Workplace Wellbeing, The Secret Sauce

It may seem like more tools and practices is the last thing you need. After all is anyone really using the program, project and change management methods well?

And if many organizations still refer to the entirety of globally recognized good practices in initiative management as bunk - preferring to have chain of command do transformation, then what on earth do I mean by introducing a whole new set of tools?

Well, the answer is “mental wellbeing”.?

Bad behavior, toxic environments, and plain old-fashioned burnout are making a comeback in workplaces around the world (despite many more in-house employee mental health programs) in large part because human beings can only process so much change and uncertainty.

Now part of the equation of processing change and uncertainty has to do with the residual ‘industrial age’ expectations companies have of their people. That is, people feel torn when they must meet the old ‘being right’, ‘error is failure’, and ‘producing quality’ expectations under conditions of nebulous priorities, many unknowns, and shifting stability.

But the other part of the equation is that in transforming environments people are rarely talking about the right things. Meaning, they are not talking about how well they are moving through the transformation(s) they are engaged in… and I mean ‘moving’ from a thinking and dialogue standpoint and I also mean ‘moving’ from a progress standpoint. Because truly, you can’t have progress without productive thinking and dialogue.

Thinking and dialoguing just about the solution

doesn’t deal with the transformation itself.

So, my methods supply tools and practices that work together to focus and accelerate how people think about the transformation, and how they dialogue about the transformation. But that leaves the question of ‘ugh! even more tools and practices?’.

Well, the necessity for new tools is evident in the transformation failure statistics, and the vastness of the nature of transformation itself, but what the new tools should be is indicated by the increasing levels of workplace burnout, quiet quitting, and toxicity in team dynamics. In fact, so many gaps exist in transformation work that it’s not possible to bridge them with ‘just work harder’ or ‘push through’ tactics - and its people who suffer.

Aside from the varying aptitudes for innovative thinking, and the wide range of interest in the kind of personal growth that transforming workplaces impose, there is simply too much work to do, too many moving parts to consider, and too many new perspectives to understand for progress to be made using the old/common/existing toolset.

The workloads of people have effectively tripled and just the thinking part of this new normal is not only overwhelming, its exhausting. Common practices are not only unable to address this - they are unable to account for it.

So, when it comes to continuous transformation:

• program and project management are needed – check;
• change management for behavior alteration, competency development, and communication for understanding is needed – check…

But tools that aid people in processing unceasing radical change at speed at the thinking level are also needed – ones that deal with transformation as transformation and not work management.

And that’s why my Continuous Transformation Management Framework contains the secret sauce of processing transformation at the thinking and dialogue level –in a way that produces consistent forward motion with speed, preserves the resiliency of people, and measures actual transformation progress.

Want to learn more? Find an explainer video on YouTube HERE .

Reshaping how people work, for success in business transformation,

Dr. Linda