Our relationship with work is becoming increasingly unhealthy. Levels of burnout and stress are at all-time highs. Even before the pandemic, the World Health Organization called stress the “health epidemic of the 21st century.” What is a major source of that stress? Our jobs. Microsoft has conducted several studies analyzing keystroke data and the use of its collaboration software Teams chat feature. Results reveal two disturbing trends: compared with pre-pandemic, during Covid, we were much more likely to work in the evenings, typically in the hours before bedtime, and the number of work messages sent and received on the weekends increased by 200%. Now, three years later, the patterns that emerged in a crisis have been normalized.

When work shifted to home, the boundary lines were blurred, and we’ve grown used to this new, casual surplus of work in the same way anyone gets stuck in a bad habit. What’s even worse is that this increased workload, connectivity to work, and altered communication patterns have been tacked on to our existing schedules, meaning we are working longer and staying more tethered to work than ever before. The harsh reality is this: Overwork is at an all-time high, and the new world of work is only making it worse.

In industrial psychology we use the inelegant term “workaholism” to describe this phenomenon. Workaholism is not someone who works a lot of hours necessarily — in fact there’s only a weak correlation between number of hours worked and problematic “overwork” or workaholism. Instead, the term refers to a deleterious inability to disconnect from work. When work dominates your thoughts and your activities, to the detriment of other aspects of your life, relationships, and health, you are displaying workaholic tendencies. Note this is not a clinical diagnosis — it’s not in the DSM — but the literature on it is deep and convincing. Workaholism is detrimental to both people who may experience it and the organizations they work for, organizations which often unwittingly are fostering it.

When talking to organizations about workaholism — and how they may be enabling it — I’ve heard every excuse you can imagine, multiple times. In an organization with an overwork culture, it’s natural and not all that surprising. For one, the company has succeeded using this approach. Why change it? For another, what I’m suggesting is that it doesn’t work as well as one might think, and the organization ought to change. Given everything we know about organizational culture and how difficult it is to change it, resistance is natural — expected even.

If you don’t want to be one of these organizations, something needs to change. And despite the default responses you have about why change won’t work for you or how your people can sustain the pace, it’s not true — and the alternative to your current modus operandi is not as bad as you think.

Once you’ve acknowledged that change is needed, you’ll need to create a plan for how you’ll overcome a culture of workaholism. Below is a three-step process to start.

Step 1: Assess Your Company’s Baseline Level of Overwork and Its Origins

Figure out where your starting point is by assessing the level of your organization’s overwork culture and who is perpetuating it. What you do next will depend on where your baseline is. Borrowing a concept from training and organizational change literatures, I recommend starting with a needs assessment. This helps to identify areas in need of change, assesses how much support (or resistance) there is to the change initiative, and allows for a comprehensive understanding of training needs at multiple levels of analysis.

There are many frameworks for needs assessments you could adopt. In general, they attempt to answer two key questions:

• What are the areas in need of change?
• What kind of support is there for making this change happen?

The assessment should be handled by people with experience doing them — for example, professionals who have been trained in change management. Relationships with top-level managers in the organization need to be established. Some of these managers will react with fear or resistance, so the better the relationship, the higher the likelihood that the results of the assessment will be received.

If people feel threatened by the change and aren’t reassured that they are protected from retribution, the initiative is destined to fail. The overwork culture assessment should target three levels: the organizational level, the job level, and the personal level.  This assessment will reveal what is driving the culture of overwork, how the structure of jobs is driving workaholism, what are the characteristics of individuals who get recognized and rewarded, if those qualities reinforce an overwork culture, and how people feel about their work and the company.

At the end of the assessment, you’ll know just how deeply overwork is entrenched in your culture and, crucially, where some of the key drivers are coming from. In some organizations, it may be almost exclusively driven by leadership. Others may have let technology foster an always-on workforce. Others will focus on job design and HR structures. Surveys and interviews are likely to expose physical and mental health issues and team dysfunctions, driven by workaholism, that you simply weren’t aware were present in the organization.

Step 2: Plan for Incremental Change by Targeting Places Where Change Will Be Most Effective Soonest

At this point, the worst thing you could do as an organization is to say, “We’re going to get rid of our overwork culture and eliminate workaholism.” Change doesn’t work that way. It will be a long process of incremental improvements. The key is that the assessment will tell you where to focus first. Where is change going to be both most possible and most effective?

At this stage, the most important things to do are to clearly identify the purpose and goals of the trial, build trust, carefully outline what the trial period will involve, and clearly communicate the plan to all key constituents.

First, identify the purpose and goals of the trial. Your purpose will be shaped by the data you have gathered and analyzed as part of your assessment. When examining your organization’s baseline levels of overwork culture, it may become clear that pursuing goals such as a four-day workweek is not possible. In these cases, the goal may need to be something smaller — what researchers Leslie Perlow and her team call “micro adjustments to the work practices” — such as changing guidelines around email communication during nonwork time or on weekends.

Trust can come only if culture change efforts involve input from all employees—it cannot come from the top down. I To help build this trust, Harvard Business School professor John Kotter recommends building a “guiding coalition” — a group of individuals from all levels of the organization who are passionate about the change initiative and are respected by their peers.

Second, carefully outline the trial experiment. In my conversations with leaders designing experiments, a couple of things stand out. The first is to resist overthinking to the point that the plan becomes too complex to carry out. Approach the process with an experimental mindset, knowing that you will adapt as you go. Set a concrete start and end date. Identify the scope of the trial — in other words, which team(s) will be involved in the initial trials and how this will be rolled out over time. And be sure to collect pretrial data on anything you’ll be assessing at the conclusion of the trial.

For example, if your purpose is to decrease employee burnout, then make sure to assess burnout before the employees even catch wind of the trial (so you can conduct more accurate pre-post comparisons). I highly recommend utilizing the help of experts anytime you are gathering employee survey data.

Clearly communicate the plan and keep the conversation going. It’s not enough to simply tell key stakeholders, “Look, we’re going to fix our workaholic culture with a new initiative.” You must communicate specifics of your effort and what you’re hoping to accomplish with each experiment. Communication should also not be top down — frequent two-way communication is essential. Seek input from your employees before, during, and after the trial experiment. Make sure you are listening and responding to their concerns.

Step 3: Execute the Trial Experiment, Learn, and Iterate

With a plan in place, it’s time to execute. Contrary to what you might want to do, you shouldn’t announce major changes; you shouldn’t even suggest that you’ve “figured it out.” Start small and meet people where they are. Limit the number of changes you take on and their scope. You may start with one team or department. Or one geography. And make sure you are constantly taking the temperature of employees about the change initiatives. Avoid being ambiguous in your execution. When people aren’t certain about what is happening, they will become risk avoidant and fall back into old patterns.

Say one of your change experiments is to require email signatures that say, “Don’t feel pressured to respond to this in non-work hours.” That seems good, but it remains ambiguous. It doesn’t say “Don’t respond.” And what if it’s from a boss? It might be interpreted like one of those “voluntary” get-togethers that people informally know is actually mandatory. Perhaps the experiment shows that people kept responding to emails despite this. The next step may be to change the language to something like “Do not respond after work hours,” or to even set up rules that prevent emails from being delivered at certain hours.

I’ve offered many starting points for implementing these changes above. And still, I know there will be resistance at the organizational level, as I laid out at the beginning. Despite evidence to the contrary, some leaders and organizations will not be able to easily escape their work devotion schema to see how counterproductive it is to encourage workaholism. They won’t be able to draw the connections between flagging performance and their focus on a 24-7 culture. They won’t see how the effects of workaholism create turnover costs, health-care costs, and productivity costs. Most of all they won’t believe that they can get the same output— indeed, better output—from fewer hours and less connectivity. It’s just not intuitive.

But it’s true. The research is clear. Work cultures that enable overwork are suboptimal. The Covid-19 pandemic was a major development in our realization that the work devotion schema may need adjusting. The success of four-day workweek trials was another. More and more organizations see the value of changing their workaholic culture. You can, too. No more excuses.

This content was originally published here.

The post How to Fix Your Company’s Culture of Overwork.. appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

Organizations around the world are experiencing unprecedented levels of burnout, which is creating a significant — and under-recognized — cost to organizations in the form of quiet quitting, reduced innovation, and even spiraling healthcare costs. Many people are quick to point to an increase in overall workload as the culprit. But our research shows that the work itself has not increased so much as the collaborative demands of the work.

By that, we mean the volume and frequency of the collaborations that people have to engage in to complete the work — what we call the collaborative footprint — have risen over the past decade and a half, bringing exponential opportunities for stress. This comes through the increased potential for misunderstanding, misalignment, and imbalances of workload and capacity, among other things. All of this combines to create a battering of everyday stresses.

One form of this stress is the one we call “microstress” — small moments of stress from interactions with colleagues that feel routine but whose cumulative toll is enormous. Our research into high performers has made clear the destructive impact of unchecked microstress, both on individuals and on teams. At the team level, this form of stress propagates through networks and relationships.

It may seem challenging to find ways to reduce stress on teams that are overloaded with deliverables, but leaders have more tools at their disposal than they may realize. Instead of relying only on coaching on individual coping strategies, leaders can look for systemic improvement in the collective working environment. We have identified four overlooked collective strategies that leaders can implement for reducing microstress. Here are the four key questions you need to ask.

Can we reduce structural complexity?

For decades organizations have been building organizational complexity — not only in expanding spans and layers in traditional hierarchical structures (expanding the number of direct reports to reduce layers between the front line and the C-suite), but also in moving to matrixed, networked, or other more agile ways of working. While new these structures can be effective at increasing flexibility, they have also unintentionally introduced complexity by multiplying the required number of interactions per employee. We routinely see organizations adopting advice to move to structures with consistent spans of control (the number of people one is responsible for managing) of eight people. But such efforts to improve efficiency don’t consider the collaborations required to do the work. The collaborative footprint of work — which has risen 50% or more in the past 15 years, according to Rob Cross’s research — is creating exponential opportunities for small stresses to run rampant in any organization. Unchecked, such complexity, can easily accumulate, triggering a proliferation of microstresses.

