E162 – Leading & Managing in 2023: Wellbeing

Really looking forward to having a conversation about employee well being brilliant. So

what are we going to be doing today? What's the sort of structure and approach to today that we're going to be taking

well? So this is the second of four themes that we've been exploring in this podcast, mini series of six episodes, thinking about leading and managing in 2023 and previously, the first focus that we talked about was hybrid remote and flexible working. And today we're talking about employee well being as one of four themes that we think is fairly central to what's been going on in a combination of global and international trends, and also what's happening in organizations at the moment, in the clients, organizations that we work alongside, in our own reflections of what's important. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about what some of the major reports and the major institutions looking at this stuff have been saying. We're going to share a little bit about the work that we've been doing there, and then what we're going to do is we're going to go on to sort of the four or five key themes that we think are worth thinking about within employee well being and and really that that what we found so far is kind of raising as important discussion points.

Brilliant. That sounds good. Why don't I kick off by talking a little bit about some of the things we've seen in some of these reports, and doing a bit of a scene setter, and then I'll, um, I'll hand over, and we'll move on to some of our reflections and move on from there. So we've, as in the other episodes, picked out a few reports from from some of the leading consultancies that we read up on at the end of each year and throughout the year. And we just want to share these. So we've got some things today from Sage, from Gallup and from Korn Ferry, and as ever, all the references are on our website to check this stuff out. So I'm going to start off with sage and see what sage save. I've got a document called, I think, HR 2030 in which they're looking at some of these things. What are they saying at the minute about employee well being? Well, here's some quotes to sort of mull over. They start off, and the quote that we've pulled out here is they say people are tired. They need proper well being support. That sense of tiredness flows through a lot of what we what we hear and see. They also say 69% of employees were experiencing burnout during the global crisis. It's a big number. They also say supporting workforces with their whole self, rather than just issues they are facing at work, will become table stakes for organizations, but it'll become hugely important to help people with their whole selves, as opposed to just work related issues. They also say supportive employers can realize a 21% increase in the number of high performers. So they call out a range of things, but at a core, they're saying that people are tired and heading towards burnout. And it's not just about what happens at work, it's about their whole lives. And if organizations help address some of these well being challenges, they have more high performing teams and elsewhere in the report, they do talk about the broader need to increase the number of employees reporting better mental health. So that's a little bit from Sage. If we look at Gallup, they do wonderful annual reports. You can check out the references online. They say employee well being is the new workplace imperative. It's kind of at the front of what they call out. They say, only 21% of employees are feeling engaged at work. Only 33% are feeling thriving. Here's some stuff that I find a bit sort of sad to read. I say 19% of workers are actively disengaged. If you ask them, Did you feel stressed yesterday? 59% will say yes. If you ask them, Did you feel worried yesterday? 56% will say yes. If you ask them, Did you feel physical pain in a lot of a day yesterday, 33% will say yes. And how about anger? 31 will say yes. These figures are staggering. And that statement these figures are staggering is actually a quote from them. I mean, I echo it, but boy, they've put that in writing as well. And lastly, they say that organization. Need to think about the whole person, not just the worker. So again, that theme of broadening out between the experience at work and supporting the whole individual comes through. And then the last of the three reports we want to share some some points from is a report by Korn Ferry, as ever references online well being is becoming a make or break issue. They say, they say 89% of professionals feel they are suffering from burnout. And you'd need to delve into the report to see who they've surveyed to get that number. But it's a huge, huge proportion. They say the implications for companies that fail to address these issues could be huge. So if we don't help our employees with their well being, the impacts could be huge. And lastly, the quote we've pulled out at the end here says remote working has given employees a greater understanding and concern for their own well being. They want companies to act more human, to have a greater purpose that speaks to connection and support meet their expectations for flexible working to help them keep the personal energy they need to survive and thrive when times get tough. So there's some some call outs from Sage and Gallup and Korn Ferry, and you'll see the themes really flowing through them. People are experiencing challenging environments, their well being is depleted and reduced. And this is about more than just the individual. This is, sorry, the individual in the workplace. This is about the whole individual. And if we get this stuff right and help improve well being, there can be great outcomes for individuals and organizations. And this really is a priority. So there's some takeaways from those reports. Jane, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things we've done and where we've gained some insight and start to let us into some of our reflections and takeaways?

