identifying barriers to wellbeing at both an individual and organizational level, and her services like signature workshops, consulting to optimize wellness programs, and lunch-and-learn seminars. Nancy shares insight from her background in scientific and engineering fields coupling it with her personal experiences.

• Background: Nancy Sajjadi is a Certified Corporate Wellness Specialist and founder of Life Quality By Design, LLC. She offers innovative solutions to businesses dealing with issues like employee absenteeism, disengagement, and escalating healthcare costs.
• Life Quality by Design: Sajjadi applies her specialized “quality by design” approach that utilizes her background in Genetic Engineering to empower employees at all levels to identify personal well-being barriers and transform their lives.
• Workstyle: Nancy operates through transformative practices that increase work-life alignment and optimize mutual benefits for both employees and their organizations.
• CEO Nugget: Nancy advises CEOs to make time for periods of complete disengagement to reflect on their quality of life and build relationships before they are needed professionally.
• CEO Defined: Nancy perceives a CEO as a Chief Entropy Objector and Chief Empathy Officer, tasked to use their influence to create more structured, empathetic environments.

Website: lifequalitybydesign.com

Previous Episode: founder-helps-organizations-address-employee-absenteeism-disengagement-rising-health-care-costs

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Transcription:

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Nancy Sajjadi Teaser 00:00

Identify barriers to being at the individual and organizational level. The goal here is to see the particular organization where they're located, their size, the type of employees, whether they're older or younger, their education levels, what is it that's really leading them to unhealthy lifestyles.

Then we work to identify and develop corrective and preventative actions to create a culture of wellbeing, which essentially comes down to fostering very healthy relationships between employees and the organization and amongst each other.

Intro 00:32

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:59

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresham Harkless from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Nancy Sajjadi of Life Quality by Design.

Nancy, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Nancy Sajjadi 01:11

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Gresham Harkless 01:13

No problem, man. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit about all the awesome things that Nancy is doing so you can learn a little bit more about her.

Nancy Sejati is the founder of Life Quality by Design LLC, a business-to-business venture that helps organizations address issues of employee absenteeism, disengagement, and rising healthcare costs. She is a certified corporate wellness specialist who works with leaders to help employees at all levels identify barriers to their personal well-being and inspires them to a higher level of commitment to sustain changes to improve their quality of life by applying an engineering approach known as quality by design.

She is a well-being enthusiast who has used her master's degree in genetic engineering and extensive experience with a multitude of organizations and teams at all levels to develop transformative programs and services that foster shared responsibility for achieving greater work-life alignment and encouraging its mutual benefits for the employees and the organizations that employ them.

Nancy, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Nancy Sajjadi 02:16

I am. I am excited to do so.

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Gresham Harkless 02:18

Awesome. I wanted to jump right in and ask you for what I call your CEO story. What led you to start your business?

Nancy Sajjadi 02:24

If I think back, I think I actually informally started this business when I was about 16 years old. I was sitting with my best friend in her bedroom and she was lamenting her boyfriend troubles and I got out a piece of paper and pencil and I said, I want you to write down what would be your optimal boyfriend relationship and what would be the attributes of your boyfriend, the ideal boyfriend. And really that was the start of me understanding a life quality by design approach, which is deciding what it is that you want and then figuring out how you're going to get it. So that was the informal start and then fast forward 40 years and I think there was a convergence of my professional biotech consulting work and my personal happenings a couple of years ago.

So I was invited to give a talk in 2014 at a new technologies and new vaccines meeting and I was speaking on quality by design principles for quality control testing. At the same time, I had changes in my personal life. My kids were graduating from high school, my mother passed away and more importantly, I witnessed the devastating and rippling effects of physical and mental health effects of choices that very highly educated people that I encountered and knew were making and trying to balance their personal and professional lives.

I saw an opportunity to make a difference, and that's how Life Quality by Design was born.

Gresham Harkless 03:50

Awesome. I always use the phrase, reverse engineering and always trying to figure out where you want to be and figure out how you can go about getting there. So I love the approach and everything that you have.