De-layering might seem to be a solution, but in embracing it many organizations have moved to spans of control that really are not feasible given the collaborative intensity of the work. (We’ve even seen some organizations scaling up to spans of control of 12 or more.) Such flat hierarchy can create stress for employees balancing competing objectives of multiple leaders to whom an employee might report, formally or informally.

Removing layers, while appealing on cost analyses and decision-making flows, also often introduces other less visible inefficiencies around work. Many teams are underperforming today due to priority overload where too many uncoordinated asks are coming into the teams from disconnected stakeholders and failures of coordination and prioritization at high levels in the organization.

One way to fix that is to have explicit processes to remove excessive complexity. It may not be possible to rewind all of these efforts at de-layering organizations, but there are a few simple practices you can employ to root out the potential for unnecessary stress from structural complexity. Most companies have many ways of introducing new complexity, but no systematic continuous effort to remove it. Netflix is one of a handful of firms known for prioritizing identifying and removing unnecessary complexity. As their company policy states, “We work hard to … keep our business as simple as possible … you don’t need policies for everything.” If you must introduce new teams or procedures, consider making them temporary. Create them with an explicit sunset clause, such that it is dissolved when no longer useful, avoiding the gradual ratcheting of complexity over time.

Companies can also control complexity by continually simplifying the product portfolio, which is often a key driver of complexity. Trader Joe’s has a such a policy for controlling the number of SKUs to maintain the number at less than 10% of the industry average. Similarly, LEGO controls the number of colors and brick types in its products, to control manufacturing and logistical complexity.

 Above all, don’t just think about on paper efficiency, think about the collaborative asks being placed on human beings who execute these tasks day in, day out. When we have asked top teams in offsites who in the room wants another email, meeting, or phone call in their lives, we have yet to see a single hand shoot up. The more complex, the more matrixed, the more required communication and connection between employees, the more ad hoc the more microstresses are going to be impeding the effectiveness of work.

Does our workflow make sense?

Organizations have had an unrelenting push into agile, network-centric structures executing through teams that are formed and disbanded at increasingly rapid pace. These efforts are providing speed, but taken to an extreme, they are starting to sacrifice the benefits of scale and efficiency that came from the process revolution. Forming and reforming project teams requires increasing coordination, often relying on the heroics of individual employees to get work done. But that is not a sustainable strategy — and triggers endless opportunities for burnout. “It’s better to rely on a process than just people,” Don Allan, CEO of Stanley Black & Decker observed of one of the key HR lessons of the pandemic, “so you do not create unnecessary stress and even burnout for your organization.”

The proliferation of technologies in the workplace promises to streamline work and communication, but instead can often became a source of additional complexity, required work and stress. Often, we find organizations using between six and nine means of collaborating to get work done — meetings (virtual and face-to-face), email, instant messaging (such as Slack), team collaborative spaces, phone calls, texting, etc. Inefficiencies invariably creep in as people use these modalities differently — for example, who doesn’t have a colleague who loves to write elaborate emails, hiding what they want in the 10^th paragraph! Or at the other extreme, some people use one modality (e.g., IM) to solve problems quickly, but lack of transparency into the interaction creates misalignment with other teammates who have no idea a decision was made over IM.

One way to limit this stress is to agree on collaborative norms. For example, a team might agree to only use bullets on email. And if a longer explanation is required or a disagreement seems to be brewing, the team agrees to meet face to face. We find a simple exercise of asking teams to agree to three positive norms across all modes of collaboration that they want to sustain and three negatives they want to stop (e.g., emailing at night, hitting reply to all on mundane responses, etc.) can generate 8–12% time savings across teams, allowing them more time to focus on the actual work. Technology itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but the culture that springs up around using that technology is where microstress creeps in.

Teams can also limit the set of tools they’re using and bake them into the work in a way which reduces human transaction costs. Focus on maximizing technology that helps eliminate or reduce the costs of mundane tasks, e.g. setting up workflows on Slack or recurring meetings to ensure appropriate check ins don’t slip through the cracks because they’re relying on a team member to set up and coordinate. Encourage the team to invest time in learning the tools and share their productivity tips and tricks. And avoid new tools or multiple tools that inadvertently becoming new sources of work or complexity e.g. through cumbersome sign on procedures or lack of mutual compatibility. Too often teams aren’t consulted about which tools will actually help their productivity.

Has the profusion of teams spiked employees’ microstress?

One of the unintended consequences of organizations relying on teams that are assembled for projects is that teams have less time to build the kind of trust that is essential for efficient collaboration. And that happens repeatedly because many organizations require employees to contribute to five or six team efforts (in addition to their primary team) and have often let these groups grow too large, with the average team size hovering around 15.

To avoid team growth from causing trouble, don’t let “flexible” turn into inefficient. Some organizations trying to attract and retain top talent during the great resignation (and quiet quitting) have implemented talent marketplaces which allow employees to locate projects they would like to work on or roles they want to fill as they chart their own career progression. Though well-intended as a talent retention tool, these shifts create inefficiencies in the network that most organizations do not account for. These programs are well-received by the employees but induce microstresses on both the team the employee is leaving and the one they are ported into, as they suddenly have to redirect and shape key working relationships with new people. One life sciences organization we worked with modeled the relational cost (the “switching costs” on work relationships and productivity of continually rotating teams) and determined that it didn’t make sense for anyone to switch roles or teams in less than fifteen months because both the team and the rotating employee would fail to optimize the opportunity.

Companies must also ensure that their return-to-office plan doesn’t create hidden stress. About 80% of companies are opting to require employees to be in the office three days a week, according to research from i4cp (the Institute for Corporate Productivity). To soften the blow and ensure flexibility, about half of those companies are allowing employees to pick the days they want to return.

Unfortunately, this well-intentioned effort has also created a new set of microstresses when the people who an organization needs to work together pick different days. Leaving this up to chance will not only hurt employee morale, but innovation and productivity. To prevent this, some organizations are using a technique called organizational network analysis (a methodology that maps employees’ working relationships) to specify specific groups of employees that need to be in the office at a given interval. Such an analysis can help leaders answer three critical questions in a return-to-office strategy:

This method also helps motivate employees to resume some in-person interactions by showing them how hybrid work can improve their own effectiveness.

Have we built a sense of purpose in our employees’ everyday interactions?

Organizations have become adept at working efficiently with the help of technologies — what can’t be swiftly taken care of on a Zoom call these days? But when work revolves around technology use, it can become transactional, missing the opportunity to make sure that employees understand how their work contributes to that purpose.

To avoid that problem, smart companies create opportunities to discuss purpose and how each group contributes to it. It is your role as a leader to shape and communicate the goal that you’re all working towards. Don’t let that get lost in the sea of microstress. With a clear understanding of how they are contributing to purpose, employees can more easily prioritize their work. Discuss what work is essential (and what is not) in contributing to purpose and use this to help your team prioritize and redesign work accordingly.

While many organizations focus on rallying employees around a collective corporate purpose, our research also suggests that purpose can be found in positive everyday interactions with colleagues, too. For example, employees can find meaningful purpose in “co-creating” (involving the aha moments that emerge as people build on each other’s ideas) which helps builds a sense of We are in this together. Small moments of working on something together create an authentic connection, a kind of antidote to the flood of microstresses that otherwise fill employees’ days.

Finally, as leaders, don’t underestimate the impact of your own microstress, both on you and your team. Look for interactions in which you are unintentionally creating microstress for your team — for example being slightly unpredictable in your expectations, failing to communicate deliverables clearly, or continually micromanaging their work. The microstress we create for others inevitably boomerangs back on us. If you recognize where you are the source of unnecessary microstress and try to course-correct, you will not only help reduce stress on your team, but you’ll be also reducing stress on yourself, as well.

This content was originally published here.

The post What’s Fueling Burnout in Your Organization? appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

Vacations are meant to be rejuvenating. Time off can not only help you restore your mind, body, and soul, it also has a positive impact on your work life: One study found that employees who take 11 or more vacation days are more likely to receive a raise or bonus.

However, not all vacations are as restorative or energizing as we hope they’ll be. Chronic work stress can interfere with our plans. The phenomenon of getting sick as soon as you start to relax even has a name: leisure sickness.

Even when pacing yourself, your time off doesn’t always go as planned. The vacation itself can be a source of stress for a variety of reasons, from strained relationships, pre-vacation stress of getting everything done, unexpected travel delays, or the weight of impending deadlines and workload when you return.

So, what can you do when you come back to work more exhausted than when you left — especially when everyone assumes you’re well rested and raring to go but you feel just as depleted (or more) than before? Here are five steps you can take to refresh on your return.

1. Take inventory of your health and energy.

Unless you’ve been on a rejuvenating health retreat, it’s possible that you’ve veered away from your healthy routines, maybe skipping out on physical activity or finding yourself caught up in a full schedule and indulging a bit too much.

On your return, assess and acknowledge your energy levels, taking inventory of how you’re feeling to determine what you need. Research has found that optimizing your energy along the following domains can help boost wellbeing and performance: sleep, movement, connection, time outdoors, relaxation and meaningful engagement.

Start by rating yourself on a scale of 1-10 in terms of your current energy levels in each of the above areas. Then identify where you would like to be in each domain and one action you can take to reinforce or improve each of these elements of your wellbeing. Reassess daily for a week, tracking how your energy shifts as you re-engage in healthier habits.

2. Ease back into work.

Coming back from a vacation can be a challenging experience when you are feeling overwhelmed or stressed about catching up with emails and conversations that were piling up while you were supposed to be relaxing and enjoying time off.

Resist the temptation to dive into work headfirst by building in a day of transition and recovery before returning to normal. You might even consider drafting an auto-response or extending your OOO for an extra day or two.

