How leaders can build a culture of wellness that actually works
Patricia Grabarek and Katina Sawyer are cofounders of Workr Beeing, where they help clients create thriving workplace environments. They are both industrial/organizational psychologists. Patricia has a background in consulting and internal roles, having led people analytics and talent management initiatives for more than 60 companies. Katina is also an associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona, where she focuses her research on workplace wellbeing.
What’s the big idea?
Achieving a culture of wellness at work goes way beyond a steps challenge or mindfulness program. Leaders need to demonstrate vulnerability about their own struggles to build bonds of trust and openness with their employees. They also need to spread gratitude and positivity. Once these pillars of a so-called Generator leader are put into action, then employees will be more willing to step up, engage, and invest their best effort for their team and company.
Below, coauthors Grabarek and Sawyer share five key insights from their new book, Leading for Wellness: How to Create a Team Culture Where Everyone Thrives. Listen to the audio version—read by both authors—in the Next Big Idea app.
1. Workplace wellness matters.
When leaders support employee wellness, employees are healthier, perform better, achieve their goals, and are more committed to their work. In addition, when employees feel better, they are more committed to the leaders and team members helping them feel that way. In turn, they help leaders achieve their goals, band together with others to tackle challenges, and ultimately create more innovative and productive workplaces.
Yet, organizations struggle to support employee well-being. A recent Gallup poll found that employee engagement has sunken to an all-time low, with only 31% of employees reporting that they are engaged at work. What’s worse, “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” employees account for approximately $1.9 trillion in lost productivity nationally. Caring for employees’ well-being and improving the bottom line are aligned goals.
Companies that dedicate time and money to employees’ health and wellness do better. It’s as simple as that. Even better, improving employee wellness can also improve society. Happy, healthy employees bring positivity to their communities, making the world a better place.
Our research repeatedly concluded that leaders are the key to driving employee well-being. While most organizations invest wellness dollars in step challenges, mindfulness programs, or team-building events, we find that the quality of day-to-day experiences with leaders is what really matters.
We refer to leaders who promote healthy and supportive workplaces (while also driving results) as Generators. We term leaders who do the opposite Extinguishers, as they deplete workplaces of energy by undermining their team’s well-being. The aim is to become a Generator: the type of leader that employees aspire to work for and whom they can be proud to represent.
2. No one wants a superhero.
Employees don’t want superheroes for leaders. Employees want authenticity from their leaders. They are looking for leaders who show their true selves at work. They do not trust inauthentic leaders who seem to put on a facade. Employees trust authentic leaders because they believe they are more willing to be transparent and honest. Employees can then better predict how their leader will behave. This predictability makes employees more likely to take risks by sharing their own truth and raising important issues that good leaders would want on their radar. As a result, employees with authentic leaders perform better, are more productive, more engaged, and have better well-being.
Let’s talk about a leader named Melanie, who is a senior executive at a telecommunications company. When interviewing her for our research, she described herself as having been a leader who always had her game face on. She admitted that she started her leadership journey as a no-nonsense leader. She believed her team would find comfort in her tough exterior when things became stressful or hard. That she could be a rock they would depend on. Instead, she learned that if her team members were struggling, they avoided bringing things up to her. Her perfect exterior made her unapproachable.
She told us everything changed for her after enduring an unimaginable tragedy in her family. Her youngest sibling was murdered in a horrific random act of violence. This obviously impacted her greatly, but she continued to show up at work while hiding her true self and emotional state. Even though she did her best to hide her experience and feelings, her team could tell something was off. She was falling apart, and others could sense the shift.
Then, one day, a campaign started around the company to support mental health. Other leaders started sharing their struggles, being vulnerable with the whole organization. She appreciated that their openness allowed her to know them as whole, complex people. Melanie began to wonder if her team would appreciate her more if she did the same.
In her next team meeting, an employee shared that they were dealing with a challenge that could derail a project. At that moment, Melanie felt overwhelmed with the information and decided to take a pause. She told the team she appreciated all their hard work and was having a reaction to this new information because of the struggles she’s been hiding in her personal life. She then proceeded to tell the team what she had been going through and how it had been impacting her and her work. To Melanie’s pleasant surprise, the team quickly rallied around her with empathy and compassion. They stepped up and wanted to help her as she navigated her loss. The team was more than willing to accept her as an imperfect leader.
The team culture shifted that day. Other people began opening up, and they would flag challenges and issues as they happened. They were more willing to ask for help and give support to other team members as authenticity and vulnerability became the norm.
One practice we teach leaders is to write struggle statements. Struggle statements help you communicate a set of challenges or difficulties you face at work, both past and present. When you are open about your struggles, employees can build their trust in you, and your openness helps them open up to you. This situation is great for employees and leaders because teams that can be open about their struggles usually do so because they are in a safe and supportive environment, making them more productive and higher-performing.
