Welcome to the How People Work podcast

In this episode, Jason and Jor­dan fur­ther explore the con­cept of well­be­ing in the work­place and how it is a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort between employ­ers and employ­ees. They dis­cuss the impor­tance of estab­lish­ing bound­aries and respon­si­bil­i­ties for employ­ees to expe­ri­ence well­be­ing. Fur­ther­more, they delve into the influ­ence of our child­hood expe­ri­ences on our rela­tion­ships with respon­si­bil­i­ty in the work­place and share per­son­al sto­ries from their childhood.

Cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment where indi­vid­u­als can thrive is cru­cial, as it allows employ­ees to bring their authen­tic selves to work. As com­pa­nies grow, we dis­cuss strate­gies for scal­ing well­be­ing ini­tia­tives to ensure con­tin­ued suc­cess. We also empha­size the con­nec­tion between a sense of accep­tance and hav­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties with­in the organization.

A com­pa­ny’s ideals for its employ­ees should be root­ed in its core val­ues, align­ing the orga­ni­za­tion’s mis­sion with the indi­vid­u­al’s sense of purpose.

Last­ly, we empha­size that when choos­ing a com­pa­ny to work for, fac­tors such as salary and ben­e­fits should not be the sole deter­min­ing fac­tors. Instead, it is essen­tial to con­sid­er the over­all cul­ture, val­ues, and sup­port for employ­ee wellbeing.

Now avail­able on: YouTube | Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy

Key ideas and highlights

• There is so much more to work than a transaction.
• Well­be­ing is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of both the employ­ee and employer.
• We are messy, com­pli­cat­ed, flawed indi­vid­u­als. Employ­ers must allow employ­ees to bring their full selves to work.
• A company’s expec­ta­tions for their employ­ees should stem from their values.

Word of the day

• Carouse — said 29:59 ✅

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:35 Well­be­ing is a coor­di­nat­ed effort between employ­er and employee
• 6:53 Employ­ees need two things to expe­ri­ence well­be­ing: bound­aries and responsibilities
• 9:11 How our child­hood affects our respon­si­bil­i­ty rela­tion­ships in the workplace
• 15:33 An envi­ron­ment where peo­ple can thrive allows them to bring their whole selves to work
• 17:33 How com­pa­nies can scale well­be­ing as their teams grow
• 19:26 A feel­ing of accep­tance comes with responsibility
• 21:20 A company’s ideals for their employ­ees should stem from their values
• 23:10 The dif­fer­ence between humil­i­ty and arrogance
• 25:56 Choose com­pa­nies based off val­ues not salaries
• 26:35 Work is more than transactional

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work? For near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps, than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

(00:50)

Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. This is a co-host of yours, Jor­dan Pease. I’m sit­ting here with Jason Mur­ray. I hes­i­tate to say this is your host, because I used to be the only host. I mean, you can be the host. I’m not sure what to say any­more. Wel­come to episode 15 today, shock­er. We’re going to be talk­ing a lit­tle bit more about well­be­ing. I think we’ve explored what well­be­ing isn’t and maybe, hope­ful­ly, bro­ken down some myths and some bar­ri­ers around what that word means and how it’s applied in the work­place in par­tic­u­lar. And then we stud­ied a few, we stud­ied a few stud­ies, if you will, and what oth­ers are say­ing, Deloitte in par­tic­u­lar, which was, I think, real­ly well done. And I think today we want to, we’ll see where it goes, but we kind of want­ed to get into our own per­son­al thoughts about what well­be­ing is, how it ought to be defined, what it should look like, maybe some exam­ples from our lead­er­ship with Fringe, et cetera, et cetera.

Jason (01:46):

And I think build on some of the ideas that we’ve talked about in pre­vi­ous episodes around just this kind of work life bal­ance and sort of decon­struct­ing that myth. And so when I was think­ing about this episode in par­tic­u­lar, I felt like we’ve sort of spent a bunch of time decon­struct­ing well­ness and well­be­ing and what it isn’t, or maybe con­ven­tion­al think­ing about it. But I thought, well, it would prob­a­bly be help­ful to maybe start con­struct­ing back some­thing pos­i­tive. And I think we’ve done that in some ways, but it feels like it’s a pret­ty mul­ti­fac­eted top­ic: well­be­ing. And so there’s prob­a­bly not just a sin­gle def­i­n­i­tion, but we could prob­a­bly start tri­an­gu­lat­ing onto some­thing that’s a help­ful, maybe work­ing con­cept for peo­ple as they’re think­ing about apply­ing it with­in their organizations.

Jor­dan (02:35):

I think one of the things that stuck out to me in that Deloitte study that I think was real­ly use­ful that I nev­er had put into words very well, was the idea that cre­at­ing well­be­ing is a coor­di­nat­ed effort between employ­er and employ­ee. It’s neither’s full respon­si­bil­i­ty, at least at work, at least in the work con­text. And being that work is such a huge part of peo­ple’s lives, and those two things are inte­grat­ed, there is a respon­si­bil­i­ty on the employ­er to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple can thrive and expe­ri­ence well­be­ing. Now, we as employ­ers, of course, can’t impact every sin­gle area of some­one’s life. We don’t always know every­thing that’s going on at home, for exam­ple, and so forth. But you can cre­ate a space in which it’s safe for peo­ple to bring the hard­ships that they’re expe­ri­enc­ing into the work­place, in cer­tain con­texts, ask inten­tion­al ques­tions and help just cre­ate that environment.

(03:34)

But I think I made this point last time, but what gets lost is, okay, my employ­er’s going to take care of well­be­ing for me. They’re going to check that box, and I’m going to go feel well every sin­gle day because this parental fig­ure in my life is going to cov­er that for me. And I think that’s a mis­take. So there’s two mis­takes that can be made. The employ­er can make the mis­take of going, not my respon­si­bil­i­ty just do your job. Right? And the employ­ee can make the mis­take of think­ing, this is some­thing that is being pro­vid­ed for me. Sim­i­lar to I think a dis­cus­sion you and I had recent­ly, which was behind closed doors, which is now not behind closed doors, cause I’m say­ing it on a pod­cast. But the way we felt about when we put our Fringe val­ues out there in the world and what they were intend­ed to be was a set of norms and expec­ta­tions that, hey, we are all going to adopt and abide by these val­ues. And I think for some, they turned into promis­es that lead­er­ship is going to treat me with these val­ues. That’s that’s what I’m going to be giv­en. Right? And I think that was, that’s a les­son learned from me as a leader. And I think for the whole exec­u­tive team that we need to com­mu­ni­cate val­ues in such a way, no, this is nor­ma­tive. This is all of us. These are expec­ta­tions we’re going to put on each and every one of us. This isn’t an adver­tise­ment of what it’s going to be like to work here. Right?

Jason (05:07):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (05:08):

So there’s that. Again, it’s that mutu­al respon­si­bil­i­ty of employ­er and employ­ee to gen­er­ate the envi­ron­ment that we’re look­ing to gen­er­ate. Yeah. So I think ther’s some over­lap there.

Jason (05:20):

Yeah, I think it’s great over­lap. It makes me think about fam­i­lies, and I know we shy away gen­er­al­ly from analo­giz­ing work to fam­i­ly because -

Jor­dan (05:29):

Well, we try to shy away from it, but I think we often get back to it because we’re sit­ting here with eight kids under 12 between the two of us.

Jason (05:38):

Well, and I think it’s safe to say work is not a fam­i­ly. The con­di­tions of the rela­tion­ships are very dif­fer­ent. But there’s things that I think we can infer from

Jor­dan (05:47):

Kids don’t get fired as much as we might exact­ly want to occasionally,

Jason (05:50):

But, well, where I was going with that, cause some­thing you said just a minute ago made me think of this was we also are very annoyed by kids who are free­load­ing and not car­ry­ing any weight. And so when you were talk­ing about val­ues being some­thing that are done for some­body ver­sus this kind of col­lec­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion in a set of val­ues that we all hold, that’s kind of the expec­ta­tion with­in a fam­i­ly is we teach our kids like, Hey, there’s jobs that you’re going to start doing around the house as you’re old enough and able to con­tribute to what we’re try­ing to build here, because that is a val­ue that we have as a fam­i­ly. And so if you don’t, then it’s actu­al­ly frus­trat­ing. And there’s even dis­ci­pline that comes into play in those sce­nar­ios where it’s like, Hey, there’s cer­tain things that you need to have true about how you go about your busi­ness and life in order to be a pro­duc­tive human being and con­tribute maybe fair­ly or equi­tably to the com­mu­ni­ties that you’re a part of, which in this case would be your family.

Jor­dan (06:53):

Yeah. Well, I think it’s com­ing from a lov­ing place as well with chil­dren. And then if you apply it to the work­place, it’s the same idea. Kids are not going to, and employ­ees are not going to feel a sense of well­be­ing if they don’t have two things: if they don’t have bound­aries and they don’t have respon­si­bil­i­ty. Right. I just, well for­get employ­ees for a sec­ond. Just think­ing about chil­dren. If chil­dren have no bound­aries, they live in a sense of chaos, right? They don’t know who the author­i­ty is, they don’t know what the rules are. They don’t know what’s okay. And so they actu­al­ly live in fear. They don’t understand.

Jason (07:22):

There’s a lot of anx­i­ety that comes with that.

Jor­dan (07:22):

Con­stant anx­i­ety. Cause they don’t know what’s expect­ed of them and what to do. And so any action might be met by any reac­tion from their par­ents, right? Because they don’t under­stand cause and effect, right? Because there’s not enough dis­ci­pline there. And then with­out respon­si­bil­i­ty, they nev­er real­ly mature into a place where they see their own kind of con­tri­bu­tion in the world and start to form a sense of pur­pose. And here’s my role and here’s what I’m good at, and here’s what I can con­tribute. That’s how they start to feel grown up. That’s how they start to feel like real peo­ple and not just kind of free­load­ing tod­dlers, which is fine. Tod­dlers can free­load. That’s accept­able. They’re two. They’re two. It’s fine.

Jason (08:05):

When they’re four. I mean, it’s a total­ly dif­fer­ent story.

Jor­dan (08:09):

A gray area -

Jason (08:10):

You tie your own shoes.

Jor­dan (08:12):

• how this grows over the course of time. And dif­fer­ent par­ents approach it at dif­fer­ent paces, I think, right? But set­ting aside kids and think­ing about employ­ees, it’s kind of the same thing when you think about well­be­ing. Peo­ple are not going to expe­ri­ence well­be­ing with those same, with­out the same two attrib­ut­es. If they don’t know the rules of the game, then they live in a con­stant state of anx­i­ety. Am I doing a good job because I’m not sure what my job descrip­tion is. I’m not sure what’s expect­ed of me. And then with­out a sense of, Hey, you need to take own­er­ship over your own life and your own choic­es and be respon­si­ble if you do too much of that for employ­ees and sort of cod­dle, which I think I’m guilty of. I’m a cod­dler when it comes to the employe- employ­ee rela­tion­ship, then you rob peo­ple of the oppor­tu­ni­ty for some growth and to kind of find with­in them­selves their best con­tri­bu­tion and what they can be in the workplace.

Jason (09:11):

So I don’t know where this is going to go, but I’m inter­est­ed because this top­ic has me think­ing that our expe­ri­ences that we have maybe in rela­tion to our fam­i­lies or our par­ents, seem­ing­ly have an impact on how we approach respon­si­bil­i­ty rela­tion­ships at work. And so I’m curi­ous total­ly for you,

Jor­dan (09:30):

Total­ly, impact on every­thing in your life.

Jason (09:31):

What do you feel like are maybe expec­ta­tions or expe­ri­ences that you kind of car­ry from how you grew up that apply to the way that you’ve thought about respon­si­bil­i­ty at work or how you inter­act in that setting?

Jor­dan (09:46):

Is this the Jor­dan Cries episode? You want me to, it can be, you want me to go all the way there? Gosh, I don’t mind shar­ing some per­son­al things here. So this, but for the sake of the audi­ence, I grew up in a house­hold real­ly lov­ing, won­der­ful house­hold, me and had a old­er broth­er still do. And I think when I was, gosh, I’ve lost the plot now. 10 years old, maybe 10 years old. I think as my mom got diag­nosed with can­cer for the first time, she expe­ri­enced sev­er­al dif­fer­ent can­cers. But the point of the sto­ry is that was a cen­tral kind of theme in our fam­i­ly, was like, we’re going to bat­tle togeth­er this dis­ease. And we had suc­cess­es and we had some loss­es, and we had more suc­cess­es. And it was actu­al­ly a real­ly back and forth thing for an entire decade.

(10:44)

And one of the things I learned, a learned behav­ior that I had was, Hey, I’m a kid. I’m not a doc­tor. There’s not a whole lot I can do med­ical­ly. There’s not a whole lot I can facil­i­tate in terms of get­ting a lot of tasks done, because I’m just not that capa­ble. But what I can do is I can make peo­ple laugh. I can raise spir­its, raise the spir­its of the room. I can be a lit­tle light­heart­ed in heavy moments and so forth, and just get peo­ple a lit­tle bit out of the fear or the grief or the anx­ious­ness or what­ev­er the case may be. And so I’m still that per­son. I mean, in the midst of, I’m like, I could be sit­ting in a funer­al and I whis­per a joke to some­body. Cause I have this learned behav­ior of I need to light­en the mood and peo­ple need that from me.

