You are looking to improve employee well-being in the workplace and you need some ideas. Nothing you’ve tried has worked. At this point, you would consider even out of the box wellness ideas! This post explores three unconventional solutions for health and wellbeing at work.

Today, we are working harder than ever. Everyday you wake up and face a gargantuan workload. There is always a new direction to go, a new trend to get on top of, a bottom line to secure, accompanied by ever-present issues and problems.

HR doesn’t have to be one of those issues. You can do three things to improve your workplace well-being and impact your staff motivation and performance.

 

1. Start with trust.

As babies, we naturally gravitate toward helping others. As a social animal you are built to enrich others’ lives, intuitively realizing that doing so automatically directly or indirectly rewards you. Young children are intrinsically driven to help and do not expect a reward. Multiple studies confirm that, if allowed, toddlers will continue to support others throughout adolescence and adulthood.

Most of our performance-oriented workspaces do not, however, reflect that evidence-based research. Modern workplaces frequently require that you prove or demonstrate you are doing your best. They are rooted in the idea that trust is earned, not given, and only after you prove your competence.

Despite the intrinsic desire that originates at birth, despite the due diligence the organization did when they hired the individual, and despite evidence-based willingness on the part of the employee, most managers assume that staff need to be pushed or coerced in some fashion to perform more or better.

If something happens, where an employee is not performing to expectations, even if a performance improvement plan is unrolled, that staff member is almost never given the benefit of the doubt and asked what support might enable or empower them to do what they naturally want to do.

The first unconventional solution is to suspend your disbelief and accept that all of your staff, including the “problem” employees, want to do their best.

What does believing others are doing their best look like in daily practice?

It requires the practice of empathy. In every performance-related situation, you try to remove your bias and actively listen to what is going on for your employee.

Before you get frustrated and stop reading, I want to emphasize that this solution is NOT asking that you condone behavior or accept lower standards.

It is suggesting that you try an unconventional experimental tactic.

First experiment with your bias. Instead of seeking to improve or fix the employee’s skills or motivation, start by assuming that this is an opportunity to find out what’s driving a mismatch between performance and expectations. Notice and release any negative implicit notions that the employee is lazy, taking you for a ride, or incapable. Reflect on the evidence-based argument above: all humans are built to contribute. Then look at the evidence-based fact that the employee originally had value for the organization. When they were hired, they were excited and motivated. They got the job because you saw proof of their talent. To remove your bias, you must accept that like all of us, they want to do their best because being useful, recognized, and belonging to the group are innate and universal motivators.

 

Now ask questions. What changed between then and now? How did you get to the current conflict? If you assume they want to and are doing their best, you don’t get angry and blame and shame the employee into improving. Instead, you get curious and gather information.

Looking at the situation through their lens, you ask: what is happening in their experience and lives that leads this to be the best behavior for them?

For this approach to be effective, you must let go of your side of the situation and experience the issue entirely from their point of view. If that feels dangerous, like going into battle unarmed, consider instead that it’s strategy at its best.

Sun Tzu famously said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

When you feel like you and your staff are on opposite sides of a conflict, you can strategically use empathy to understand what’s going on for them. This will help you find the insight you need to design a solution that protects your organization.

In terms of culture, knowledge, training, time, and financial investment, your staff are an asset that you want to protect. Your employee wellbeing has a causal relationship to the health of your deliverables and bottom line. Where staff feel heard, trusted, valued, encouraged, and challenged, you will witness a corresponding shift in the wellness of your organization.

Notice there’s a second part to the quote that often gets overlooked. To be successful, to find a solution that honors all parties, you need to know yourself.

Thus, the second part of practicing empathy is applying that same question to yourself: what is going on in your life or what happened in the past that causes you to experience the situation this way? Why do you assume they aren’t doing their best? What causes you to react to your employee with mistrust and suspicion?