Before you enter into a full day’s work, set some guard rails for your time so that you can get off to a good start.  Begin with essential and time-sensitive tasks and give yourself a buffer to catch up on emails and updates that can come later. Block time out on your calendar also for activities that energize you.

3. Reflect on the positives; reframe, and learn from the negatives.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed or disappointed by things that may not have gone as well as you had hoped — but there are likely some positive memories to hold onto. Take some time to reflect and savor those experiences, as well as lessons and insights gained. Capture them on paper, so you can share them with your team members, and reinforce the benefits of your time away. If the trip left you feeling in a rut, maybe you can find solace in the fact that you’re home again getting back to normal.

4. Use the fresh start effect to set new habits and routines.

The fresh start effect is the phenomenon of increased success in behavioral change associated with new beginnings, such as birthdays, the new year, and other milestones. You can harness this effect by using your return to work as an opportunity to reset.

Coming back from a vacation is a good time to establish new practices that further enhance your energy and productivity, like exercising, shutting off notifications, blocking distractions, or writing in a journal each night. Seek out habits and routines that feel replenishing in your day-to-day life. You can leverage practices such as timeboxing to optimize your energy for the things that matter to you.

It can be tempting to try to overcompensate but don’t let remorse drive your actions. Rather think about the routines that will work within the context of your daily life so that your habits can be sustainable.  Determine what you need to do today to get back on track, leave remorse out of the equation and do what you need to create forward momentum.

5. Clarify what you need for future time off.

Use this experience as a learning opportunity to set the ground for a more replenishing vacation in the future. Decide how much structure was energizing versus draining on your energy. Who do you want to spend time with and how far do you want to travel? How much communication with your team do you need for your own wellbeing and connection needs?

Even a good vacation can sometimes be exhausting. If you don’t properly manage your time and energy when returning, your exhaustion can have a cumulative impact on your wellbeing, work, relationships, and performance. If you didn’t get what you needed from this vacation, use it as motivation to ensure that you build sustainable, energy-preserving practices into your daily life.

This content was originally published here.

The post When Your Vacation Wasn’t Exactly Relaxing appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

In some arenas, mistakes are par for the course and not very costly. It doesn’t really matter if a designer starts over several times before producing a beautiful cover image, an inventor tries a hundred prototypes before finding the one that works, or an entrepreneur pivots from one idea to another based on customer feedback. In these roles, failures are part of the path to success. In others, the stakes might be limited by one’s lower level of responsibility.

But what about roles in which perfection is expected? No one wants their neurosurgeon to make a mistake or their criminal defense lawyer to have an off day. Accountants can’t file flawed financial statements with the IRS, SEC, or any other regulator. Some security roles are focused on surveilling for potential threats, and success means not missing any, ever. Your job may be in this category. Or maybe the consequences for getting something wrong at work aren’t so dramatic, but you feel they are because of a mean boss, looming layoffs, or deep-seated anxiety.

How do you cope with the feeling that you simply can’t screw up? My recommendation is to use strategies that reduce your chance of making a critical mistake while simultaneously reducing your worry about doing so.

The basics of anxiety

Let’s start with some basic background on how anxiety works. First, overthinking is not problem-solving. It paralyzes us more than it mobilizes us. Second, people often obsess about one particular type of mistake or threat while ignoring others because fear narrows our attention. Finally, action is an antidote to anxiety.

Jobs in which mistakes are costly or dangerous (like medicine, accounting, engineering, or security) sometimes attract people who are naturally conscientious, diligent, and good at getting things right. But the additional focus on being careful at all times can be hard for someone who already has that personality type. It’s a bit like how a parent’s admonition to “be careful” can make an already cautious or anxious child even more nervous. If your training or institution is focused on eliminating mistakes, that might intensify your perfectionism and anxiety.

Here’s what you can do to lower the tension.

Distinguish between big and small mistakes

If you think about every mistake you could possibly make, it will distract you from the ones you should most fear. You’ll lighten your mental load if you regularly take actions that lessen the risk of making the worst mistakes. To figure out which to prioritize, consider ones that easily come to mind as well as those that are often overlooked, such as opportunity costs.

There are several other, somewhat related categories of major risks people fail to see. One is what former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld called “unknown unknowns”: risks from situations that are so unexpected they would not be considered. Another is “you don’t know what you don’t know,” which refers to blindspots you’re not aware of having, or when you think you understand something fully but you don’t.

Put mechanisms in place to mitigate these risks. For example, schedule a monthly meeting with a colleague to discuss how you are approaching difficult cases as a way of uncovering any potential risks you’re missing. Putting a recurring meeting on your calendar with the expectation you will discuss complex decision-making will ensure this gets done. Consider some examples and ask what similar situations you might face in your own role: Maybe you don’t know that a student may interpret an instruction differently than you’d intended, resulting in a dangerous situation in your lab. You don’t know that a traveling nurse in your operating room will use a procedure they’re familiar with rather than the one you routinely use, resulting in confusion or an important step being missed. You don’t know that a software provider will roll out a buggy update the day before an important deadline and break systems you rely on. What could you do now to ensure those mistakes aren’t made?

Cautious people can retrain themselves to look for and ward off the most critical risks. But this requires a mental capacity to see beyond what others typically do and to tolerate uncertainty.

Adopt risk-reducing systems and habits

Instead of thinking about reducing mistakes through willpower and by never having a bad day, create systems that don’t rely on that type of unrealistic, robotic perfection.

There’s evidence that basic strategies like checklists, for example, can reduce mistakes but are underutilized in particular fields. If you’re looking for inspiration, consider how you adapt actions taken in other industries or roles. For example, medical devices such as heart monitors and ventilators often incorporate redundant sensors and alarms to detect malfunctions and provide timely alerts. How could people in your role get earlier or duplicate warning signals automatically? Industries like aviation have strict reporting requirements for near-misses. Should you do the same if an article nearly goes to print with a significant factual mistake or a project barely meets its deadline and only after staff pulls an all-nighter? What would be most useful and genuinely focused on learning rather than blaming? Educate yourself on the science of how to build diverse teams that share opposing views, courageously speak up about concerns, and engage in healthy debate. Create a culture that rewards people for soliciting and positively reinforcing uncommon views. When someone points out something you didn’t know you didn’t know, take special care to encourage them to continue to do this in the future.

Get support to address your weaknesses

When I was a therapist, my weakest spot was always record keeping. I hated documenting. My mind worked quickly, and it felt like recording kept slowing me down. I preferred to put all my energy into face-to-face interactions with my clients. If I were ever in this role again, I’d stop trying to improve in that area on my own and accept that I needed a support person to keep me on track with documenting.

Similarly, if you’re the only one who knows how to perform critical roles and you’re not good at systematizing your process, you might get help to do that. If you’re not the best communicator but are making a must-win pitch to a client or boss, could you ask a mentor, friend, or even an AI chatbot with more of those skills to help you be more persuasive? Likewise, if conflict management isn’t a strength, but team in-fighting threatens to derail a key project, perhaps you engage a consultant you can call on as needed to give, and maybe even implement, suggestions. Or, if your messy office presents a real risk of losing documentation, have a professional organizer come in and give you a fresh start every few months. Remember that it’s not just your own willpower and diligence that will help you avoid mistakes. You can enlist a village of coworkers — and even friends, family, and technology — to help you.

Play on your strengths

I often argue for using your strengths to mitigate your weaknesses, and this can extend to how you avoid mistakes. For instance, if you’re visually creative you might create visual reminders, or if humor is a strength, then humorous ones. Just Google “funny airline safety video” for examples of how to make people pay attention to serious safety advice. If you’re gregarious and good with people, how might you use that gift to extract information others might usually keep close to the vest, like telling you why you might not want to partner with a particular individual or group? If, by contrast, you’re more introverted, how might you use your natural inclination to listen and observe more than speak to notice looming problems or make it more likely people will trust you enough to disclose concerns or errors without fearing you’ll tell others? Consider how your top strengths can help you solve your particular problems. One question you can ask yourself to identify your uncommon strengths is: What are you willing to do that 95% of other people aren’t?

Address self-sabotaging behaviors

When we’re very anxious about something, we often self-sabotage in ways that increase the chances of the feared thing happening. For example, you know you’ve got a weakness, but you don’t seek mentors or supervisors who could help you address it because you don’t want to draw attention to it. Or you don’t ask for an accommodation for your depression due to embarrassment and stigma or a belief you should tough it out, but that increases the chances of making a mistake on a bad day. Or you hate wasting money, so you don’t try an option that might solve the problem but isn’t guaranteed. Or you’re a perfectionist so you don’t seek to solve a problem where improvements are possible but perfect seems impossible. Get creative about overcoming your self-sabotage, and talk to yourself compassionately about it.

Collaborate with others focused on the same issues

When you think about mistakes, you may mostly do so on a personal or team level. “How can I prevent myself or a colleague from getting this important thing wrong?” But to seek out better solutions — and the camaraderie of a group that shares your fears — consider getting involved in larger efforts to reduce mistakes in your field, like sitting on a committee for complaints and disciplinary actions or one establishing new guidelines for people in your role. Teaching also usually improves our own practice, so consider finding opportunities to teach others about how your work is done in a way that minimizes or eliminates mistakes. Write a talk on this for an industry conference or host a panel.

Reduce small-threat distraction by taking simple actions to mitigate those risks

Though most of your focus should be on the biggest threats, some simple strategies can lessen the risk of small mistakes so they won’t distract you from that focus. You’ll want to take simple actions that help reduce the frequency of minor problems, and then accept that you can’t eliminate all of them. Pick the low-hanging fruit. For example, if a doctor is worried about forgetting names of patients and family members, they might write the names down on the top of each page as they’re taking notes during interactions. Address minor potential mistakes to the extent that they free up your mental capacity to think about and prevent larger ones.