Yeah, thanks, James. And it's probably as with all a lot of the stuff we've talked about in these workshops, in these sessions, it's probably worth mentioning that generally, those kind of reports will be drawn across an international audience. But generally that international audience will tend to be Western countries, western US, UK, European countries, generally, and quite often knowledge based work. But the sheer scale of those numbers, I mean, it's not often that I repeat what Gallup say, but it is pretty staggering, right? And I I think, when we think about all the global issue, about, particularly the pandemic and the wars and the economic sort of shifting, it's perhaps not surprising that we as humans are a little bit more vulnerable to this stuff right now. But I don't think even on my worst days in the pandemic. I don't know that I would have predicted those kind of numbers in terms of how people are feeling, but like we talked about the very beginning, well being isn't something that suddenly appeared. We've been talking about this for a few years now, and it's just that it's become bigger and bigger. And I think one of the reasons is that we're struggling to understand how to address it. So things that we've been doing, we've been working. So, for example, our management development programs that we run, so we run connected management as an open house one, and we also run that in house for people. Increasingly, when we run it in house, people are asking for wellbeing resilient. They're asking for things around supporting people with their wellbeing in the content that we do and that we're delivering, we're seeing increasingly when we do explorations with clients about what their employee experience or engagement is like, the issues well being are coming up again and again. They've come up in a couple of organizations that we've worked with, and we're doing some really interesting work at the moment about helping people design job roles for better well being. So thinking about how they design roles to better support individual well being within that and I guess the first thing that's worth calling out is that this issue of decreased well being independent of work, and then decreased well being in relation to work is real for a lot of people, and it's present and it's pressing. And they are they are feeling it. They are really noticing it and seeing it as part of their lives. And we recognize that lots of this is affected by issues that are way beyond the scope of work, so things about like increased isolation during the pandemic, bereavement through challenge, changes in personal circumstances and responsibilities, increased isolation and loneliness that sometimes interact with remote or hybrid working, for example, all of these things alongside financial issues you know, can contribute to someone's experience of week of less feeling less well I'm feeling less positive, and I think I think there's a really interesting thing. So we have talked and advocated for a long time about people's experience of work and how organizations need to better engage with the individual. Recognize that someone should be able to be themselves, but they've also looked to. To employees to blend their boundaries more, you know, hey, we want you to be more flexible in the way that you work. We want to take your phone home with you so that we can, you know, have a conversation if things are out of time. We want you to be a little bit more flexible about whether you start, what time you start, and what time you ended. In return, we'll give you that flex. But the challenge with that is then you have to ask question is, what responsibility does that organization then have to be a little more proactive in the way in which they support their employee well being? And I think we went to a real period, pre pandemic, where, you know, the answer to this appeared to be more yoga sessions and head massage at lunch time and lots of very light touch, you know, physical activity, or mental, mental sort of engagement activities, like going for walks and getting clubs going at lunch and stuff like that. But they don't necessarily, and they haven't necessarily engaged with the sort of, the causal factors of this, you know, and in and that is the way that people are being allocated work, and the way that they're experiencing work, and the way it's draining on them, and where they're changing circumstance now has them being able to cope. So someone who might have been able to cope with work 100 pieces of report in a week, pre pandemic, due to all of those changes, and due to, you know, quite, quite significant social sort of pressure and stress. May only be able to cope with 80 now, but if they're still expected to do 100 you're then doubling down on that challenge for that person, because not only are they no longer able to do what they were able to do in the first place, but that's going to build up, right? So if they're missing 20 pieces of work every week, that pressure is coming again and again, and that's going to make them more stressed. So I guess, at its simplest, we want people to understand and organizations to really stop and understand this is real and it's not going away, and it requires a different way of thinking about it for Ba Be able to and one other call out just on this is during the pandemic, we saw lots of HR and managers over stretching their scope in terms of mental health support, because there wasn't mental health support available in the community, particularly in the UK, there's huge pressures on mental health support at the moment, and I think we need to be really careful about supporting those people. Because actually, if you found yourself dragged into additional mental health support with your team because they're struggling, what's that doing to you? How are you then stretched? How are you then feeling the pressure in order to be able to cope? So we need to really think about that too.