3. It’s the tone, not the time.
Being a role model for balancing work and life and showing positivity and gratitude toward team members can inspire employees to follow your example. Positivity and gratitude are contagious. When leaders share these sentiments with employees, those employees spread them to others.
One of our favorite examples involves a leader who made it a point to spread positivity and gratitude to his team. To make sure he remembered to show gratitude to his team, he would put three coins in his left pocket at the start of each day. Each time he told someone on his team they were valued or thanked them for their efforts, he moved a coin to the other pocket. The physical reminder to show gratitude kept him on track and ensured he lived out his intentions. After a while, though, he didn’t need the coins. His gratitude practice had become a habit. Even better, he noticed that his employees were paying it forward to one another. With a small shift in his behavior, he had created lasting change in his team culture.
Employees are motivated to help each other if they see you and other team members doing the same thing. Generators create cultures of work-life balance, positivity, gratitude, and support. As team members begin practicing good behaviors, leaders don’t have to be the sole architects or reinforcers of the culture. Employees become cultural caretakers so that leaders have their time freed up to focus on other things.
Generators also understand how to become confidants to their employees quickly and meaningfully. To do so, they leverage what we coined as the SWIFT Process:
Setting aside time for relationship-building sprints.
Welcoming others warmly.
Intentionally inquiring about employees’ lives.
Following up with appropriate questions to dig deeper.
Taking time to reflect on how to improve relationships with employees.
By creating a positive team environment and building strong relationships with employees, Generators set the right tone for their teams: they focus on the quality of the work experience rather than narrowly focusing on how many hours are worked as a measure of success or productivity.
4. Work should support life.
Work should support life instead of the other way around. As a leader, it’s important to be elastic by demonstrating flexibility and recognizing that your way isn’t right for everyone. It’s also important to protect and respect employees’ boundaries between work and life. Generators are boundary bouncers because they help employees set boundaries, serve to enforce those boundaries, and block employees from people or situations that violate boundaries. Boundary bouncers also protect their own boundaries by leading by example.
Generators value work-life balance and recognize that employees’ preferences for balancing work and life may differ from their own (and other employees).
For example, people differ in their preferences for integrating or segmenting work. Segmenters like to keep work and life separate. These employees like to put in their nine-to-five and then fully stop working at the end of the day. They do not like it when their personal life bleeds into their work life and vice versa. When they are working, they want to focus on work. When they are away from work, being pinged by someone from work is particularly stressful.
On the other hand, some people prefer to integrate work and life. Katina and I both prefer integration. We are happy to shift between both domains throughout the day. Integrators may take a few meetings in the morning, then do a workout at lunch, followed by another meeting. After that, they might do laundry and complete a few work tasks. They may pause around 5 p.m. to spend time with family and grab dinner but then log back in for an hour at 7 p.m. to finish some tasks. They shift between work and personal life seamlessly, and it helps their productivity.
Generators create work environments that better match employees’ unique needs and preferences in managing their work and life. When Generators earn employees’ trust, make them feel cared for, and act in ways that honor their preferences and needs for managing work and life, they retain their employees longer.
5. One size doesn’t fit all.
One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to wellness. Generators recognize this and engage in what we call person-centered planning, a practice centered on the famous work of psychologist Carl Rogers, who used it in a clinical setting. Engaging in person-centered planning helps Generators find solutions that are tailored to employees’ real wellness needs, which can vary significantly from employee to employee.
Person-centered planning is effective because it helps leaders to get to the root of the actual problems that employees are facing, so solutions can be tailored to their needs.
Consider this example. An employee, Ollie, struggles with staying organized. His leader, Marta, is very skilled at organization and easily structures her workday, assignments, and deadlines. If Ollie shares with Marta that he is struggling with organization, she might assume that he just isn’t putting in the effort. She might also assume that tips or strategies that help her stay organized will automatically work for Ollie. Ollie’s confidence might decrease as he is overlooked for opportunities, or he might take her advice and follow similar strategies that she has, but without getting results. Instead, if Marta engaged in person-centered planning, she would follow three steps:
First, Marta would provoke honest and transparent responses. She would create an open and comfortable environment for Ollie to share what is getting in his way regarding his organizational skills.
Second, she would suspend judgment. Even if Ollie’s situation doesn’t resonate with her own experience, she will listen and validate his perspective, recognizing that she has likely struggled with things before that others found easy.
Finally, she would show empathy by working with Ollie to devise solutions that work for him. Instead of feeling “for” him, she feels “with” him, invoking a more collaborative and unified stance toward solving the problem.
This three-part process helps employees feel safe when sharing their wellness struggles, allowing leaders to respond to their challenges in ways that drive effective long-term solutions.
Taking a person-centered approach also requires that leaders chip away at mental health stigma at work. Generators are vulnerable about their own mental health challenges, speak inclusively about mental health, and use experts to help their teams understand mental health more deeply. Reducing this stigma is another way that Generators learn what employees really need and allow these employees to gain true acceptance and validation from their teams.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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