How well is wellbeing at work working for you?

Some organizations I come across think of and approach wellness or wellbeing, and performance, as separate priorities.

Some workplaces have a 'wellbeing month'. In these instances I am invited in to speak about wellbeing on a webinar, or run a short workshop. In these scenarios I do my best to be helpful. But when treating wellbeing as an event, I suspect that we could all be missing the point.

Wellbeing is - or at least should be - a priority for workers of all kinds and from every walk of life. The relationship between wellbeing and performance can and should be mutually reinforcing.

But there needs to be a reset in organizational discourse on the domains of both wellbeing and performance. There does not need to be a trade-off between wellbeing and performance, if jobs are designed well, if workload is sized appropriately, for people who are adequately enabled, physically, psychologically, and operationally, for the task at hand.

In general, like the happiness industry, the wellbeing industry has commodified and commercialized wellbeing into something to be attained, bought in a shop or online, or experienced as part of a 'wellbeing package' or service, or even to be approached competitively. Corporate executives who, for example, run in lots of ultramarathons or compete in triathlons, or who attend perfectly curated (and expensive) wellbeing retreats in luxury settings, in between weeks which are rammed with back to back meetings and flights, while maintaining a strict regime of intermittent fasting, aren't necessarily as 'well' or as productive as they could be.

Competitive and performative wellness can be just another way to put ourselves under even more pressure to try to 'have it all', rather than make choices. The business of wellness - massively promoted on social media - can lead some people towards unsustainably tough mental and physical expectations or standards of perfection. What can also happen too easily is that wellbeing at work becomes too closely associated with the following corporate practices:

• group mindfulness and meditation sessions

• lunchtime runs or yoga classes

• working from home and hybrid working

• wellness 'zones'

• '1000 steps a day'

• employee assistance programmes

• HR policies such as flexible working (with no attention to actual workload)

These can all contribute to and support some peoples' wellbeing, for sure. None of them are bad things and these are all part of a progressive, holistic approach to corporate wellbeing.

However, the evidence suggests that wellbeing is very personal, multi-faceted and it has more than one definition and several layers.

Without going into the theoretical and psychological details too much for a short article, I will just say that the topic is oversimplified. It has become another thing that HR functions, coaches and corporate trainers sometimes try to tackle through sticking-plaster methods, rather than by addressing root causes.

The thrust of the approach which psychological evidence suggests might help people marry wellbeing and performance requires a more systematic and contextualized approach. 'Flow' is a state in which people can experience heightened engagement, high performance, creativity and fulfilment. It is achieved when our personal talents are being used in the best and highest way to achieve a task in which we are immersed fully. That is a state in which wellbeing and performance can come together.

A state of flow is known to artists and athletes. I have wondered how people at work, outside of intrinsically creative, fun and performatively rewarding work such as professional sport, music or acting, whatever their role or industry or level, might achieve flow.

Is it harder to experience 'flow' if your job involves drafting legal contracts, for example? And is this why top lawyers can earn so much money - because (for some observers) it appears to be mind numbingly tedious work? In fact it transpires that there are people for whom writing a very clever and robust legal contract is a challenging yet surprisingly joyful process, like creating a classical symphony, and it comes quite naturally. They can earn huge amounts of money, because such people are relatively rare. The work has significant commercial importance in large corporate transactions. If that is you, well done!

The experience of flow states at work is tied up with how jobs and organizations are designed, and how people are managed. A few key factors do come to mind and are supported by research: effective line management; skilled delegation; careful prioritization and workload management.

Line managers at all levels need to get better at connecting performance with wellbeing in their teams so that people can achieve something closer to a state of flow at least some of the time. Poorly trained, unskilled line managers, who cannot provide performance feedback effectively, or coach people well, tend to create toxic team climate and undermine both wellbeing and performance in the long run.

The art of delegation may not come easily to everyone. It is a basic management skill. Line managers need to learn to delegate in ways which are productive, enabling and empowering. Delegation is not about issuing email edicts or garbled instructions on WhatsApp. It is about judging the knowledge and skill of team members, creating mutual clarity around expectations, and where necessary supporting them to complete tasks properly.

Senior leaders need to learn to prioritize effectively so that teams can achieve meaningful and inspiring goals without sacrificing their physical or mental health in the process. In some jobs the nature of the work might require sacrifices of sleep, safety, or physical risks, at certain times. In this case the onus is on leaders to monitor and manage people so that they are not being stretched in ways that is likely to lead to harm to themselves, or others.

Sizing work accurately, prioritizing early, allocating resource intelligently, simplifying workflow, eliminating bureaucratic behaviour, showing that we know the difference between meaningful and meaningless work, can make all the difference to peoples' lives, and to customer experience.

In this sense, when helping leaders and managers build workplaces that support wellbeing, there is a need to go beyond workplace design, facilities management solutions, symbolic gestures and visible tokens. It makes sense to put in place precise measures of wellbeing, and targets that are aligned with the nature of the work you do and which are predictive of performance in your business.

Find out what the barriers to wellbeing really are in your organization. They could be embedded in the way people are required to work. There is also a need to be more honest about practical constraints.

It can help to be more realistic and honest about aspects of work which require mental or even physical stamina, endurance, and, in certain crucial moments in your business cycle, a high degree of discomfort. Employee wellbeing does not imply the total absence of any kind of discomfort, or risk.

Not much real work in any role or career that really has any substance is going to feel comfortable. Discomfort is a feature of most peoples' working lives. The question every organization, team and individual needs to ask is whether the discomfort that accompanies the work is within the boundaries of our personal and collective duty of care. Is the discomfort sustainable and conducive to performance? Are the demands of the work also commensurate not just with explicit contractual expectations but also with the implicit psychological contract that exists between the different parties involved?

People may need to be coached on how to manage their own energy, and to build their own mental and physical toughness. This may be necessary if, for example, the business you are in requires people occasionally to to work all night to close deals, even after you have done everything possible to minimize or manage such job demands. Wellbeing or resilience training, or mindfulness interventions, which do not seek to surface and share organizational realities, are unlikely to help people manage stress, or rise to the occasion when the situation demands going the extra mile.

Wellbeing is supported by robust job and organization design, effective basic people management practices, pragmatism, constructive dialogue, and individual coaching. Obfuscation certainly does not help.

Healthier organizations are in turn likely to be high functioning, realizing more of their human potential and performance goals. This will not happen if wellbeing is just treated like an add-on, or indeed an entitlement.