Wellbeing at Work | Book Review

“The five key elements of wellbeing are career, social, financial,
physical, and community - in that order." (p. 7)

Subtitled How to Build Resilient and Thriving Teams, is the second of Jim Clifton & Jim Harter's three book series published between 2019 and 2023 and extends beyond Gallup's focus on engagement to include concepts of Wellbeing and Net Thriving.

Published during Covid-19, the authors found that the five elements of your life that affect your wellbeing are interdependent (p. 16). This is reminiscent of Lisette Sutherland's Work together Anywhere, which persuasively demonstrated the emergence of hybrid work environments long before the pandemic.

Clifton and Harter offer three additional human condition categories: We determined the thriving, struggling and suffering categories based on analytics from over a million respondents across 160 countries. (p. 23)

• Thriving: These respondents have positive views of their present life situation and have positive views of the next five years.

• Struggling: These respondents struggle in their present life situation and have uncertain or negative views about their future.

• Suffering: These respondents report that their lives are miserable and have negative views of the next four years.

This review focuses on Workplace Wellbeing opportunities and risks to a Net Thriving Culture.

Workplace Opportunities

Managers don't seem to be very effective creating wellbeing at work:

Spending time with their manager is the worst part of the day for
employees, according to an approach called National Time
Accounting that asks people detailed questions about their
time use throughout the day. (p. 41)

The authors suggest using proven methods to transition your managers' mentality from boss to coach. Think of the instinctive needs dimension of an Energize2Lead Profile, whose colors represent:

• Motivational Needs
• Learning Style
• Survival Instincts
• What we LISTEN FOR 

A boss likely focuses on the task or project at hand, while the leader as coach focuses on the more significant aspects of wellbeing. Recall from Culture Shock that holding one meaningful conversation per week with each employee is the best way to increase engagement. Since career is the most significant wellbeing element, effective coaches should focus on creating an environment where thriving in what you do every day makes for stronger relationships (p. 35).

During Academy Leadership Creating a Motivational Environment workshops, we ask "Do Leaders Motivate People?" Rather than believe a boss or coach can make someone do something, we should focus on whether or not we're creating a thriving environment. An engaged employee wakes up in the morning thinking about the work they are going to do that day -- and that work is interesting and challenging to them (p. 42).

Wellbeing is also a financial opportunity: If organizations doubled the percentage of their employees who have a best friend at work, they would realize fewer safety incidents, higher customer ratings and as much as 10% higher profit margins (p. 45).

How to start? Ask employees who they enjoy working with, who has common goals, and who they would like to partner with on future projects (p.  52). An easy place to address this when composing our Personal Leadership Philosophy, is perhaps in the Operating Principles section. Another place is where we articulate our Priorities. For example, make communicating the importance of physical wellbeing an expectation for managers (p. 69). Finally, we may stress the importance of team identity, a powerful motivator. People get a great sense of fulfillment when they feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. Communities can give people that feeling (p. 71).

Risks

The authors define a net thriving culture as one that improves people's lives and performance - beyond typical wellness programs. The four biggest risks in designing and activating a net thriving culture are (p. 87):

• employee mental health
• lack of clarity and purpose
• overreliance on policies, programs and perks
• poorly skilled managers

Our leadership philosophy addresses clarity and purpose. Let's take a closer look at policies, programs and perks. Particularly in larger organizations, we'll frequently notice a plethora of administrative detritus nobly attempting to replace the actions and energy of a leader as coach. In Germany and in the U.S., Gallup found that people with a bad manager had even worse wellbeing than those without jobs (p. 91).

Support for developing managers into leaders must come from the top. Managers are often stuck between organizational decisions and front-line implementation. When managers are taught coaching skills -- which include collaborative goal setting, ongoing feedback and accountability -- they will develop high levels of trust with their employees (p. 101).

Employees usually don't leave companies; they leave lousy supervisors. Of the four risks, poorly skilled managers are the greatest risk. Managers are the single most important factor in the engagement and performance of your workforce (p. 109).

Summary

The best organizations can exceed 70% engaged employees, and the following common themes emerge (p. 124):

1. Culture change was initiated by the CEO and board.
2. They transformed managers from boss to coach.
3. They practiced highly effective companywide communication.
4. They held managers accountable for engagement and performance.

When comparing top -- and bottom-quartile business units and teams, all of this accumulates into a 23% profitability advantage (p. 125).

An interesting observation:

While employee engagement has been on the rise for the past 10 years, as of this writing, 36% of U.S. workers and just 22% globally are engaged (p. 19). It may well be that increased autonomy from the emerging hybrid work environment has increased engagement. Let's see if post Covid return to office policies negatively affect the generally positive trend in employee engagement.

Never forget that you are here to serve. Serve the organization first,
then your team, and long afterward yourself. (p. 223) 

Team Gallup generously provided a copy of the book for review.