(11:33)

And to kind of enter­tain and so forth. So I mean, it’s what you go through in your child­hood. I mean, just impacts your entire per­son­al­i­ty, your entire thoughts about your mis­sion of life and what you’re all about and so forth. Also, and a lot of folks lis­ten­ing prob­a­bly won’t be famil­iar, but there’s a per­son­al­i­ty assess­ment called the Ennea­gram and the per­son­al­i­ty type of that Ennea­gram test. That’s a numer­i­cal one through nine. And I fall in this num­ber eight cat­e­go­ry and the num­ber eight, they’re kind of key desire in life is the need to be against, they need an ene­my, in oth­er words. They need some­thing to fight. And it’s no sur­prise, 10 years old, can­cer comes into our fam­i­ly. We get into a fight with it joint­ly. And my whole life, I’m 37 years old, I’m just look­ing for fights, but I’m look­ing for fights that I can fight along­side oth­ers. So I’m a big recruiter as evi­denced by the fact that we have five founders of our start­up. I’m a big recruiter. I don’t want to just fight. I want to get my group togeth­er and let’s go bat­tle it out, and let’s do some­thing that seems impos­si­ble, have a big scary fight, because I don’t real­ly feel like less­er fights are worth fight­ing. It needs to be incred­i­bly hard for it to feel worth­while. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, absolute­ly. I don’t know if I’m get­ting at your ques­tion, but Yeah. Yeah, absolute­ly. That col­ored my entire life.

Jason (13:09):

Yeah. So grow­ing up a mil­i­tary kid is a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. So I mean, it’s inter­est­ing hear­ing you talk about it in rela­tion­ship to work and what that’s meant. And yeah, I mean, I’ve known you long enough that the sto­ry of how you gath­er peo­ple togeth­er and that sense of we’re going to go fight and be against some­thing and accom­plish some­thing big is great. And I think that’s part of what’s made our part­ner­ship as friends and in busi­ness so good. And it’s fun­ny for me because I feel like my dad, hav­ing been a drill sergeant in the Marine Corps, when I was grow­ing up for a cou­ple years along­side of a long career in the mil­i­tary, I just had this sense of do the right thing, respon­si­bil­i­ty, take care of your busi­ness, the buck stops with you. All of this throughout -

Jor­dan (14:10):

High account­abil­i­ty,

Jason (14:11):

Super high account­abil­i­ty. And I’d say that that’s prob­a­bly not actu­al­ly extreme­ly nat­ur­al for my per­son­al­i­ty in some ways. I mean, maybe in some areas, but I’m not nat­u­ral­ly, I think a high­ly dis­ci­plined per­son as some peo­ple might be that you’d go and look at. But I do think that there’s this sense for me as I approach my work, even of it requires respon­si­bil­i­ty and you do need to own it. And there’s kind of a dri­ve that comes out of that. I mean, as I’ve unpacked with my coun­selor and stuff like that, yeah, there’s, there’s neg­a­tive sides to that as well. But I mean, think that’s some of prob­a­bly what we’ve got­ten to a lit­tle bit in that indi­vid­u­als have some respon­si­bil­i­ty them­selves, even for under­stand­ing, Hey, what are you bring­ing to the table that’s impact­ing why work may feel a cer­tain way? It’s not like work, or your expe­ri­ence of work is just objec­tive­ly good or bad, right? We’re bring­ing stuff to the table when we go to a work set­ting or take on a role that is all these years of what we think work should be and healthy mind­sets and unhealthy mind­sets and strengths and weak­ness­es and so on.

Jor­dan (15:33):

I think what I was think­ing while you were talk­ing, I was lis­ten­ing, I promise, but I was also think­ing, every­body lis­ten­ing brings some sto­ry, maybe sim­i­lar may be far dif­fer­ent, but they bring that into work every day. And I think part of what, cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple can thrive, where there’s human flour­ish­ing, to use your term, where well­be­ing can be a big part of the cul­ture is hav­ing a place where you can bring your sto­ry in, where you’re allowed to have a past, you’re allowed to have a child­hood, you’re allowed to have wounds and pains and pref­er­ences and what­ev­er beliefs. And it’s part of, it’s obvi­ous, you could use the word diver­si­ty to apply to that, but I think diver­si­ty is almost lit­tle bit too much of a buzz­word to real­ly cov­er it. I think it’s an accep­tance of flawed peo­ple with painful pasts, right?

(16:38)

Yeah. That’s more of the expres­sion I would use to describe what this wel­com­ing envi­ron­ment ought to look like. And it’s a tough thing to scale. Inti­ma­cy is a tough thing to scale, right? Because when you have 10 peo­ple in your orga­ni­za­tion, you can ask inten­tion­al ques­tions, you can get to know them, trust builds. Even­tu­al­ly you begin to hear their sto­ry. And of course, there’s going to be a sit­u­a­tion where peo­ple feel a sense of well­ness, right? Yeah. Oh, I brought my whole self. That whole self was accept­ed. That whole self was, dare I say, loved. And there’s a coor­di­nat­ed effort to take that whole self and to fig­ure out the best con­tri­bu­tion and the best work and the best style of work, and the best hours of work and what­ev­er. All you can cus­tom, you can bespoke that, if you will, to use that as a verb, which is not.

(17:33)

But then at scale, how do you do it? How do you cre­ate that deep­er sense of well­be­ing? I think the only way is to repli­cate that through a man­age­r­i­al process or a lead­er­ship process. Peo­ple are trained to not just tell peo­ple what to do and why we’re doing it, which is two very impor­tant things, but to also con­nect on that deep­er lev­el and to under­stand who it is that’s work­ing for them and what their sto­ry is. And I think it might be achiev­able, so long as you don’t have one per­son lead­ing 20 peo­ple, if you keep that kind of span of con­trol, I think you ought to rebrand that span of care maybe, might be, Span of care might be a bet­ter term, that it might be achiev­able. Yeah.

Jason (18:27):

Yeah. You said some­thing that kind of stuck with me, and I want to talk about it a lit­tle bit more because you men­tioned accep­tance as part of this kind of con­cept of inti­ma­cy. And maybe it’s because I’m an intro­vert and I have only so much capac­i­ty for inti­ma­cy in my life, but I was also think­ing about this con­cept of psy­cho­log­i­cal safe­ty. And I’m not sure I always under­stand what peo­ple mean when they say it. I’m not sure they do either. Fair. I won­der if some­times, and this is relat­ed to our dis­cus­sion on what do we bring to the table from our child­hood and what­not, if we put accep­tance at the pin­na­cle of what it means to feel like I belong some­where. And if that’s right. So if we go back to the anal­o­gy of a fam­i­ly, well, what’s, what is one thing that’s true of a fam­i­ly? You’re part of the fam­i­ly, right?

Jor­dan (19:25):

You’re accept­ed permanently.

Jason (19:26):

Right? Should be. I mean, in a prop­er­ly func­tion­ing fam­i­ly, accep­tance should be sort of the oper­at­ing truth across the board. But then what hap­pens in a healthy fam­i­ly to devel­op indi­vid­u­als, and I mean, maybe come back to kids, this is a use­ful way to do this, is we chal­lenge them, right? So it’s not just like, Hey, I love you and you’re accept­ed, right? I love you. You’re accept­ed, and there’s respon­si­bil­i­ty you’re going to need to take on. Yeah. There’s ways that you’re going to need to grow. There’s going to be chal­lenge that you have to take on for things that are hard even. And so I think the ques­tion is, are the hard things actu­al­ly bad? Because the sense I get from inter­act­ing with peo­ple is some­times I just want to be accept­ed. Don’t make me do any­thing hard, right?

Jor­dan (20:14):

Yeah. Right. Well, I think that’s a child’s per­spec­tive to just go, well, I just am. Just accept what­ev­er I am. But I think there’s a dip, a dif­fer­ence between accep­tance and approval or accep­tance, and no one’s ever done. No one’s fin­ished grow­ing. No one, no one’s arrived, ever. So I think the accep­tance is, I’m going to take you into this team, and I’m going to take your past and I’m going to take those wounds and all that pain and all that stuff. But there’s still an expec­ta­tion that these val­ues and these norms that we put out there as some­thing that you agreed to when you took the job, you, you’re expect­ed to live that out here, right? So there isn’t just like, well, what­ev­er you are rela­tion­al­ly, what­ev­er you are social­ly, what­ev­er, how­ev­er you act, is okay. Yeah. That’s not true. There has to be a stan­dard. There has to be an idea of what the ide­al is, and the ide­al should be set forth by a com­pa­ny’s values.

Jason (21:25):

So that’s a real­ly inter­est­ing idea because when­ev­er you put forth an ide­al, it means that we’re not going to meet it.

Jor­dan (21:34):

Oh yeah.

Jason (21:34):

Because an ide­al, by def­i­n­i­tion, is something

Jor­dan (21:37):

That nec­es­sar­i­ly means that

Jason (21:39):

That is to some degree unat­tain­able. And so there­fore, I’m mea­sur­ing myself against an ide­al, which means I am always falling short of that ide­al. So it’s this fun­ny ten­sion that we have of our need for accep­tance as human beings. We’re not per­fect. We’ve got our bag­gage and our sto­ries and so forth, but yet, if we don’t have an ide­al to strive for, what are we aim­ing for? We’ve talked about that. What are we doing? Yeah, we’ve talked about that. Yeah. Actu­al­ly in pre­vi­ous episodes, it’s like, what are we aim­ing for? Has a lot to do with how we go about oper­at­ing in the world.

Jor­dan (22:16):

Yeah. I don’t think I’m okay, you’re okay is love. I don’t think that’s a lov­ing way to treat peo­ple in your life. I think you should under­stand what they want, and you should under­stand what their goals are, what mat­ters to them and what they’re aim­ing towards. And if they’re not aim­ing towards any­thing, maybe a lit­tle coach­ing would help to, Hey, you should maybe set your sights on some­thing. We talked about pur­pose and past episodes. But then once you under­stand the pur­pose and the pur­pose they signed up for by tak­ing the job and tak­ing on the val­ues as ascribed, you need to coach ​‘em towards that with the knowl­edge that they will fail. But I mean, they will nec­es­sar­i­ly fail, and as will the leader, as will every­body in the orga­ni­za­tion, which I think, I’m just think­ing through our own val­ues doc­u­ment. There’s phras­es in there like, fail bold­ly, be flawed, but be flawed and don’t front. Right? That’s the key. That’s the dif­fer­ence between humil­i­ty and arro­gance. Both a hum­ble per­son and an arro­gant per­son are flawed, but the arro­gant per­son pre­tends not to be. And the hum­ble per­son accepts that they are and will tell you that they are flawed. And you can­not coach some­one who won’t. Right. You can’t. Well, because they’re not par­tic­i­pat­ing in their own wellbeing.

Jason (23:34):

Humil­i­ty at its core is an acknowl­edge­ment that you don’t know every­thing. So if you don’t -

Jor­dan (23:39):

And you’re not perfect.

Jason (23:40):

And so, yeah, they’re kind of one and the same. And so humil­i­ty requires that you’re acknowl­edg­ing, I guess, a deficit you might call it. That’s a deficit that’s uni­ver­sal­ly true about humans. But I mean, com­ing back to this idea, even though the ide­al cause I think that to me, there’s some­thing more pro­found that maybe gets at our dis­com­fort because an ide­al judges you, and we are very uncom­fort­able with judg­ment. Who are you to judge me? Right? Yes. I’m a per­son. I’m a beau­ti­ful but­ter­fly. Right? Who are you to judge me by some stan­dard? But what we’re get­ting to is with­out a stan­dard, we have no aim. And so we have to have some kind of stan­dard or ide­al, because oth­er­wise we have noth­ing to aim for. But as soon as we have that ide­al, it judges us, and that judg­ment is uncom­fort­able unless we can maybe be more com­fort­able with humility.

Jor­dan (24:45):

Well, I think to reit­er­ate, I think that’s the mis­take that I made with Fringe. One of many mis­takes I’ve made with this com­pa­ny that we run, but one of the mis­takes I’ve made, again, is not lay­ing those val­ues out as an ide­al, as an expec­ta­tion. It was more, I think it came, and I did­n’t mean it this way ini­tial­ly when I wrote it, but it came across more as a recruit­ing pitch. Come here and here you’re allowed to be flawed, and here you’re allowed to be, right? As opposed to, this is what the ide­al is here, be hum­ble, be coura­geous, be these things. And I think had I done that, we prob­a­bly would’ve saved our­selves cer­tain amount of pain with folks that came in and thought that they were going to be hand­ed — hand­ed well­ness, hand­ed accep­tance, hand­ed, what­ev­er, a vision for their life, what­ev­er the case may be, and did­n’t real­ly par­tic­i­pate in that them­selves from the jump, because they nev­er accept­ed an ide­al that was laid out before them.

(25:56)

And I said this before, you should not choose a com­pa­ny to work for based on the salary or the ben­e­fits. You should choose based on the val­ues and your per­cep­tion as to whether or not the exec­u­tive team actu­al­ly believes the val­ues that they put out there, or it’s just a bunch of virtue sig­nal­ing crap, right? Does it real­ly reflect what they believe in their hearts of heart, in their heart of hearts, and are you on board? And if you’re on board, you’re going to have a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence with that com­pa­ny, but if you’re not aligned from a val­ue stand­point, I mean, I don’t care how much a com­pa­ny pays, it’s going to be a mis­er­able experience.

Jason (26:35):

Yeah. I think to me, this is why I recoil so much at the idea of work being just a trans­ac­tion between employ­er, employ­ee trans­ac­tion of time for wages. I give you time, you give me mon­ey, end of sto­ry. Yeah. That’s it. And I hear a lot of peo­ple talk about it in that way, and it just feels so, it feels shal­low, I guess, because I don’t know. You don’t have to go far below the sur­face to real­ize it’s just not even true. We might try and put that frame­work on top of this con­cept of work, but I mean, we talked about, I think of one of the pre­vi­ous episodes, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion calls employ­ment, one of our social deter­mi­nants of health. So I mean, even in that set­ting, they’re acknowl­edg­ing that work has -

Jor­dan (27:24):

I’s not just a paycheck.

Jason (27:26):

There’s some­thing that’s not true deep­er to work than just a trans­ac­tion between an employ­er of time for money.

Jor­dan (27:34):

But we’re cyn­i­cal peo­ple that are afraid of inti­ma­cy, and so what do you, you fall to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor, which is this quote, liv­ing the dream atti­tude. I like to call it.

Jason (27:47):

Nobody means it.

