IAM043 – Founder Helps Organizations Address Employee Absenteeism, Disengagement & Rising Health Care Costs

Nancy Sajjadi 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 health care 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.

• CEO Hack: Gary Chapman of The Five Love Languages, Michael P. Nichols' The Lost Art of Listening Second Edition: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships, meditate and exercise
• CEO Nugget: Take time to completely get away and remember what “off” looks like and reflect on your quality life and “feed them [relationships] before you need them”
• CEO Defined: Chief Entropy Objector and Chief  Empathy Officer

Website: http://lifequalitybydesign.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancycsajjadi/

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

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 0:27

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresham Harkless from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today Nancy Sajjadi of Life Quality by Design. Nancy, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Nancy Sajjadi 0:39

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Gresham Harkless 0:41

No problem. And 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 Sajjadi 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 health care costs. She's a certified corporate wellness specialist who works with leaders who help employees at all levels, identifies barriers to their personal well-being, and inspires them to a higher level of commitment to sustaining changes to improve their quality of life by applying an engineering approach known as Life 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 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 1:44

I am excited to do so.

Gresham Harkless 1:46

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

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Nancy Sajjadi 1:53

Well, 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's troubles. And I said to her, I got 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 kind of the start of my understanding of the 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 sort of the informal start. And then sort of 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. And so I was invited to give a talk in 2014 at the new technologies and new vaccines meeting, and I was speaking on quality by Design Principles for quality control, and testing. And at the same time, I changed in my personal life, my kids are graduating from high school, and my mother passed away. And more importantly, I sort of saw sort of witnessing the devastating and sort of rippling effects of physical and mental health effects of choices that very highly educated people that I encountered knew were making and trying to balance their personal and professional lives. And I suppose I saw an opportunity to make a difference. And that's how Life Quality by Design was born.

Gresham Harkless 3:23

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And, I always use the phrase, you know, reverse engineering and always trying to figure out where you want to be and figure out how you go about getting there. So I love that approach and everything that you have. So I wanted to drill a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more about like how you started with clients and what services you provide.

Nancy Sajjadi 3:40

Well, 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% of the US workforce is disengaged, we see rising absenteeism and burnout. For example, in the physician arena, something like 65% of Family Physicians reports being burned out. We know we have rising healthcare costs as a nation of $3 trillion, which is around 20% of our GDP is related to healthcare, and about 50% of that is attributed to lifestyle unhealthy lifestyles. So that's the first thing is to really make aware to the organization's employees that these are huge costs to us personally and as a nation and as an organization.

So that's the first thing is just raising awareness. The second thing we do is identify barriers to well-being at the individual and the organizational level. The goal here is to see, you know, the particular organization where they're located their size, the type of employees when they're older or younger, their education levels. I mean, 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 well-being, 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. And essentially, we also offer Lunch and Learn seminars, that's a popular item to cover, you know, select topics such as healthy eating, exercise, financial security, things like that.

Gresham Harkless 5:51

Awesome, awesome, I was me I know a lot of times, like you, like you mentioned when you started talking a lot of times is kind of increasing the awareness of what's going on and what's happening to the world and the community and, of course, the business world and how you can best go about changing it. So I think that's awesome that you have those different options for organizations or businesses that want to kind of increase and improve their overall health by design, quality by design, I should say. So I wanted to drill a little bit deeper and ask you for your quote unquote, your secret sauce, or what you feel makes your organization your company unique.

Nancy Sajjadi 6:22

Well, I would say that I think it's, you know, I have sort of another 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, a famous engineer, and quality expert coined as the profound base of profound knowledge where you sort of 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. And 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. And so I think I just bring sort of credibility. And yeah, just a credibility and a passion that people recognize and are able to make changes I like to refer to kind of 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 lives, and how I've applied it as an executive and as a consultant in the biotech industry, to help really just to help people take more control of their decisions and their lives.

Gresham Harkless 7:41

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yeah. And 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 kind of dumb it down for us so that we completely understand how we can definitely, you know, make an implement those changes. So I definitely appreciate that.

And now, what I wanted to do now is to switch gears a little bit and, 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 kind of lean on or do on a regular everyday basis that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Nancy Sajjadi 8:13

That's a great question. Let me say that you just talked about sort of, quote-unquote, 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 like I think about that often just trying to keep things very simple and focus. That's the first one.

The second one would be a book called The Lost Art of Listening. I mean, I think everything in life, quality of life comes down to the quality of relationships. And when you talk about the quality of relationships, that really comes down to the capacity that you have to listen and 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 sort of keep it in my head all the time and I ran a 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 sort of accept that as a first premise. And then I basically meditate and I make sure I get in some good exercise every morning before I start my day.

Gresham Harkless 9:41

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

Nancy Sajjadi 9:55

Ah, that's a good question. I guess I'm probably again back to this idea that we have so much power that we can exercise and make 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.

And 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. And 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. And I guess that would be.

Gresham Harkless 10:34

I love that, I love that feed them before you need them. And I think that's so important is that a lot of times you 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 take the time to do that. So I think that's a phenomenal CEO nugget. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call the definition of what being a CEO means. And we're hoping on this show to invite different types of quotes, unquote, and 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 us being a CEO means. So I wanted to ask you very specifically, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Nancy Sajjadi 11:09

Well, I think that acronym is standing for two things and sort of reflects two roles, I'd say the first is a chief entropy objector. And if you know biology, all natural processes, entropy, or chaos of the universe increases. So whenever we transform energy, we lose some of it to chaos. And the main goal is to transform as much of the available energy, as I have in my clients into productive outcomes for them. And 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 12:03

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

Nancy Sajjadi 12:09

Yes, entropy objector and empathy officer.

Gresham Harkless 12:12

I love that, I love that. 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 wanted to do was 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 12:33

I guess, you know, 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, you know, a focus on a sort of a decision-making framework in your life to sort of be, there's sort of three components I like to think of one is your awareness of your unmet needs, you know, we have to be careful, especially as entrepreneurs, unhealthy actually starts to feel normal or normal after a while. So we need to really be aware of where our needs are not getting mad, to focus on those.

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

As for being able to get a hold of me, you can email me at nancy@lifequalitybydesign.com You can call me at 703-727-9195. And 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 13:36

Awesome, awesome, awesome. We will make sure to have those links in the show notes and I truly appreciate all the awesome things that you're doing and that you talked about with us today. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Nancy Sajjadi 13:48

Thank you, you too Gresh

Outro 13:50

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co

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