Why Tech Innovation Isn't Enough If People Are Stressed Out

Welcome to my newsletter, where you'll find inspiration and actionable advice on how to build resilience and connections in our unprecedented times. 

Today's read is ~5 minutes.

Why Adding a Human Layer Is the Key to the “Great Reset”

Photo: Westend61 / Getty Images

The coronavirus pandemic has changed everything about the way we live and work. And now Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom predicts productivity drops within companies of five and even 10%. “These falls are not surprising,” Bloom says, “but are absolutely massive.” 

The reason they’re not surprising is because productivity is not just about technology. It’s also about people. And right now, people are stressed out of their minds. A survey released last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that over 40% of adults reported experiencing mental health challenges, including anxiety and depression. 

That’s why companies need to pay as much attention to the human element as they do to innovative new technologies — agile shift management dashboards, tech-infused elevator protocols, vibrating social distancing apps, and much more.

The World Economic Forum published a paper in July entitled “Digital Transformation: Powering the Great Reset.” But those who think that the “Great Reset” can be powered exclusively by digital transformation are missing the fact that there can be no “Great Reset” unless people are able to hit the reset button within themselves. 

That starts with giving people the tools they need to support and nurture their own well-being and mental resilience so they can operate from a place of strength and navigate change in their daily lives. This was always important, but now it’s imperative.

We all have treasures inside us — amazing insights, original ideas, needle-moving solutions to previously unsolvable problems. Those treasures are the building blocks of productivity. But we can’t tap into them when we are as anxious and stressed as most people are right now. To access our creativity in the middle of uncertainty and chaos around us, our immediate emotional needs have to be met first. We can’t create and implement new solutions for the future if we are struggling to simply get through the day. We can’t be empathetic, inclusive, open to new ideas and see alternative perspectives when we’re in a perpetual fight-or-flight mode. 

Real inspiration, breakthroughs and deep, sustained focus can only happen when we’re in the calm eye of the hurricane — when we’re recharged and engaged, not at the mercy of our survival instincts. That’s when the creative rather than reactive parts of our minds can come to the surface. 

Ultimately, all technology is about humans and what the technology allows us to do. So does it allow us to be our best selves, and unlock our uniquely human qualities? Does it augment our humanity, or diminish it?

A company is only as resilient as its people. If employees are anxious, reactive and burned out, every business metric — from productivity to attrition to customer success — will be affected. That’s why people need to be at the center of whatever reentry plans or digital transformation strategies companies are formulating right now.

Sure, it’s great to use cutting-edge online teamwork software, create virtual stages for presentations, build customized workflow systems, optimize distributed workforces, have the latest in video meeting technologies and all the other marvels that are now more critical than ever. But what about the humans using all those optimized workforce systems? Are the humans optimized? We can see them showing up in the “participant list” of our video conferencing dashboards, but are they bringing their whole selves to work? And how much of their wisdom, empathy and creativity are showing up with them? 

We’re at a moment of deep discontinuity — when one system falls away and another takes its place. The pandemic sped up our future, accelerating trends that were already forcing us to come up with a new definition of productivity built around what we know allows people to reach their highest potential. As we reopen and reenter, we need to reimagine and rebuild the relationship between employees and companies — and at the heart of that is helping employees rebuild their relationship with themselves. Creating the conditions for people to operate from a place of strength, calm, empathy and resilience should be on the list of every company’s plans for both the short term and the long term. Without also prioritizing the human factor, digital transformation and external productivity tools, no matter how sophisticated, will never be enough.

Read More on Thrive: Why Adding a Human Layer Is the Key to the “Great Reset”

Thrive ZP Available for Download

The big news at Thrive this week was the launch of our Thrive ZP App in partnership with Walmart, which combines our behavior change technology with inspiring storytelling and a whole suite of tools that can help you take charge of your well-being. You can use it to take the 21-day Thrive ZP Challenge to help you make Better Choices, and you can choose science-backed, too-small-to-fail Microsteps to help you reach your goals. And when you complete a challenge, you can submit a short story about your experience to enter for a chance to win a cash prize from a $1 million prize pool. One of my favorite tools in the app is Reset, which allows you to create a personalized guide with photos, quotes and sounds that help you feel more calm and centered in just 60 seconds. I’m endlessly inspired by the stories and success of those participating, and thrilled that the app is now available to everyone. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to tap into our resilience. You can download the app here.