Jor­dan (27:48):

The peo­ple that you, just to clar­i­fy the peo­ple that you ask, Hey, how’s your day going? How you doing? They go liv­ing the dream with all this drip­ping with cyn­i­cism. That is the eas­i­est thing. That is the eas­i­est way to com­mu­ni­cate. The eas­i­est way to inter­act with peo­ple is just with this cyn­i­cal, jad­ed, emp­ty reac­tion to that ques­tion or to any ques­tion. I think that is the poi­son in the water when it comes to this whole con­cept of work that has led peo­ple to, even in 2023, even though I think they know deep down is not true to say, yeah, it’s just a paycheck.

Jason (28:27):

Well, because it lit­er­al­ly reduces you to a resource. You are only time.

Jor­dan (28:33):

Is that what you want?

Jason (28:34):

That’s what you are.

Jor­dan (28:36):

You want to be a cog in a wheel? I won­der if that’s a way of just shirk­ing the respon­si­bil­i­ty of being more. I think that maybe that’s com­ing from a place of fear as I’m self-pro­tec­tion that, okay, well, if I get into this role and I’m not pro­mot­ed and I’m not praised, and I’m not the star of the show, well then it’s because I, I’m just a cog in the wheel any­way. Nobody real­ly cares about me. Maybe it’s just this kind of self-pro­tec­tive dis­claimer that’s put up front to shy away from the inti­ma­cy of actu­al­ly hav­ing to try. The risk of effort, which could be met with failure.

Jason (29:20):

Which should be scary.

Jor­dan (29:21):

Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, that’s what we’re all afraid of. We’re all afraid to actu­al­ly try and then fail. If we fail, and we’re like, well, I just sort of phoned it in any­way. It’s like, it’s not so upset­ting, right? When we pour our­selves into some­thing, we expect to win. So any­way, we’ve prob­a­bly gone well over our allot­ted time for an episode today. Good top­ic. Thank you all for lis­ten­ing to episode 15 today. Jason and I are going to con­tin­ue to hit our tequi­la glass­es hard and carouse with one anoth­er through­out this after­noon. Oh, you worked it in right at the end. I got it. Got to give you your new word too. Got it, J? Yeah. Jason, hit us with the word of the day for the next episode. All right. Next episode. Word of the day is going to be rar­efied. Okay. Eas­i­er than carouse was like, how do we, it’s like this drink­ing and par­ty­ing and being like, how does this relate? This is what we do on the pod­cast. I mean, I guess, yeah, that is some part of well­ness. But alright. Thanks for lis­ten­ing to How Peo­ple Work. We’ll catch you next time. Bye-bye.

‍

In this episode of How Peo­ple Work, Jason and Jor­dan explore the role of lead­er­ship in employ­ee well­be­ing and delve into the qual­i­ties and strate­gies that define excep­tion­al man­agers. They cov­er a range of top­ics, includ­ing the impact of man­agers on employ­ee reten­tion, the essen­tial traits of suc­cess­ful lead­ers, the per­ils of micro­man­age­ment and under­man­age­ment, and the chal­lenges faced dur­ing the tran­si­tion to a man­age­r­i­al role.

Jor­dan and Jason share per­son­al sto­ries of their expe­ri­ences in lead­er­ship and man­ag­ing a start­up. They dis­cuss the sig­nif­i­cance of trust, the impor­tance of both EQ and IQ in lead­er­ship, and the best prac­tices for devel­op­ing oth­er leaders.

Now avail­able on: YouTube | Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy

Key ideas and highlights

• Lead­er­ship and orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­ture are key deter­mi­nants of employ­ee wellbeing.
• One can be a com­pas­sion­ate but incom­pe­tent leader.
• The tran­si­tion from indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor to peo­ple leader is a dif­fi­cult one. How to set your­self up for success.

Word of the day

• Equiv­o­cal — Jason wins this week!

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:35 Deloitte Study Recap
• 5:25 What it means if peo­ple leave a com­pa­ny because of a manage
• 7:54 What the role of a man­ag­er needs to be
• 10:52 Well­be­ing is a shared responsibility
• 11:33 Which is worse: micro­man­age­ment or undermanagement?
• 13:03 The bina­ry of lead­er­ship styles
• 16:55 Why the tran­si­tion from an indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor to a peo­ple man­ag­er is so hard
• 18:17 How trust­ing your peo­ple is one of the most impor­tant things you can do as a leader
• 20:07 Which mat­ters more in being a leader: EQ or IQ?
• 22:59 Here’s what the best lead­ers do to devel­op oth­er leaders
• 25:57 Here’s what we actu­al­ly love receiv­ing from people

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work? For near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work Pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

(00:50):

Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. This is your host, Jor­dan Peace and your oth­er host, Jason Mur­ray. Hey Jason. Say hel­lo. Hel­lo. We have been fever­ish­ly talk­ing about the top­ic of well­be­ing. We got into the Deloitte Work­force Well­be­ing Study Imper­a­tive. They call it imper­a­tive in the last episode. Very self impor­tant. It is very self impor­tant. We got into that a lit­tle bit. There’s actu­al­ly far more to dis­cuss and to dis­cov­er today, so we’re going to do more of that. We’ll actu­al­ly share an info­graph­ic or two with you as we go along in the episode if you are look­ing at the video por­tion. But thanks again for lis­ten­ing in.

(01:35):

To recap last time where we land­ed, a few things. One, every­body needs to have in order to have true well­be­ing, you need to have sort of your own mis­sion, vision, val­ues in life and know who you are, inde­pen­dent of your employ­er, so that you can find the right employ­er, align to that right employ­er, and real­ly be bought in a way that’s real­ly inte­grat­ed and real­ly true to your nature and kind of your world­view. And then when we got into the Deloitte study, real­ly where we land­ed was again, with this info­graph­ic, this idea of what is the for­ward think­ing idea around well­be­ing and what’s the pur­pose of well­be­ing, which is defined by Deloitte. And we agree with this as the ambi­tion for human sus­tain­abil­i­ty. We end­ed the episode by talk­ing about the fact that work is a deter­mi­nant of well­be­ing. Well­be­ing is a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty between the indi­vid­ual employ­ee and the orga­ni­za­tion, the employ­er, that the employ­er must cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that is suit­able for well­be­ing, where well­be­ing can be cre­at­ed and sus­tained. And that last­ly, the orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures impact well­be­ing, not just throw­ing perks and ben­e­fits at the wall and see­ing what sticks, but real­ly cre­at­ing holis­ti­cal­ly an envi­ron­ment in a cul­ture where well­be­ing can take hold and be sus­tained. So we’re going to con­tin­ue with the Deloitte study today. And Jason, why don’t you take us and sort of tee us up, talk about the rest of this study and what you and I have learned through it.

Jason (03:12):

So we kind of went deep on a cou­ple areas of this study already that we’re going to gloss over this time, but I think there’s prob­a­bly two areas that I think are inter­est­ing and mer­it some dis­cus­sion. So one of those is the study out­lines three fac­tors that they say have an out­size impact on well­be­ing, and they call these the work deter­mi­nants of well­be­ing. And so in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to what we’ve talked about in pre­vi­ous episodes, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion calls social deter­mi­nants of health and well­be­ing. This arti­cle has sort of tak­en a sim­i­lar par­a­digm and labeled these things work deter­mi­nants of well­be­ing. And so from their research and stud­ies or a sur­vey that was con­duct­ed that served as kind of the pri­ma­ry source mate­r­i­al for this report, they deter­mined that the three work deter­mi­nants of well­be­ing are lead­er­ship behav­ior at all lev­els of the organization.

(04:12):

So basi­cal­ly, I mean, I think you’d prob­a­bly sum­ma­rize this maybe as, hey, peo­ple don’t leave com­pa­nies, they leave man­agers. So it’s kind of maybe an encap­su­la­tion of that. The lead­er­ship behav­ior of indi­vid­u­als with­in the orga­ni­za­tion has a sig­nif­i­cant bear­ing on an employ­ee’s expe­ri­ence, seems self-evi­dent. How the orga­ni­za­tion and jobs are designed. So that’s some­thing that’s inter­est­ing. Prob­a­bly mer­its a lit­tle bit dis­cus­sion, maybe adding a lit­tle bit more col­or to what we talked about last time with the sort of inten­tion­al­i­ty behind design­ing employ­ee expe­ri­ence and then ways of work­ing across orga­ni­za­tion­al lev­els. And so some of what that means is are peo­ple just work­ing in silos by func­tion or is there more cross-func­tion­al inter­ac­tion? How does that work take place across teams? For exam­ple, is it per­haps more project based ver­sus just kind of func­tion based, some of those kinds of things. So I mean curi­ous, I know you have a lot of thoughts and ideas how some of those just strike you initially.

Jor­dan (05:25):

Yeah, I mean what I was sit­ting there think­ing when you were read­ing those is around job design and orga­ni­za­tion­al design. I think that as a leader for me, I’m prob­a­bly bet­ter at one and pret­ty poor at the oth­er. So orga­ni­za­tion­al design, I think I’ve got a decent idea at least around how we’re going to car­ry our­selves an orga­ni­za­tion, how we’re going to treat each oth­er, what our val­ues are going to be, where we’re going to hold each oth­er account­able from a human stand­point and a rela­tion­al stand­point. But the job design ele­ment is just not a strength for me. I’m like, well, I know I need these tasks done or I know that I need this goal to be aid­ed by the work of this per­son. But I think some­times we maybe fail to design a job as well as it needs to be ful­ly designed so that the per­son that’s placed in that role knows not only what’s expect­ed of them, but why what’s expect­ed of them mat­ters, and how it con­nects to the mis­sion and the vision of the orga­ni­za­tion. So I was think­ing about that hon­est­ly. But the lead­er­ship behav­ior at all lev­els, that is just, it’s kind of an old adage. Like you said, peo­ple don’t leave com­pa­nies, they leave man­agers. And I mean, there’s a lot of fail­ures there that are implic­it in that state­ment. One is if peo­ple are leav­ing a com­pa­ny because of a man­ag­er, then there is some sort of some very clear, to me, respon­si­bil­i­ty to the upper lev­el lead­er­ship of, well, you left a man­ag­er in place that would run peo­ple out of the job.

Jason (07:17):

Right.

Jor­dan (07:18):

What the hell? How could you leave some­one in place that is so dif­fi­cult to work with? Or so maybe even as far as abu­sive of their pow­er or what­ev­er the case may be, that peo­ple would actu­al­ly lit­er­al­ly quit their job, which is a very stress­ful thing to do and go look for anoth­er direct­ly as a result of a man­age­r­i­al rela­tion­ship. That’s a fail­ure on my part. It’s a fail­ure on your part as exec­u­tives to not see that. So that’s a big deal.

Jason (07:54):

I mean, I will say though, it feels like a top­ic that is maybe more com­plex than we want to acknowl­edge, because I think this to me feels like one of those areas where there’s a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty, right? And so if you think about

(08:13):

Man­agers, absolute­ly a thou­sand per­cent have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to care for their peo­ple, look out for their inter­ests. I would say the num­ber one job if you lead peo­ple, is to make sure your peo­ple are suc­cess­ful, right? Because what­ev­er you’re charged with as a leader of a team, let’s say, your suc­cess in accom­plish­ing your own goals is real­ly con­tin­gent upon how suc­cess­ful the peo­ple on your team are going to be. And so the peo­ple on your team aren’t a means to your own end, right? Your job, the means or your end rather, is help your peo­ple be as suc­cess­ful as they can pos­si­bly be in what­ev­er they’re doing. And I think that helps change the par­a­digm. But then on the flip side of that is none of us are mind read­ers. If an employ­ee has, we’re all wired so dif­fer­ent­ly. I’ve had this expe­ri­ence myself and work­ing with indi­vid­u­als who just like you miss each oth­er on com­mu­ni­ca­tion style, right?

(09:13):

Lead­er­ship style, some­thing gets said, maybe tak­en out of con­text, some­body feels a cer­tain way about it and it’s like, Hey, I need you to tell me, right? I need you to com­mu­ni­cate open­ly. And it’s my respon­si­bil­i­ty to make sure peo­ple feel safe. They can com­mu­ni­cate open­ly with me with­out threat or reper­cus­sions and what­not. But at the same time, it’s also the indi­vid­u­al’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. Say, Hey, this isn’t work­ing for me. I need some help here. Is there any­thing we can do? And a good man­ag­er prob­a­bly ought to say, Hey, yeah, let’s talk about it. Maybe we can’t fix all of this, but maybe we can fix some of this, right? Yeah. Or, Hey, I’m sor­ry, I did­n’t real­ize I was doing some­thing that was caus­ing you to feel a cer­tain way.

Jor­dan (09:56):

Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, there’s two prob­lems there. If a leader real­ly tru­ly cares about the peo­ple that they lead and they’re pur­su­ing their well­be­ing and they’re pur­su­ing their suc­cess and all of that, then that ought to be enough. So long as the indi­vid­ual that’s being led has the courage to say, this is how I’m doing. This is what I need, this is how what you said, or the way that you lead makes me feel or makes me react. I think that the inten­tion is there, and the courage is there to be vul­ner­a­ble and to be forth­right on both ends. Then this type of thing’s not just not going to hap­pen, right? Because fail­ures are going to hap­pen and errors are going to hap­pen. But when the inten­tion is there to cul­ti­vate this envi­ron­ment of well­be­ing, then you know, you can solve a whole lot.

Jason (10:52):

Well, and I think, I’m curi­ous what you would say to this. I think it would be a mis­take to con­flate com­pas­sion with good lead­er­ship. It’s impor­tant that lead­er­ships, that lead­ers demon­strate com­pas­sion for their peo­ple. But that does­n’t, in and of itself com­prise all of what it means. And so there’s cer­tain­ly, there’s, you could be an incom­pe­tent, com­pas­sion­ate leader, right? And that’s not what we’re aim­ing for, right? We’re aim­ing for the leader has expec­ta­tions, right? And so, I mean, some of what this arti­cle points out is they’re on the job expec­ta­tion side. There’s micro­man­age­ment, which is a hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence for you as an employ­ee if you’re being micro­man­aged. And then there’s under man­age­ment, which is prob­a­bly what I’m more inclined to do with indi­vid­u­als that have report­ed to me, which is, Hey, I don’t give enough direc­tion. I like giv­ing peo­ple auton­o­my, but I like it so much that some­times peo­ple are like, Hey, what the heck am I sup­posed to be doing here?

