I have needs! - psychological needs and how to fulfil them

Hello and welcome to my newsletter! If you’ve been forwarded this, please join our growing community at ‘Wellbeing that Works’ by subscribing here so that you receive future newsletters straight to your inbox ??

This week, I’ll be covering:

?? The state of affairs

?? What are our psychological needs and why are they so important?

?? Take these simple evidence-based steps to fulfil your, and your team members psychological needs

?? Role models leading the charge on evidence-based wellbeing?

?? Where was I this week??

?? How you can work with me through engagements, communications, and being involved in creating a million new years of free time?

?? My nerdy audible listens on wellbeing

First up, here’s the state of affairs:

We spend about a 3rd of our life in work, and about 60% of the population worldwide are engaged in work. What happens during the 8 hours minimum every day is going to undoubtedly have an influence on our health.?

We hear a lot about mental health in the workplace these days - but it is often talked about in a very superficial and ungraspable manner. There is a recognition that it impacts on our work, but many don’t understand the severity of it because the effects may not be as evident.?

Well here are the statistics from the World Health Organisation.

So what can we do about it??

Point one to take away - is that mental health is not a bad thing. We often hear the term thrown around as if it is a sign of shame but we all have mental health - good, bad, or somewhere in between. Sometimes it is transient, influenced by a positive interaction with a customer, or negatively as a car beeped at us on our way to work. So if it is something we all have - how can we begin to understand how it is shaped by work?

Evidence shows that decent work, designed for people, can support good mental health by giving them livelihoods, connection with others, and a sense of accomplishment. This feeds into a very well established theory in psychology called ‘self-determination theory’ which states that we all have basic psychological needs, similar to have we have basic physiological needs (e.g. the need to sleep, eat etc.). These are broken down into three areas:

Our basic psychological needs according to Self-Determination Theory .

When we fulfil all these needs inside and outside of work - kaching - we’ve hit the jackpot of intrinsic motivation, improved health, positive wellbeing - all the things we want in this messy world.?

Work can either help fulfil these needs or thwart them. As a leader of an organisation, i’m always trying to fulfil these needs in myself and for my team. So what does that look like?

These are the simple steps you need to fulfil your basic psychological needs ??

1?? Autonomy ???

1. Self-reflection ??: In my day to day work, how much control do I feel like I have over my work and my calendar? Some days I feel completely overwhelmed with back-to-back meetings, unsocial work hours, unmissable deadlines, and being in demand by multiple people at once. I feel pretty awful those days because my autonomy is being taken away from me. It is important for me at this point to ensure that subsequent weeks I can build in sufficient recovery time, learn to say no to some work, deprioritise and delegate work which is taking me away from doing the work I need to do.?
2. Team enablement and team capability building ??: I work in a global start-up, operating across 5 continents, with 4 generations of staff. We all work pretty differently - but we all are capable of getting our work done. My role is not to tell people how to do their work - but to ensure they have the skills to do it properly, and to create time for them to do it in the way that makes sense to them. As a leader, I also have a role to ensure that the work I delegate isn’t overloading them and taking away their autonomy.
3. Life outside of work ???: This goes hand-in-hand with all psychological needs. If work is taking away my time to engage in the other important things in my life - like being with my fiancée, going for long runs, or meeting friends for lunch then I know my sense of autonomy over my life ain’t going great. Improving my workload management, and crafting a #4DayWeek for myself enables me to both physically and cognitively switch off from work.

2?? Competency ??

1. Self-reflection ??: I’ve leaped through a few careers - from physiotherapist, to academic, to business consultant, to social entrepreneur. This means I constantly feel out of my depth. Over the years i’ve learned to develop a ‘growth mindset’ which means that I view these anxieties as opportunities for growth and development. We are all capable of doing anything if we have found the right resources and support to help us get there. For example, I don’t know anything about economics - but the two to three audiobooks i’ve listened to now help me build some sense of competency. It is the small incremental steps in learning to address my own thwarted competency that help me feel good about myself, and ultimately become better at the skill i’m trying to learn. An important skill I learned is that comparison is the enemy of joy and success - if I always compare myself to someone better, i’ll never feel good enough.
2. Team enablement and team capability building ??: We’re a start-up organisation, and oftentimes our hard work doesn’t get the external validation we expect. I’ve learned that sometimes the work just doesn’t pay off straight away. Not only should we celebrate the big successes (e.g. our company making TIME100 Most Influential Companies of 2023 - not so humble brag) but also day-to-day recognition for just doing the good but thankless work. That is my job. It is also on my team to know they’re doing a good job too - empowering themselves throughout the process and taking control over their own emotional responses to their work. We do this by being clear about what ‘good work’ looks like - and not using ‘time’ as an arbitrary metric of productivity. I don’t care if the team work 6 hour days or 2 hour days - as long as they can achieve their work, and feel good about it. I feel a lot of workforces fail in both these spaces.
3. Life outside of work ???: And sometimes, no matter what, you just feel useless in your work. The client just isn’t happy - the processes mean you missed a deadline - your manager called you out for poor work in a stand-up. C’est la vie - we can’t control everyone or everything in our work - but we often can do so in our own lives. A wonderful academic called Prof Sabine Sonnentag has dedicated her academic career to showcasing how the best active recovery strategies from work come from those who find themselves doing an activity outside of work that gives them a sense of accomplishment or meaning. I always think of Prof Luke O’Neill - a leading immunologist in the world, and pivotal scientific voice during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m sure there are many days during his career he felt unaccomplished due to failed experiments - but you’d never think it with his infectious (pun intended) positivity. I like to think its because Luke is also a musician with a band called The Metabollix (an incredibly witty name) - and during the darker days of COVID-19, where maybe he felt like we weren’t going to turn the tide - that his hope and motivation what reignited through playing a few riffs (as you can tell, i’m more of a recorder guy, not a guitar guy).?

