How does sustainable leadership work?
This episode takes you behind the scenes of a recent gathering led by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development together with IMD, where David Bach sat down with two sustainability leaders....
Leadership
How to avoid the coming well-being crisis in our workplace
Employee engagement has long been the standard measure of organizational health. But what about the well-being of the people who work for you? With the pressures on today’s workforce becoming increasingly acute, leaders must not only rethink but reset the way they manage.
Do you keep a regular check on how employees are feeling in your organization? If so, what measures do you use?
The chances are that engagement features high on your workplace barometer, and with good reason. In recent years, employee engagement has become something of a byword for organizational success. Engaged employees are more productive, more likely to stay at an organization and to perform well. Engagement equals prosperity, goes the mantra. Little wonder that we have all become a little fixated on keeping rigorous tabs on how engaged our workforces are. But here’s a curiosity.
According to Gallup, employee engagement has not really changed much over the last two decades. Since 2001, it has hovered around the 30% mark without substantive shifts one way or the other. Meanwhile, organizations continue to pursue growth, with top performers posting profits and returns for investors that consistently outpace inflation. Good news for investors, but what about employees?
Even as business has essentially boomed over the last 20 or so years (allowing for the odd financial or global health crisis), salaries have remained stagnant. Spiking inflation in 2022 saw a decrease of -0.9% worldwide.
With inflation surging and disposable incomes squeezed ever tighter, there is a looming cost of living crisis; one that is poised to hit younger workers particularly hard. Deloitte and others warn that Gen Zs and Millennials are plagued by financial insecurity. Around 60% of this younger cohort are living from paycheck to paycheck, without any realistic hope of being able to buy their own home. Meanwhile, organizations and leaders keep piling on the work. Business remains entrenched in the notion of doing more with less and growing at most if not all costs; and while forward-thinking organizations do what they can to evolve or enhance corporate culture in some way, the majority of us are still largely constrained and conditioned by EBITDA (net income before taking out interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization expenses), by short-termism, and fulfilling stringent financial expectations set by public trading.
This posits a quandary.
Happiness is plummeting among a cohort of the workforce that will accede to the majority in the next 10 or so years.
The pressure is on our workforce to maintain an ever-faster pace of work and performance – to do what they can to prove themselves, to meet those targets, and secure that promotion or risk falling behind or even out of the running altogether. Never mind not being able to buy a house, for most of our younger employees, not making the grade amounts to the same thing as not being able to make the rent. And in this scenario, well-being becomes problematic.
Ask yourself again: do you keep a regular check on how your employees are feeling? Besides the routine engagement metrics, do you have a serious purchase on their mental or emotional health? The same Deloitte data reveals that only half of Millennial and Gen Z workers feel their mental health is good. And around 40% say that they feel stressed all or most of the time.
Happiness is plummeting among a cohort of the workforce that will accede to the majority in the next 10 or so years. Meanwhile, declining fertility rates suggest that there may not be enough young people in the coming decades to fill the jobs that organizations need to do. This means that the internal and external pressure to do more with less is only set to intensify and engulf older generations – Gen X workers who will be less able to retire and more likely to have to continue supporting adult children emotionally and financially, let alone their elderly parents.
I see our current reality as quintessentially and profoundly unsustainable. I see a calamitous emotional and financial crisis engulfing our workforces and societies unless we enact a meaningful reset in what we expect from people and how we lead and manage them. But what do I mean by this?
For starters, I believe that we need to rethink what we mean by leadership. And that means looking at the people that we lead and manage as actual human beings. It means that instead of fixating on things like engagement or work-life balance – a meaningless metric in today’s context where the demands of work and the financial exigencies of life are completely out of kilter—we instead strive to prioritize the differentiated needs of individuals in the workplace.
I believe we need a leadership reset that puts the individual at the center of the workforce in a way that human beings feel valued, heard, trusted and that they matter and belong, and that they are not simply spokes in an engine geared to growth at all costs.
