Many businesses implement wellness programs while ignoring the central role of culture in ensuring the success of any wellbeing initiative. This explains why employees reject many programs and, ultimately, why programs do not improve employee health or deliver meaningful business outcomes.
The Returns On Wellbeing Institute Podcast interviewed Jon Robison and Rosie Ward, co-founders of Salveo Partners and authors of How To Build a Thriving Culture at Work, where they discuss how organizations can deliver successful wellbeing initiatives by creating thriving workplace cultures.
ROWI: Culture is an amorphous term. Yet it’s central to improving employee wellbeing. How do you define culture?
We borrow from Dr. Edgar Schein, who defines organizational culture as the underlying, taken for granted beliefs, values, attitudes, and perceptions that manifest in a particular workforce.
Workplace culture is like a river. On a river, everything you can see, from the shape of the river beds to how rough water is, is only a partial representation of all that’s happening under the surface. But if you step into the river, you feel it.
This is a good analogy for how culture forms the dynamic, collective mindset that underlies an entire organization, from management to front-line employees. And it determines whether employees will ultimately embrace improvement, growth or transformation efforts.
ROWI: What’s the state of workplace cultures in the US today?
Pretty sad. We’re seeing a global epidemic of dehumanized workplaces. As technology comes in, we’re forgetting how to connect with people. We’re forgetting how to treat people as human beings and culture is eroding.
Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book Dying For A Paycheck shows that many companies are creating job-related stress and unhealthful conditions that account for about 120,000 deaths each year, making workplaces the fifth leading cause of death in the United States and driving 8% of our national healthcare spend.
Increasingly, companies convey to employees they don’t really matter as human beings. They treat them as exploitable resources and managed workers as predictable, controllable machines or small children. This is where many companies have gotten off course.
ROWI: In your book, you say successful organizations don’t “motivate” employees, they “engage” them. What do you mean by that and where does culture fit into this idea?
Many companies start by trying to motivate employees with extrinsic tactics. The most obvious is paying incentives and imposing penalties to get employees to talk part in workplace wellness initiatives.
But here’s the problem. Extrinsic tactics like incentives and penalties are a way of telling employees what to do, rather than enticing them to take part in a wellness initiative through their own self-interest because people want to think and decide for themselves.
When companies use extrinsic tactics, we can perceive them as coercive or manipulative ways to get employees to do something. This removes peoples’ autonomy, and many employees will push back by ignoring or resenting a company’s extrinsic tactics, or taking shortcuts or cheating.
Engagement tactics encourage employees to decide for themselves. It engages their own self interest and innate desire for self determination to take part in wellness programs because they see the value based on their own goals (not the company’s goals), and because their peers are doing and the workplace culture makes it easy.
Companies can increase employee engagement by avoiding top-down wellness programs and conducting assessments to learn what employees need and want. Leaders should lead by example, and managers should encourage participation. Companies should celebrate wins, which make employees feel valued and part of something bigger than themselves.
ROWI: In your book you talk about “paradigm paralysis” that hampers efforts to improve employee wellbeing. How has this manifested in companies today?
Paradigms are lens that shape how we view the world. They determine how we make meaning out of our experiences and how we understand things.
Human beings are biologically pre-programmed to maximize reward and minimize threat. We gravitate toward what’s comfortable. So if we have a paradigmatic belief about how things should work, and new evidence clashes with that belief, it causes cognitive dissonance and discomfort.
We then have two ways to reconcile that dissonance. We either consider that fresh information and adapt our paradigm or dig in and resist.
When I was growing up, companies felt that taking care of employees was the right thing to do. Somewhere along the line companies started focusing on getting a return on investment for what they invested in their human capital.
As employee wellbeing took a backseat, and shareholder value and ROI became top priorities, the wellness arena started taking a narrow, biomechanical approach for minimizing employee health risks to reduce healthcare costs, which hasn’t worked, and it’s not supported by research.
Yet, it’s widely believed and familiar. It’s how many people got and keep their jobs. It’s entrenched, particularly for wellness vendors or health insurance brokers. It’s hard to commit your life to a paradigm and say it was a failure.
So, what we see today is a clash of belief in traditional wellness versus evidence that culturally supported whole-person wellbeing is the way to healthier, more engaged employees. But once an entire industry builds up around a paradigm, it’s difficult to say, “wait a minute, that’s not right.”
ROWI: Talk about your distinction between a smart organization and a healthy organization.
A smart organization excels in basic business fundamentals, like strategy, operations, finance, marketing and technology. A healthy organization has a supportive workplace culture, with minimal politics and confusion, and higher morale and productivity and lower turnover.
The strongest, most sustainable companies are both smart and healthy. However, many leaders focus almost all their time, energy and attention on the smart aspects, and pay little attention to things like employee health and wellbeing or building supportive workplace cultures.
Organizations that invest in healthy aspects get both healthier and smarter. They articulate their mission, vision and values, and every employee knows how he/she fits. In healthy, smart companies, their leaders help employees leverage their strengths, and their employees in return feel valued.
ROWI: It sounds like companies that build thriving workplace cultures don’t see wellbeing as a cost cutting measure, but as a revenue enhancer?
Correct. Cost cutting inspires no one. Creating a program solely to reduce healthcare costs, without regard for employee wellbeing, is all about the organization, and employees will know that.
Striving for organizational wellbeing is about helping employees bring their best selves to work, find meaning in their jobs, and feel proud of where they work. When cultures create that set of conditions, programs will work and employees will become healthier, happier, and more productive.
