By Fisher Qua, Director of Health 3.0
I just returned from a Seattle CityClub event about "Employer and Employee Partnerships for Wellness." What I kept returning to during the panel discussions was a lingering thought that for most companies employee wellness is a waste of time and resources. Why?
Because most companies are un-well themselves and creating some new program to promote employee health won't address those underlying root causes of poor performance, increasing health care costs, and lack of creativity & innovation.
So, what to do? How about we blow up the entire notion of employee wellness altogether? What might that look like?
- Start with asking employees whether they're happy with their work. Don't do this with a survey. Instead, invite them into a conversation that relentlessly confronts reality and challenges them to step out from behind themselves and be honest - even if what they have to say is personally & organizationally painful.
- Empower people across the organization to make decisions about their work - let them co-create their futures. Radically embrace the idea that local solutions are almost always better than externally or hierarchically imposed conditions.
- Unleash creativity & a culture of continuous improvement within the organization. Do this by amplifying individual freedom and responsibility AND by building pathways for collective action to make decisions.
- Make work visible and limit work-in-progress. We are human. We can only accomplish so much at a given time. Impose a physical limit on what you're doing. Kanban is great for this.
- Build trust and practice deep respect for people, their problem-solving skills, and their desire to make a difference.
- Turn everyone into a hero, dragon-slayer or firefighter capable of dealing with emergent disruptions instead of relying on epic instances of effort by individuals.
- Spend time exploring the darkness - confront your most difficult challenges today; be willing to think dangerously about your potential; don't live in fear that new ideas might dramatically change what you've built your business around.
These are just a few of the things we might start with in re-imagining what employee wellness is all about. Ultimately, we'll spend close to 1/3 of our lives at work. Shouldn't that be enough incentive to create an environment that enhances and amplifies everyone's happiness, quality-of-life and wellbeing ... and if you're environment doesn't, don't you owe it to yourself to find someplace that does?
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