Going Through the Motions — What Presenteeism Does to Decisions Before Anyone Stops Showing Up

Presenteeism and Decision Quality: Measuring the capacity behind attendance in large organisations

Georgina Woodley spent more than 20 years running customer insight and market research for large Australian organisations, including 13 years as Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand at BVA BDRC, and she argues the most expensive people in a business are often the ones who never miss a day. Attendance, output and engagement scores all read normal while stress and cognitive load strip the capacity behind decisions, creativity and collaboration. She built the Joy-O-Meter, the first application of her Human Energy Intelligence framework, to measure that gap directly instead of inferring it from a yearly engagement survey. She names the patterns that produce it: meetings that decide nothing, work that stays invisible until it fails, and structures that reward presence over contribution. Listeners leave able to tell a team that is present from a team that is working, and knowing what to check before next quarter's numbers explain it for them.

About Georgina Woodley

Georgina Woodley, podcast guest

Insight Strategist | Human Energy Intelligence

20+ years Customer insight and organisational performance3-part ecosystem Custology Insights, Joy-O-Meter and TTIMBA AGSM at UNSW Business SchoolChief Insights Officer Custology Insights

Human Energy Intelligence/ Organisational/ Performance Leadership/ Customer Experience

Georgina Woodley is an insight strategist in the emerging field of Human Energy Intelligence—a business framework for understanding how the invisible human factors inside organisations influence performance, leadership, customer experience and business outcomes.

After more than two decades leading customer insight and market research for some of Australia's largest organisations, Georgina began questioning a fundamental assumption: what if organisations are measuring performance outcomes while remaining blind to the human forces creating them? That question became the foundation of her work.

Drawing on more than 20 years of experience in consulting, market research and customer psychology—including Deloitte Consulting, Managing Director ANZ for BVA BDRC, and now as Chief Insights Officer of Custology Insights—Georgina combines rigorous business research with a fresh perspective on organisational performance.

Her work explores how human state influences decision-making, creativity, collaboration and innovation, arguing that performance is not just driven by strategy—it is driven by the state of the people executing it.

This thinking led Georgina to develop Human Energy Intelligence, a business framework for understanding the invisible human drivers of organisational performance. Its first application, Joy-O-Meter, is a methodology designed to help organisations measure and better understand those invisible human dynamics.

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Boosting manufacturing outcomes by understanding human energy, with Georgina Woodley of Custology Insights
0:00 / 40:16
The Manufacturing Employer· Listen to Georgina Woodley on air