What role can Experience Management play in mental well-being in the workplace?

The interest in and importance of mental well-being in the workplace is a growing focus in many organizations today. My esteemed friends Daniel Breston and James Finister inspired me to reflect on the question, "What role does experience management and specifically XLAs play in mental well-being within the organization?"

At the risk of taking a vital journey at an overly brisk pace, thus missing some important nuances, here are my thoughts.

Opening Statement

Experience management needs to be a scale proposition to be relevant for an organization. Therefore, experience management is not a discipline exercised at an individual level. "We aren't concerned with Mr. X as an individual, but with everyone like Mr. X."

Does this position negate an individual focus on social well-being and emotional safety? It does not. While Experience Management needs to be the purview of the digital anthropologist to be effective, that doesn't mean that other approaches by psychologists or psychiatrists that focus on individual well-being are less valuable. In fact, XLAs can provide heat maps to guide practitioners and make them more effective.

How can mental health be handled within Experience Management?

Mental health within XLAs and experience management is a Social Fact. Social facts are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control.

To illustrate this thought, let's look at arguably the most distressing incident of impaired mental well-being: suicide. The digital anthropologist's thesis is that mental health can be analyzed and even predicted at scale without a complete understanding of the individual tribulations and motives of those who kill themselves.

Suicide as a Social Fact

This idea was first suggested in an eternally relevant study, Le Suicide, by Emile Durkheim in 1897. Durkheim was the first person to describe suicide as a Social Fact. Durkheim's study suggested that four categories of suicide can almost be predicted depending on the state of society at any given time:

• Anomic suicide is an extreme response by a person who experiences anomie ,?a sense of disconnection from society, and a feeling of not belonging resulting from weakened social cohesion. Anomie occurs during severe social, economic, or political upheaval periods, which result in quick and extreme changes to society and everyday life. In such circumstances, a person might feel so confused and disconnected that they choose to commit suicide.
• Altruistic suicide is often a result of excessive regulation of individuals by social forces such that a person may be moved to kill themselves for the benefit of a cause or for society at large. An example is someone who commits suicide for the sake of a religious or political cause, such as the infamous Japanese Kamikaze pilots of World War II or the hijackers that crashed the airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania in 2001. In such social circumstances, people are so firmly integrated into social expectations and society itself that they will kill themselves to achieve collective goals.
• Egoistic suicide is a profound response executed by people who feel totally detached from society. Ordinarily, people are integrated into society through work roles, family and community ties, and other social bonds. When these bonds are weakened through retirement or loss of family and friends, the likelihood of egoistic suicide increases. Older adults, who suffer these losses most profoundly, are highly susceptible to egoistic suicide.
• Fatalistic suicide occurs under conditions of extreme social regulation, resulting in oppressive conditions and a denial of the self and agency. In such a situation, a person may elect to die rather than continue enduring the dictatorial conditions, such as the case of suicide among prisoners.

The XLA as an Expression of a Social Fact

Holding to this concept, an XLA is essentially 'painting by numbers' to understand the sentiment and the direction of travel of a group of employees, patients, customers, etc.

An XLA tracks the social facts.

One of Durkheim's revelations in 1897 was that soldiers kill themselves at a much higher rate than civilians. A hundred and twenty years later, we take this gruesome social fact as a given. Still, it is only since 2016 that we have organized and coordinated responses to deal with it. (see link in the comments)

In fact, since 9/11, more US military personnel have died from suicide than combat operations. For our purposes, it is important to note that the elevated suicide rate continues after serving military are discharged. Suicides under veterans are 1.5 times higher than the general population, and for women veterans it is 2.5 times the average! In other words veterans in the workplace potentially have an elevated rate of suicidal intent.

Experience Management allows us to apply the mental well-being criteria to the sentiment and non-sentiment measures we include in an XLA. This enables us to operate a scale observation. The best application of XLAs is focused on an Experience persona. This is a defined audience within the organization. Usually, this is a persona that represents a specific value to the organization (e.g., a sales professional, a designer, a developer)

In our example, we will tailor an XLA for the well-being of veterans in our workforce. While this approach might not be as targeted as one-to-one counseling, it is much more effective at predicting the gravity of sentiment at scale. Just consider that there are almost three million military personnel in NATO. There are eight million veterans employed in the US civilian workplace. Can our understanding of their sentiment at scale be the sole purview of psychologists, counselors, and chaplains? I suggest not.

In addition to their application at scale, XLAs have the advantage of continuously monitoring moments over time rather than individual transactions or events.

So, let us imagine that we wish to track the mental well-being of veterans in the workplace.

How could an XLA for veterans in our organization work?

Veterans are more prone to Anomic and Egoistic suicide. So, we should incorporate our sentiment analysis appropriately. Obviously, much more research needs to go into an XLA stack, but here are some initial thoughts.

By monitoring the sentiment and correlating it with supporting operational and technical indicators, we can continually track well-being and its direction of travel. Should the gravity of the experience set in, we can mobilize to address it promptly.

While suicide is a hefty application, we can obviously use the same approach in other areas of societal concern:

• To track anti-social sentiment that can trend to domestic terrorism (Altruistic and Egoistic triggers)
• To understand unease within a multi-generational workforce (Egoistic triggers) or
• To understand unease of technological change such as AI (Anomic triggers)

In Summary

XLAs are an excellent mechanism to determine the direction of travel of relevant sentiment at scale within an experience persona.

Enhanced mental well-being is best served by applying individual counseling guided by analysis of Social Facts.

I understand this is a complex and vital subject, so I want your opinion on this article.

Other initiatives where combinations of data and observation are being considered are described at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5077254/

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Veterans Affairs Canada / Anciens Combattants Canada