Yeah, I think that's right. And, and, you know, as a little sort of building that we've we've worked with a whole range of organizations today, today, this year, and when we've been out and listening to to people, seems like there are a handful of people who've who've had sort of significant wellbeing impacts as a result of COVID in the last few years, and they stand out, but really, even apart from them, it seems like across larger swathes of the population, even with people who've not had significant impact, it feels like there's just been That degradation in the quality of their well being. So so this is real for many people, and it's real in different ways. Some have had these big impacts, but even where people haven't, there's just been this erosion of well being that seems to have permeated a lot of a lot of a population that we've seen. And those are slightly different types of change in well being, but I think it's just worth remembering both of them, and one of the phrases that popped up, or was sort of popularized during the pandemic to talk about that is this word languishing that you might have seen bouncing around in social media and other places. You know, this sense that maybe people just felt a bit less joyless and a bit more aimless, and were having a bit about languishing. So yeah, so this is real, I think is a great reminder moving on, I guess some other things to think about, kind of the rest of our thoughts sit under, I guess one big heading really, which I think Jane alluded to. And it's this idea that actually, employers have a lot of power in this space over the well being, that individuals have in their teams over their employees well being, and they should try and use that power well. We said in the first of these podcasts about hybrid and remote that really investing in well being is a productive activity, and employers have the power to to help influence the well being of the individuals on their team, and that's a productive thing to do. It'll lead to great returns for them, as well as having that positive impact on their employees. So employers really should try and use that power well. And I guess in the past, I've struggled a little bit, and I think Jane has as well, though she can speak for herself about some of the work that we do around resilience and this idea of grit and the but just if you're a little bit tougher, it'll all be okay in the workplace. And that shifting of responsibility for wellbeing to the individual in that basis, you know, the world is all just perfectly right, but you just need to be better at coping with it, because that's the way it is. That's a lot of a messaging I hear, what I see work around resilience out there, that shift of accountability to individual. Was kind of abdicates organizations about responsibilities to create reasonable work and normalizes some of that. And I think we can't really work like that. I think that's not responsible to link to some of our other big themes and and I don't think it's sustainable, and certainly my experience of resilience type work like this is but if you improve the resilience of individuals, quite often, organizations increase the demand on them, so you kind of end up back where you were. It's, you know, that sort of metaphor of you're in a cinema, and somebody stands up to get a better view, and then everybody stands up, and then suddenly everybody's standing up and is less comfortable and has the same view. That's kind of like that with some of this resilience work. So we think organizations need to move away from some of these quicker fixes and start to own and hold on to some of their accountability around what they can do to create better wellbeing experiences and improve the mental health of individuals in their teams. And I guess one, one last thing that sort of sits in here under this this recognition of a power they have, and the desire to use it well, is that the sense we get, and some of the things that we've read imply that quite a few of the mental health interventions that are out there aren't really evidence based or necessarily supporting improving the mental health and well being of individuals, and it might be that They're those interventions are helping the people that deliver them feel better, helping others feel that they're cared for and looked after. But we're not so sure that they're really great investments or great interventions, sorry, that are really making a difference. And so we think employers should step back and think about the power they have and think about how they can use it. And we think that appears in a couple different ways. We think that appears in the roles and the scope and the space and the accountabilities leaders and managers have for well being. And we think it comes back to Designing healthy and balanced roles. So Jane, do you want to build on any of that? Or do you want to jump on and talk about managers and role design? Oh. Jane,

so yes, those two like, it's interesting, because when we looked into leader and managers, quite often, and this is a separate bugbear of both of us, well, certainly mine, in quite significant ways that we quite often see, oh, the answer is just train managers leaders better, right? It's not absolutely one part of the puzzle. And one of my biggest concerns is the in the growth and interest of leadership training, there has been an abandonment of good management, and particularly line management skills and training for a lot of people. We deal with a huge number of people who manage people and have no training, and that I find, I mean, I I'm just constantly gobsmacked. And yeah, I did. I managed, I managed my three teams. I think I went through before I ever had any management training. And so I think, I think absolutely, like leaders and managers, training is really, really important to do it better and to be supported better in their role. But I think that only works when you are also designing healthier, more balanced roles. And I think, you know, I've done, I've done a lot of thinking over this since we've been working on quite a lot of well being issues and quite a lot of well being challenges over the year. And it just strikes me that time and time again, when we talk about these issues, what we hear from people in the roles is not what the narrative coming out of the organization is about the problem. You know, they absolutely recognize the symptoms, the stress, the overwork, the risk of burnout, the increased number of days off, the stretch, the tension in the office. They recognize all the symptoms, but what they don't seem to always pick up on is this idea that people are doing too much work they don't feel is relevant to their role, not enough opportunity or time or space to do it well, and therefore they're not getting that sense of completion and that sense of satisfaction from it. They're quite often experiencing frustration because they're not allowed to say no and prioritize against the role they've been asked to do. And we're quite often seeing them not having what they need to be able to do it. So for example, on a very practical level, if you put someone into a role where they're going to have to deal with more tricky stakeholders over the next three months, so they're going to have much more challenging conversations. The emotional labor and the pressure on them from an emotional point of view, is going to be tougher. Their mental skills, they're gonna need a bit more space to think about it, and they're probably gonna go need someone to download onto right afterwards. They need someone to talk to more than they might if they're doing a project that is technologically, tech, technically difficult, but not necessarily emotionally or personality difficult. And I think I you know, we have to get better at saying, what is it? What is the demand we're putting on you to do this job, and what do you need from us as an organization to make sure you can do that job in a healthy, well, way efficiently, and not spend every week feeling increasingly depleted? You know, we talk a lot about people should always come back to work on a Monday feeling full, full time. It, right? And if they're not able to recharge from empty tanks full time of the weekend, or if that's all they're doing is just using the weekend to recover, then that's a problem, because that's, that's a job that's spilling into their lives in all aspects, right? You know, I know organizations want people to be fully engaged beyond nine to five and beyond the organization, but finally, but finally, that should at the very least be a choice. And if work is spilling into the rest of your life because it's depleting you and you're you're using, you're using your own time to recover too often, I think that's a really big problem, and I think a lot of that comes down from the design of the role working in tandem with the management and leadership relationship.

