Towards A New Work Wellness Model (Eh?)
Here is the full report. You can also see some analysis in Stowe Boyd’s newsletter. It feels like a new “comprehensive take” on work-life balance and work wellness comes out every 4–5 years. If you’re one of the 12 people in America who follows wellness tech brands on Instagram, you might see some reports come out more frequently. I don’t know your life.
As you can see, the five “pillars” are:
Hmmm. OK. Let’s go one-by-one on these.
Protection from harm
In the physical sense, yes. There are in-office shootings, although somewhat rare, and most mid- to large-sized places have corporate security. I think you are generally going to be physically safe from harm in an office, and ideally if you’re remote or hybrid, same.
Now, protection from emotional harm is essentially “psychological safety,” which Google and a couple of academics and long-form journalists have been discussing since 2010. I don’t think that’s common in many workplaces. It’s more common on teams with functional managers, even if it’s not common at the organizational level. Lots of people cry at, or because of, work. Emotions run rampant, even if we want the places to be process-driven. So no, I don’t think you’re protected from emotional harm at the highest level. If your boss is self-aware and functional and not a calendar slave, then yes.
Opportunities for growth
Usually when people say this, they mean “financially.” We all know about stagnant wages and CEO-base worker ratios. None of that looks good. Lemme drop a Vox Media video here:
I do think some people say this and mean “opportunities for learning” or “chances to grow professionally.” Most people mean money, especially in inflationary environments. By and large, companies don’t like paying people. They will pay typically for:
That’s about it. So no, I don’t think there are many opportunities for growth at places. I know some guys who are 12+ years at one company and they still get screwed on bonuses, even though everyone loves to talk of “retention.”
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Mattering at work
This is another one that comes back to how functional your direct boss is. If you have an absentee boss (common) , you don’t matter at work. Period, end of sentence, end of story. When I was working at TCU, my boss’ boss was this guy Bill. He was gone every single day from 11am to 2pm. He was mostly in meetings and approving things via email, although sometimes those things took weeks to approve. It was pathetic and not “leadership” in any sense of the word; classic absentee, and he maybe spoke seven total words to me in four months. I didn’t matter there. That was a function of the silo head. Even if the work I did mattered (it didn’t really either), I ceased to matter as a person because of the personalities involved. That’s common for a lot of people, especially as more bosses are Temple of Busy calendar slaves. I think this can be at-scale, but it’s not common.
Work-life harmony
This is a tricky one because, well, look at the season we’re in right now. If you talk to anyone in December, they tell you how busy everything is, and how they have so many commitments, and all this stuff. Busy busy busy. Everything is so slammed. So busy. Running around. Etc. Here’s the thing: in reality, it’s one of the laziest times of the year. Work barely matters. You go to more social functions, generally, but again, those are 2–3 hours of open bar that some law firm provided. It’s not some massive commitment except for dressing up.
So the thing with “work-life harmony” is that a lot of times, people will try to present as busy when they’re not that busy, because this increases feelings of relevance and “I’m needed” in the person claiming to be busy. Hugely important thing to understand there.
As work gets more automated and SaaS creeps into different industries, and so many managers are just “I approve this and tell you in Slack to look at the changes I made,” no, I don’t think people work 70 hours/week. Some do. Financial analysts. Bosses that really care. Fulfillment center workers at the holidays. Etc. But a lot of white-collar jobs are probably bored 3–4 hours/day.
In that way, I think work-life harmony isn’t too bad. I think it’s harder for moms.
Connection and community
Now you get into the whole “work is a family!” thing, which is dangerous. Work is a form of community, but you should not want work to be your entire community , because that trips you up. Some people lost their minds during COVID in part because their only community was work — no real friends, no real hobbies, no real activities aside from maybe kids’ soccer — and they were losing in-person access to that community. I don’t think work should be your community, nor would I say the Surgeon General should recommend that. Work should be a safe space to share concepts and ideas, with a few friends and a few acquaintances, and they should pay you fairly so you can go back and be a good little consumer of fancy Havarti cheese. That’s it. That’s all work really is. Looking for “community” there isn’t healthy, IMHO.
The bottom lines
Most of these Surgeon General-recommended things are not offered at most companies. That’s, uh, not good. I would say the biggest possibility to make this a bit better is more functional managers. Promote the people with the most internal respect and sense of time management/organization, not necessarily the people with the “best numbers.” A “best numbers” guy is usually a hideous manager, and that drives up all these connection and health concerns. A “OK numbers” guy with respect and admiraton is a much better managerial contender for the bigger picture.
Most people come to hate jobs not because of core product/service made, or even the executive team (because most people don’t have access to the executive team). They hate jobs because of their direct manager and their workload, and those two are often tied together. If we got more functional and self-aware managers — which I know is easier said than done — we’d be able to do more about “work wellness” than a few misguided gym memberships and periodic 10% discounts on juices.
CEO and Dir of Application R&D, introducing executives to humaneering - 21st-century OS for the human side of business (humaneeringtech.com). Resolve people problems, unleash achievement, delight employees and customers.
10 个月Ted, thank you for posting this, or I might have otherwise missed it. As the Surgeon General writes in the report's introduction, this model reflects an ideal . . . an opportunity . . . a potential for what work, or employment, should be like . . . an ideal that is worth working towards. As you point out, most of us can probably agree that the reality today is a far cry from this. Realistically, for this to ever become reality, their would need to be some evident benefit for executives and shareholders. And the current trend seems to be for most employers to do less for employees (if not eliminate the employees altogether) . . . because management is under continuous pressure to spend no more on employees than is absolutely necessary. Has employment ever been designed to achieve these "Five Essentials"? Are these qualities that employees aspire to receive in exchange for their employment?