MC46 Proactive wellbeing

i think this is such a different topic now post-pandemic or you know do you know what i mean like the experience of the pandemic really changed the whole narrative and awareness i think about well-being and whether work was connected to it or disconnected from it completely completely the the conversation has opened up this is this is what i'm seeing hearing reading feeling that before it was really like a separate thing and almost something that nobody wanted to or dares to bring up and now it's it's really opened up and um and yeah i found this article in gartner about the future of work trends for 2023 and this one i just this is how they phrased it as well which i thought healing pandemic trauma opens path to sustainable performance and it's the fact that healing trauma and performance are only one sentence oh i wouldn't expect that yeah it's uh but i think it's right you know i think that we all experienced it in different ways it was something that everyone was affected by and i think everybody recognized that it was affecting them at work i guess if it becomes a skill that workplaces acknowledge like that oh if we have to get over this trauma that people experienced at that time and it doesn't it isn't just like oh that was a one-off thing we never have to do that again but rather it becomes like okay well now we have some awareness within the workplace that people will experience trauma in or outside the workplace and that we can support them then that would be a great support i love that you called it a skill oh listeners hello hello it's lovely to have you here again with us tim and i are just talking about how well the conversation around well-being is really seeping now into the workplace it's very prominent because of the experiences that we have during the pandemic we are still i suppose as you were saying tim post-pandemic in february 2023 and well this is if we haven't met before my name is pilar and i'm here with tim and we're going to be talking for about 20 minutes about this so you're very welcome to join us but before i think before we continue talking tim i wanted to acknowledge the presence of some listeners here that uh they have said hello in between conversations so i want to say hello to teresa for and a big thank you don't you think tim for recommending our show on linkedin i was loving so we get to have these conversations and then someone gets to enjoy them and then they'll say oh do other people go over to the management cafe have coffee with us love that and the other thing my friend paula she got in touch um in between episodes because she was listening to the episode on running a business together and she called me oh wow this is great i rarely get phone calls anymore and she called me i'm trying to listen to it but it's jamming near the end so i don't know what it was it was some technical issue but i love that she called and i love that once she called to say hey i can't listen she she um she wondered whether we were going to mention that going into a business partnership was a bit like getting married that sometimes you might not discover your values until you're actually married and that the values like we talked about in the conversation they're so important so and she said oh i wonder if that's a bit you get into in your conversation i said no we didn't we didn't reflect on that but thank you very much because i think it's a great comment yeah well i mean it's a close relationship it's an important relationship i mean i was a little bit hesitant uh with these with comparisons between like the family yeah work as a family that's the one that's the triggering one but i do think there's a lot of there is a lot of truth to it yeah particularly that concept of knowing what you're getting into in advance because very difficult afterwards this is we would love to hear from you because the cafe is getting busy i'm very very pleased to to say so we'll just uh management cafe podcast at gmail.com you can drop some conversation there but let's um let's continue with uh let's get to the conversation uh tim which is this aspect that well but now you were talking about dealing with health and supporting people through health being a skill i think that is a very interesting way of looking at it well i think hopefully there's an evolution that organizations go through from where you know work was a place that was sort of separate you know you were just meant to be your work self you're meant to be reliable every day is meant to be the same uh you know no variations in your performance and you're not meant to let other things affect your work which of course they do you know it happens for everybody and hopefully as we go through this increase in awareness that we're able to now recognize that people's performance is going to change based on how they're feeling and their you know mental reserves and how fresh they are and how much other stuff they have going on in their life and that also the workplace can help with that it can try and find some alignment with it as opposed to just viewing it as a you know as an hindrance or an obstacle i love what you're saying about work as a place where which can help with that well-being because the first thing that was coming to my mind was that the workplace can be the source of that in imbalance in a way of that stress so to in a way to flip it and rather than acknowledge that the workplace often causes that stress not just life we're coming in but actually finding a way of making it a place where you can in a way recalibrate whatever i think it's a nice way of flipping it yeah there's going to be times that and you know maybe it's more tilted that way that work is a source of stress and your outside of work life is a source of recovery or respite but there are there are definitely times that are the opposite if you're living in a house with very small children