I wanted to drill a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more about like how you serve your clients and what services you provide.

Nancy Sajjadi 04:06

Essentially, where I start is trying to raise awareness, essentially, about the rise in impaired functioning we see that manifested in disengagement. The Gallup Poll in 2013 indicated that 71 percent of the U. S. workforce is disengaged. We see rising absenteeism and burnout. For example, in the physician arena, something like 65 percent of family physicians report being burned out. We know we have rising healthcare costs as a nation, 3 trillion, which is around 20 percent of our GDP is related to healthcare. About 50 percent of that is attributed to lifestyle, unhealthy lifestyle. So that's the first thing is to really make aware to organization employees that these are huge cost to us personally and as a nation and as organization. So that's the first thing is just raising awareness.

The second thing we do is identify barriers to being at the individual and organizational level. The goal here is to see the particular organization, where they're located, their size, the type of employees, whether they're older or younger, their education levels, what is it that's really leading them to unhealthy lifestyles. Then we work to identify and develop corrective and preventative actions to create a culture of wellbeing, which essentially comes down to fostering very healthy relationships between employees and the organization and amongst each other.

In terms of actual services, we offer two signature workshops, one sort of aimed at employees and their responsibility, and that would be work-life alignment, how to achieve greater work-life alignment, and also a workshop for leaders at all levels to help them understand how the organization might be contributing to poor and unhealthy lifestyle choices. We also offer consulting to help optimize wellness programs and some coaching and championing for individuals and teams where people are maybe struggling with specific problems in the organization. Essentially we also offer lunch and learn seminars. That's a popular item to cover, select topics such as healthy eating exercise, financial security, things like that.

Gresham Harkless 06:16

Awesome. I know a lot of times like you mentioned when you started talking is a lot of times is increasing awareness of what's going on and what's happening to the world in the community and of course, the business world and how you can best go about changing it. So I think it's awesome that you have those different options for organizations or businesses that want to increase and improve their overall health by design, quality by design, I should say.

I wanted to drill a little bit deeper and ask you for your quote and quote secret sauce, or what do you feel makes your organization or your company unique?

Nancy Sajjadi 06:45

I would say that I think I have a not a traditional background. I have, again, a scientific and engineering background, but I think that experience and in that Genetic engineering and experimental medicines really helped me develop what Edward Deming, the famous engineer and quality expert, coined as the profound, base of profound knowledge where you understand systems, you understand variation in systems, you have a basic understanding of what constitutes knowledge, as well as an interest in psychology and how people think and develop relationships.

And my experience, I think, is really wrapped in all of that. Again, my personal experience, I had the great fortune of growing up at a time, a place, and in a family where the way that we lived was one that was very healthy. So I think I just bring a credibility and a passion that people recognize and are able to make changes. I like to refer to the main mode of influence as the normative power of the actual, just being able to show people how I've applied these things in my own life and how I've applied it as an executive and as a consultant in the biotech industry to help people take more control of their decisions and their lives.

Gresham Harkless 08:02

Awesome. I love the fact that you're able to obviously have that engineering background and that ability to understand things on a very high level, but be able to of course communicate that and dumb it down for us so that we completely understand how we can definitely make and implement those changes. So I definitely appreciate that.

What I wanted to do now is to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this might be an app, it might be a book or it might be a habit, but it's something that you lean on or do on a regular everyday basis that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Nancy Sajjadi 08:31

That's a great question. Let me say that you just talked about quote and quote dumbing it down. I don't like to use that term because I think everybody is smart, but I would like to say that I think heuristics sort of simple models and simple tools really help people. And so I actually really like Gary Chapman. He is the author of the five love languages because he has taken what I call practice-based evidence as a pastor and a marriage counselor. He developed a very simple set of languages that he can communicate to people to improve their relationship. So I think about that often, just trying to keep things very simple and focused. That's the first one.

