Wellbeing at work: You spend more than 1/4 of your life at work. 3 ways to make it a better place to be
What if work could be a place you looked forward to going? What if it was a place that made your employees thrive that replenished rather than drained them?
Wellbeing at work is important not only because a significant portion of our life is spent there, but also because when you put massive amounts of energy toward gritting your teeth, clenching your jaw, and hunching your shoulders just to get through the day, you lose your creativity, your motivation, your productivity. The impact you and your staff are able to make is less.
The business case for investing in culture is there. Organizations that invest in employees create a people-first culture that fosters innovation, productivity and loyalty. Gallup has measured it. A study by the Corporate Leadership Council shows similar results. In fact, Forbes calls employee engagement the wonder drug for customer satisfaction.
If we know that a culture of investing in your employees literally translates to increased engagement, which directly impacts your bottom line, why aren’t human centric standards the norm in companies?
Likely because it’s hard to know how to translate a concept like employee engagement into concrete actions.
The good news is that there are now software systems like Platypus that help you understand what information you need to collect on the employee lifecycle. The software also helps you quantify seemingly subjective and qualitative data.
It’s from here that you formulate your people strategy just as you would a business strategy. In fact, your people strategy should inform and be integrated with overall business strategy. According to this study, the trajectory of your bottom line is causally related to the organizational commitment to employees.
Installing a people-first culture will take some time. In the meantime, there are three things that will make an immediate impact on your and your staff’s wellbeing at work.
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Know yourself
What is your leadership story?
Douglas Conant, former CEO of Campbell’s Soup Company, Nabisco Food Company, and Avon Products, asks what your story is. It’s there that you’ll find your leadership story.
What is your current leadership story? Is it one that cares about your staff? Is it one that asks what you and your company can do for your employees? If not, what do you want your leadership story to be?
It might seem impossible to implement the leadership story you’d want because you don’t have time or energy in your current landscape. In his new book, Conant lays out six steps to lift your leadership that you can unroll where you are now.
Like other writers such as James Clear, Stephen Covey, and Charles Duhigg, Conant is clear that upleveling your leadership is done through tiny focused habits consistently undertaken.
What ridiculously small habit can you implement today to begin immediately lifting your leadership?
Self-awareness
That is to say, when you are in a meeting and you feel irritated and are focused on the two things in the meeting that went poorly, why? Why are you not calm and focused on the other 18 things that went well?
Is that how you want to show up in your leadership? If the answer is yes, skip the but. You will never lack for reasons that showing up differently is hard or impossible.
Life in general, difficult employees, problem projects, and decreased productivity are just a few of the reasons you feel you weren’t able to show up the way you’d like.
First, rewrite your past day. Tonight when you are in bed, think back over your day and identify the moments when you didn’t show up the way you wanted. Maybe you yelled in a meeting or forgot to say thank you. Then, envision yourself showing up the way you want.
Next, start with intention. How do you intend to show up? Create an intention statement and write it down. When you wake up, mentally walk through your day from the point of view of the intention.
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Establish an environment of trust
Research is clear that trust is the essential element of a people-first approach and translates directly into return on investment. Trust is the gluten in your flour. Without it whatever you bake doesn’t stay together because there’s no foundation.
Trust is established first by releasing control. Where you are policing your employees and layering on policy after policy, stop. Give them the benefit of the doubt.
People are innately built to help and want to enrich the world around them.
Stop creating an environment of suspicion and doubt, which makes them wilt, rather than thrive. Start giving them autonomy and focusing on their results, not their hours.
Besides autonomy, another quick way to establish a culture of trust while you are measuring employee engagement, is to start leading with courage.
Brené Brown says that leading with courage is daring leadership. It requires taking personal risks. Risks of vulnerability, asking questions, and letting go of perfectionism.
The culture starts with top leadership. If your leadership encourages questions, takes ownership of mistakes, affirms saying “I don’t know, but I want to learn,” and is comfortable with emotions, you are leading with courage.
Where you need to be the one who always knows, who doesn’t ask questions for fear of revealing your incompetence, who demands perfection and criticizes, rather than explains, you are armoring up, rather than leading with vulnerability.
No one is perfect, but the more you commit and practice the first style of leadership, the more you create a culture that empowers people to thrive.
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Give thanks
The power of focus
There are two reasons you are doing this. The first is to shift your focus. Turning your attention to things that were done well or that you appreciate in your workplace, your staff, improves your mood and attitude.
Then the one or two “problems” don’t seem so big alongside all the things going right.
It also physically shifts you out of a stress response – fight or flight mode – into a learning and creativity mode as your parasympathetic nervous system turns on.
You want to be in a creative learning mode when you tackle a problem. You will get more innovative solutions. Creating this for yourself also creates it for your staff.
Both the ambiance and the security generated by your mood creates a safe environment for staff to share and be inventive.
Think it. Say it.
There might be 100 things you appreciate everyday at your organization, but if you don’t say it, no one ever hears it. If they don’t hear it, they probably don’t know it.
At the top, you wield incredible power. Your staff innately want to coalesce around your shared mission and do their part to fulfil the direction you are setting.
When you are thunderous and demanding they jump through hoops, I’d bet most of them ask you how high.
The same goes for your thanks and praise. If you compliment their work, I’d bet they ride high on a single note of praise for ages. You inspire them to work harder with your thanks.
Experiment
A culture of trust isn’t built overnight, but you will see immediate results if you begin to implement these three things in small ways every day.
If you are skeptical, try it for a month – do an experiment and measure your results against the previous month. Where you can point to times during this month where you gave clear direction and then stepped back – how well did your employees step up? Where you gave grace – did they stop working hard? Where you said thanks – what was the outcome?
If you see any difference, dip your foot in and try it for six months. By that time, you should have some concrete indication from the employee lifecycle of where you can intervene the most effectively to establish a culture of trust.
Doing so will lead to enormous gains.
If you want to help telling a different leadership story or you want to map out what a culture of trust looks like for your organization, schedule a free call with me.