There’s also a causal relationship between self-empathy and your ability to empathize with your staff. Your ability to create the environment of group cohesion or team spirit that reinforces your bottom line is directly tied to how well you can self-empathize.

Do you wince when you hear the term self-empathy? A lot of leaders buy into the self-improvement trap. At the heart of this trap is a desire (just like your staff) to do your best. A mechanism of self-protection, rigorously finding and eradicating faults has helped you get to where you are. But it comes at a high cost. Constantly improving yourself implies that you don’t believe you are good enough. You inherently believe you are not doing your best, or perhaps that your best will never be enough?

How often do you find yourself thinking you should have done better? Does the voice in your head have a parental tone? The despotic inner critic originates in childhood. It’s both modelled for you and applied to you. Perfectionism is a process addiction that never ends. It keeps you locked in a cycle of constantly proving you are enough. What you expect of yourself is applied to your employees.

If you wrote down the last three things the inner critic said, would you use those words or phrases with your mother or child? If not, start using the language you would use with them with yourself. Your language shapes the way you think about yourself and others.

 

2. Show gratitude for what you appreciate.

The second unconventional solution to improve workplace wellbeing is to not only appreciate the willingness, effort, and enthusiasm of your staff, but to think it, say it, and show it. There’s a strong business case for showing gratitude in the workplace.

Maybe you feel like you already have expressed your thanks, but if anyone in the organization has complained of being unrecognized or unappreciated, your appreciation didn’t land. If you want to avoid disengagement and turnover, it’s important that you very intentionally make your people feel valued.

If you hear those words, get curious and use empathy to conduct a gaps analysis on where your appreciation isn’t being received. This will tell you how to ensure your staff – your assets – do hear your message.

How do you implement a culture of gratitude? Very practically, you could start by allocating the first portion of all meetings to gratitude. Open the floor for staff and share your own appreciation. This sets a positive tone and shifts the focus toward what’s working. Or perhaps you dedicate a portion of revenue that staff can use to thank each other. In their book, Leading with Gratitude, Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick suggest very practical ways to bolster morale, efficiency, and profitability.

 

3. Take time to look at progress, not what’s left to do.

We are working more than ever before, despite much of the world having stable access to food and shelter. The quantity of work that many organizations are dealing with makes even your best employees feel like failures because they use their ever-increasing to-do lists to measure their performance and worth.

If your employees are feeling like failures when they are working harder than they’ve ever worked, it makes sense that your workplace has morale issues.

The third unconventional solution is changing how your staff measure success. Wherever you are on the mountain of work, take a moment to help your staff look down the mountain at the pile of work that’s under their feet. Looking at what they’ve accomplished individually and what you’ve accomplished as an organization shapes the way you feel about the job you are doing.

Feeling good about their work and focusing on their accomplishments, makes them want to go to work and do more of the same. Seeing themselves as failures, despite their best efforts, makes them want to call in sick and avoid their ever-increasing task lists.

As their leader, you may find that you sympathize with them because you are facing off with your own leaning-tower-of-Pisa-to-do list that encompasses not only your own work, but the work of the entire organization.

This is where the self-empathy factor comes into play again. If you aren’t looking at your accomplishments and are measuring your leadership ability against your own ever-growing to-do list, you may feel resentful that staff are asking for recognition and need help feeling like they aren’t failing.

Giving yourself empathy and recognition is a must if you want to be able to recognize how much your staff are giving and empathize with their sentiment. Where you see work as duty, rather than a choice, you will struggle to create a culture of gratitude that celebrates progress no matter the to-do list.

These three unconventional solutions will change your culture, but you must undertake them sincerely and consistently.

If you encounter a block – you are having trouble practicing empathy, your appreciation isn’t being heard, or worry is making it hard to celebrate wins – schedule a free call to map out a plan for improving the health and wellness of your organization.

**

With gratitude for art that helps us see more clearly to Shonagh Rae. Find this piece and more here: https://www.heartagency.com/artists/shonagh-rae/