Consider a hobby that allows you to make mistakes

To add some balance to your life, you might want to take up an activity in which mistakes and false starts aren’t at all costly. For example, I’ve recently taken up vegetable gardening, and it’s refreshing to partake in an interest in which a low rate of success is perfectly acceptable. After all, a packet of a hundred seeds costs only a few dollars. A friend of a friend is an avid surfer, content to miss or bail out on dozens of waves to eventually get few good rides, which is a great antidote to his day job as a startup CFO trying to make sure the company doesn’t run out of money.

When perfection is expected and mistakes are costly, it’s easy to become terrified of making one. You might lose sleep over it or avoid leadership and increased responsibility. But there are ways to constructively reduce the risk of potential mistakes and reduce your anxiety.

This content was originally published here.

The post Managing Anxiety When There’s No Room for Error appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

We’re approaching three years since the initial office exodus, where millions of people found themselves stationed at home full-time, overnight. The initial shock of that transition has worn off. So if you participated in the office flight, you’ve likely settled into some semblance of a routine.

But is it time to make a change? As a time-management coach, I’ve helped clients all over the world navigate the shift from the office to home, and back again. What I’ve seen is that some small tweaks to your schedule can make a big impact and could give you a fresh approach to the new year.

Here are a few reasons why you may want to shake things up — and how to make these changes effectively.

Reason #1: You’re feeling bored with the same old, same old.

One reason why you may need to change up your work-from-home schedule is that nothing has changed at all in the past two-plus years, and the monotony is getting to you. Instead of really starting work on time, you’re logging in and then snoozing some more. You miss the social interactions with your coworkers. And every day feels like the day before.

If you find yourself in those WFH doldrums and it’s impacting your motivation and productivity, it’s time to switch things up.

One of the most effective ways to do that is through a change of scenery. I’ve seen people go to coffee shops, libraries, or even hang out by the pool if they live in warmer climes. If you want a real office-y feel, you could also position yourself at a co-working space. Getting out and being around other people may add a little bit of time and distraction. But if it overall helps you feel more energetic and motivated, then it’s a productivity win.

If it’s not easy to transport your work because you need multiple computer screens or other special equipment, there are still ways that you can infuse some variety into your routine. One could be through a virtual coworking buddy. You could ask a coworker or friend to work alongside you on a video call. Or you could use a service like FocusMate, which will pair you with someone else in the world who needs to get something done at the same time you do.

Finally, you could add a little spice to your routine by incorporating something new and fresh. For example, if you sign up for ClassPass, you can try out a variety of gyms in your area. Each week could be an opportunity to experience something new. Or you could search MeetUp.com for events happening in your area. Sometimes having something to look forward to in the evening hours can make you much more focused in the daytime hours. Clients I’ve worked with have also said that being in a setting where it would be rude to be on their phones also helps their minds really shut off from work.

Reason #2: Your household routines have changed.

Another reason to adjust your work-from-home schedule is to account for shifts that may have happened not to you, but around you. For example, maybe your spouse has gone back to the office, so they’re gone most of the day, or your kids have changed schools so the pick-up and drop-off times are different, or you got a puppy and now you need to fit walks into your schedule.

These changes in your environment matter and mean you need to think carefully about all the parts of your day. For example, should you adjust your start time to later or earlier? Do you need to look into carpooling help for school or sports? Does your exercise schedule need modifications?

Acknowledge how the changes in your household routine give you more or less time, and then reset your expectations accordingly.

Reason #3: You want to establish healthier habits.

For some the shift to work-from-home bumped up their self-care because they repurposed their commute time to enjoy more sleep in the morning or to fit in some evening walks. But for others not going into the office took a toll on their healthy habits, leading to not having a defined stop time so they worked later and then went to sleep later. Others also ditched their exercise routine when they stopped going to the gym at work and never regained momentum. And still others may have traded the salad bar in the office cafeteria for DoorDash and found that even their stretchy pants no longer fit.

If this sounds a bit like you, it’s time to tweak your schedule to better support your health needs. Some potential solutions include giving yourself firmer start and end times so that you have time in the evening to wind down and get to sleep at a decent hour. If you want more flexibility than a set schedule but also want to have clarity on when you’ve “done enough” for the day, another approach is to count out work blocks that you complete, aiming for eight or nine hour-long blocks. Once you’ve put in your hours whether that puts you at 4 PM, 6 PM, or 8 PM, give yourself permission to stop guilt-free.

To begin to fold back in physical movement, you can start small. Some of the people I work with will begin with even 10 minutes of exercise a day that they can do from home. Apps like Sworkit can give you short routines and you can find a plethora of free videos on YouTube. Another strategy is to do short five-minute walks as breaks instead of checking your phone. It takes about the same amount of time and improves your health and focus instead of detracting from them.

Finally, if you’ve struggled with nutrition since working from home, you may need to incorporate in a time on the weekends or a week night to pick up or order groceries. Most grocery stores do have premade salads and quick meals that are less expensive and often healthier than takeout. You can also pick up apples, bananas, baby carrots, and other quick and easy snacks to encourage nutritious eating.

Just because your work-from-home schedule isn’t terrible, doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be better. Use these strategies if you need a new relationship with your remote work schedule in the new year.

This content was originally published here.

The post Is It Time to Shake Up Your WFH Routine? appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

A client of Ron’s, “Kelsey,” a division general manager of a large food manufacturer, recently told him, “Everyone on my team seems tired…all the time. I ask them how they’re doing, and they tell me ‘fine.’ If someone asks for time off, I say yes. They get the work done, but it seems like they’re in a fog. I don’t know what to do.”

Kelsey’s organization and industry were hit hard by the last two years of volatility and as a result saw increased employee turnover, supply chain disruptions, changing workforce expectations about flexibility, and exhausting demands on time. The aftermath has been a widespread human energy crisis. And Kelsey is hardly alone.

The world is seeing increased languishing, depleted surge capacity, and a global mental health crisis. According to Gallup, seven in 10 people globally report they’re struggling or suffering.

Microsoft’s annual Work Trend Index, a survey of thousands of workers worldwide, shows people around the world have a new “worth it” equation, with 53% of respondents — particularly parents (55%) and women (56%) — saying they’re more likely to prioritize their health and well-being over work than before. And they’re taking action: The number one reason cited for leaving their jobs in the last year was for personal well-being or mental health reasons. But even as we saw The Great Resignation emerge as a stopgap solution for some people to regain a feeling of control in their lives or try to address well-being concerns, The Great Regret emerged almost as quickly. What we’ve learned is people want to keep working — just not at the expense of their overall health and happiness.

As it turns out, work doesn’t have to be energy depleting, and the volume of work may have less to do with whether or not it is than you might think. What people find de-energizing is a lack of meaning in their work, the cognitive load required to prepare for and get through interactions with toxic bosses and colleagues, and the seemingly impossible trade-offs they feel forced to make between their or their family’s well-being and the demands of their jobs.

The U.S. Surgeon General recently released a new framework for workplace mental health and well-being, and the findings support that what it takes to create a healthy workplace of well-being is more holistic than we’ve previously understood.

If your team isn’t displaying the vibrant energy you believe them to inherently possess (or that they once had), here are some renewable energy sources you can tap into to help replenish it.

Initiate purpose-driven career conversations.

The last two years have unleashed a hunger for deeper meaning from our work. People want to know they’re on a path of growth and opportunity for greater impact. They want to talk about their careers but aren’t always comfortable initiating that dialogue. Leaders can show they care by starting those conversations and making them routine. This legitimizes people’s desire to talk about their future aspirations while removing any awkwardness. These conversations should also include caring feedback on areas to improve so that people are ready for opportunities when they arise.

Leaders can also organize broader efforts as well. For example, Kathleen and her team have established “Discover Days” across Microsoft to give people access to a broader set of career opportunities and make themselves visible to the internal talent marketplace.

Leaders should also be on the lookout for especially talented people getting bored. For them, your greatest support might be helping them find a more challenging role within the organization, and it could keep you from losing them to an external opportunity.

Create team rituals that foster mutual care and belonging.

Remote work has increased people’s sense of isolation, a particularly harmful source of energy depletion. Loneliness intensifies the stress of difficult challenges. Leaders who create team rituals ensure they aren’t exclusively responsible for replenishing team energy.

A strongly bonded team creates a place people want to be, whether remotely or in-person. When people feel deeply connected to their peers, it energizes work, making it more fun. Kathleen’s leadership team creates space for people to safely share about challenges they’re facing and where they’re personally struggling. Team members talk freely about family difficulties, health needs, and other general concerns. This also makes it safe for people to ask for help when needed and make plans for covering for each other when someone needs to step away from work.

One of Ron’s clients routinely opens team meetings with a variety of check-in rituals — for example, asking people to share something they’re grateful for that day or one word that describes how they’re feeling. The idea is that, over time, the team becomes a place of refuge where you go to get reenergized and restored.

Help build a portfolio of diverse relationships.

Remote work has narrowed people’s exposure to predominantly their immediate peers, weakening ties to cross-functional relationships by as much as 25%. This can increase isolation and monotony, two energy-depleting experiences.

As a leader, you can create opportunities for people to connect with cross-functional peers who do very different work. These experiences are energizing because people learn new things about their colleagues — and themselves. One client of Ron’s started a program they called “walk in their shoes,” which consisted of weekly peer-mentoring sessions between people in adjacent functions. It was intended to strengthen connections between employees from different parts of the organization. What Ron’s client didn’t foresee was how much people would learn in the process — the program changed how people performed their own jobs and opened lateral career paths they hadn’t considered.

Model being okay with not being okay.

Modeling is one of Microsoft’s three management practices, alongside coaching and caring. One of the greatest examples you can set as a leader is allowing your team to see how you prioritize your own well-being. Openly discuss how you’ve dealt with work stress or even other challenges like anxiety or burnout. Acknowledging your humanity by being vulnerable about your own well-being makes it safe for others to admit when they’re struggling, rather than feeling the need to feign a posture of false positivity. If you’ve found your company’s wellness benefits helpful, share how they’ve helped you and encourage team members to take advantage of them. Your example of practicing self-care signals its importance to your team, empowering them to follow suit.