The second one would be a book called The Lost Art of Listening. I think everything in life quality of life comes down to quality of relationships. When you talk about quality of relationships, that really comes down to the capacity that you have to listen. The Lost Art of Listening by Michael Nichols is a book that I refer back to often, if not to read it, certainly to think about the principles and always trying to focus on improving listening skills.

I guess I keep in my head all the time an Ayn Rand quote, which is, you can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. We have to just understand that we have power over our choices and we can make decisions to lead to good outcomes if we accept that as a first premise. Then I basically meditate and I make sure I get in some good exercise every morning before I start my day.

Gresham Harkless 09:57

Awesome. Yeah, those are definitely some great CEO hacks and obviously some books to pick up as well, too. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This might be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice you might have for other CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners.

Nancy Sajjadi 10:10

That's a good question. We probably again back to this idea that we have so much power that we can exercise in making healthy choices for ourselves. So I think entrepreneurs often start their businesses because they want to take more control over their lives, but running a business can be very overwhelming.

I think it's important to take time to completely get away so that you remember what off feels like and to reflect regularly on your quality of life before you jump back into work. It's really important, I think, to always focus on your key personal and professional relationships and make sure that you remember that you need to feed them before you need them. I guess that would be it.

Gresham Harkless 10:47

I love that. I love that. Feed them before you need them. I think that's so important is that a lot of times you're making sure that you keep your cup full, so to speak, and you're making sure you're taking care of those things and you taking time to do that. So I think that's a phenomenal CEO nugget.

Now I wanted to ask you for what I call the definition of what being a CEO means. We're hoping on this show to invite different types of quote and quote CEOs on the podcast so that we can learn from different people with different backgrounds, a different number of employees, and so on, to understand exactly what they think being a CEO means. So I wanted to ask you very specifically, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Nancy Sajjadi 11:21

I think of that acronym as standing for two things and reflecting two roles. I'd say the first is a chief entropy objector. And if biology all natural processes, entropy or chaos of the universe increases. So whenever we transform energy, we lose some of it to chaos. And so my main goal is to transform as much of the available energy as I have and my clients have into productive outcomes for them. Correspondingly, of course, then to minimize the energy loss towards unproductive chaos, which has a way of gaining momentum.

The second I would say is to consider the chief empathy officer. To me, it means, being able to consistently create enough space between reacting and responding to people so that my thoughts can catch up with my emotions and that other people will always feel honored during important conversations and in the process of making critical decisions.

Gresham Harkless 12:13

Awesome. I love those two definitions and entropy and empathy. You said?

Nancy Sajjadi 12:19

Yes, entropy objector and empathy officer.

Gresham Harkless 12:22

I love that. I love that. I can't say that three times fast, but I love those definitions and I think they definitely hit home. So, Nancy, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out to speak with us, tell us a little bit about your background and give us some incredible insight into all the awesome things that you're doing.

What I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and how best people can get a hold of you.

Nancy Sajjadi 12:42

I guess I didn't really talk too much about the life quality by design or quality by design principles, but I think it's important to maintain a focus on a sort of a decision-making framework in your life. So, there are three components I like to think of. One is your awareness of your unmet needs. We have to be careful, especially as entrepreneurs. Unhealthy actually starts to feel normal, normal after a while. So we need to really be aware of where our needs are not getting met. Focus on those.

The second is to maintain good self other balance. I think a lot of times when we lose our wellbeing, it's due to responsibility and imbalance that we either, take too much responsibility for things or not enough. And that, always accessing good information to make good decisions. That's really important.

As for being able to get ahold of me, you can email me at nancyatlifequalitybydesign.com. You can call me at 703 727 9195. I would love it. If you'd like to look at my blogs, you can find them on the website under the blog tab at www.lifequalitybydesign.com.

Gresham Harkless 13:43

Awesome. We'll make sure to have those links in the show notes. I truly appreciate all the awesome things that you're doing and that you talked about with.

Talked about with us today, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Nancy Sajjadi 13:54

Thank you. You too.

Outro 13:55

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase. It's a community. Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at blue16media.com.

This has been the I Am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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