A few months after he joined Johns Hopkins Medicine in 2012, Dr. Richard Safeer was walking on the hospital campus when he noticed a red truck parked under an old sign with the capital E, indicating what had once been the emergency room. Initially, from afar, he thought it was a fire truck, but when he gave it more attention he realized it was a delivery truck for soft drinks – to his mind, a sugar dispensary.
“Inside that building, some of the brightest minds and best caregivers in the world were treating people with diabetes, heart disease and other increasingly common chronic illnesses that are partly caused by sugar or made worse by it. Outside the building … well, there was no escaping the irony,” he writes in A Cure for the Common Company.
He had been hired to get Hopkins healthier as medical director for the employer health program and now had an obvious initial target. His concerns may seem remote from executives in business organizations – hospitals are about health – but he believes people want to work for employers that support health and happiness, making it a competitive advantage. People generally know what is healthy, but they face challenges adopting healthy behaviours and getting rid of unhealthy ones. They need support from their employer.
That employer can face a conflict of interest. Soft drink trucks, after all, are not the biggest menace to health in an organization. Often it’s pressure from management that is the prime source of employee ill health – witness the burnout epidemic of the past few years. There are many reasons for those pressures – shareholders, competitors, egos – and they can seem unstoppable. But Dr. Safeer is offering a contrary concept for executives to grasp: A well-being culture is a competitive advantage.
He points to the Vermont Public School System, which became concerned about stress on teachers and students, notably in elementary schools. When they looked at the high points of stress throughout the day, they were drawn to the chaos when kids arrived in the morning, especially during winter months. There had been clamour and stress at home getting them out of the door and now they had to struggle out of winter clothes – for the youngest classes, that could take half an hour – and move from that high energy to sitting still to learn. To change the culture, teachers began taking part in a mindfulness exercise before the students arrived; the food service team baked bread and other foods that created a warm, calming smell; games were developed to help the kids stomp snow off their feet; and counsellors took kids who needed to run off energy to the gym.
The key was putting well-being on the agenda. And Dr. Safeer believes that’s where your organization must start, making it a priority and creating accountability so that well-being can permeate the workplace. “Provide leaders with the training they need to understand the full spectrum of well-being, from work boundaries to respecting family time, to mindfulness as a tool to mange stress. Help your managers learn to communicate with respect to the individual well-being journey each person on the team is taking,” he writes.
Beware of speed bumps. Here are three he spotlights:
- All talk, no action: Everyone nods in acceptance of the desire for a healthier organization, but their calendars say otherwise. There seems to be no time for it given everything else. You need your teams to care about this commitment. Stories can convey the sense of urgency and inspiration required, be they of personal struggles and triumphs or of soft drink trucks.
- Antagonists: Some people will be opposed to what they will call “all this health nonsense.” Dr. Safeer warns against provoking them. Listen, be empathetic and be patient. “Do not spend a great deal of energy on this group as your efforts may only serve to further antagonize them. Let a shift in the broader culture do the work for you,” he says.
- Lack of accountability: Your plans to build a well-being culture must be written into the job descriptions of key players and their annual goals and be a part of performance evaluations. Poppy Jaman, global chief executive officer of the MindForward Alliance, an authority on workplace mental health, told Rotman Magazine that companies leading in this field are checking in 360-degree performance reports with peers and subordinates whether employees feel able to talk to their manager about their well-being. They are also asked whether they are able to get support if they need it, and whether the business is providing enough information and support around mental health.
Dr. Safeer is asked repeatedly about what the return on investment is in well-being. His response is to wonder about the return on investment of a computer, desk or chair. “Humans need basic tools in order to do our jobs, such as computers, desk, chair and our health and well-being,” he writes. Think of it as helping achieve your other priorities – helping you to excel.
Cannonballs
- Here’s a handy communication tip from singer-songwriter Paul Simon: “I try to leave a space after every difficult line, either a silence or a lyrical cliché that gives the ear a chance to ‘catch up’ with the song before the next thought arrives and the listener is lost.”
- Blogger Donald Latumahina says to plan your strategy, study your opponent. To plan your tactics, simplify and experiment. Find a simple way to get the result you want, which increases the likelihood you’ll stick with it. But also experiment because your situation is unique and what works for others might not work for you.
- Executive coach Dan Rockwell shares these three signs that you are offering destructive support to subordinates: Overdependence on you; prolonged weakness, with people stopping to grow; and broken boundaries that have led you to doing someone else’s job.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.