Swap productivity paranoia for helpful prioritization.

Microsoft surveyed 20,000 people in 11 countries and analyzed trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals for its latest Work Trend Index. One of the most significant findings was the mismatch between the degree to which employees are working more than ever and the degree to which managers struggle to trust that people are, in fact, being productive.

Because leaders lack the visual cues they once enjoyed in an in-person workplace, 85% of leaders say that the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive, resulting in “productivity paranoia.” But the data offers no support for such lost confidence: 87% of employees report being very productive, as evidenced by a colossal increase in meetings (153%), the volume of multitasking, and the expansion of work hours overall. As people feel the pressure to prove they’re being productive, the result is often “productivity theater”: an especially toxic form of energy depletion where people waste precious time creating the appearance of productivity.

Rather than worrying about whether or not people are working enough, spend time helping people focus on what’s most important. Eighty-one percent of employees say they could benefit from more help prioritizing their workloads, but only 31% say they’ve ever received useful guidance from their managers in doing so. Accept the reality that people are working harder than ever. More than just reordering the to-do list you overloaded as a result of worrying whether people were doing enough, you have to eliminate non-value-added activities and connect each person’s work to the organization’s most important priorities. You’ll create positive energy as people become more engaged in purposeful work that provides meaning rather than banal activities that attempt to justify their value to you.

Watch for signs of flourishing and intervene when it’s waning.

Ultimately, every organization needs to define for itself what an energized and flourishing workforce looks like — and identify the signals that indicate whether things are trending as desired. You can find important clues in the routine interactions of your team. For example, what kinds of questions do people ask in your team meetings? Are they curious, asked with an intent to learn? Or do they have a twinge of cynicism or complaint? How are people talking about their challenges? With a sense of empowerment and agency or with a sense of resentment and futility?

Employee engagement data, regular pulse data, and other listening systems — like Microsoft’s measurement of employee thriving, defined as “empowered and energized to do meaningful work” — are all great for measuring employee experience at scale. But for individual managers without access to such data, making effective use of the barometers right in front of you will go a long way in enabling you to monitor team energy reserves.

For example, an executive coaching client of Ron’s noticed one of her star performers had begun to miss deadlines and be late to meetings. It wasn’t overly disturbing, but it was noticeable. When Ron asked her if she’d raised it with the person, she replied, “Well, I didn’t want her to think I was nit-picking, so I just gave her the benefit of the doubt. She’s one of my best people and I know she’s slammed, so I didn’t want to insult her.” Many leaders shy away from intervening when patterns of behavior shift, but that’s precisely the wrong instinct to follow. Expressing concern for someone is different than expressing concern about them. When you spot early warning signs, intervene promptly. If someone is dealing with personal stress, they can choose if and what to share with you. If they’re overwhelmed with workload demands, offer help as an expression of confidence in them, not as a loss of confidence. Encourage them to take time off as needed before they have to ask for it. Reassure people, especially high performers, that it’s safe for them to step away from work without a loss of status or opportunity.

The data has shown that today’s volatile, ever-shifting workplaces have the capacity to de-energize employees. Embrace the role you play in keeping your team’s energy replenished and prioritize creating a team environment that keeps energy reserves high.

This content was originally published here.

The post 6 Ways to Reenergize a Depleted Team appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

Back in December 2020, one of us surveyed a group of 537 public-sector employees and asked them a simple question: “Do you have any goals for the upcoming winter holiday?” with the answer options “yes” or “no.” We also asked them to indicate how happy they are, which is a commonly used measure of subjective well-being.

We found that employees who set goals for their holidays indicated being 8% happier than those who didn’t. This difference in happiness emerged regardless of gender, age, employment, income, marital status, frequency of working from home, or number of dependents.

Next, we wanted to understand whether proactive recovery is associated with how many days of vacation people planned to take off from work and what activities they anticipated engaging in during those days. On average, people who had holiday goals planned to take 1.2 more days off from work than those who didn’t set goals for their holidays. This is important since roughly 768 million vacation days are forfeited annually, which is approximately $62.2 billions in lost benefits.

Employees who had holiday goals further anticipated allocating 24% less time to passive leisure activities such as watching TV, napping, or doing nothing, and 28% more time to socializing with their friends and family. These differences in how we plan to spend our time off matter for our well-being: We found that planning to spend more time with loved ones was associated with greater happiness. This is in line with one of the most consistent finding in time-use and well-being research on the unique benefits of social connection.

Proactive recovery can also benefit the organization: Indeed, we found that employees who set goals for their upcoming holiday indicated being 5% more satisfied with their job than those who didn’t.

Notably, we found similar results in a different sample of 184 workers surveyed back in 2019 who indicated having access to paid holidays. Those who indicated that they typically set goals for their holidays were 12% happier than those who didn’t. Proactive recovery was further associated with spending one’s holidays pursuing more social activities and fewer rest-related activities. As before, time spent on social activities during holidays was associated with greater happiness.

The benefits of proactive recovery are not limited to holidays. In a different survey we asked a sample of 243 workers if they usually have goals for their weekends. Once again, we found that people who set goals for their weekends were 13% happier than those who did not set weekend goals. Similar to holidays, people who have goals for their weekends are also more likely to spend their weekends pursuing social activities and less likely to spend their weekends resting or doing nothing. And spending one’s weekend engaging in social activities may in turn lead to greater happiness.

Further, the positive effects of setting goals aren’t just limited to weekends and holidays, but can actually be tapped into on a daily basis — setting goals for how we spend our evenings can even be beneficial. In a separate sample of 242 workers, we found that those who set goals for their evenings spent more time on social activities and were also 10% happier than those who didn’t set goals for their evenings.

One caveat: While setting goals for our time-off is important, that doesn’t mean we should treat those goals like a to-do list. We should be flexible. Research by Gabriela Tonietto and Selin Malkoc showed that scheduling leisure activities can undermine the enjoyment people experience from such activities in part because leisure starts to feel like work. These authors found that when people scheduled leisure activities loosely, they were still able to maintain the enjoyment of leisure time. In our research, we suspect the reason setting break goals works is because it makes us more intentional about how we will spend our time away from work and not because it allows us to cross things off from yet another to-do list.

With the challenges of an ongoing pandemic and unforeseen economic consequences, many employees might question whether they should make any plans over the holidays. Their flights might get cancelled, they might get sick, or they may simply feel too exhausted to do anything. Although it might be counterintuitive, as we might look forward to lying around in our pajamas and doing nothing for a while, our research suggests that setting goals can actually help us recharge and ensure we get the most out of our leisure time.

The post Be Intentional About How You Spend Your Time Off appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

Swarm intelligence refers to the ways in which decentralized and self-organized organisms behave. It’s what makes ants, bees, birds, and fish display sophisticated collective behaviors that even humans can find inspiring — for example, how they search for food or distribute the work that needs to be done in a colony.

In ant colonies, ants can quickly exchange places when a disruption happens — they’re instinctively interchangeable. For example, if they’re out looking for food and a dog gets in the way, they recognize that something disruptive has happened and quickly swap tasks in order to protect the colony. Their ability to know when to switch — without anyone telling them to — is what gives them the capacity to recover and adapt to life-threatening situations. Since this behavior is only possible at the level of the colony, we refer to it as collective self-healing.

Extrapolating this idea to humans, collective self-healing happens at the level of the team, not the individual. It’s enabled when team members take the initiative to swap tasks, even if those tasks are outside their traditional roles. This way, they become interchangeable — in the same way as ants do — as a strategy to adapt to unexpected situations.

In our ongoing research, my colleagues and I have built on previous work by conducting in-depth interviews with members of action teams, including emergency response teams, police SWAT teams, trauma teams, and military healthcare teams. We’ve found that through training, these teams have developed an instinct for interchangeability that makes them very effective at collective self-healing. In essence, we’ve learned so far that three key features bestow these self-healing teams with a formidable capacity for adaptation. The following three techniques can inspire your team to recover from disruptions more quickly.

Get things done — regardless of who does it.

Since everyone on a self-healing team is focused on the same goal, they don’t get stuck arguing about who should be doing what — they just see what needs to be done and do it.

This is a behavior we observed in trauma teams in the midst of the pandemic. For instance, as part of Covid-19 planning, clinicians were asked about where in the hospital they would be comfortable being deployed if needed. In thinking about that question, many members of these health care teams realized that even though they hadn’t worked in a particular service for a while, they would be able to go there. And some of them ended up saying, “plug me in wherever you need me.” In the past, a strong hierarchy and very rigid roles had to be respected. Nobody was allowed to perform tasks outside their role.

However, the pandemic challenged that hierarchy as team members began to work outside their traditional scope to ease the team’s workload and enhance its capabilities. While at first, the idea of doing tasks that conventionally belonged to another specialty was unnerving, team members told us that when things become grim, it’s possible to become interchangeable.

Capitalize on distributed leadership.

Self-healing teams adopt a cross-training mindset to help each other learn how to fill in the gaps when a team member can’t. It doesn’t matter if you’re the leader or not. What matters is that everybody is ready to step and to take on tasks outside of their role if needed. This often happens in emergency response teams. Different from trauma teams, which have an established composition, emergency response teams are made up of whoever is available at that moment. Therefore, a team could end up with many paramedics or a few paramedics, with the fire department or no fire department, or even with a student emergency response team. They have to function with whoever they’ve got, and those circumstances inevitably necessitate swapping of tasks, particularly among the trained professionals. It’s not uncommon for leadership tasks to get redistributed or assumed by whoever is better equipped to lead in the moment. Therefore, if something happens, they can get back to work as quickly as possible.

Realize the limits of your own expertise and seek help when needed.

Self-healing teams understand that when things go awry, there’s no place for people with big egos. They know they must call out bad behavior, and if you’re the one being called out, you better shake it off fast so that the team continues to operate as a cohesive unit.