work can be wonderfully calm and uh peaceful by comparison uh you know and there are times where i think a lot outside of work sometimes it can feel like it's all upside down you know everything's a mess and going to work can be quite calming and uh and sort of nourishing because it's consistent you know it can be the one place where you feel good about yourself or where you know you're going to get a certain result or you know you're going to you know you know what's going to happen so i think it's a cycle between those would you agree yes and i'm trying to think about if we're thinking of that skill around sensing feeling that all of this and our role as as managers i'm trying to find what what is that what is part of that skill is it about learning to listen more is it about observing more is it about having this present in how we organize the work i think that awareness like i think you're right it's looking to see that something that you know what are the signs that something might be going on and also having that open mindset to to think that oh maybe maybe there's something that i don't know about here you know like as opposed to oh this is sam sam's performance is down by 40 percent sam's no good we're gonna get rid of sam if you approach that as sam's performance is down i wonder what's going on i'm going to talk to sam and find out and it might be that that sam's struggling for reasons that don't have anything to do with work but that if you can help sam through that mythical sam person but if it is a manager you help somebody get through that difficult period you help them recover themselves and you show that you're invested in them enough to say i know you're a good person i know you do good work i know this is a temporary thing i'm gonna back you i'm gonna support you to get through it and then there's huge reward at the other at the other end of it you know the person's gonna be super loyal they've gone through this great things and also like you've done a really good thing you've done a very caring and kind human act and i'm wondering whether the proactiveness that i was reading about about that those steps we can take before sam i love sam before sam has in a way started to underperform because as you were saying there's stuff that happens outside of work stuff that happens in work and i like that the fact that we're recognizing that the workplace has a role to play can help us to start to think about what can we do so that we don't get to where the performance starts to plummet in a way and i was reading about for example um giving proactive personal time off before high demand working periods for example that that's something that some organizations might be doing and allotted wellness time and managers being gold on their team taking adequate personal time off i think i can also be hearing the risk of making this into another we talked about metrics earlier it's it's really interesting that the fact that what can be done before so in a way we're preventing so it's not just about you know the classic yoga classes but what else is there that might be helpful it's a really interesting notion you know i think a lot of the times that stress comes in actually yeah i guess a lot of the time it is predictable you know there's a bunch of times it isn't you know customer rings up something's broken you know if you knew it was gonna break you wouldn't let it break so that the disaster wouldn't happen and i think a lot of the time that those stressful periods come up it's because it's because something going wrong and it's not necessarily something that that we know about but i think you're absolutely right that you can be proactive about it the one one great way to do it is to try and avoid having people working close to their limits so they always have a reserve and i think that's that's a difficult thing for a manager to achieve without the support of the organization because if the organization is one that wants high productivity at all times and wants to be sort of bringing every little out of uh performance that they can out of everybody at all times it's very difficult for a manager to try and uh and create an environment where that doesn't affect their team and if you don't have any reserves in any drama it's a stressful drama because you're already at your limit and we're talking also just about the times that we need to rest because our brain needs a rest or our emotional being needs a rest rather than a physical rest if you look at how many people don't take a break when they need a physical rest that is very obvious either because they have a big cold or they're not feeling well but they still want to plow on you can see then how in some organizations it might be even more difficult to take that time off because you feel like you just need to stop maybe maybe you just know that you just need to stop for a day but between the loyalty that you feel towards your colleagues and the fact that it might not be a good thing to be seen doing in the organization it's a constant tension oh yeah yeah it's really it's really difficult and so you know there's it's great ways for managers i think to role model the behavior uh that they want to see you know something i was not very good at as a manager uh is you know i would well for example i would tell people don't work when you're on leave uh take all the leave but i would work when i was on leave and i would always justify to myself as you know i'm in a business and there's stuff i need to do blah blah but in reality looking back i'm pretty sure i could have been a lot better at that and i think it weakens the message if you're telling people one thing and you're doing another uh so i think role modeling is super important but also what i've seen a lot is this idea of if the organization provides the resources or feels that they provide the resources then that's enough and then people can support