(11:58):

Am I doing the right stuff? Am I work­ing on things that are impor­tant? Am I focused on things that are aligned with what we’re try­ing to do here? And I think that’s a real­ly impor­tant part too. So we have to bal­ance all of those things, which I think ties into what we talked about in the last episode, which is we actu­al­ly real­ly need to focus on doing good work to man­age or lev­el up, let’s say, the peo­ple lead­ers, the peo­ple that man­age peo­ple with­in our orga­ni­za­tions, which is who our pod­cast is for. We need to help them lev­el up in how they think about the work that they’re doing with their teams.

Jor­dan (12:34):

Yeah. I mean, think again, we talked about in the last episodes that you don’t like bina­ries, right?

Jason (12:41):

I real­ly don’t.

Jor­dan (12:42):

And you should­n’t, right? Because they set up a false par­a­digm that one thing is right, and the oth­er thing is nec­es­sar­i­ly wrong. And in some cas­es that’s true. It’s just like toma­toes are poi­so­nous. That is a tru­ism. It is true. That’s just true, right? Yeah. There’s no debat­ing that.

Jason (13:00):

Espe­cial­ly that heir­loom kind. They’re all big, and it’s gross.

Jor­dan (13:03):

It’s a fam­i­ly trait. We’re not a toma­to fam­i­ly. But yeah, I think this, you’ve got lead­ers, I guess in that bina­ry. You’ve got lead­ers that are your friend and they under­stand and they heard you, and they know how you feel, and they’re com­pas­sion­ate and they care. But you can spend all of your time car­ing and feel­ing and empathiz­ing, and it’s not actu­al­ly lov­ing to peo­ple. It’s not actu­al­ly what they need. It’s just to feel and feel and feel. They actu­al­ly need to be aligned and remind­ed of the mis­sion and what are we here for? And how might we take our feel­ings and still feel them, but through those feel­ings con­tin­ue to strive, con­tin­ue to work, and con­tin­ue to pur­sue the mis­sion for which we are here. Right? And then you’ve got oth­er lead­ers. Again, it’s already set up this bina­ry sce­nario that it’s just screw your feel­ings, get the work done, get the job done. And I feel like as a leader, one of my fail­ures is that I swing a pen­du­lum from one side to the other.

(14:19):

It’s where I’m just like, man, I just hate that peo­ple are going through this. I hate that peo­ple feel what­ev­er that they’re feel­ing. Or our com­pa­ny, Fringe, lit­er­al­ly we are in the midst of an eco­nom­ic down­turn. We’re in the midst of like most com­pa­nies, just a hard time, a scary time of just like, Hey, peo­ple are going to con­tin­ue to buy this. They’re going to, are clien­t’s con­tin­ue to use this and appre­ci­ate this. Or their CFO’s going to get ahold of it and just slash the thing reck­less­ly, because it’s some­thing to slash. And so you can swing from like, oh man, I real­ly hate that peo­ple are feel­ing the fear of that. And then fail to lead from the stand­point of just like, yeah, but we got a mis­sion to ful­fill. Let’s go. And then swing too far that way and for­get to care for peo­ple and their feel­ings and so forth. So it’s easy for lead­ers to, when they’re not giv­en a real­ly good exam­ple of how to lead and how to man­age those aspects to fall into one bina­ry side or the other.

Jason (15:25):

Well, and I think this prob­a­bly gets us into some of the dis­cus­sion that we want to have around this info­graph­ic and these work deter­mi­nants, because the lead­er­ship side in par­tic­u­lar, it’s so dif­fi­cult. I mean, any­one that’s been in lead­er­ship, and any­one that’s been respon­si­ble for teams and lead­ing and man­ag­ing peo­ple would under­stand, it’s just a dif­fi­cult job. I mean, some­thing that I’ve learned and I say often or find myself say­ing often, maybe it’s advice or just some­thing you learn is like, Hey, if you’re in lead­er­ship, it’s always your fault. It does­n’t mat­ter. That’s just part of what comes with the job. And I’ve also learned that the job, it is real­ly dif­fi­cult. A lot of peo­ple, espe­cial­ly when you’re shift­ing from being an indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor, that type of role where you’re respon­si­ble a lot or some, a lot of your work has been doing the things, right? Yeah. Very task ori­ent­ed, let’s say to, Hey, now most of my work is actu­al­ly man­ag­ing peo­ple. And it’s a very, very dif­fer­ent par­a­digm. And I think what’s real­ly inter­est­ing, and I want you to share some of this, is what are these work deter­mi­nants? And then what it looks like. Cause I think on the lead­er­ship side in par­tic­u­lar, there’s some­thing, some things that are real­ly inter­est­ing and prob­a­bly lev­el up to a degree that’s maybe a lit­tle uncom­fort­able, what our expec­ta­tions should be for any­one who’s lead­ing people.

Jor­dan (16:55):

Gosh, I have a lot to say about lead­er­ship. In a very short time, I feel like I went from an indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor in a role that we were both in pri­or to Fringe, pri­or to our oth­er com­pa­ny, Green­house Mon­ey, where we were com­plete­ly respon­si­ble for every sin­gle task and run­ning our little -

Jason (17:21):

Yeah, if you don’t do it, it does­n’t happen.

Jor­dan (17:22):

It just does­n’t hap­pen. And now to be CEO of a com­pa­ny, it’s incred­i­bly dif­fer­ent. And I will say it’s a lot scari­er to me at least than how so than being indi­vid­ual. Because what­ev­er emo­tion I felt in the day, if I felt like, oh, I’m not get­ting enough done, or I haven’t made enough calls, or I haven’t had enough meet­ings, or I haven’t, what­ev­er, I would just go do the thing, what­ev­er the thing was that felt that as though it were lack­ing, just more clear, I would just go do it. Myself, right? But my role now is very far removed from that. It would actu­al­ly be a great offense to peo­ple if I was stress­ing out about like, oh, well, we did­n’t get enough leads this month, or we did­n’t like what­ev­er the thing is, we did­n’t put enough ads out there.

Jason (18:16):

You’re not the one that’s sin­gle-hand­ed­ly respon­si­ble for that.

Jor­dan (18:17):

And if I just went and just start­ed doing it, peo­ple would be like, what the hell kind of lead­er­ship is that? Do you not trust that I can do it? Do you not trust that you have lead­ers under you who lead oth­ers, who lead oth­ers who write, get this stuff done? It would actu­al­ly be a big mis­take for me to just grab the reins and just do the task. So it just takes this enor­mous amount of trust. And I have to trust that the exec­u­tive lead­er­ship team is lead­ing the man­age­ment team that’s lead­ing the mid- man­age­ment team, that’s lead­ing the indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tors to do the thing that I want, and not so far in the past did myself. And it’s ter­ri­fy­ing because I have so lit­tle direct con­trol. And so for one, that’s why it’s so impor­tant to build your orga­ni­za­tion well, and to hire peo­ple you can trust.

(19:11):

But for two, I have to facil­i­tate an envi­ron­ment where I am trust­ing in peo­ple, and they feel that trust, and they feel as though I have belief in them that they can do the thing that’s nec­es­sary, oth­er­wise they don’t feel safe. They feel like some­body’s just going to snatch their job away from ​‘em, or their task away from them. And they also just don’t get to feel that sense of, I have a pur­pose here. I have a thing that this is my exper­tise, this is my thing, and I’m going to do this for me, because it makes me feel like I’m a worth­while indi­vid­ual because I hus­tle and I do this thing, but also for the com­pa­ny. And I can’t steal that from peo­ple. So I have to sit in my fear and in my strug­gle to trust peo­ple that I don’t have even influ­ence over directly.

Jason (20:07):

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think some of what you are demon­strat­ing right here in this con­ver­sa­tion is what they’re describ­ing in this arti­cle that’s real­ly imper­a­tive to what lead­ers do, which is they have self- aware­ness, right? And there’s a lev­el of, I mean, I was sur­prised to see this in here. They say that your emo­tion­al intel­li­gence is real­ly crit­i­cal for lead­ers, because you need to be able to say, Hey, I under­stand the things that I’m feel­ing, right? And I under­stand that the actions that I take may have a cer­tain way that they feel to the peo­ple that I’m lead­ing. And not every­body under­stands that. And I think some of what gets dif­fi­cult too, and we have this at Fringe, and I’ve expe­ri­enced this myself again, is, you know, go through jour­neys where, Hey, maybe I’m man­ag­ing peo­ple and I have indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor respon­si­bil­i­ties. And that starts to get real­ly tricky.

(21:03):

Hey, some parts of my day. It’s like, I am respon­si­ble for doing the things. And so I got to switch that part of my mind on where it’s like, okay, if I don’t do this, it does­n’t get done. And then over here in this part of my work, it’s like, okay, I’m respon­si­ble for lead­ing through peo­ple. So now my job over here has helped them be suc­cess­ful. And it does take a lev­el of emo­tion­al intel­li­gence and self-aware­ness to be able to do that well, and even to acknowl­edge, hey, some­times I’m not going to do it well. Right? Being able to acknowl­edge that too.

Jor­dan (21:34):

Yeah, it’s been amaz­ing to me lead­ing a com­pa­ny, what is mean­ing­ful to peo­ple and what isn’t. From an indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor stand­point. And if that’s the major­i­ty of your career, which it’s the major­i­ty of mine, I always think, oh, well, when I was a guest on that pod­cast, or when I wrote that blog, or when I raised that mon­ey, or when the thing that I did, yeah, that’s the thing the com­pa­ny needs most. But the feed­back I get is absolute­ly not that. The feed­back is like, Hey, the most impor­tant thing you did this week is when you reached out to so-and-so and you said this. Some very vanil­la thing. Just like, Hey, you did a real­ly great job. I’m so grate­ful you’re here. Some­thing that took some vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, but very lit­tle time. Yeah, very lit­tle intel­lect to do, which thank good­ness, right? Yeah. Thank good­ness. EQ is what’s demand­ed of me and not IQ. Cause my IQ is aver­age at best, but -

Jason (22:40):

Don’t sell your­self short.

Jor­dan (22:42):

But that’s what I keep hear­ing being demand­ed of me and asked from me is just be vul​ner​a​ble​.Be kind. Be grate­ful for your peo­ple. Express to them that you’re thank­ful for their con­tri­bu­tions, and give them clear direc­tion on what to do.

Jason (22:59):

Well, do you know, one of the things that they list as a key lead­er­ship behav­ior is?

Jor­dan (23:03):

Tell me.

Jason (23:04):

Recog­ni­tion.

Jor­dan (23:05):

Recog­ni­tion.

Jason (23:06):

Which is what you just described, quite literally.

Jor­dan (23:11):

Yeah.

Jason (23:11):

So yeah, I mean, I think it’s inter­est­ing too. The oth­er thing that they say that stuck out to me when they were talk­ing about lead­er­ship behav­iors. So there’s this self-aware­ness, emo­tion­al intel­li­gence or EQ, they talk about fos­ter­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal safe­ty, which I feel like I’d want to unpack maybe sep­a­rate­ly, because I have some ques­tions even about what do we mean when we say this and what’s going on there. But the oth­er thing that real­ly stood out to me was exhibit­ing pos­i­tive per­son­al well­be­ing behav­iors. So basi­cal­ly do as I do, not as I say, right? I mean, again, this, it’s like, duh, we all learned that. We all were told that’s what lead­er­ship is, right? And that’s like what we do with our kids even, right? We don’t like, Hey, I want to exem­pli­fy for my chil­dren, and not that employ­ees are chil­dren, but in areas of our lives that I think we just kind of take for grant­ed that we’re lead­ers of peo­ple or kids and so forth. That sort of the oper­at­ing prin­ci­ple there is the words don’t mat­ter. The actions are what mat­ters. Do as I do. And so that is what they’re call­ing out here is a real­ly crit­i­cal piece of lead­er­ship behav­ior is like, don’t just tell your peo­ple, do this or that. Demon­strate for them what you want that to look like.

Jor­dan (24:37):

Wow. Yeah. I mean, it comes right back to just open­ness and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. I think as a leader, if you’re not real­ly will­ing to show your­self to the peo­ple you lead, who you real­ly are and what you’re about and what moves you, why you get out of bed in the morn­ing, how are you going to expect any­body else to oper­ate from this place that we’ve preached about the last two, three episodes around pur­pose and around hav­ing a mis­sion in life and that’s just not exhib­it­ed from the top. How do you expect peo­ple to act that way, right? Because it takes a seri­ous amount of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to share with peo­ple, here’s what my life is about. Here’s why I do what I do. Here are the peo­ple that I love and what I’m striv­ing after for them. And it all just always, no mat­ter what top­ic we talk about on this pod­cast, it always comes back to some incred­i­bly open, vul­ner­a­ble place that the lead­ers need to be. They need to be at in order to exhib­it this ful­ly raw human thing.

Jason (25:57):

Yeah, it, it’s a human thing because so many, I don’t know, you say so many pres­sures and what we, what we real­ly love get­ting from some­body is authenticity.

Jor­dan (26:18):

The actu­al truth.

Jason (26:19):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (26:20):

Devoid of all the bullshit.

Jason (26:23):

And even just know­ing like, oh man, this per­son­’s not bull­shit­ting me. They’re real. And they can acknowl­edge their mis­takes and they can acknowl­edge they don’t have it all together.

Jor­dan (26:34):

Fail­ures, needs, fears.

Jason (26:35):

I’m grow­ing too. I’m doing the best I can. It may not always be awe­some. And we’re on this jour­ney togeth­er. And I think that that’s actu­al­ly, when we see that in peo­ple, it helps build trust and it helps. Maybe that’s what some of that psy­cho­log­i­cal safe­ty is. It helps build that set­ting where it’s okay to share those things and talk those things and not be perfect.