3?? Relatedness

1. Self-reflection ??: We’re becoming a hyperconnected world, but also an incredible lonely one. In Ireland, nearly 1 in 5 people report feeling lonely most or all of the time. We’re not alone (albeit we feel it) in those statistics as research shows loneliness rates are growing rapidly amongst all age groups. I work fully virtual - and have done so for the guts of 4-5 years. From 5 a.m. till 7 p.m. I spend long periods in a small apartment by myself (I don't work this long fyi, it's just my fianceé works late into the evening). Over the years, I've found that COVID has made it difficult to understand how to connect and relate to one another - despite the fact that we have all undergone this deeply seethed collective trauma. I know now that my environment isn’t going to naturally create connectedness with others - so I have to seek those experiences out myself.
2. Team enablement and team capability building ??: Despite the growing narrative that workers must return to the office in order to build team culture, the research shows that it isn’t the physical closeness of a team that builds relatedness - but three important workplace interventions - improving communication (and having more real conversations with one another), investing in collaboration and being deliberate about it through coordination, and streamlining our technology for effective engagement with one another. So while seeing eachother in the flesh is wonderful, and don’t get me wrong - there are loads of days I'd love to be around my team in person - that alone isn’t going to build a sense of connectedness within the team. So what do I do? With staff across five continents, I focus on making the moments that we engage matter. Each meeting has a purpose - drawing on leading organisational psychologists Adam Grant’s research on meetings to ‘do’ , ‘learn’ , ‘decide’ , or ‘bond’ - I often find the former three can be achieved through asynchronous communication (ending the death by zoom culture) thus allowing us to invest in bonding through our dedicated time together.
3. Life outside of work ???: Finally, the most important things in life are our supports - sometimes they come from work, but oftentimes they are the family and friend structures we often take for granted. As I've learned to work less over the years, I've learned to embrace being present and connected with the people in my personal lives more. They’re the ones who love me, no matter what I achieve in work. They’re the ones who are there when the times are tough. Being there for them when the times are good is one of the best ways to help build longer term happiness. That’s not just waffle - that’s supported by decades of longitudinal research from The Harvard Study of Adult Development?

Who do I think of as role models in this space of wellbeing? ??

The team at led by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Richard Layard and their social impact team World Wellbeing Movement being led out by Sarah Cunningham are making a significant impact is making the business case for investing in wellbeing. High quality, high impact research that is turning the narrative around why wellbeing is not just a nice-to-have in 21st century organisations - but a necessary investment for longer term sustainability

The team at WOHASU ? being led by Karen Guggenheim who is bridging the gap between research and practice by bringing world leaders from all walks of life together to talk about the importance of building happiness in society.

Finally, all of our pilot participants in our 4 Day Week - Global trials! They are the trail blazers, showing how a new way of working can be created - that organisation performance can be enhanced by investing in structural interventions that enhance staff wellbeing.?

Where can you catch me this week? ??

Catch me in articles over the past few months from the The Atlantic, INSIDER , The New York Times , Bloomberg , Wall Street Journal , and Fast Company.

Work with me! ??

I’m trying to start the conversation around wellbeing interventions that work. According to high quality research from Wellbeing Research Centre at University of Oxford organisations are investing more money on wellbeing interventions than ever, and struggling to move the dial. Window shopping wellness is having a negative impact on our workforce, and it is time to follow the science. Help me build that conversation by working with me:?

• Have me speak at your next event or conference
• Bring me in to run a workshop session with your employees around evidence-based wellbeing interventions
• Join our growing movement at 4 Day Week - Global as we build a million new years of free time
• Educate your talent team about wellbeing and start with bottom-up designed interventions
• Sponsor my newsletter and reach thousands of likeminded people
• Connect about sponsored posts and influencer opportunities

If you’re interested in any of these, please DM me via LinkedIn or reach out at [email protected] .?

I’m an audible nerd - so here is some of my favourite books on this topic ??

Peak performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness

The Art of Rest by Claudia Hammond

Life on purpose by Victor Strecher

Why we do what we do by Edward Deci?

This book will change your mind about mental health by Nathan Filer

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi?

The Happiness Industry by William Davies

Can we be happier by Richard Layard

Till next time ??,

Dr. Dale Whelehan