Higher Office

Nellie Bowles writes in The New York Times about a new trend surfacing in corporate America: the spiritual consultant. “They blend the obscure language of the sacred with the also obscure language of management consulting to provide clients with a range of spiritually inflected services, from architecture to employee training to ritual design,” she writes. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Organized religion may be on the decline, but our need for spiritual meaning is on the rise — especially at a time when people are cut off from their usual sources of connection and community. So the question, as one consultant put it, is “How do you translate the ancient traditions that have given people access to meaning-making practices, but in a context that is not centered around the congregation?” Bowles, who herself says she’s “hungry for ritual,” lists some examples of rituals for remote meetings, like starting with a moment of silence, or what we love to practice at Thrive, moments of gratitude. The point is less what form the expression takes and more about the need for spiritual meaning to be a part of our national conversation.

We Need Your Best School Ideas

In normal times, our country’s 56 million children would be filing into school this month, with the biggest challenge being back-to-school jitters. But these are not normal times, and the challenges facing our 130,000 schools are unprecedented. That’s why Thrive Global has joined forces with Dream Corps, Nextdoor, DonorsChoose and the CAA Foundation to create #BackToSchoolSolutions, a one-stop nationwide hub to surface solutions from people around the country. Our schools are more than just places to learn — they’re communities of care, serving vital roles for our children in emotional development, nutrition, exercise and mental health. And teachers, parents and community leaders are moving ahead with creative ways to educate and nurture. On September 12, #BackToSchoolSolutions will be hosting a National Day of Conversation and Action. So please add your voice and your ideas. You can register here to find out how you can be a positive catalyst for change in your community.

Before You Go

Neologism of the Month (new words, terms or phrases that define our time)

“Coronasomnia” — the inability to sleep due to stress and disrupted routines from the pandemic, which, as The Washington Post reports, “could prove to have profound public-health ramifications — creating a massive new population of chronic insomniacs grappling with declines in productivity, shorter fuses and increased risks of hypertension, depression and other health problems.” The warning signs are already here: sleep aid prescriptions are up 15% and insomnia complaints to the U.C.L.A. Sleep Disorders Center have jumped by 20 to 30%. All the more reason to make sleep a part of your coronavirus health and safety protocol. This means being mindful about declaring an end to your workday, stopping yourself when you’re “doomscrolling” and shutting off your devices — and escorting them out of your bedroom — as part of your bedtime routine. While we wait for a coronavirus vaccine, we can at least start rolling back coronasomnia!

Book of the Month

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It, by John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, and Adrian Wooldridge, political editor of The Economist. If the pandemic is a wake-up call — and it is — this book is the urgently needed to-do list for when we (hopefully) wake up. We’ve all been reminded of how much government and leadership matter. We’ve watched, the authors write, as “the world’s most powerful country has failed spectacularly” in its response to the pandemic. But the book isn’t just an acute diagnosis of how we got here. It’s also a detailed plan for how America can, as it has in the past, reinvent itself. But we’re at a crossroads. “If Washington snoozes,” they write, “it could follow the way of other empires that crumbled, notably Rome and Athens (which gave way to autocratic Sparta in the wake of a plague).” The authors’ plan includes: building resilience to deal with the next inevitable disruptions, including climate change, coupling police reform with gun reform, creating a healthcare system to “guarantee every American a certain standard of free health care,” unleashing technology to “build the infrastructure a knowledge economy needs,” and looking more to mayors, who are “driving most of the innovation in government.” We face two endings to our story, they write, “one in which the ship continues to rot and another in which it is repaired and rejiggered.” True to its title, this book, which is on my nightstand full of handwritten notes in the margins, is a great wake-up call for how to repair and rejigger our democracy.

Stay healthy, stay safe,