BUT I AM “JUST A WELLNESS PERSON”

As my partner Dr. Rosie Ward and I interact with corporate wellness/wellbeing professionals on LinkedIn, at presentations and in our Thriving Workplace Culture Certificate training, one of the most common concerns we hear is that they are intimidated from getting more involved with various aspects of their organizations because they see themselves and are often seen as “just a wellness person.” This is, for individuals and organizations alike, an inaccurate, distressing and self-defeating reality.

Origins of The Problem

A major contributor to the problem is that the education and training of many wellness professionals is narrow. Workplace health professionals often know quite a bit about health but very little about the workplace. This is highly problematic, particularly at this time in history when the business landscape in the so-called VUCA WORLD, is changing so dramatically and so rapidly.

Furthermore business leaders who have been heavily lobbied by wellness vendors, brokers and consultants, envision wellness/wellbeing as separate from the organization’s inner workings, an outside intervention to “fix” health care costs – which is something it does not and cannot accomplish.

This goes right along with the outdated structures and operations of far too many companies, where “command and control” is still the order of the day and employee autonomy is mostly just a buzz word. And despite the conclusive evidence to the contrary, in this type of environment, grabbing onto some predetermined set of health outcomes for employees and threatening to punish them if they don’t participate in or comply with programs somehow seems like a reasonable approach.

Why Is It A Problem?

There are important reasons why this approach to employee wellbeing is problematic and needs to be re-envisioned. Many have already received a good deal of coverage, and include:

1. Corporate Wellness programs are not a viable health care cost savings strategy.
2. Programs that focus on physical health risks are not powerful enough to make a dent in employees’ health or organizational effectiveness.
3. HRA’s are at best useless and a waste of time and money.
4. Screening the stuffing out of employees can be counterproductive and again, a waste of valuable resources
5. Rewards and punishments do not improve long-term outcomes and often add to morale problems at the workplace which can diminish rather than enhance employee engagement.
6. Employees find the punitive nature of these programs to be quite distasteful.

Addressing these issues is beginning to move workplace wellbeing in the direction in which it needs to go to increase efficacy and limit the frequency of unintended consequences. However, there is another issue, which if addressed properly may have even more potential to improve both employee health and organizational effectiveness.

 More Than “Just a Wellness Person”

If done for rather than to employees, delivering lunch and learns, assisting at biomedical screenings and facilitating wellness programs can be part of the job description for corporate wellness professionals. However, focusing just on these endeavors severely limits their ability to positively impact the functioning of the organization. Fortunately, we are learning more about how these professionals can play a greater role. Here are just 3 examples:

Mind, Body, Spirit for your Organization – Thanks to the explosion of research in Psychoneuroimmunology (mind, body spirit science) beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, many health and wellness professionals now have a better understanding of the critical importance of “holistically” addressing all aspects of the human experience to maximize the potential for improving individual well being. The applications of this understanding can be helpful for organizational effectiveness as well.

The 17th century conceptualization of humans as sophisticated machines, whose behavior has little if anything to do with the mind and spirit is being replaced by the understanding of the complexity of living systems. Like human beings and unlike machines, organizations are also complex living systems in which the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts and the parts are inextricably interconnected.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, the machine metaphor lives on in the remnants of Frederick Taylor’s early 20th century scientific management in which employees are envisioned as not much more than extensions of their machines whose job it is to simply "follow orders," with no need for autonomy or self-direction. 

This problem is clearly visible if we look at traditional representations of organizational structure. The first figure represents the traditional organizational chart – boxes neatly stacked up on top of each other - neat and clean. These are pyramidal hierarchies of power where stability and control are the orders of the day. The second figure shows the partial organizational chart of a self-managed company – with all its messiness and complexity – representing the real-life interactions among human beings, where interdependence and flexibility to adapt are fundamental.

To make maters worse, more often than not the various entities within these organizations still function out of silos, with little communication and coordination among for example wellness, safety and people development functions even though all are integral to the employee experience as well as to organzational effectiveness.

Wellness professionals can be uniquely positioned to bring the understanding of the multiple dimensions of the human experience to the corporate world. From helping to view data holistically, to nurturing relationships and coordinating cooperation across important organizational disciplines, to carefully crafting and training culture and wellbeing teams and ambassadors, wellness professionals can greatly increase their contribution towards creating a thriving workplace culture far beyond the possibilities created by just running programs.

