Rethinking how we approach wellbeing

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10 years ago I wouldn’t be talking about this.  Maybe in 10 years I won’t be.  This article may have the shelf-life of the importance of promoting vaccinations in the workplace.    It’s very much in vogue at the moment, so let’s discuss.

What needs rethinking

I’m not going to bury the lead on this, so here’s my proposition. We are approaching wellbeing as an events of unwellness that we need to cure. Instead we need to think of it as an inherent pain point we need to reduce.

What is wellbeing?

Good question. We could find a dictionary definition, but sometimes those are less useful. But we need some common understanding, so let’s go with this:

Wellbeing: the overall condition of a person’s physical, mental, emotional, and social health, including how well they feel and function in their life.

Continuums vs binary

Here’s where I add more complexity, not because it’s helpful, but to make sure we aren’t missing something as we scoot past it. The definition above is clearly describe a range, a continuum, a scale. Everyone is somewhere on that scale- some of us amazing, some terrible, most somewhere in the middle, functional but not as good as we would like.

But humans love binary situations. You are, or you are not. You are happy, or not. Tall, or not. It’s blunt, inaccurate, and missing a lot of detail, but it is the frame of reference you’ll always be using, so live it, but recognise it’s missing out a lot of nuance.

This binary means that we get tricked into thinking as events or occurrences. ‘So and so’ is unwell, has crossed the line from good wellbeing to bad wellbeing, we need to cure this.

Wellbeing in the workplace

Is it a personal thing, not a work thing? Not really, because work is such a big part of our lives- our time, our wealth, our outcomes, our sense of purpose.

At the heart of the discussion on wellbeing in the workplace are four premises:

1. That all humans are prone to mental illness, and that proneness to illness varies from individual to individual. 

2. That the workplace hazards can contribute (wholly or partially) to mental illness occurring. 

3. That the organisation should assist in curative* actions to mental illness. 

4. That negative workplace effects can be counter-balanced with positive workplace effects.

In short, people can become ‘unwell’, and work can contribute to both the cause, and solution to this.

*whether counselling is curative or not is a much bigger question, too big for here.  But to keep it simple, counselling is a treatment to an illness/injury/harm that has occurred.

A H&S approach is better than a PR approach

Now we’ve muddled around the question, let’s try for an answer. The simple answer is to think just like a Health and Safety person should. Hazard identification and reduction is far more important that grandiose after-the-fact solutions.

I discuss my bias against PR HR elsewhere, but my bias leaks into this discussion as well.  The temptation of PR HR is to focus on the appearance of good practice, without focusing on the more difficult but more significant problems.

Employee wellbeing is important, and the organisation providing services that seek to cure the harm caused workplace stressor is important.  In most western countries at the moment, work provided counselling through the contracting of third party providers (i.e. EAP) is the best source of counselling available to most people.  This is a good thing, and should not be discouraged, but its is secondary. It’s the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

But in addition to providing ‘curative’ counselling, what can the organisation do?  They  either:

• Tackle the workplace hazards that are causing the harm (heavy workload, ambiguous work environment, insufficient tools) and minimise them, which is the H&S approach. 

• Or they seek to bolster employee capability to handle these hazards, through morning teas and cupcakes.  Use curative and restorative tools to attempt to balance the negatives with positives, which is the PR approach.

You may be arching your eyebrow at me to ask- is this really ‘PR’? My simple answer is yes- because you are telling them that these solutions work, trying to convince them, without them asking for them. No one has ever asked for fruit bowl to solve their busy workload.

I’m showing my bias again, but the scientific evidence is clear; building resilience is less effective than hazard reduction, and is only suitable where the hazard is immutable.

Think of swimming in the ocean

Let’s get a good analogy going, because we are big fans of those here. Imagine swimming at a surf beach- big waves coming in that you need to deal with. Here are the details:

• The waves come at you regularly, and you need to navigate them- jumping over, diving under, ducking down.

• There’s always another wave coming, so once you’ve got through one, you need to be ready for the next one.

• Some of us are better than others- taller, younger, better swimmers etc.

• If you aren’t ready for the next wave, you start to stress, splutter, get overwelmed, breathe in water- and now we are at risk of drowning with each wave progressively catching while you’re vulnerable (see the metaphor works).

 What is a H&S approach? Right-sizing the waves. Reducing the hazards being thrown at them to levels they can handle, and keep swimming.

what is the PR approach? Praising them, applauding them, and sending to counselling to talk about how big the waves are.

An ACTUAL solution.

There’s lots of things you can do, but here’s one.

Have your manager regularly ask their team members these simple questions:

1. How’s your workload?

2. Are you coping?

3. If 2. is not coping, is there light at the end of the tunnel soon enough?

4. let’s fix this.

Let’s throw some options in:

• You could structure this to be annually, quarterly, and/or part of your performance management or health and safety system. You could poll people too.

• You could ask put a scale to 2. (1= perfectly fine, 4=barely, 5=no.)

• You might not want to go with 3., or you might what to handle it differently- that’s up to you. I include it to recognise that sometimes people stretch, but that stretch is only short term.

To go back to the wave analogy, not everyone is drowning, but you often can’t see until too late. But they will probably tell you if you ask them.

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