Hierarchy is an innate condition of humans, and no human team is exempt from its influence. While highly effective, swapping leadership tasks in emergency response teams is not straightforward — it requires a certain degree of insight. Sometimes a triggering event prompts a person from the fire department to know that they must take on a leadership task even though the paramedic was supposed to perform it. In those situations, the conversation must be crafted carefully so that everybody on the team knows that the switch happened because of the circumstances, not because of a judgment of incompetence.

In military health care teams, hierarchy is doubly established. There’s a hierarchy regarding military rank and also one regarding the health care culture. On these teams, the issue of ego naturally arises. However, in deployed situations where resources are scarce and danger is imminent, team members need to remain open-minded. In many instances, we heard stories of “that” medic who was the “jack-of-all-trades” and knew how to troubleshoot better than even the surgeons.

Because of their deployment experience, they’ve been exposed to a variety of situations, and if needed, can perform tasks as an anesthesiologist or a nurse in an intensive care unit. They can do triage. They can assist with airway management. And that’s fine, because these teams are willing to accept that someone with less professional pedigree might possess the skills needed at a critical moment.

As these teams have taught us, collective self-healing demands that team members understand that the group is more important than the individual. While sensible, it’s not an easy premise to embrace. In social insects, like ants, collective self-healing is a natural ability. Ants are very primitive — they can’t make decisions by themselves, and their organizational system is biological, not social. Because of that, they don’t have the ability to argue about who’s more important or who has the best ideas. But humans do, which creates challenges.

Collective self-healing in human teams is not a natural trait; it must be nurtured and developed. As emergency response teams, police SWAT teams, trauma teams, and military health care teams showed us, it requires a strong learning and teaching mindset. You know you’ve struck gold when you have a team member who’s willing to gain knowledge and learn skills and attitudes outside their professional scope. And this mindset implies that any time that’s available to team members is used to train and retrain so that there’s no gap or lack of proficiency when it comes to an unexpected event.

Leaders trying to keep up with the ever-changing challenging issues of our society should reflect on a few questions:

Although the answers to these questions might not be straightforward, they at least should provoke thought. Ultimately, the end result for the trauma, police SWAT, emergency response, and military health care teams is a much more cohesive team and a higher probability of a positive outcome. Isn’t that what any organization is looking for?

The post 3 Ways to Help Your Team Recover from Disruption appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

If there’s any beauty that’s come from this pandemic, it’s that we’re reorganizing our priorities to honor what really matters to us. And for many, “career” is top of the reboot list. But letting go of what we always thought we could count on, like a five-year plan, can be painful and leave us feeling like we’re floundering.

Having a plan is one of the best stress-reduction strategies out there. As humans, we crave feeling like we’re in control and that we have certainty. In fact, research shows that a sense of control helps us stave off symptoms of depression and anxiety and can even decrease mortality risk. And the more we crave control, it turns out, the higher achieving we tend to be.

Just because we no longer have the illusion of knowing what our long-term future holds doesn’t mean we can’t still benefit from the stress-reduction — and achievement-enhancing — results of planning. It all comes down to how we look at time and goals.

If you want to thrive and be part of the meaningful change, adaptability is the key ingredient. But I don’t mean to just go with the flow and take life as it comes to you. This new brand of adaptability channels our desire to make a strategic plan, while building in planned checkpoints for course correction as new information arises and circumstances shift. It’s called micro-planning.

Micro-planning is simple. It takes a larger vision and breaks it down into yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily check-in practices to plan and adjust as necessary. We get some of the same stabilizing effects that a five-year plan may have given us but with shorter chunks of planning that make more sense in our current economic and cultural context.

Micro-planning is based on biomimicry, “a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design problems — and find hope along the way.” Prolonged stress, like the kind experienced during a global pandemic of unknown length, can cause a significant decrease in our ability to function optimally, especially when it comes to our cognitive abilities (like our brain handling high-order tasks or our ability to make decisions based on our goals instead of based on our habits). Micro-planning allows us to relieve this stress without the seduction of thinking, however erroneously, that we have control over what is going to happen in the next one, three, five, or more years of our lives.

There are six elements of micro-planning:

1. Purpose: Identify your compelling purpose that allows flexibility in terms of how it will come to pass. So many people are in a reboot phase when it comes to their careers. New directions can feel risky, but when we look back at our career history, we often find a thread that connects what all of our different roles have had in common. That thread is a great place to start when it comes to identifying your compelling purpose. For example, my purpose is to help leaders become more connected to sustainable sources of personal power so we can all make our highest contribution to humanity and the planet.

While how I implement this purpose may change as circumstances change around me, the purpose itself remains the same. If you aren’t clear on your purpose, do a quick exercise: Jot down the most fulfilling career experiences you’ve had to date. Notice what commonalities they have. Those are the ingredients of your purpose.

2. The Year: Make a plan for the year that aligns with your purpose, based on the best information you have available to you. Reflect on the previous year and what worked (or didn’t work) and take into account past lessons you’ve learned. Identify one to three areas of growth that you want to focus on. I don’t recommend trying more than three; a larger overhaul often fails because, when we put too much on our plate, we end up overwhelmed and not achieving the results we want. Your yearlong plan could include a job search, pursuing growth opportunities in the career you currently have, meeting and exceeding your KPIs, laying the groundwork for starting your own business, or whatever else makes sense for the current moment you’re in.

3. Quarters: At the beginning of each quarter, reassess what you’re working on and how you’re working by asking yourself powerful reflection and planning questions, such as: What themes emerged this past quarter? What worked, and what didn’t? What did I learn? How can I apply what I learned in the next quarter? What needs to shift in my plan based on new information and circumstances?

Based on the answers to these questions, set goals for the next quarter, being careful to choose no more than five per quarter. (The fewer the better; the fewer things you do with more focus and attention, the better results you’ll get.) For example, you might notice that a theme that emerged over the previous quarter was that you weren’t recognized for your ideas at work. After reflection, you realize you weren’t advocating enough for them.

You may then shift your plan for the next quarter and set a goal to share one new idea with your department every month and that when you do so, you also share very clearly how it will positively impact results for your department. You might also decide to read two books on increasing your influence as a leader to improve in this area.

4. Months: Each month, take your goals for the quarter and assess where you stand with them. For any active goals, break them into specific projects and then break each project down into phases. Every project requires four distinct phases to get it off the ground and achieve the results we want: planning and initiation, shipping/launching/making it visible, completion and integration, and rest and reflection.

For example, if your project is to “search for a new job,” the “plan and initiate” phase would be updating your resume, tapping into your network for potential opportunities, and searching for openings. The next phase, “making it visible,” would be applying for jobs, showing up for interviews, and following up after. The “complete and integrate” phase would be the onboarding phase once you receive your new job offer. Finally, the “rest and reflect” phase would be allowing yourself to exhale and celebrate, knowing that a new cycle has begun — and you have accomplished your goal.

5. Weeks: At the start of each week, make a weekly to-do list — rather than a daily one that’s a mile long and leaves you feeling defeated when you shut down for the day. This weekly plan allows you to have a broader view of what’s ahead and gives you more flexibility to plan than your average to-do list. But don’t just think about work tasks. Prioritize movement, sleep, time outside, hydration, and healthy food, too, as you look ahead in your week. Optimizing your physical energy make you significantly more effective at executing your plans than buying into the common, yet inaccurate, belief that our best work comes exclusively from our intellect.

6. Days: Finally, track your energy on a daily basis. Gathering data about yourself and your physical, mental, and emotional energy at the end of the day can give you powerful information as to how to optimize your workflow. Keep a journal by your bedside and jot down how you felt emotionally, mentally, and physically. Note what you worked on, how it went (what went well, what didn’t, and what you learned), and what you’re grateful for. This five-minute practice allows you to incrementally adjust the way you show up at work and in your life so you can approach your weekly, quarterly, and annual planning more mindfully. Using this data collection practice to make micro-adjustments to the way you work and your goals also gives you a tremendous sense of control, which has been proven to decrease the amount of time it takes to get tasks done.

The world is changing dramatically all around us, and we need to change with it. Clinging to a long-term strategy like the five-year plan isn’t going to work anymore. But letting go of our need and desire to know what the future holds does not mean a freefall into anxious indolence. By breaking down our planning processes into smaller chunks, we begin to check in more frequently and adapt more naturally. The five-year plan may be dead, but our capacity for doing our most impactful work and live into the goals that we set for ourselves is very much alive.

The post How to Plan Your Life When the Future Is Foggy at Best appeared first on Matt Dallisson Global Executive Search | Leadership Consulting.

Mendonca is right: mental health issues are pervasive. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), one in four Americans has a mental or substance use disorder. The National Center for Health Statistics noted a suicide-rate increase of some 35 percent between 1999 and 2018, with the rate growing approximately 2 percent a year since 2006. Suicide is now the tenth-leading cause of death in the United States. Depression increases suicide risk—about 60 percent of people who die by suicide have had a mood disorder. The Health Care Cost Institute’s 2018 report disclosed that per-person spending on mental health admissions increased 33 percent between 2014 and 2018, while outpatient spending on psychiatry grew 43 percent. Between 2007 and 2017, the percentage of medical claims associated with behavioral health (both mental illnesses and addictions) more than doubled.

Preexisting mental health challenges have been exacerbated by the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Based on analysis by McKinsey, COVID-19 could result in a potential 50 percent increase in the prevalence of behavioral health conditions. A new survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that 45 percent of Americans felt that the COVID-19 crisis is harming their mental health; while 19 percent felt that it is having a “major impact.” In a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of Americans reported feeling anxious at least a few days per week since the onset of the pandemic. Between mid-February and mid-March 2020, prescriptions for antianxiety medications increased 34 percent. During the week of March 15, when stay-at-home orders became pervasive, 78 percent of all antidepressant, antianxiety, and anti-insomnia prescriptions filled were new (versus refills).