Jor­dan (26:59):

So the table that we, I think we’re going to share here after lead­er­ship, it talks about design of work, high­er orga­nized. So what it looks like, Deloitte describes this as work is designed to lim­it clut­ter, opti­mize scope, and stream­line the flow of infor­ma­tion to the work­ers, can focus on out­comes rather than task and enable more pur­pose-dri­ven work. I don’t know about the out­comes rather than tasks, but I think the stream­lined flow of infor­ma­tion has been a big les­son learned for the two of us. I think there’s so much infor­ma­tion that we start­ed the com­pa­ny that we run. We know what’s going on. We are in the board meet­ings. We know what the bank account looks like. We know what every depart­ment is doing. And so there’s just this aware­ness that’s just there from an exec­u­tive lead­er­ship stand­point because you just run the damn thing where I, I’ve dis­cov­ered that this real­ly, there’s a ton of thought that needs to be poured into the flow of infor­ma­tion. How infor­ma­tion is shared, when it is shared, whose lips is it uttered, and with what tone and what, because peo­ple, you’ve got peo­ple that I think kind of bury their head in the sand and they’re just like, I don’t know. I just do my job and what­ev­er. And you got peo­ple on that oppo­site end of the spectrum.

Jason (28:31):

What the hell’s going on here?

Jor­dan (28:32):

I want to know every last thing that’s hap­pen­ing. I want all of the content.

Jason (28:36):

It’s not even pos­si­ble. I don’t even know every­thing that’s happening.

Jor­dan (28:39):

First of all, I can’t give you that. And sec­ond­ly, are you sure? So I think that’s big though. I think it’s some­thing we real­ly learned about. We’re on this top­ic of well­be­ing. We’re on this top, on this top­ic of peo­ple feel­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal, safe­ty, et cetera. And that’s a real strug­gle I think for us, is to fig­ure out exact­ly what to com­mu­ni­cate and when to com­mu­ni­cate and how to com­mu­ni­cate it. And I think that is essential.

Jason (29:09):

That’s tied to the out­comes. And so that’s how I inter­pret some of this is that it, it’s less about, peo­ple need to know every­thing exact­ly at the right time, and it’s just going to be impos­si­ble. Cause every­one has a dif­fer­ent way that they feel about it. It’s true, as you

Jor­dan (29:24):

It’s a whole lot of dif­fer­ent desires.

Jason (29:25):

But what every­body sure­ly needs to know is, what do I need to do? What does suc­cess look like? What are we aim­ing for? And I think that, so that’s what stood out to me when I read this, was the out­comes rather than tasks. I don’t care what you’re doing day to day, as long as this is what we get.

(29:46):

And the this needs to be real­ly clear and every­body needs to be aligned with it from top to the bot­tom of the orga­ni­za­tion. Right? So that is very obvi­ous. This is the expec­ta­tion, this is the out­come that we’re aim­ing for. Now how you get there, there could be a whole bunch of ways that you get there, right? And I think that’s where the auton­o­my and trust comes into play. Cause peo­ple want auton­o­my. They need auton­o­my in what they do. And so we can say, Hey, this is what we need deliv­ered, right? Yes. How you get there, I can help. I’m will­ing to dive in. I’m not going to micro­man­age you in it, but this is what we need and you let me know what help you need. But you also have cre­ativ­i­ty and auton­o­my with­in that to get there. Hope­ful­ly that’s why we hired peo­ple that we believe have that abil­i­ty to prob­a­bly bet­ter than we would come up with ways in which we’re going to achieve the out­comes maybe with bet­ter designs than we would’ve come up with on our own.

Jor­dan (30:44):

Yeah. I think it is easy to think that that work is this lin­ear path where you come in as an indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor and you become some sort of asso­ciate man­ag­er of some kind, and then you man­age it.

Jason (31:02):

It’s the career lad­der, right?

Jor­dan (31:04):

This lad­der, and it’s just not real­ly true. Peo­ple have par­tic­u­lar gift­ings and skillsets, and some peo­ple need to be real­ly high­ly paid and beloved and appre­ci­at­ed indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tors for 35 years and because that is how, that is just what they’re great at. It’s just get­ting stuff done. And sure, can they show oth­ers how they get it done along the way in the moment? Yeah. It’s not to say that there isn’t any lead­er­ship capac­i­ty there, but that maybe the role does­n’t fit that. Because when I think about what you just said, there are tac­tics and there’s strat­e­gy, right? Yes. What we’re con­cerned about is the strat­e­gy and the strat­e­gy is what­ev­er leads us to the out­come. And so we’re going to have this notion of like, we are going to climb the moun­tain because at the top of the moun­tain, there’s this gar­den full of fruits and veg­eta­bles and every­thing we need to sus­tain us and the beautiful -

Jason (32:09):

Yum­mies.

Jor­dan (32:10):

Just going to get up there. You and I, we don’t care whether we throw a zip line up and we climb up or we use cara­bin­ers or we don’t, or we paraglide. I don’t care. Paraglide up the moun­tain. We use giant springs like in a Mario game or some­thing. I don’t care how we get up there, but there are peo­ple that are actu­al­ly fan­tas­tic at exact­ly that, right? No, actu­al­ly the best tac­tic is this. Yeah. Cause we’re going to waste a bunch of ener­gy doing this route or that route. The oth­er thing, and I think some­times we’re so obsessed with, I got to climb the cor­po­rate lad­der. I got to get to the next stage. We should have low lev­el or mid-lev­el man­agers. That might be some of the high­est paid peo­ple in the orga­ni­za­tion because they’re so freak­ing good.

Jason (33:01):

Or not even man­agers, right?

Jor­dan (33:03):

Yeah. Or not even man­agers, maybe just indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tors. They’re the high­est peo­ple in the com­pa­nies because they’re so good that what they do. And I think that’s one of the mis­takes of how work is designed to get back to exact­ly the info­graph­ic here. Some­times it’s designed to be a ladder.

Jason (33:24):

That’s how you esca­late and that’s how you move up. And there’s respon­si­bil­i­ty to the orga­ni­za­tion to make sure they design paths for peo­ple to find ways to con­tribute that don’t require, Hey, the only way for you to go up here is to man­age peo­ple. So I mean, I’ve gone from in my time at Fringe man­ag­ing small teams to man­ag­ing teams of 20 peo­ple to now I have lit­er­al­ly nobody that reports to me and actu­al­ly kind of love it. It’s been a real­ly great, it’s great. It’s been a great time. I’m doing some cool stuff, work­ing on projects that I’m the one doing the task stuff and exe­cut­ing, but it’s great. And so, I mean, I’d also want to encour­age peo­ple lis­ten­ing even to feel like, Hey, real­ly think deeply about what you love doing too, because there may be a path that isn’t what you always thought it need­ed to be.

Jor­dan (34:11):

This is exact­ly where the sat­is­fac­tion and well­be­ing is a joint respon­si­bil­i­ty. Yes. Because you can tell that what you just said is -

Jason (34:19):

You need the opportunity -

Jor­dan (34:19):

Indi­vid­u­als, employ­ees out there, find what you love and do it. But if your employ­er does­n’t facil­i­tate an envi­ron­ment where you can progress in, where you find your call­ing, if you will. You find exact­ly what you’re best at. And they’re just like, well, yeah, you’re best at this, so we’re just going to treat you like you’ve been here a short time and not real­ly reward your exper­tise. That’s problematic.

Jason (34:46):

A thou­sand per­cent. Yeah. So let’s hit on this last one here. So ways of work­ing, how you get work done. So I want to read the descrip­tion, but this will tie into some stuff that we’ve talked about in the pre­vi­ous episode. Tech is used in strate­gic ways to facil­i­tate automa­tion, enable more mean­ing­ful work and lim­it task switch­ing. Stream­lined tech comes with clear­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed expec­ta­tions and sup­ports inten­tion­al­ly designed hybrid work. There’s a lot there.

Jor­dan (35:17):

There’s a lot. So many buzz­words in there.

Jason (35:20):

A lot of buzz­words. Wow. They are consultants.

Jor­dan (35:22):

Hybrid work -

Jason (35:23):

They got to sound real­ly important.

Jor­dan (35:24):

Stream­lined tech. Yeah. Yeah. You’re real­ly down on con­sul­tants tonight. No, I think, yeah. I mean, what I take away from that, if I get through all the BS of the jar­gon of, okay, mean­ing­ful work. Yes. Enable mean­ing­ful work and clear­ly com­mu­ni­cate expec­ta­tions, right? Yeah. Give peo­ple flexibility.

Jason (35:52):

I took flex­i­bil­i­ty. Yeah, because the hybrid work thing, I mean, it’s kind of a hot top­ic right now, and I think it’s a lit­tle ridicu­lous that it is a hot top­ic. I mean, I think where that plane is going to land is peo­ple are going to need hybrid work, peri­od. So let’s not even dis­cuss it fur­ther than that.

Jor­dan (36:09):

Where else could it even land? Yeah. Yeah. I agree whole­heart­ed­ly. I think, again, I mean, we said this ear­li­er, I want to beat a dead horse, but clear­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed expec­ta­tions. Lit­er­al­ly every­thing else is a tac­tic. Every­thing else beyond, here’s your job, here’s how your job con­nects to the broad­er pur­pose of what we’re try­ing to do, and here’s how I define suc­cess for your par­tic­u­lar role. Every­thing else is a tac­tic. Oh, well, okay, I’m not real­ly sure how to do my job. Use this tool. I don’t know how to use the tool. Get trained. I don’t like this tool. Let’s get anoth­er tool. Every­thing else is a tool. Every­thing else is a tac­tic. Every­thing else is a kind of way in which the thing gets done. But that’s not where orga­ni­za­tions fail. Orga­ni­za­tions can always find the right piece of soft­ware, right?

Jason (37:00):

Well, and the dan­ger is think­ing that that’s going to fix the prob­lem. Yes. When it’s not the problem.

Jor­dan (37:06):

It’s not the prob­lem. The prob­lem is peo­ple don’t actu­al­ly know what’s expect­ed of them.

Jason (37:09):

I want the new shiny thing. Right. That’s not the problem.

Jor­dan (37:12):

That’s not the prob­lem at all. Yeah. Yeah. And some­times the expec­ta­tions are clear and some­times the tool is actu­al­ly there in place, but it’s just you just going through a peri­od of strug­gle. I kind of described, we were talk­ing about this with some oth­er peo­ple at Fringe late­ly. It’s an eco­nom­ic down­turn. It’s just a tough time for a lot of busi­ness­es right now, and we’ve actu­al­ly been real­ly for­tu­nate to not have a hor­ri­bly hard time right now. We’re doing pret­ty well, but some­times you’re just on a los­ing streak. The whole coun­try’s on a los­ing streak right now. There’s not time to freak out, change tac­tics, change strat­e­gy, change peo­ple, what­ev­er. It just, you just got to hus­tle. You just got to believe that work is good and believe in your mis­sion and pur­pose and just get after it. And things are going to turn around to, not to dimin­ish what this is say­ing about the ways of work­ing are impor­tant, the tac­tics are impor­tant, the design of work is impor­tant, but I think all the more so, the top of the chart here, if you’ve got lead­ers that peo­ple trust and a clear direc­tion that we’re head­ing, and peo­ple under­stand how their job aligns, the direc­tion that the com­pa­ny’s head­ing in, you can weath­er a whole lot of storms and switch­ing tools around might help you in small ways, but it’s not the point.

Jason (38:38):

Yeah. I mean, the thing is just achiev­ing lever­age with the tools. So I think the hot top­ic now is Chat­G­PT, what­ev­er. Peo­ple are find­ing all sorts of cre­ative ways to do it. I mean, even in my own work, I found some inter­est­ing ways to lever­age Chat­G­PT to cre­ate effi­cien­cy. And so I think those are great things, right? Because they can help peo­ple accom­plish the job faster. It can maybe offload mun­dane work that is a lit­tle bit drudgery and that kind of stuff. And then the task switch­ing is actu­al­ly real­ly inter­est­ing to me. I think we’ll come back to that in anoth­er episode because the task switch­ing, I mean, it’s some­thing we’ve been talk­ing about at Fringe with deep work days, right? Because the task switch­ing actu­al­ly gets in the way of doing real deep work, which helps the com­pa­ny from a pro­duc­tiv­i­ty stand­point. But there’s actu­al­ly a lot of sci­ence that I want to delve into around deep work. How that ties into the notion of flow, which is psy­cho­log­i­cal prin­ci­ple and how the notion of -

Jor­dan (39:36):

I’ve heard you talk about flow.

Jason (39:37):

And how the notion of flow -

Jor­dan (39:39):

Big flow guy.

Jason (39:39):

Yeah. I mean, well, flow relates very strong­ly to your sense of sat­is­fac­tion and pur­pose at work. And so to the degree that you expe­ri­ence more flow, all of those things are going to be felt more pos­i­tive­ly. And so I think that lim­it­ing task switch­ing, that’s sort of a neg­a­tive fram­ing. The pos­i­tive fram­ing would be like, well, hey, we’re actu­al­ly accom­plish­ing some­thing bet­ter by replac­ing task switch­ing time. We’re mov­ing back and forth with some­thing that’s deep­er and more mean­ing­ful in terms of the work that’s tak­en place.

Jor­dan (40:12):

That makes per­fect sense. Well, we are well into the time that we intended -

Jason (40:21):

We are. But we’ve cov­ered, and I think exhaust­ed this report

Jor­dan (40:24):

We have, I think we did well. I just real­ized too that I think we’re going to have to give you a W on the word of the week, because I just com­plete­ly fell down.

Jason (40:35):

Is this a win-loss game now?

Jor­dan (40:36):

Yeah. Yeah. I think it prob­a­bly ought to be.

Jason (40:40):

If it is, the inten­si­ty is about to increase.