Mission and Vision Work - In his best-selling book, Start With WHY, Simon Sinek states that great leaders inspire people to act by providing a sense of purpose or belonging; they create a following of people who act for the good of the whole because they want to, not because they’ve been manipulated using fear, peer pressure or incentives. Great leaders start with WHY!

Starting with WHY includes following the pattern of the Golden Circle:

• WHY: is a purpose, cause or belief that is about our contribution to impact and serve others.
• HOW: includes your Core Values (what makes your organization unique, your differentiating value proposition, not “permission-to-play” values). It is only through the discipline of HOW and being true to your Core Values to guide every decision you make (including holding the organization and every person in it accountable to these guiding principles) that you can realize and live your WHY.
• WHAT: is simply what you do – the products and services your organization provides, or, for individuals, your job titles or roles.

Every organization and every individual is clear about WHAT they do. Very few know WHY they do it and have the discipline of HOW to bring their cause or purpose to life. The WHY is a belief; HOW are the actions you take to realize that belief. Both should remain constant; what evolves and changes over time is the WHAT we do to realize the WHY. And it should evolve, because the world is constantly changing.

Many wellness professionals have considerable experience facilitating group work and building relationships. With just a bit of training (Simon Sinek’s latest book - Find Your Why – will take you through the process step by step) they can be well suited to facilitate the invaluable process of helping to define and develop the Golden Circle for themselves and their organization. Going through this process can not only be critical for creating a sustainable, thriving organization but also a powerful way to positively impact the employee experience in ways that most wellbeing programs cannot begin to touch.

Leadership development – We know from the 2016 Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report surveying over 10,000 executives and HR leaders worldwide that improving leadership is a key priority for 89% of them. The good news is that leadership development is also one of the most important areas in which wellness professionals can play a significant if not leading role.

If we consider that, as Danielle Harlan suggests in her book, The New Alpha, “leadership is about becoming the best version of yourself in order to maximize your positive impact on the world,” it is not difficult to see how this would be the case; and not just for the C-Suite but for all employees.

 The 4-step process we use for leadership development is shown below. Though many leadership training protocols focus heavily on steps three and four, steps one and two are the ones where wellness professionals are especially well-positioned to use their skills to positively impact the process.

• Step 1: Self-awareness is the fastest growing competency in leadership development. We know that self-awareness is a cornerstone for developing emotional intelligence and resiliency – and isn’t that really wellness 101? You can’t expect people to behave differently until they are truly self-aware. This phase of development can include various assessments (e.g., Judgment Index, DISC, Myers Briggs, Strengths Finder, etc.) as well as reflection exercises. It is also the perfect place to further embed wellbeing, providing quality coaching and facilitating workshops as part of the journey towards greater self-awareness.
• Step 2: Once people have greater self-awareness, clarity of their strengths, purpose and opportunities for improvement, connect to what matters to them, can identify when their thinking is and isn’t serving them well, and know what they need in terms of their wellbeing to have a solid foundation for being the best version of themselves, they can begin building effective thinking skills and helping others to grow as well. This phase can include work related to self-management and changing our story, Intrinsic Coaching?, Immunity to Change work and other ways to help people navigate adaptive change. It can also include more in-depth resiliency and mindfulness work – again all areas where wellness professionals can be uniquely qualified to contribute.

Take Home

All of these areas focus on developing key elements of individual wellbeing. Regardless of our organizational roles, we can’t maximize our positive impact if we can’t first be our best selves. This is a space of tremendous opportunity for wellness/wellbeing professionals to play an integral role in the company's people development strategy - to get off the sinking ship of positioning wellness as a health insurance and cost-savings strategy and instead be part of the leadership development and business growth strategy which is likely to have more of an impact on employee wellbeing that wellness programs ever can.

If you are interested in learning how to accomplish this transition, consider enrolling in our upcoming Thriving Workplace Culture Certificate Training Program. Our next session starts in September and still has seats available. Earn CEUs for SHRM, HRCI, CHES/MCHES and CEBS from the comfort of your own computer.

And if you want to mingle with hundreds of like-minded revolutionaries and meet the most progressive leaders in the business world - all dedicated to putting people first and inspiring humanity at the workplace – check out FUSION2.0 – a new and unique conference coming to Minneapolis in November. Take care - Dr. Jon