Change the Label, Change the Game – How Reframing Unlocks Innovation and Value in Your Business
Priscilla Hinds is an ICF-accredited coach specialising in growth, wellbeing, and mental fitness. As the founder of dream work achieve and creator of the happy growth coach app, she’s dedicated to helping people unlock their full potential and create lasting, positive change in both their lives and businesses.
The way we label and categorise things shapes our perception, and often limits it. In business, we can unconsciously default to the status quo, missing innovation opportunities, overlooking risks, and failing to see the bigger picture.
Reframing offers powerful insights for your business, from day-to-day decisions to long-term strategic planning. Below, we walk through a reframing example to demonstrate its potential.
What if we framed ‘labour costs’ as ‘labour benefits’?
Consider how we describe the money spent on people delivering work in organisations. It’s commonly labelled as a labour cost, implying it’s something to be managed or reduced.
Yet many organisations describe their people as their greatest asset. So why is spending on this asset framed as a cost, rather than a strategic benefit or investment?
Why do the words matter?
A simple shift in language can transform the energy and intent behind your actions.
The terms labour cost and labour benefit trigger very different emotional responses. The language you use will shape your mindset and your decision-making.
Positive reframing can also unlock powerful behavioural benefits, such as better collaboration, improved decision-making, stronger relationships, lower stress, and greater creativity.
Your framing shapes your approach
How might your approach shift if you evaluated labour benefits instead of labour costs? If you’re analysing the benefits, you're likely to take a broader view, deeply considering the strategic value created for your customers and organisation.
In contrast, the traditional labour cost lens often narrows focus to reducing spend while maintaining output, typically aimed at maximising financial return.
Though similar on the surface, the perspective, focus, and creativity each approach sparks are likely to differ greatly.
Change the labels, change your view of the world
If you focused on maximising labour benefits instead of reducing labour costs, what new ideas might emerge?
You might invest more effort into critically evaluating roles and the true business value each one generates, not just what it costs.
Maybe you’d develop a detailed understanding of the specific people skills that deliver the most value for your business.
Or you might focus on how to increase revenue by leveraging labour benefits.
This benefit-focused lens may feel hard to apply in practice, but that’s likely due to a lack of familiarity, not because it’s conceptually more difficult.
Reframing: The big picture perspective
This labour-labelling example is especially pertinent as AI is increasingly touted to replace jobs and reduce labour costs.
In today’s world of uncertainty, turmoil, and rising mental health challenges, people are seeking human connection, trust, support, and someone who listens and understands them. Combined with the fact that few tech projects run perfectly, this explains why many AI-replaceable roles still exist and even thrive. Customers crave human connection, especially in uncertain times.
Is this important societal and organisational impact being thoughtfully considered when we think in terms of labour costs rather than labour benefits?
Taking an even broader view of labour benefits raises an important question: what role should, and does an organisation play in supporting and connecting others in the community?
Reframing at the system level
Let’s extend this concept further. Imagine if organisational performance were reframed to recognise broader labour benefits, such as community wellbeing and social impact. Company valuations and decisions could look very different.
What if organisations were rated by a community happiness index or employee wellness score? How might that shift priorities, and how might society benefit?
This isn’t to suggest that labour costs should never be reduced, or that the label itself is inherently bad. Every situation is contextual and multifactorial, and financial sustainability remains critical. This example simply illustrates how reframing can expand and enrich our thinking.
There are well-known examples of companies that have reframed their entire business and achieved great success, Apple, Netflix, and LEGO among them. But reframing should not be limited to big strategic shifts; it can expand thinking and improve outcomes at any level.
Experiment: Create value for you & your business
Challenge yourself to see more by reframing your thinking and changing the labels you use.
Think about the labels you use in your business. What would change if you re-labelled and viewed things from a different perspective? For example, what if growth coaching was considered core asset improvement, rather than an overhead labelled “learning and development”?
Want to go next level? Challenge yourself to radically reframe something you believe has only one perspective. What happens when you look through a completely different lens? You may be surprised by the new ideas that arise. This can be a powerful exercise to build thought leadership at the team level.
Start with one thing. Change the language, see where it leads. Notice what new insights emerge.
Another powerful reframing experiment is to flip your thinking on a problem. Instead of focusing on the issues, look for the benefits that arise. Everything has upsides and downsides. What you see depends on the lens you use and the timeframe you’re considering.
Reframe for personal growth & mental fitness
Reframing is equally powerful on a personal level. Simply shifting from “I have to” to “I choose to” or “I get to” can be transformative.
Monitor your internal thoughts and words, reframe your “I have to” statements and notice how different it feels.
Final thoughts
Reframing helps your business break free from the status quo and embrace positive disruption. It also boosts your mental fitness, making it a valuable asset for both innovation and wellbeing.
At dream work achieve, we help leaders and teams think differently, grow boldly, and create lasting impact through evidence-based, innovative coaching.
Ready to unlock growth and enhanced mental fitness in your life or business? Visit us to learn more.
Read more from Priscilla Hinds
Priscilla Hinds, Growth & Wellbeing Strategy Coach
Priscilla Hinds is an ICF-accredited coach specialising in personal growth, wellbeing, and mental fitness. She’s the founder of dream work achieve and brings together a lifelong passion for health and wellbeing with years of executive and leadership experience. Helping people create thriving lives and businesses comes naturally. Her mission is to inspire others to dream boldly, grow continually, learn deeply, smile often, move with purpose, and live fully as their best selves.