Jor­dan (40:43):

Some of it. Just take the L here instead of try­ing to come up with some BS sen­tence to find a place for equiv­o­cal in our con­ver­sa­tion. I was lost in the con­ver­sa­tion itself and did­n’t think much about it, so I apol­o­gize to the audi­ence for break­ing my streak here.

Jason (40:59):

Well, I will give you the word for the next episode.

Jor­dan (41:02):

Yeah, give me the word for next week.

Jason (41:02):

Which is carouse.

Jor­dan (41:04):

Wow. You’re just get­ting bet­ter all the time, and I’m get­ting worse. Oh, we’ll see how that plays out. Thank you so much, guys, for lis­ten­ing to How Peo­ple Work. It’s been an enjoy­able time just sit­ting here with you. Jason, I appre­ci­ate, again, your prepa­ra­tion, your insights, your read­ing, your nerd­ing out, as I like to say, on dif­fer­ent arti­cles and stud­ies that you’re look­ing into. I hope this episode was enjoy­able to lis­ten to. Please do, send us feed­back, send us ques­tions. We’d love to answer any ques­tions for you guys, or just have dis­cus­sions that are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to what’s going on in your life and your work and the things that you’re try­ing to learn about. Thanks for lis­ten­ing. We’ll catch you next week.

‍

In this episode, Jason and Jor­dan dive into the essen­tial aspects of employ­ee well­be­ing and the roles both employ­ees and employ­ers have to play.

Jor­dan and Jason kick off by stress­ing the vital role of attract­ing and retain­ing tal­ent in orga­ni­za­tions — no short­cuts here! They intro­duce the ther­mo­stat vs. ther­mome­ter metaphor to dis­cuss effec­tive mea­sure­ment and man­age­ment of talent.

They high­light the sig­nif­i­cance of align­ing a com­pa­ny’s mis­sion and vision with its employ­ees. When per­son­al val­ues res­onate with the orga­ni­za­tion’s pur­pose, engage­ment and com­mit­ment soar. They explore the evolv­ing per­spec­tives on find­ing pur­pose in work, com­par­ing dif­fer­ent generations.

Recruit­ing comes into play as they delve into how mis­sion and vision make a dif­fer­ence in attract­ing the right tal­ent. They also dis­cuss the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion’s expand­ed view of holis­tic well­be­ing, going beyond tra­di­tion­al well­ness programs.

The inter­play between work and per­son­al life is exam­ined, touch­ing on the chal­lenges faced by work­ing par­ents. They even throw in a pop­u­lar HBO show’s take on work-life bal­ance for extra insight. And who should real­ly take respon­si­bil­i­ty for employ­ee health and wellness?

Remem­ber, well­ness isn’t about check­ing box­es — it’s about deeply embed­ding it in your orga­ni­za­tion’s cul­ture. Set­ting the rules of engage­ment is cru­cial for cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment where your peo­ple can tru­ly thrive.

Tune in to this episode for a com­pre­hen­sive explo­ration of tal­ent attrac­tion, mis­sion align­ment, work-life bal­ance, and holis­tic employ­ee wellbeing.

Now avail­able on: YouTube | Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy

Key ideas and highlights

• Both employ­ees and employ­ers play a vital role in employ­ee wellbeing.
• One of the biggest ways to ensure employ­ee well­be­ing is in your recruit­ing strategies.
• Today’s work­force demands pur­pose­ful work. How can employ­ers pro­vide pur­pose­ful work?

Word of the day

• Aus­pi­cious — said @ 15:47 ✅

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:56 No mat­ter how you cut it, all roads lead to attract­ing and retain­ing talent
• 4:32 How well­be­ing is a Ther­mome­ter not Thermostat
• 7:06 The impor­tance that the mis­sion and vision of a com­pa­ny match­es with the employee
• 9:39 The dif­fer­ence between pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions and today’s in find­ing pur­pose in work
• 11:50 How mis­sion and vision mat­ter in recruiting
• 16:15 W.H.O. and the expand­ed view of holis­tic wellbeing
• 19:40 Work and life can’t be separated
• 21:02 A TV show’s com­men­tary on work-life balance
• 23:12 Who is real­ly respon­si­ble for employ­ees’ health and wellness
• 28:02 Well­ness is not about imple­ment­ing pro­grams and check­ing boxes
• 30:26 How set­ting the rules of engage­ment can help your peo­ple thrive
• 33:33 Episode Recap

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:00):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work? For near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling lead­ers. Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. I’m one of your hosts, Jor­dan Peace. Jason Mur­ray, along­side me as usu­al. We had a great episode last week. I thought we had a great, I’m self con­grat­u­lat­ing so

Jason (01:01):

I thought so too.

Jor­dan (01:02):

We had an enjoy­able episode. It was

Jason (01:03):

It was enjoy­able. I enjoyed it.

Jor­dan (01:05):

Peo­ple might have liked it. They might have hat­ed it, but I enjoy, enjoyed it. You seemed to enjoy it. We were talk­ing about well­be­ing. Yes. And we got on some, I don’t want to say high hors­es, but we got pas­sion­ate about some ideas around well­be­ing and what it ought to be, what it means that it’s a deep­er idea. Talked about the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion. We talked about some Jew­ish wis­dom lit­er­a­ture from 4,000 years ago. We real­ly ran the gamut of sources in terms of think­ing through well­be­ing in today’s world and why this top­ic has resurged as some­thing real­ly rel­e­vant to the employ­ee expe­ri­ence, to attract­ing and retain­ing and keep­ing employ­ees, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things I noticed in the show notes in prepa­ra­tion for this week is that you had this phrase, well­be­ing. We’re going to con­tin­ue with well­be­ing if you haven’t picked up on that. Lis­ten­ers, well­be­ing is the ther­mo­stat. So often you’ll hear analo­gies and Hey, this is the ther­mome­ter, this is the ther­mo­stat. I assume that’s where we’re head­ed here, but frame up for us what is meant by well­be­ing is the thermostat.

Jason (02:17):

Yeah. Well, you just jumped right to the punchline.

Jor­dan (02:19):

I know. I’m sorry.

Jason (02:21):

Yeah. I mean, when I was think­ing about this top­ic of well­be­ing, I could­n’t help but think about what are the met­rics by which com­pa­nies often sort of gauge the suc­cess that they’re hav­ing with peo­ple in their organization.

Jor­dan (02:39):

And last week we crit­i­cized and said, it is not engagement.

Jason (02:43):

Yes. Because we don’t, well, we said engage­ment is more com­plex than it’s often thought to be.

Jor­dan (02:48):

But then off cam­era, we real­ly ragged on it even fur­ther. Let’s be honest.

Jason (02:52):

I will nei­ther con­firm nor deny this.

(02:56):

And so there’s sort of this sense of all roads lead to attract and retain. And so I can’t help but remem­ber a cou­ple years ago, we were part of an accel­er­a­tor pro­gram where we were basi­cal­ly in small group set­tings with any­where from 8 to 10 dif­fer­ent peo­ple lead­ers over the course of a num­ber of weeks. And so I think I spoke with in just a few weeks, over a hun­dred dif­fer­ent peo­ple lead­ers. And when I kind of pressed peo­ple on, yeah, every­one talks about engage­ment and every­one talks about well­be­ing, but what real­ly mat­ters? And when you got peo­ple off the record, every­one’s like, yeah, attract and retain, right? You’re like, yeah, I thought so. I thought that’s what it was.

Jor­dan (03:37):

So you want to have real­ly great employ­ees and then you want ​‘em to stay. Yeah. Okay. That makes a whole lot of sense.

Jason (03:44):

And so what I think is inter­est­ing about that is it does mat­ter, right? I mean, we run a busi­ness and there’s costs to run­ning a busi­ness and there’s real and mate­r­i­al mat­ters to be con­sid­ered when it comes to attract­ing good peo­ple and keep­ing ​‘em here. You can even think of it in terms of employ­ee life­time val­ue. You’re going to hire some­body, you’re going to pay ​‘em. Like are we going to get out­put from that indi­vid­ual that’s com­men­su­rate with the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of the over­all orga­ni­za­tion? It’s necessary.

Jor­dan (04:16):

You’re a mon­ster. You want pro­duc­tiv­i­ty from employees.

Jason (04:20):

I’ll take that on to save you from that crit­i­cism, Jor­dan. So send all your hate com­ments to me, Jason Mur­ray on LinkedIn. I think it’s

Jor­dan (04:28):

I think it’s okay -

Jason (04:28):

Oh is it?

Jor­dan (04:29):

To want pro­duc­tiv­i­ty from peo­ple you pay mon­ey to.

Jason (04:32):

Oh, well. And so there’s ten­sion though between maybe what an employ­er wants, what an employ­ee, how an employ­ee might per­ceive some of that, right? But I think the prob­lem with both of those things when we think about attract and retain is they’re ther­mome­ters. They’re not ther­mostats. When most peo­ple are tak­ing read­ings of their met­rics as it per­tains to recruit­ment met­rics as it per­tains to reten­tion, we’re sim­ply look­ing at what hap­pened in the past, how well did we do It’s what we would call lag­ging indicator.

Jor­dan (05:09):

Mea­sur­ing out­comes, mea­sur­ing, what is the tem­per­a­ture in the room right now.

Jason (05:12):

And so there’s only so much that you can do with that. And I think what’s inter­est­ing, we mea­sure this stuff with our cus­tomers. And so we know things like, for instance, com­pa­nies that offer flex­i­ble ben­e­fits have 84% high­er loy­al­ty, employ­ee loy­al­ty than their com­peti­tors. And that’s almost two times bet­ter, which means these com­pa­nies are also most like­ly to have bet­ter reten­tion, pre­sum­ably if we believe that loy­al­ty is a lead­ing indi­ca­tor of reten­tion. And so when I say well­be­ing is the ther­mo­stat, I think it’s one of those things that is a lead­ing indi­ca­tor of what’s going on inside of an orga­ni­za­tion. So you want peo­ple to stay, treat ​‘em well, right? And make ​‘em feel cared for, give them the tools they need to be health­i­er, hap­pi­er, pur­pose-dri­ven indi­vid­u­als. And I think that is the rea­son or the con­text for why well­be­ing is this impor­tant top­ic for us to discuss.

Jor­dan (06:10):

Yeah. It’s fun­ny, when you were talk­ing about a track, I, again, off cam­era, just side con­ver­sa­tion, one of the things that came up was this idea of how peo­ple choose to work, where they work or how they choose a boyfriend or a girl­friend, or how they choose a spouse or what­ev­er the case may be. And what I was taught at an ear­ly age, and maybe I had just excep­tion­al men­tors and peo­ple in my life was, Hey, fig­ure out who you are. Fig­ure out your iden­ti­ty and then fig­ure out what your mis­sion is. And then when you are run­ning, chas­ing down your mis­sion, kind of look to your left and look to your right as you’re run­ning along and see who’s run­ning along­side you. Maybe that per­son could be the per­son you might want to mar­ry, some­body, like the per­son you might want to spend your life with. Maybe that’s your mate. The idea was mis­sion and mate.

(07:06):

So that was appar­ent to me that, hey, I, I’ve got a mis­sion that is sort of high­er and greater, and that is the thing that my life is ded­i­cat­ed to. And I should prob­a­bly find peo­ple in my life, whether that’s a spouse or friends or whomev­er that are on that track. And so when I go to look for a job, I should look for some­one that is adver­tis­ing. This is our mis­sion, this is our vision, these are our val­ues. Oh, that’s aligned with me. I should, maybe this makes sense. I’m going to go apply. I’m going to go see it and check this thing out. Where­as I think more often than not, we’ve got peo­ple com­ing in and they get real­ly lit up about the mis­sion or the vision or what­ev­er, but they don’t know if it aligns to their own because they don’t have one, right? So they adopt the com­pa­ny’s mis­sion and they are attract­ed, to use the word here by that. But then they don’t stick around because all of that ear­ly fer­vor sort of dies out when it’s just like, well, I don’t know. I guess I don’t real­ly care about that much. Any­way, it was just a job. But every­thing’s always going to be just a job, right?

Jason (08:12):

Well, I mean, I think for very few peo­ple, is the com­pa­ny’s mis­sion ever going to be the penul­ti­mate sort of thing that -

Jor­dan (08:23):

Well maybe not the penul­ti­mate, but not the ultimate.

Jason (08:24):

Not, yeah. Okay. Fair enough. For you as an indi­vid­ual. Yeah. I mean, it seems a lit­tle pre-

Jor­dan (08:30):

They should align.

Jason (08:31):

They should align. But it seems pre­pos­ter­ous to see, man, when I hop out of bed in the morn­ing, I could­n’t be more excit­ed about the mis­sion, the com­pa­ny that I work for. Right? Right. Yeah. I hope that peo­ple is maybe a secondary

(08:47):

thing that brings val­ue and mean­ing to them. I hope what they wake up and say is like, Hey, I like the peo­ple that I love, the peo­ple that I care for, my spouse, my sig­nif­i­cant oth­er, my chil­dren, my friends, my com­mu­ni­ty, my local com­mu­ni­ty, my broad­er com­mu­ni­ty, what­ev­er the case may be. I have a laid out set of val­ues and pur­pose in terms of what I’m try­ing to accom­plish there. And then what’s great is you can take that to what you’re describ­ing with an orga­ni­za­tion and say, Hey, to the degree that the mis­sion of the com­pa­ny match­es or aligns with some of those val­ues, that’s awe­some. But if it does­n’t or if it does­n’t per­fect­ly, because how many of them will per­fect­ly align to every­thing? you can prob­a­bly none of ​‘em. Yeah. You can still say, well, the things that I’m doing at this orga­ni­za­tion are still enabling me to be suc­cess­ful in these oth­er areas of my life.