themselves you know oh we have flexible pto you know we let people work from home we let you know you can take mental health days like we've got an eap as though just having those things there is enough and yet what what's causing the stress it's often things like working hours pressure workload having no one who can come before you if you're out of the office or the expectation that customers are always going to get responded to really quickly they're much more difficult to address but if you address those things then it has a profound impact such that you're treating the disease not the symptom yeah you're yes exactly you're going to the source of the disease and you're treating that and making sure that's not there rather than just putting band-aids on stuff as it's happening while the virus is still lurking well i remember reading an article about it was about diversity and inclusion but it was a major global consulting company and they got a group of academics in to look at why were they not uh retaining female staff particularly around maternity so when they would go off from maternity leave they would come back or they wouldn't come back when they come back and they leave they couldn't retain their staff and the researchers spoke to everybody within the organization and they presented to the ceo and they said look you've got two problems here uh problem one is your culture is too aggressive sales driven culture where customers always write which means there's always pressure and your other problem is that it's not uh it's not just women who need flexibility everybody's suffering from this you know you've got fathers here who also want to be able to have flexible time you've got people who are caring for elderly parents like they have all these examples of people who felt like they you know if they could work those hours if they didn't have to work out if they didn't have to answer emails at night that would improve the quality of their life and so they said to the ceo like this is the problem this is what you need to do and uh and the ceo canceled the contract and kicked them out oh well then that's it yeah yeah luckily they published their research but like it was just such a confronting change it's such a confronting cultural change to go oh this isn't a surface issue this is a deep cultural issue right at the core of how this company operates are you willing to address that it's very scary to have to do that it is a huge reset button and well we saw that many organizations even during the pandemic which it was a great opportunity to do that and it didn't happen i i agree i wonder if it would be possible to quantify the cost of not doing it like if you looked at how many people leave because they burn out who could have stayed if we had to change that culture how many times have we dropped the ball because oh you know we've failed to deliver or we've made a mistake or whatever else because we're pushing people too hard and what would it have been like if we had dialed it back a little bit would we have not experienced that friction it's impossible to work out but i do wonder about that question that's a really good point and just going back to what you were saying before about like it's not just this group of people who are struggling because it's actually something that's underneath the whole organization there's a line in this article that i read which was i where is it oh yeah 82 percent of employees now say it's important that their organization see them as a whole person rather than simply an employee and i wonder whether we should go further and see they want to be seen as a whole person not just as a certain type of demographic because it goes exactly back to what you're saying that sometimes we are assuming that certain people deal with things better have need for example need more personal time often others need either more time to rest or they need more flexibility because they are this kind of person actually we forget that probably everyone does for different reasons and we i think we also need to be very aware of what what you're allowed to say in a way like if i want to take uh two hours in the middle of the day to do some fiction writing i'm gonna i'm not sure how many people would be uh would feel like they can say that as a valid reason for not being available during certain hours whereas if you say i have to go pick up my kids that's absolutely fine oh yeah absolutely yeah there's so much bias and like stereotyping going on in this area and and it's you know pretty difficult it takes a lot of work to shift it out i mean i think the other the other difficulty with this concept of proactive well-being is that there there's a line around like let's say there's this barrier between work and outside of work how much can work can you as a manager let's say manager at work how how direct or instructive can you be to someone about how they should organize their well-being or what's appropriate for them outside of work can you tell people to take leave can you tell them what to do when they take leave there's an example that's been on my mind and this is a perfect moment to share it with you around the table is that i know someone who has been working very long hours for quite some time having trouble sleeping basically they're working way too much they work for a small business the business owner has had to pull them aside and say you need to leave the office earlier they work they work in an office and they're not someone who takes work home you need to leave earlier you're doing too many hours it's not necessary his wife is saying the same thing and yet he can't he's finally i mean he's made the commitment to do it because he knows it's not great he's really struggling and i think you're right that point of how much you can see that you think it's the right thing to do and stuff but it's very difficult to push someone because