Yeah, I hardly agree. And I know that in some roles, we sort of go in with a sense of contract about if you go pet really well, you expect it to be a broader thing sometimes. And some of that language exists, which I don't think is very healthy, and sometimes I think it's worn as a bit of a badge bomber, which isn't healthy. And I think if we sort of break it down a little bit and think about this, the impact on the organization as well, you know, if people are lacking in well being, they're not bringing a lot of greatness to their role. Some of the lovely things that we don't really touch on here, but certainly are out in in the sort of discourse of a minute are for conversations about before day, working week, and the benefit that has, and the impacts on hourly productivity and all those types of things. And there's really a fair amount of evidence that the more space people have to be well, the better they are to contribute. CIPD saying, quote, investing in employee well being can lead to increased resilience, better employee engagement, reduced sickness absences, and higher performance and productivity. I mean, it's like, it's pretty clear that there is not just that moral case to do this, but there is that business case as well, if you want to, if you want to use that as an argument to focus on well being, which I just think it's interesting that we're, we're, we're sort of slipping into some of those competitive traps that exist around this. And I think that's a bit unhealthy. I think I

think it's super unhealthy. And I think I you know, people are obsessed with filling a 3540 hour a week job with the amount of tasks they think that should take, rather than saying these are the three four things I want you to do, spend all your time figuring out how to do them the best you can. And I think I find it really challenging, because I think fundamentally, it is incredibly depleting. And I think there's somewhere along the way, and I've said this to you before, I think people have forgotten that labor is an exchange of salary and benefits, including, you know, enjoying your work and things like that, and sense of accomplishment for your labor. And when that contract starts to feel wonky, when you feel like you're giving up your labor, and also family time and also but that contract doesn't feel like you're being recognized, accommodated for it, and that there's not a break from that, then I think you're problematic. You know, there are some jobs that you were I've done one where you work, you don't get days off for 3040, days, but you have a slow time at other times, with a lot more holiday that allows you to compensate. That's great, right? And if that works for you, that's a great thing. Lots of people really enjoy shift work, for example, because they find they can condemn they find they can condense their time. The point is, it needs to be what you agreed to, and it needs to feel like it's a fair exchange. And I think your well being really starts being affected when you feel like you're not able to deliver on that contract, either because you can't do your job properly, because you're being dragged in so many different directions, or when you're being stretched beyond the job in such a way that is dissatisfying for you. And I just, I don't hear enough conversations about, are we structuring jobs right? And I very rarely hear jobs properly assessed and analyzed, how long they should take. So I Oh, we want to create a full, full time job. Okay, great. Have you worked out that it's 35 hours a week, 48 weeks, 44 weeks a year, 48 weeks a year. Oh, well, it just feels like a full time job. Really, that's, that's how you're running your company. Because I can assure you, if you were building something, I don't know if you're making widgets or if you were making food, the guys who are working out the cost per unit are not going with oh, well, we think it feels like a full time job. They're counting how many widgets someone can process on their factory line with a certain piece of machinery and a certain number of hours, right? Why are we so careless with people's time? That's what I as organizations, and I think that's one of the reasons we've got ourselves here with this

wellbeing issue. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so that kind of brings us to the end of this reflection on wellbeing, employee wellbeing, the first of these sort of breakout podcasts on leading and managing in 2023 talked about the broader context and these four main areas that we're focusing on. And the next episodes are each looking at one of these areas of focus. So. So we've talked about hybrid, remote and flexible. This episode was all about employee well being coming up next we've got people and skills for the future, and after that, we're going to be talking about responsible and kind business. So with that, I think we are pretty much getting to the end of this episode. We will see you in the next episode where we are going to be talking about people and skills for the future. Thanks very much and goodbye. You.