(09:39):

So actu­al­ly some­thing we were just talk­ing about off cam­era too was we some­times rag on our par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion. Cause some­times they worked for 35 years, 40 years, and jobs that they hat­ed. And it’s easy to crit­i­cize that and just say, oh yeah, they just put their heads down and did­n’t even think about it. But what moti­vat­ed them, if we want to shine a light on the pos­i­tive aspect, is they did it for their fam­i­ly. They had that ulti­mate pur­pose for them that moti­vat­ed them to move through what was prob­a­bly just a ter­ri­ble set of work­ing cir­cum­stances that they hat­ed. And I think that’s part of what we crit­i­cize as after 40 years of that, it just kind of beats you down and you see what it’s done to them. But at the same time too, there has to be a lit­tle admi­ra­tion, I think, or the fact that they had some­thing so sig­nif­i­cant to them that it drove them to actu­al­ly make that sac­ri­fice, we might even call it for their family.

Jor­dan (10:35):

I think it’s the right word. Yeah, absolute­ly. No, I think it is. I, it’s incred­i­bly com­mend­able and it’s sad to me that the par­a­digm that we’ve set up is it’s one or the oth­er, you know, have this great pur­pose in life and work is just toil and it’s like,

Jason (10:52):

I don’t like binaries.

Jor­dan (10:53):

Right, exact­ly. I know you don’t, right? Toil. It’s just toil and hard­ship and suf­fer­ing and pain. And it’s like, but it’s all for this great high­er pur­pose. And hon­est­ly, I’ve had to pick one or the oth­er. I prob­a­bly would pick that rather than hav­ing a job that as much as it pos­si­bly can, feels real­ly good. I love my cowork­ers and we’re hav­ing a great time, but I have no freak­ing clue why I’m doing it oth­er than to pay bills so that I can go spend more mon­ey to receive high­er bills so that I can make more mon­ey to go out and buy more stuff, to receive high­er bills, right? If I’d rather have the great pur­pose than the crap­py job. So I think when this attract and retain, my point with I was try­ing to make there is I assumed that start­ing our busi­ness, that we would attract peo­ple through real­ly pro­mot­ing our mis­sion, vision, and values.

(11:50):

And that those maybe the val­ues prob­a­bly most pre­dom­i­nant­ly would speak so loud­ly that when peo­ple were inter­view­ing or they were check­ing on our web­site or what­ev­er, they would go, Hey, those are also my val­ues I’m in. And we have seen some of that. We’ve seen some real­ly mature, I would say ful­ly inte­grat­ed adults that have gone, oh, that I see it. Right? That is what I val­ue too. I am in. And those have been the hap­pi­est, most engaged, most what­ev­er word you want to throw in there, peo­ple at Fringe. And I think they’re going to stick around to the end, what­ev­er the end is, and how­ev­er far away the end is, because they’re just like, this feels like home. This feels like me. This feels like I cre­at­ed the com­pa­ny because it’s so well aligned with who I am. And then you still have oth­ers that I think we’re a lit­tle bit more flash­es in the pan.

(12:44):

Yeah. I’m just like, oh, this feels good. I like how these peo­ple treat each oth­er. This is cool. But there just was­n’t a core mature idea of what I’m about and what my world’s about what my world­view is. And so the charm sort of wore off after a while and it was just like, well, I just kind of want more perks, more ben­e­fits, more stuff, more pay more, more, more, more. Right. Yeah. What’s going to keep me here? Make me hap­py. Buy my loy­al­ty. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I think as you go about recruit­ing, you got to think about who you’re recruit­ing. Don’t just recruit peo­ple that have the skillset. Don’t just recruit peo­ple that seem­ing­ly think that your soft­ware or what­ev­er the thing that you do is cool. Oh, I’m just such a fan­boy fan­girl of what you guys do. It’s such a cool thing. Okay, what are you about? And it does­n’t real­ly mat­ter what the answer is. It just mat­ters if there is one.

Jason (13:46):

Is there an answer? Is there an answer to what you artic­u­late what you’re about?

Jor­dan (13:50):

Can you artic­u­late a world­view? Right, A pur­pose? And if they can’t, I don’t think that nec­es­sar­i­ly means they’re like, well, you absolute­ly don’t hire this per­son, because that’s what devel­op­ment is for and that’s what train­ing is for. And that’s kind of part of the job, espe­cial­ly younger peo­ple that just haven’t had a lot of life expe­ri­ence to fig­ure this stuff out. But I think it’s a huge red flag if some­body’s just like, well, I got skills. I can do the job. Yeah. Okay.

Jason (14:20):

Yeah, it’s real­ly inter­est­ing. I mean, this is a lit­tle bit of a side­bar and then I want to bring us back. But in the role that I’m serv­ing in at Fringe now on the inno­va­tion side, that’s actu­al­ly a top­ic that I’m real­ly excit­ed about because at least from the research that I’ve done around the psy­cho­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture and so forth, it indi- would seem­ing­ly indi­cate that there’s a pret­ty low thresh­old for how much time peo­ple need to spend think­ing about their pur­pose in set­ting a few goals in order to actu­al­ly make a real­ly sub­stan­tive change in how they feel from a stand­point of their own sense of well­be­ing. And then how that trans­lates into pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and so forth. So much so that there’s cer­tain assess­ments that just have you sit down, think about your life a lit­tle bit, come up with a few goals that might be meaningful.

(15:10):

Yeah, prob­a­bly won’t get it per­fect the first time. But right in about 90 min­utes, these researchers found that in about 90 min­utes of doing this, that they could see a 30% increase in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty from indi­vid­u­als sim­ply because they actu­al­ly had a greater sense of pur­pose now in the work that they were doing day to day. I mean, it’s so wild that it’s not this mon­u­men­tal task that I think some­times it feels like, oh man, I got to fig­ure out my life’s pur­pose. How the hell do I do that? It’s like, no, actu­al­ly, just the first step is pret­ty small.

Jor­dan (15:41):

And I think when peo­ple start a new job, it’s the per­fect tim­ing. It’s like this, it’s an aus­pi­cious oppor­tu­ni­ty, if you will, to go, okay, I’m in a peri­od of tran­si­tion. There’s some­thing very new about my life. Now’s the moment. And I feel like peo­ple respond real­ly well when they first come into an orga­ni­za­tion and you hit ​‘em with that type of train­ing or opportunity.

Jason (16:04):

It’s super cool to build that in for orga­ni­za­tions. So any­ways, I want to bring us back to this Deloitte study so that we actu­al­ly get to it.

Jor­dan (16:12):

Didn’t we promise, about 15 min­utes ago we were talk­ing about Deloitte study?

Jason (16:15):

Yes, we did. And so maybe a lit­tle bit of recap. In the last episode, we talked about this more holis­tic kind of def­i­n­i­tion that’s put forth in this arti­cle. And so just to recap that a lit­tle bit, the study ref­er­ences the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion who lays out a frame­work for well­be­ing or employ­ment rather as a social deter­mi­nant of health. Mean­ing that they see employ­ment, your work is a real­ly sub­stan­tial and sig­nif­i­cant part of your over­all well­be­ing. And so it’s inescapable, it’s just as impor­tant as your com­mu­ni­ty. It’s just as impor­tant as your phys­i­cal health, your work and employ­ment is a sig­nif­i­cant part of that. And one of the things that we talked about that I think is real­ly use­ful is the sense that it extends beyond sort of the typ­i­cal cat­e­gories that we talk about in the employ­er space, which are usu­al­ly lim­it­ed to phys­i­cal, men­tal, and finan­cial. And what the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion is say­ing, no, it’s big­ger than that. It’s social, it’s com­mu­nal, your sense of pur­pose, your sense of I have the abil­i­ty to grow and learn. It’s a more holis­tic kind of view­point of this. And so the arti­cle in Deloitte refers to this in the sense of human sus­tain­abil­i­ty. And I got real excit­ed when I saw that. Cause I was like, oh my gosh, we talk about human flour­ish­ing all the time. And so it felt very anal­o­gous. And so-

Jor­dan (17:41):

You felt vin­di­cat­ed with your phrase

Jason (17:43):

I did.

Jor­dan (17:44):

I mean,

Jason (17:46):

On the one hand, I’m like, I don’t know. They’re con­sul­tants. Dun­no how I feel about say­ing the same.

Jor­dan (17:51):

But they’re good ones though!

Jason (17:52):

They’re talk­ing about it at least so vin­di­cat­ed in that sense.

Jor­dan (17:56):

Yeah. I love this dia­gram that you shared in the show notes here, and I think we got to just read it since obvi­ous­ly folks aren’t see­ing this here. So there’s a matrix here, left side, right side, left side being lega­cy think­ing, right side, being for­ward think­ing. And that’s where this ambi­tion for human sus­tain­abil­i­ty is com­ing from. And there’s three blocks here, the first of which says well­be­ing equals find­ing bal­ance between work and life. That’s the lega­cy think­ing. That’s what well­be­ing is defined as, right, is if I just find work-life bal­ance, then I’ll be good. Because work is the neg­a­tive, stress­ful, hard thing, and life is the per­fect idyl­lic moment of rest and peace and pros­per­i­ty and every­thing else. And if I just bal­ance the two and keep away that hor­ri­ble work stuff as much as pos­si­ble, then I got a chance of being hap­py and sus­tained and ful­filled, which there’s just a lot of sar­casm in my descrip­tion there.

(18:59):

Then there’s this for­ward think­ing idea of work as a deter­mi­nant of well­be­ing. So work is deter­mi­nant of well­be­ing and part of life work direct­ly shapes the con­di­tion of an indi­vid­u­al’s well­be­ing. So let’s stop there. So look­ing on the left side, this idea, and again, my sar­casm prob­a­bly betrayed a lot of what I’m about to say here, but this idea that it’s about a bal­ance and that is going to solve the prob­lem, I think is the neg­a­tive side. We were prais­ing the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion, their kind of will­ing­ness to suf­fer. But the neg­a­tive of course being, as we said before on the show, that the idea that work is just bad.

Jor­dan (19:40):

Work is bad. We just want as lit­tle of it as possible.

Jason (19:42):

I’s a trans­ac­tion for val­ue. That’s all it is. Noth­ing more.

Jor­dan (19:47):

And then life is all as if life is just all good and easy. I often find life hard­er than work per­son­al­ly, I don’t know about you.

Jason (19:56):

I’m just laugh­ing because I think about kids, again, I’m like any­one lis­ten­ing that has kids are like, ha! Life is eas­i­er. Right?

Jor­dan (20:01):

Exact­ly. I mean, we have eight kids between us, which is eas­i­er Fri­day night or Mon­day morn­ing. Mon­day morn­ing is a cake­walk by com­par­i­son to Fri­day night.

Jason (20:12):

You can ask our wives, they’ll tell us.

Jor­dan (20:14):

Yeah, exact­ly. And so obvi­ous­ly that is lega­cy think­ing in a way that we’ve dis­cussed a lot. And then where­as this idea around work being a deter­mi­nant of well­be­ing and work being part of life, that’s actu­al­ly real­ly refresh­ing to see that par­tic­u­lar phrase work is part of life.

Jason (20:33):

I agree. I agree. And I don’t think it can be over­stat­ed. I mean, they’re using clin­i­cal ter­mi­nol­o­gy com­ing out of the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion, these deter­mi­nants of such and such. But I mean, it just basi­cal­ly means you can’t extract it. Right? Yeah. It’s not a dichoto­my. It’s not this oth­er thing, it’s it not only is it just an inescapable part of life. Yes. But it’s actu­al­ly a valu­able part of life and we should see it as such.

Jor­dan (21:02):

It is fun­ny, I told you about this, but I don’t want to, this is a long tan­gent. I’m not going to take us out, I promise. But that Apple TV show Sev­er­ance, I told you about this thing.

Jason (21:11):

You tell me. I haven’t watched it yet.

Jor­dan (21:12):

It’s crazy. I mean, it’s lit­er­al­ly that they are sev­er­ing peo­ple’s brains in such a way that when they’re at work sounds awe­some. They have no idea who they are out­side of work. They don’t know if they have a spouse. They don’t know. They have no clue. And at work, they are a new per­son­al­i­ty. They give them the same first name, but they only know work. And if they’ve worked there for a year, they feel as though they’re a year old. They don’t have expe­ri­ences beyond that one year. Right? Yeah. It’s wild. But when you watch some­thing like that, it high­lights just how duh it is that these two things must be inte­grat­ed. Because the char­ac­ters, whether they’re the peo­ple that only know work, and the peo­ple that only know home. They spend their entire exis­tence try­ing to fig­ure out who the oth­er per­son is and what they do and what they’re like and what they enjoy. That’s all. They obsess over it. So they’re con­stant­ly think­ing about the oth­er thing that they’re not inte­grat­ed with that they don’t have the knowl­edge of.

Jason (22:13):

So man it’s so wild.eah, because I mean, if you think about it, the premise there, well one, I don’t know about any­one lis­ten­ing to it, but the reac­tion I have is like, oh my gosh, that is so weird.

Jor­dan (22:28):

It’s weird, it’s hor­ror. It’s real­ly, it’s more of a hor­ror show than some­thing else.

Jason (22:30):

It’s wrong. And I feel like most peo­ple would prob­a­bly have that reac­tion of some­thing about that does­n’t feel right. Yeah, maybe I can’t artic­u­late what does­n’t feel right about it. But if you, what’s hap­pen­ing there is you’re tak­ing the premise of work-life, work-life bal­ance, and play­ing it out to the log­i­cal extreme.

Jor­dan (22:48):

Per­fect­ing it.

Jason (22:49):

Right? And you’re say­ing, okay, we want to sep­a­rate these things. Here’s the most extreme ver­sion. And when we see that, we say, oh no.

Jor­dan (22:58):

Oh no, no.

Jason (22:59):

That is not what we want. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Jor­dan (23:02):

Inhu­mane.

Jason (23:03):

Yeah, nev­er­mind. Yeah, I don’t want that at all. So I, I think that should tell us just intrin­si­cal­ly that there’s some­thing that we’re not wired for it to be that way.

