Weird wellness: Science, ego and confusion

If you’re a snowman built from a late April flurry, happily laying your plans for the next 12 weeks, then Thomas Gray’s most famous phrase, “ignorance is bliss” probably applies. However if, based on that same April squall and ignorant of weather patterns, you hire a fleet of snow ploughs for the months ahead, well, maybe not.

Here is another phrase, Ignoris juris non excusat.?Yet in business, ignorance is not seen as an excuse, it is habitually seen as a benefit, often yodelled across CBDs. Outdated and discredited ideas and notions are propounded as truths because, not only is ignorance bliss, but it is also easy and profitable. Why bother with legitimacy?

Sorcery and pseudo-science

We have, for example, spoken before about the utter futility of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).?This trite piece of chicanery has been pirouetting on snake oil, since it was exposed as a scientific charade in the 1980s, stopping only for businesses to slide sizeable notes into its garters.

The same applies to that cauldron of chaos, the psychology of colour. An awesome discipline in universities, a field of profitable self-delusion in business. Green is relaxing, red makes you productive, blue chills you out.?Really? When did you last nod off at a green light?

Woe is wellness

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey”(thanks Ted), as elsewhere, so it is that disinformation and fallacy are infecting wellness. A friend gave an oblique suggestion that I may like to comment on a LinkedIn post he had made, beneath an article on stress. I went to do as asked. I could not do as asked. The article held more fiction than Star Wars.

For some bleak, but illustrative, sport, let's take a salutary to look at some of the article’s claims along with a few of the responses it generated. Then let's see *what scientific support these comments attract.

Claim: “Stress” said the article “is the largest driver of unwellness....The approach to wellness has to start from a place of reducing stress.”

Science: This argument is less accurate than Braveheart and displays scientific illiteracy. Stress is a dependent variable. It depends on a starting agent. Stress couldn't start a bike race.

For example, you cannot just demand your cholesterol to be lower than it is. To reduce cholesterol you need to change your diet or take a pill. In just the same way stress is dependent on primary actions. If stress - or wellness - increases or decreases, something else is the cause (see below).

In short stress cannot start a bike race, but a bike race can start stress.

Claim: “Almost everyone defines (wellness) differently, and no one mentioned chairs, desks, etc. no real surprise there”

Science: First, Wellness is defined in different ways because, as quickly becomes gin clear, few understand what it is.?

Second, it is hardly surprising that people haven’t mentioned chairs, desks etc. when talking about wellness, because there is no direct link between the two. Furniture does have uses as a psychological cypher and then it can indeed help to improve wellness, but that is a different story. In bald reality, though, putting a call-centre worker’s bottom on a spinny chair that goes up and down, even if it is vegan leather and super comfortable, is frequently the precursor to workplace angst, worry and sorrow.

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?Claim: “Most companies are checking the wellness box. There are gyms, yoga classes, meditation, etc.”

?Science: These factors are part of well-being, not wellness. We must understand the difference…it’s coming up.

Claim: “Who is training employees to deep breath and how often. My training has me doing it hourly to reduce stress. Or get up from your desk every hour or two and walk around, or how often should I exercise and which exercises help eliminate stress best?”

Science: ?This kind of stress relief is an organizational salve and usually utterly useless. Workplace stress generally stems from organizational pressure. So that if, for example, you have a job with no autonomy, no input, and/or you are under jack hammer pressure to meet ridiculous targets, then short of ingesting a cannabis farm, you are going to be stressed out. Jogging around your desk, breathing like a sperm whale, and eating a rain forest of Brazil nuts will not make it better.

Claim: “Better leadership training around building truly inclusive teams and leaders at all levels having better training around building productive teams is key”

?Science: Well, yes. if done properly, this is certainly a key. However leadership itself is a quagmire and how are you going to measure productivity, in say your Marketing or HR Team? (As a clue of what not to do, measuring KPIs does not measure productivity. And it is not possible to measure productivity by just asking somebody how productive they are. Need help? See one of the several articles on the subject on this profile, or just ask).

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?Claim: “Our society is crying for our communities to care.... our employees are searching for companies who care more sincerely...(for them)...than the bottom line. Investing in each other, equally, seems to be a game of chicken.”

?Science: Yes, yes and yes. This is a great point. Companies who care, perform better than those that don’t. Also, caring companies feature higher levels of wellness and well-being, while stress plummets. There is ‘stress’ appearing as that dependent variable again. Having people care reduces stress.

?However companies that trust people, who treat colleagues as grown-ups, do even better.

Claim: “(A) Typical approach to well-being is a “check the box” mentality. If it’s not deeply rooted in the culture and behaviors don’t change, employees will still dread for Mondays.

Science: Scientifically, this is the best comment on the board. Sticking plaster solutions to make the management feel good, do not work. Sleep, for example, is a beautiful thing, but you can employ the best sleep coach in the world (I may even know who that person is) and if your lousy job is keeping you awake at night, then six pints of Night Nurse will struggle to stop the doom-laden, four o’clock malaise monster.

Claim: “Love this insight XXXX!”

?Science: This comment is the most worrying of all as there was no insight on offer. Stress as a driving factor is a taxi ride to a dead end, but no doubt the fares stack up nicely.

Well then...?

So what is Wellness? Well, notice that Wellness is a psychological concept. It is, if you like, a sense of ambience, a sense of feeling at home when at work. In the workplace context, it is entirely predicated on the actions of the business. How much trust am I given, how much resource; am I allowed to do things my own way?

A high sense of wellness then becomes the key pivot point for everything else that goes on within an organization, a mediating factor is you will.?If wellness is positive, then so are factors like citizenship and productivity. And so are well-being variables, such as stress.

So stress doesn’t drive wellness. Quite the reverse, it is driven by it.

Wellness and well-being sound similar, so conflation is understandable, especially as in business, both terms remain inchoate. But mixing the two is a profound error.

If you think of wellness as a sense of feeling at home, you won’t go too far wrong. And if you do feel at home, that augurs well for everything else. Feeling at home or otherwise, is rather down to the employer.

The concepts discussed here lie at the heart of The Knight Index (www.TheKnightIndex.com). The Ki is based entirely on science and shows how a business’s management is making things good, bad or otherwise for people, prospects and the bottom line. ?

But whether you are a Ki user or not, do please use the science. Always use the science. Science could save and make you a fortune. Science will save angst, unhappiness and stress…and ignorance. If you need any help to improve wellness, well-being and performance, call. Craig.

#science #psychology #management #theknightindex #workplace