Lenny Mendonca had the resources to get as much help in whatever form he needed, and he recognized how rare his situation indeed was. Obtaining treatment for behavioral health issues remains much too difficult. A 2018 survey cosponsored by the National Council for Behavioral Health reported that 42 percent of respondents cited cost and poor insurance coverage as key barriers to accessing mental healthcare, with one in four people reporting having to choose between obtaining mental health treatment and paying for necessities. Because of cost, coverage, and the social stigma still associated with mental and substance use disorders, most people with behavioral health issues do not receive treatment. A study of more than 36,000 people found that this was true of 62 percent of people with mood disorders, 76 percent of people with anxiety disorders, and 81 percent of people with substance use disorders.

Access to mental health resources and attitudes about mental health are almost certainly poised to improve. First, young people are both more likely to have behavioral health issues—young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 had the highest prevalence of any mental illness—and more willing to talk openly about psychological well-being and to seek assistance. Second, companies are recognizing the costs associated with not addressing employees’ mental health issues. Third, the growing emphasis that companies place on controlling their self-insured healthcare costs points directly to investing in mental health interventions. That’s because mental health prospectively predicts the incidence of serious—and expensive—medical conditions such as diabetes, cancer, and coronary artery disease. What has effectively been a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to mental health in the workplace is becoming instead “do ask, do tell, let’s talk.” There is a coming revolution in how companies (and public-policy makers) think about, talk about, and cope with all forms of mental health issues.

In this article, we argue that mental and substance use disorders—sometimes referred to as behavioral health conditions—are real, pervasive, and expensive. They cost companies money directly for treatment expenses and indirectly, and more expensively, from increased healthcare expenditures, turnover, and diminished productivity. Employees need, and increasingly demand, resources to help them cope with mental health problems. If companies make mental health services more accessible and intervene in the workplace in ways that improve well-being, they will simultaneously make investments that will provide real improvements in employee outcomes and consequently in company performance. Examples from companies that are taking the lead in addressing mental health illustrate what to do and how to do it.

Employees need, and increasingly demand, resources to help them cope with mental health problems. If companies make mental health services more accessible and intervene in the workplace in ways that improve well-being, they will simultaneously make investments that will provide real improvements in employee outcomes and consequently in company performance.

The economic impact of mental health issues

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, behavioral health problems such as anxiety, stress, and depression were widespread, constituting a leading cause of diminished well-being and exacting an enormous toll in the form of absenteeism, reduced productivity, and increased healthcare costs. In 2019, the World Health Organization labeled employee burnout a medical condition, noting that its cause is chronic workplace stress.

Research shows that workplace stressors such as long hours, economic insecurity, work–family conflict, and high job demands coupled with low job control are as harmful to health as secondhand smoke. Together, they cost the United States approximately $180 billion and 120,000 unnecessary deaths annually.

A 2015 peer-reviewed study estimated the total cost of major depressive disorder in the United States to be $210 billion, a figure that had increased 153 percent since 2000. About half of the economic impact was attributable to costs of treatment, with the rest attributable to absenteeism and presenteeism (being physically at work but not at full productivity) costs incurred in the workplace.

A 2019 Mind Share Partners report noted that almost 60 percent of the 1,500 employed respondents sampled across for-profit, nonprofit, and government sectors reported experiencing symptoms of a mental health condition in the past year, with half saying that the symptoms had persisted for more than a month. Sixty-one percent said that their productivity at work was affected by their mental health. More than a third of the group—50 percent of millennials and 75 percent of Gen Z respondents—reported that they had actually left jobs at least partly because of mental health.

Mental health is also a diversity and inclusion issue. The Mind Share Partners study found that Black and Latinx respondents reported experiencing more symptoms of mental disorders than their white counterparts, and were more likely to have left a previous job for mental health reasons.

The pandemic has only made the situation worse. A McKinsey survey of approximately 1,000 employers found that 90 percent reported that the COVID-19 crisis was affecting the behavioral health and often the productivity of their workforce. Gallup reported that almost half of US workers were concerned about one or more of four possible job setbacks—reduced hours, reduced benefits, layoffs, or wage cuts.

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, behavioral health problems such as anxiety, stress, and depression were widespread, constituting a leading cause of diminished well-being and exacting an enormous toll in the form of absenteeism, reduced productivity, and increased healthcare costs.

Depression and stress foretell other costly physical illnesses

Companies and countries are appropriately obsessed with bending the curve of healthcare costs. Starbucks paid more for health insurance than for coffee, and the three domestic automakers spent more on healthcare than on steel.

What is less recognized is that stress and depression increase not just the costs associated with treating behavioral health problems but also the incidence of other costly physical diseases. At least two mechanisms help explain this connection between mental and physical health.

First, psychological well-being and social determinants of health can directly affect the likelihood of an individual engaging in healthful behaviors and self-care such as eating and drinking alcohol in moderation, regular exercise, and avoiding smoking and drug use. People with mental and substance use disorders, as well as those who have experienced psychological trauma, are at higher risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and musculoskeletal problems.

Second, research shows that stress and depression cause physiological changes, such as metabolic, endocrinal, and inflammatory shifts, that are markers and predictors of disease. The idea that the mind affects the body is scarcely new, but the emerging science of psychoneuroimmunology is revealing in detail the pathways that link changes in the brain to effects on the immune system (see sidebar, “The promise of precision psychiatry”). A paper linking stress, depression, the immune system, and cancer noted that “many studies” showed “that psychological stress can down-regulate various parts of the cellular immune response. Communication between the CNS [central nervous system] and the immune system occurs through chemical messengers secreted by nerve cells, endocrine organs, or immune cells, and psychological stressors can disrupt these networks.” ¹ 1. Edna Maria Vissoci Reiche et al., “Stress, depression, the immune system, and cancer,” The Lancet Oncology, October 2004, Volume 5, Number 10, pp. 617–25, thelancet.com.

As an example of the effect of depression on other diseases, we used a large longitudinal Optum prescription data set to explore the prospective effects of depression. Receiving an antidepressant prescription was used as a marker for depression, and obtaining prescriptions for drugs used to treat diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer as markers for those diseases. We found that obtaining an antidepressant increased the odds of subsequently receiving a drug for diabetes by 30 percent, cancer by 50 percent, and heart disease by almost 60 percent. People who received antidepressants were more than 300 percent more likely to later use sedatives and 400 percent more likely to obtain an amphetamine prescription.

Simply put, the path to reducing healthcare costs goes through the brain.

One plausible reason for both the stigma and undertreatment of behavioral health problems is the perception that conditions such as depression are less “real” than clearly physical ailments, such as a broken leg or liver disease. Many people even suspect that curing a mental illness is largely under the volitional control of those suffering from it. Moreover, the treatment of mental illness is often perceived as being imprecise and relatively ineffective. Therefore, urging companies to take mental health more seriously requires demonstrating both the physiological reality of mental disorders and the possibility of more effective treatment.

Depression is a heterogeneous disorder that manifests with a variety of symptoms including “sleep disturbance, guilt, loss of energy, impaired concentration, change in appetite . . . and suicidal ideation.” ¹ 1. Manpreet K.Singh and Ian H. Gotlib, “The neuroscience of depression: Implications for assessment and intervention,” Behaviour Research and Therapy, November 2014, Volume 62, pp. 60–73, journals.elsevier.com. This heterogeneity has made diagnoses and evaluations of treatments more difficult. However, recently there has been substantial progress in understanding the physiology of mental health issues. To take one example, major depressive disorder (MDD) in fact does have physiological consequences that are evident in neuroimaging studies of the brain. Neuroimaging as a diagnostic tool has the advantage of being “a safe, noninvasive procedure that is ideally suited for simultaneously identifying aberrant behavior, brain structure, and brain function.”

Leanne Williams has outlined a “neural circuit taxonomy” for both depression and anxiety. The fundamental idea is that there are different neurological manifestations—for instance, in which regions of the brain are active and are connected to one another—for different manifestations of depression. Such a taxonomy can be used to link symptoms to underlying neural disorders as revealed through neuroimaging.

Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, many people are facing the impact of sustained and uncontrollable sources of stress that affect brain physiology. Using her taxonomy, Williams and her colleagues have illustrated how stress and isolation related to COVID-19 may affect different neural archetypes for anxiety and stress.

A taxonomy of different forms of depression makes it possible to associate treatment outcomes with different manifestations of the disease. Such an approach would do for psychiatry what has occurred in other medical domains such as cancer treatment and other diseases over the past 20 years: advancing clinical practice by matching treatments more effectively to each version of the underlying disease. Better understanding the physiological etiology of mental illness can also help move practice toward prevention. Instead of waiting till the equivalent of “stage 4” of a mental illness, when a person facing a crisis due to the accumulated burden of disability feels that suicide is the only choice, we might be able to detect the problem early, at something like “stage 1” or before onset of a mental disorder, and treat preemptively.

When treatments are matched to different disease archetypes, doctors can prescribe more robust healthcare interventions. As precision psychiatry becomes a more common standard of care, mental health treatments will become even more effective, giving more confidence to those who fund treatment of employee behavioral health conditions, such as depression, that their investment will pay off for both the company and its people.

Employees’ rising demands for attention to mental health

Today’s workforce expects employers to take mental health issues seriously and provide appropriate support and assistance. Senior executives consistently tell us that discussions of mental health issues have become much more frequent and open in workplaces. The head of mergers and acquisitions for BP noted that in the last 18 months there had been a striking shift in the willingness of people to disclose struggles with behavioral health issues.

Ginger, a company providing an on-demand mental health platform to employers, conducted a 2019 survey using a random sample of US employees. The study found that employees were more likely to seek help with stress, anxiety, and depression now than they were five years ago. More importantly, 91 percent of employees surveyed believed that their employers should care about their emotional health, and 85 percent said that behavioral health benefits were important when evaluating a new job. In fact, the respondents said that when evaluating the benefits of a new job offer, on-demand mental health support came second after corporate wellness initiatives, ahead of financial advising, gym memberships, and free meals.