What does that reset look like in practical terms?
Work-life bloom
A good place to start is that human beings are dynamic and mutable. We are in a permanent state of flux, change, and evolution. There are constantly shifting needs, demands, and exigencies in our working and private worlds that shape and reshape how we think, feel, and perform, depending on our age and stage of life. Leaders need to be cognizant of this and do their best to support, nurture, and encourage people at different phases of their lives, across their ups and downs, while embracing and acknowledging the differences between their employees.
In the context of work, I think of human beings as four essential personas, using the garden as a kind of metaphor. At any given time, your employees might be:
- Blooming: The different factors in their work and life are relatively positive or balanced on aggregate. They feel trusted and valued at work and on the life side, they are supported, and they have agency and purpose.
- Budding: They might be doing OK at work but not perhaps so well in their home life, so they may feel off-kilter in some way.
- Stunted: Your employees may be exemplary in their personal lives, but for whatever reason, work is not going so well, and they need support in the workplace.
- Renewing: They are experiencing different factors both in the workplace and their private lives such that both work and life need a reset.
Looking at human beings this way, seeing them through this lens, can help us embed the idea that the people we lead are not always holistically “blooming.” They won’t always be on and performing at their peak. They’re likely to be wholly blooming some of the time and at others, their well-being or balance shifts and is at odds with itself. Something may be happening at home that they are bringing into work. Or work might be impacting their home life in some way. The point is that human beings are never truly in a permanent state of balance, and this is wholly natural.
“Our workforces are prone to enormous pressures, and it is likely those pressures will only intensify over time. It is critical, I believe, that we prioritize this kind of humane leadership, that we shift our focus from metrics to emotion, from output to input.”
Resetting the way we understand leadership means grasping this and understanding that there is no magic pill to make the people we lead bloom when we want them to bloom. Instead, we can become more skilled in perceiving the different personas or phases that surface within individuals at different times, in reading their very human emotions, and appreciating the factors and forces, from generational differences to cultural nuances, that shape and reshape the way they feel and perform. Doing this as a leader means first asking yourself an important question: do I assume team members are essentially the same, or do I actively differentiate between them?
From here, I think there are five practical things that leaders can do to support the mental and emotional well-being of their people within their purview.
- Advocate for human beings. Setting tasks and deadlines falls to managers, but leading humanely means asking yourself what you are doing to advocate for individuals inside and outside of work. It means reflecting on what steps you can take to support them across all four of the personas outlined above and across the ups and downs they will experience. And that means asking questions.
- Build trust and safety. Creating the conditions, interactions, and multidirectional channels of communication so that people feel they belong and have agency can transform the workplace into a space where well-being is prioritized and nourished.
- Ensure they are valued. Again, setting objectives and deadlines is limited to management. Humane leadership entails asking for opinions and ideas, even if those ideas are not fully implemented, you are giving people their opportunity and right to contribute and, most importantly, to be heard.
- Ensure they are compensated. Leading humanely means asking what is fair across measures such as tenure, gender, and competency. It also means constantly questioning and checking yourself for bias.
- Declare a sense of purpose. Ask yourself whether you have adequately declared what you stand for as a leader and shared a real purpose with your people. For me, that purpose is less, “We are here to see through each other,” and more, “We are here to see each other through.”
Our workforces are prone to enormous pressures, and it is likely those pressures will only intensify over time. It is critical, I believe, that we prioritize this kind of humane leadership, that we shift our focus from metrics to emotion, from output to input, if we are to support our employees as they navigate and constantly rebalance the different and competing demands they face in their working and private lives. It is the right thing to do for the business outcomes that are ultimately predicated on the well-being of workers. And it is the right thing to do for human beings doing the work.
Dan Pontefract will take part in a panel discussion on ‘Do You Know Where Your
Knowledge Workers Are? at this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum on 15 November in Vienna. This year’s theme is ‘The Next Knowledge Work. Managing For New Levels of Value Creation and Innovation.’
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