that could be a stressor as well yeah yeah yeah for sure exactly in that situation i think you can you can encourage people you can nudge them can you force them it's very situational and i think the more you know about the person like in that situation if if the guy feels that i think it was a hit if he feels that he's being forced to act in a certain way by a doesn't care about him that's a very negative thing uh but if it's very clear that it's coming from a place of caring maybe he's more open to to it one of the difficulties here is as a manager you might feel like you know what's best for somebody but if that person doesn't agree that that's what's best for them you shouldn't do it you know i think they have to they have to agree and they like and they have to support it and if you get into that situation the guy is saying look you're right i agree i should be leaving earlier i'm finding really difficult to do it okay then you can sit on the same side of the table and say well let's see if we can work out some ways that we can do we can make that happen together you know it's a joint objective what i think we keep coming back to is the same as this quote said that it's important that employees see them as a whole person i think we also need to see them as part of a whole ecosystem where it's not about just them and their well-being and what's going on outside the lines of blah blah blah all of that actually what else is happening what is the environment that we're creating both at an organizational and at a team level and like you said that includes the workload and i think like you were saying this we can have that now we can include the proactive personal time off in this article they also mentioned no meeting fridays uh allotted wellness time and stuff like that but all of that is not great if there's some other issue which is around the amount of work workload maybe low budget so you can't get cover uh etc etc or overwork small teams because you can't recruit new people in it's um and i think that just going back to that being able to mention some of these things as well because i think sometimes we feel some of the problems with well-being is that we feel powerless about what's going on but if actually someone says look this is what's happening there's nothing we can do about it it's not about you and you're not going to solve it by doing two more hours every day even that can help yeah absolutely part of this approach like no meeting fridays i like that a lot of times during working hours that's a really positive concept the idea that we're not going to try to tell you that you know work is something that happens between these hours and recovery only happens outside those hours we're going to try and bring this notion of recovery de-stress refreshing yourself into work hours so it can become part of the workplace you know what i mean like it's always okay you've got to use pto pto is the big cure-all for work because here it's going to be stressful but if you're on pto it's not that's too simplistic a notion if you can try and blend it a bit and that's something i remember we had uh talk to us about uh we're talking about burnout we're trying to identify in teams and she helped us try to clarify that uh that there was normal workload there was high stress that was okay if it was time limited like oh i can do this as long as it's for a short period of time and then there's i can't have another day like i had today i remember we had a team that's experiencing really high workloads they're feeling burnt out and once we started to try and frame it that way like what's unsustainable what could be okay if it was only for short periods and what's sustainable it helped us compartmentalize the work a little bit better and it also had changed the way that we framed some of those short intense periods because sometimes those can be very energizing they can be opportunities to grow and practice and you know and test yourself as long as you know there's a light at the end of the tunnel and framing that that aspect of resting during work time and that's okay that's actually part of your professional practice is resting and it's okay you can do it during work time i think that's a huge huge um a big signal yeah yeah yeah well and also just having conversations like these over coffee which which um which is great we can have them at work outside of work so i don't know about you tim but i would love to hear listeners thoughts about this because we have a lot to say it's obviously a topic that affects everyone and that everyone will have thought of at some point either from someone seeing someone else struggling or from us having to role model some of these behaviors which are easier easier told than done in a way yeah absolutely i'm particularly curious about whether people feel that some of this goodwill and initiatives that were that came about in the last couple of years during the pandemic are they still active you know are they do you feel that the workplace has changed or do you feel like it was just a you know it's just a thing for that time and now it's just back to how it was in the before times so management cafe podcast at gmail.com for all your messages or you can also go to the website managementcafepodcast.com where you have a contact form and you can also subscribe there to get the blog posts into your inbox every week or you can join us over by listening in your podcast app it'd be lovely to have you join us for coffee every week for our short 20-minute coffees so coffee is over for us now it's over to you thank you for joining us at the management cafe remember you can subscribe to the show on whatever podcast art you use to make sure you get your weekly dose of reflection our website is management.caf and on twitter we are at managementcaf that's all for this episode from myself pilar or t and our fellow co-host thank you for listening you