HR insight from a hibernating bear

Why bears go for hibernation or winter sleep during winter months? Even a nursery school student may know the answer and can explain why bears and other animals like some species of bats, snakes, ground squirrels, mouse lemurs, marsupials etc., hibernate during winter.

Answer to the above question should not be either received or interpreted in a simpler way and instead, the various factors that trigger such biological phenomena should be analyzed and understood. Indeed, from various hibernating animals in nature, the modern corporate and its HR function can learn some best management insights, provided they are open and sensitive.

Lack of food and water availability coupled with torturous winter/summer only compels the resident animals to opt for hibernation otherwise called as winter sleep or aestivation (summer sleep). Generally it is believed that some one is sleeping means, they are inactive. But the term inactive is widely misunderstood to be ‘lazy’ in corporate context.

Many employees in most corporate may remain inactive or in a state of winter/summer sleep. The corporate leaders may blame such people to be non performers or as ‘burned out candles’. They are lazy, inactive, non productive and liability to the corporate and that is how the corporate may view such people.

Are these employees really non productive, lazy and inactive. When the corporate looks at the problems through subjective eyes and purely from an individualized zone, naturally they will find more data to support their concept or definitions that they have already formed about such employees. But they should carefully study and understand the entire corporate ecosystem to see and understand why some employees are inactive and non-performing?

Lack of opportunity or scope coupled with unhealthy culture of the people in the corporate only would have made many employees to be ‘inactive’ and go for hibernation. Animals go for hibernation because of lack of food, water and the extreme heat or cold.

The choice of animals to be inactive was not due to their laziness or disinterest but due to the compulsion of the ecosystem where they live. Studies have proved that when these hibernating animals faced no shortage of food had not gone for hibernation.

From every anomaly in nature, the corporate can learn and benefit. The collective effort and responsibility only has made many species of plants and animals to be unique either structurally or behaviourally. The corporate should not miss to acknowledge the ‘collective’ role and contribution of the corporate culture as a whole in determining the performances of people and should not attempt to describe such people as sacrificial goats fit for ablution.

Nature has versatile management insights in its creation and functioning and hence the corporate leaders must approach the nature with quest and commitment to learn. Before blaming your employees, introspect whether your corporate has contributed anything to the non performing attitude of the employees. Keep a collective and mutually supportive platform to operate than from mundane functioning style of boss-subordinates.