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The SWIMCON24 convention on the Sunshine Coast has commenced with Elaine Jobson, Chief Executive of Jetts Fitness, present the keynote address on the topic of ‘High Performance Through Happy People’.

In a significant showing of cross-sector learning, Jobson’s presentation saw her share

strategies that make organisations high on performance and high on employee engagement.

Underpinning this, she explained that making staff and team members feel safe in their working environment is fundamental to their effective performance.

Speaking after her presentation Jobson advised “when doing presentations like this, you are really hoping that it resonates with the audience in a way that they can take it home and actually take it into their own businesses.

“I presented on culture and happiness today, and I think wherever you go, there's culture, whether it's in a team sport or it's a company or even a community group. You get culture. And I think we all want to be in an environment where culture is amazing.

“We don't always know how to achieve it, so hopefully today talking about things like the importance of leadership, how that needs to give permission for a culture to behave by making sure that you describe what culture you want and being able to even identify the list of things that you want, like I did with the 'Ninja’ … and also the things that you don't want with the ‘Nonja’.

“Having a culture where happy people make your customers happy, in turn, makes a successful business.

Referring to Maslow's hierarchy of needs (proposed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper  A Theory of Human Motivation in the journal Psychological Review) in her presentation and her recently published book High Performance Through Happy People, Jobson stated “having a culture where happy people make your customers happy, in turn, makes a successful business.

Speaking about safe working environments, Jobson stated “I always spend time in these presentations talking a lot about the kind of bottom rung of ‘Maslow’, I think sometimes we just assume people feel safe, but you actually can't build on happiness or achieve happiness unless people really do feel safe.

“So I think being really thorough with your strategies of, when we talk about people feeling safe, I know I spoke about South Africa today (she headed operations for Virgin Active South Australia from 2008 to 2011, ed) and that's an extreme example where a lot of people don't have the ability to look after themselves from a medical perspective. Even teams here have to feel safe of knowing what's expected of them when they need to know what to wear to work.

“There was a situation when we were at Virgin Active where it used to take ages for the uniforms to arrive, and obviously everyone was dressed in red. And so what the teams were doing is if somebody started new while they're waiting for their uniform, they used to say ‘hey, come to work dressed in black’, because most people got something, black pants, black T-shirt in the wardrobe.

“But what we didn't realise is that people is like being all black, walking onto the pitch when you're in amongst a team of white. So, it was a really bad strategy. So we implemented the ability to make sure that everybody got a red uniform and felt part of that team from day one, whereas I say how unsafe you'd feel if you had a completely different looks, everybody else on the team. So small things like that.”

Presented by SWIM Coaches and Teachers Australia (SCTA), SWIMCON24 is Australia’s premier conference for swim coaches and teachers, aquatic professionals and industry leaders.

Commencing today at the Events Centre, Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, SWIMCON24 runs through to Sunday 22nd September.

Images: Elaine Jobson (top), addressing the role of the  'Ninja’ and the ‘Nonja’ in building high performance teams during her SWIMCON24 presentation (middle) and with SCTA Chief Executive Brendon Ward and Australasian Leisure Management Publisher Nigel Benton after her SWIMCON24 presentation (below).

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