While the vast majority of employers see mental health as a priority, they struggle to meet increasing employee need and demand for behavioral health services. The Ginger survey found that one-third of respondents had to pay out of pocket for behavioral health services. Twenty percent fear that they’d harm their careers if their employers found out, 20 percent worry that they don’t have time to get help, and 15 percent find that the providers listed in their company’s plan were too limited, not available, or didn’t actually provide services under the plan.

These concerns are not confined to the United States. A Deloitte study conducted in the United Kingdom reported, among other things, that just 22 percent of line managers had received some form of training on mental health at work, even though 49 percent said that even basic training would be useful. In the absence of such training and support, more than a third of employees did not approach anyone the last time they experienced poor mental health, while 86 percent noted that they would think twice before offering help to a colleague whose mental health concerned them.

Current mental health benefits fall short

According to the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, mental health benefits in health plans in the United States should be comparable to physical health benefits. They are not. A 2017 report by Milliman noted that an office visit with a therapist was about five times as likely to be out of network—and therefore more expensive—than an office visit with a primary-care practitioner. The CEO of a company providing mental health benefits to companies noted that in some instances insurance-mandated networks of mental health providers are filled with professionals who are not accepting new clients and do not respond to inquiries. Network adequacy and accessibility of behavioral health services pose serious problems for health insurers, employers, and workers nationwide. Given the economic toll of mental and substance use disorders, employers should be highly motivated to invest in behavioral health else risk increased healthcare costs and employee attrition.

Another constraint on accessing mental healthcare is that for many years mental health providers have been undercompensated for their work, leading, not surprisingly, to a great shortage. One study showed that 60 percent of US counties did not have one psychiatrist. One SAMHSA report noted that 55.2 percent of adults with mental illness received no treatment in the previous year.

It will take years to overcome the underinvestment in mental health. But if employers begin now, they can earn the appreciation and loyalty of their employees.

Six ways to ensure that mental health benefits serve a company and its people

Good mental health benefits pay off. An April 2018 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that about 86 percent of employees reported improved work performance and lower rates of absenteeism after receiving treatment for depression. ² 2. Ron Z. Goetzel PhD et al., “Mental health in the workplace: A call to action proceedings from the Mental Health in the Workplace—Public Health Summit,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, April 2018, Volume 60, Number 4, pp. 322–30, journals.lww.com/joem. A Harvard Business Review article noted that “$4 is returned to the economy for every $1 spent caring for people with mental health issues.” ³ 3. Morra Aarons-Mele, “We need to talk more about mental health at work,” Harvard Business Review, November 1, 2018, hbr.org.

Some leading companies understand this payoff and are taking action. A McKinsey study of about 1,000 employers noted that about 60 percent said they were starting, continuing, or expanding their behavioral health services. Drawing from their examples, we’ve created a list of key actions that every organization can and should take to improve employees’ mental health and benefit from the ensuing economic gains.

Measure behavioral health

Measurement of employee stress and mental well-being is on the rise, but still lacking. A prepandemic (2019) survey of more than 600 firms by benefits consultant Willis Towers Watson reported that the proportion of employers measuring the stress level of their employees was projected to increase from 16 percent to 53 percent by 2021. That increase would still leave a significant fraction of employers with no data on the empirical dimensions of employee behavioral health challenges.

Furthermore, employer surveys and measures of behavioral health often use ad hoc, idiosyncratic questions. To detect current mental health problems, we recommend a 12-item general-health questionnaire first developed in 1970. The instrument has been translated into 38 languages and extensively validated worldwide, including in Spain, Germany, and Australia. Consistently using validated, reliable measures permits better comparisons across study settings and over time, and gives companies the best chance to measure progress and benchmark their mental health status against other populations.

Given the economic toll of mental and substance use disorders, employers should be highly motivated to invest in behavioral health else risk increased healthcare costs and employee attrition.

Make behavioral health a transparent priority

It’s incumbent on company leaders to drive awareness and action on mental health. By talking about mental health openly and backing up that talk with significant action, leaders can destigmatize mental illness and signal that people can and should access the support the company provides. EY (formerly Ernst and Young) launched a WeCare program to educate its people about mental health, urge them to seek any necessary assistance, and support others who might struggle with mental illness. At SAP, Vivek Bapat, who drives purpose initiatives, which include mental health, commented: “We’ve created a virtual team of representatives across the entire business. We have representation from our product area, customer engagement, HR—including the diversity and inclusion officer—and from our chief medical officer.” This group meets regularly to discuss the company’s mental health initiatives. “It’s a diversity and inclusion conversation,” added Bapat. “It’s a product conversation, it’s a customer conversation, it’s an employee-engagement conversation, it’s a leadership conversation, it’s a brand conversation. It’s all of those conversations. Together.”

A company’s actions will be significant only if senior management and even the board of directors ensure continuity of effort and follow-through. Sometimes, mental health becomes a priority at the company’s highest levels because of personal experience. The head of one intellectual-property practice for a leading international law firm became interested in mental health because of the struggles of his brother. Brian Heyworth, the global head of institutional business at HSBC Global Asset Management, joined HSBC in 2006. Heyworth struggled with anxiety and depression when he was in his 20s and 30s, and in 2006, shortly before joining HSBC, he had “a full-scale psychiatric breakdown, which led to spending two months in a hospital in the United Kingdom called the Priory.” He currently serves as chair of the City Mental Health Alliance in London, a group of some two dozen financial-services companies, banks, law firms, accountancies, and insurance companies that explores how to improve the environment for mental health.

Company values can also play a part in prioritizing mental health. John Flint, the former CEO of HSBC, felt called to provide a duty of care for HSBC’s 240,000 employees and their families. He also believed that improving employee health and well-being was the most important enabler of executing the company’s commercial strategy.

Jonathan McBride, the former head of diversity and inclusion for BlackRock, noted that the company became interested in mental health as part of its effort to advocate for social issues and to create a culture that nurtured diversity. McBride noted three pathways that can encourage a greater focus on mental health. One was to educate people via data-backed awareness campaigns about the empirical realities of mental illnesses. Second, he said, “You ennoble the topic. You talk about overcoming [behavioral health challenges].” The third pathway is a “Be Kind” campaign, where you interrupt the rush to judgment by helping people understand that “it’s entirely possible that people around me are going through something you can’t possibly understand.”

It’s incumbent on company leaders to drive awareness and action on mental health. By talking about mental health openly and backing up that talk with significant action, leaders can destigmatize mental illness and signal that people can and should access the support the company provides.

Hold leaders accountable for making progress on employee mental health

Things that are measured and receive management attention lead to accountability, and mental health is no different. Michael Fenlon, the chief people officer at PwC, told us that the company “asked all of our teams to create well-being plans using the framework of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being, where spiritual refers to having a sense of purpose. We provided tools and examples and asked everyone on the team to have both a personal goal and a team goal. I think we got about 5,200 team plans. We asked teams to visit progress against those plans on a regular basis. And we asked all of our leaders to lead from the front, to share goals they’re working on, and to serve as role models. Our CEO, for instance, talks openly about vacations and how he plans vacations throughout the year.” The combination of visible plans with accountability for progress ensures that mental health receives the attention it deserves on the company agenda.

Explore a range of new services, including online interventions

A Society for Human Resource Management article noted that a rising number of employers are providing a variety of subsidized or fully covered digital mental health solutions. ⁴ 4. Stephen Miller, “Employers enhance emotional and mental health benefits for 2020,” Society for Human Resource Management, October 28, 2019, shrm.org. Just as telemedicine visits with doctors for conventional physical ailments are growing, so are various online applications to help deal with behavioral health issues. Many companies now offer Calm and Headspace, apps that help with meditation and sleep. Companies such as Talkspace, BetterHelp, and Ginger work with companies to ensure that employees have easy access to trained therapists. There are even start-ups, such as Toronto-based Animo, that try to apply natural language processing to social-media posts and emails to discern the psychological health of a population, track the effectiveness of interventions, and predict trends in mental well-being.

Given the pace of innovation in the mental health space, companies would be well advised to learn about this ecosystem as part of their efforts to give the best mental healthcare to their employees.

Work closely with your health-benefits administrator to ensure adequate behavioral health coverage

In the United States, most people receive their health insurance through their employer. Most of those employers use health-benefits administrators—health insurance companies—to run their plan, including contracting for access to behavioral health providers. That’s why it’s critical for business leaders to collaborate with their plan administrators to review their company health plans regularly and thoroughly, carefully examining how the plans operate and what they provide. Business leaders can make clear to health-plan administrators that investing in mental health is key to their companies’ organizational success. They can ensure availability of behavioral health services by assessing barriers to access, the breadth of provider networks, reimbursement rates for providers, utilization-management practices, and out-of-pocket costs confronted by employees. Organizations that prioritize access to mental health services and workplace supports have the potential to realize significant return on their investment.

The pandemic has made painfully clear that our collective emotional health is in jeopardy, and many employers are scrambling to meet burgeoning demands.

Consider on-site mental health services

More large employers are providing onsite medical care. Providing care onsite cuts out employee travel time and can save costs. Company-paid doctors are often less expensive than fee-for-service arrangements or care provided in settings with large facility charges.

Now there is a growing movement to make behavioral health services available at the workplace as well. According to the Business Group on Health, one-third of employers with more than 5,000 employees said they would offer behavioral health counseling on-site in 2020, a big increase from the one-fifth that did so in 2018. Presumably, this trend—together with increased access to virtual care—will continue when employees return to traditional office settings post-COVID-19.

The spread of the novel coronavirus has accelerated many shifts that had started in the months and years before the pandemic. Better mental health coverage for employees is one of those. The pandemic has made painfully clear that our collective emotional health is in jeopardy, and many employers are scrambling to meet burgeoning demands. Combine this with the openness of young people toward mental health discussions, and that good mental health coverage for employees translates into success for companies, and you’ve got the foundation of a revolution. The six steps we’ve laid out in the article can give companies a head start on this inevitable, welcome, and profound change.

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