Jor­dan (23:12):

Yeah. I mean, the show might, you know, you might have a cou­ple of uneasy nights’ sleesp. I’m not going to rec­om­mend it ful­ly, but it is very fas­ci­nat­ing and iron­i­cal­ly direct­ed by Ben Stiller, who I’ve only ever seen do com­e­dy. So it’s pret­ty iron­ic. The sec­ond sec­tion here, well, so this is inter­est­ing. This is speak­ing of gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences, this is huge. Well­be­ing is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the indi­vid­ual. That is the lega­cy think­ing. And the sub­text. Orga­ni­za­tions believe indi­vid­u­als have pri­ma­ry agency over their well­be­ing and do not acknowl­edge the ways that work has an impact that indi­vid­u­als can­not con­trol side for­ward think­ing. Well­be­ing is a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty. So in this case, orga­ni­za­tions are account­able for design­ing work that enables indi­vid­u­als to use their agency to main­tain well­be­ing. Cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment con­ducive to well­be­ing is a respon­si­bil­i­ty of lead­ers and a core com­po­nent of their skillset. So pret­ty fas­ci­nat­ing cause I think we would agree whole­heart­ed­ly with the right side that it is a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty. But I think what we’ve seen in prac­tice though, sad­ly, is that we’ve seen in some cas­es that the pen­du­lum swung too far. I know you hate bina­ries, it swung too far. Where­as hey, instead of well­be­ing as a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty, well­be­ing is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the employer.

Jason (24:36):

Right. Well, and that I think that comes out of the dichoto­my of work-life bal­ance where work is bad. So if work is bad, you as the employ­er are doing bad things to me, you need to make it less bad because it’s work. And so you need to make it less bad for me, right? Yes. And that comes from as an indi­vid­ual. So it is not just employ­ers need to rethink that frame­work. It’s as an indi­vid­ual, if that’s how I’m going to approach it, it’s going to be hard for me to see it in any oth­er way. But if I’m will­ing to approach it and say, Hey, what is the, and it’s a lit­tle inter­est­ing that we do this in the work set­ting. Yeah. Because when it comes to health, for exam­ple, phys­i­cal health, do we blame oth­er peo­ple for the out­comes of our phys­i­cal health, right?

Jor­dan (25:18):

Well

Jason (25:20):

Iean we might some­times, but ulti­mate­ly what I put in my body -

Jor­dan (25:24):

Doc­tors have a lot of lia­bil­i­ty insur­ance as a result of that. Well, that’s true. But yeah.

Jason (25:29):

I was some­thing I was lis­ten­ing to recent­ly though, and I’d have to find the kind of source for this, but they said 80% of your phys­i­cal health, or 80% of your health out­comes are just phys­i­cal lifestyle things that you do. And 20% are hered­i­tary, more clin­i­cal kind of stuff.

Jor­dan (25:50):

Some you lit­er­al­ly can’t control.

Jason (25:51):

Con­trol, which means that, hey, that 80% I’m pri­mar­i­ly respon­si­ble for what are my sleep habits? Yes. What do I eat? Do I exer­cise? Min­i­mal­ly, so on and so forth.

Jor­dan (26:03):

But there is this idea that your employ­er con­trols one-third of your time can determine -

Jason (26:13):

Which is significant.

Jor­dan (26:13):

Where you work and when you work, and how many meet­ings you’re in and so forth. And so in that sense, I think there is a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty even on the phys­i­cal health side to cre­ate a con­ducive environment.

Jason (26:25):

So I think that’s the impor­tant thing, is mak­ing sure that we’re help­ing to remove some of that ten­sion. So this sur­vey of HR lead­ers that I did recent­ly actu­al­ly high­light­ed the fact that the per­cep­tion of HR folks for the most part is that there’s a sig­nif­i­cant ten­sion between the needs of employ­ees and the needs of the busi­ness. And so I think what we need to help do is sort of fig­ure out where the areas that the inter­ests are aligned. And I think that comes back again to the human flour­ish­ing, right? Yes. Well, I think the inter­ests can be aligned around these areas where when indi­vid­u­als are doing bet­ter is bet­ter for the busi­ness in terms of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, attract and retain, so on and so forth.

Jor­dan (27:11):

But there’s some beliefs I think, that need to be turned around for that to actu­al­ly work. If work is just bad. And the avoid­ance of work is real­ly the whole goal, and it lit­er­al­ly does­n’t mat­ter what an employ­er does.

Jason (27:23):

Right.

Jor­dan (27:24):

You could pay great wages, you could give great ben­e­fits, great pto, et cetera, but real­ly the whole goal is just to work as lit­tle as pos­si­ble and to get paid as much as pos­si­ble for it.

Jason (27:33):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (27:34):

Right? Yeah. You can’t fix that one. Peo­ple have to adopt this atti­tude that work is good and work is mean­ing­ful. And it’s actu­al­ly part of being that ful­ly inte­grat­ed adult with a mis­sion, with a pur­pose with char­ac­ter. That work is part of how I play out in the the­ater of the world, the thing that I’ve been put on this world to do. Right? Yeah. Right.

Jason (27:58):

Well, yeah, yeah, total­ly agree.

Jor­dan (28:02):

The last sec­tion here, just so we can more ful­ly cov­er the Deloitte study, and less our own mus­ings for once. The left side of the lega­cy think­ing, the best solu­tion is to offer perks and ben­e­fits. Orga­ni­za­tions believe their role in work­force well­be­ing stops at the offer­ing of ben­e­fit pack­ages, opt-in pro­grams and well­ness perks. Man, have we seen that? And the right side, orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures impact well­be­ing. So well­be­ing is a mea­sur­able out­come of the way orga­ni­za­tions are designed and the norms that deter­mine how work is done. So not to say ben­e­fits are bad, perks are bad, opt-in pro­grams are bad well­ness pro­gram, those things are great. The prob­lem is the box check­ing atti­tude of just like, look I gave you the stuff!

Jason (28:48):

A hun­dred percent.

Jor­dan (28:49):

Love the stuff. Use the stuff, use it.

Jason (28:53):

It’s your responsibility.

Jor­dan (28:54):

It’s your responsibility.

Jason (28:55):

I’ve washed my hands.

Jor­dan (28:56):

Yeah, exact­ly. Done, right? Very Pon­tius Pilate. But this idea that it’s about the norms that deter­mine how work is done, the design of the cul­ture, the design of the work, again, it’s right back to this cul­ti­vat­ing the right environment.

Jason (29:13):

Yeah. Yeah, a hun­dred per­cent. So I mean, to me, what stands out in that is that we’re talk­ing about the employ­ee expe­ri­ence is sort of how I would sum­ma­rize these. If you were to com­bine perks, ben­e­fits, orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures, so on and so forth, all these things that impact, I’d just call that that is the employ­ee expe­ri­ence, right? And it has to be designed with inten­tion­al­i­ty. And that’s lit­er­al­ly the imper­a­tive I think of the HR pro­fes­sion now. It’s not just ben­e­fits, it’s not just what­ev­er silo com­pli­ance admin­is­tra­tion that HR has often been put in. I think the key role that HR has to play, and prob­a­bly only they can unique­ly play, is this design­er of the employ­ee expe­ri­ence because they stand in between the needs of the busi­ness and exec­u­tive teams and so on and so forth. And the peo­ple, they’re most capa­ble and in the posi­tion to under­stand what the peo­ple need and what the busi­ness needs.

Jor­dan (30:16):

I don’t know that you know this, but we have a per­son at Fringe whose title is an Employ­ee Expe­ri­ence Design­er. Did you know that that’s the title? I did­n’t know that.

Jason (30:24):

I knew that,

Jor­dan (30:26):

Which I kind of thought was at the time that that title was giv­en a very kind of nov­el idea. I had not seen that out there, but I think it is a real­ly apropo descrip­tion of exact­ly what the role should be. Last thing I’ll say on this is the lan­guage here, the norms that deter­mine how work is done, norms is a soft word for rules, the rules of engage­ment. And it’s so impor­tant. I was lis­ten­ing to some­thing recent­ly about games, and we’re going to talk about this next week. I think we’re going to talk about play, right? But the idea around games, games don’t work unless there’s rules, right? You can’t play a game, you can’t enjoy a game, you can’t have any pre­dictabil­i­ty that any cer­tain strat­e­gy is going to yield a cer­tain out­come because it, it’s just kind of chaos, right? And chil­dren play games this way some­times, espe­cial­ly small chil­dren, or they change the rules as they go along, or they have no rules at all, or they break them with no consequence.

(31:27):

And then what imme­di­ate­ly hap­pens and ensues is chaos, right? It’s fight­ing and scream­ing and yelling and he’s cheat­ing and he lied and he like what­ev­er. Yes. And I think this is on the right side, by the way. This is the for­ward think­ing side, right? So I think when we think about, well, there’s rules and there’s norms and there’s, it’s too but­toned up. It’s too old school. But actu­al­ly, I think what gives peo­ple the abil­i­ty to have free­dom in their work and the abil­i­ty to thrive in their work is to know what is the ide­al? What are we like here? How do we work? How do we treat each oth­er? When do we work? Where do we work? You might be flex­i­ble about that answer, but you have an answer to those ques­tions. And I think some­times I can be guilty of maybe giv­ing peo­ple this impres­sion that’s just like, well, just do it how you do it, just do your thing. It’s cool. I want to be the bud­dy. I want to be the bro. And as opposed to think­ing, no, actu­al­ly we have a well thought out way that we get work done and how we treat each oth­er, how we do that work, and putting some para­me­ters in place and actu­al­ly putting some, we used to talk about chil­dren a lot, but I actu­al­ly putting some rules in place, rules of engage­ment is actu­al­ly quite free­ing and leads to wellbeing.

Jason (32:49):

We can’t win some­thing if you don’t under­stand the rules.

Jor­dan (32:52):

You don’t know how the game is played.

Jason (32:53):

Or if there are no rules. So we need those to under­stand how we’re mak­ing progress and so forth. And there’s real­ly inter­est­ing research on all that stuff too, because if we’re not mak­ing obvi­ous progress in ways that make sense to us, then it actu­al­ly caus­es stress and so on. And so those norms and rules are actu­al­ly real­ly impor­tant. And I think what’s kind of being spec­i­fied is not the fact that there aren’t norms today, but they’re the wrong ones.

Jor­dan (33:17):

Right? They’re arbitrary.

Jason (33:20):

They’re arbi­trary. We need new norms. The world’s changed. How we work’s changed. Peo­ple have changed, their expec­ta­tions have changed. Our life expe­ri­ence just with the world has changed. So we need new norms.

Jor­dan (33:33):

So I’ll recap that as we are wrap­ping up the episode. Work is a deter­mi­nant of well­be­ing. Well­be­ing is a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty. I think that’s super impor­tant. I think we can’t go old school and just say, well, you know what? You want to be hap­py, fig­ure that out at home. But when you’re here, you work. And we can’t also swing the pen­du­lum too far. And just like, oh, wel­come to the asy­lum. We’re going to make every­thing per­fect for you and every­thing we’re going to take care of every sin­gle need.

Jason (34:05):

The asy­lum. I dun­no why you chose that word.

Jor­dan (34:05):

I don’t know why I chose that word either, but it just makes me crazy think­ing about this idea of, yeah, you, your job to make me happy.

Jason (34:13):

It’s like it’s preschool or something.

Jor­dan (34:15):

Shared respon­si­bil­i­ty, right? Yeah.

Jason (34:17):

Come on in. Just have fun.

Jor­dan (34:18):

Yeah. Right. Yeah, no rules. Just enjoy yourself.

Jason (34:21):

Play at the stations.

Jor­dan (34:23):

And then last­ly, orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures impact well­be­ing. And so I think Jason put it incred­i­bly well. It real­ly, the job, the whole pur­pose of HR at this point is real­ly just think­ing about design­ing an employ­ee expe­ri­ence in which peo­ple know the rules of engage­ment. They know how to be suc­cess­ful. They’re ful­ly inte­grat­ed adults that have known and have been trained how to think through their pur­pose and their mis­sion in life and how that aligns to the mis­sion of the com­pa­ny or does­n’t. And if it does­n’t, we kind of coach ​‘em out so they can go find align­ment. I think that is the job these days, not to check box­es, not to just throw ben­e­fits and perks and offer­ings and check those box­es off, but to real­ly design a con­ducive envi­ron­ment for wellbeing.

Jason (35:14):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (35:14):

Yeah. So hit me up with the word of the day next week so I can be in preparation.

Jason (35:22):

Word of the day for our next episode is Equivocal.

Jor­dan (35:26):

Equiv­o­cal, equiv­o­cal. Equiv­o­cal. Yeah. Which is not equiv­a­lent or equal or equi­table or I’m going to have to look that one up. I know the pre­fix, but that’s about it. Well, thank you for lis­ten­ing to How Peo­ple Work this week. I real­ly enjoyed, Jason. Thanks for the prepa­ra­tion and the insights as usu­al, and we’ll see you next week.

‍

In today’s high­ly com­pet­i­tive work envi­ron­ment, employ­ers are increas­ing­ly rec­og­niz­ing the impor­tance of employ­ee well­be­ing. How­ev­er, there is still a lack of clar­i­ty on what exact­ly we mean by well­be­ing in the work­place. This ambi­gu­i­ty can have seri­ous con­se­quences. For instance, employ­ers may imple­ment work­place well­ness pro­grams that don’t take into account all aspects of employ­ee well­be­ing, result­ing in low­er engage­ment, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and ulti­mate­ly, reten­tion. Sim­i­lar­ly, employ­ees may have dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions of what well­be­ing means to them, lead­ing to con­fu­sion and dis­sat­is­fac­tion. To avoid such prob­lems, we need to get on the same page about what we mean by well­be­ing in the workplace.

On this episode of How Peo­ple Work, Jor­dan and Jason dis­cuss the impor­tance of get­ting on the same page about well­be­ing in the work­place and how this shared under­stand­ing will allow employ­ers to devel­op work­place well­ness pro­grams that pro­mote employ­ee well­be­ing in a holis­tic and effec­tive man­ner. It will also help employ­ees make informed deci­sions about their own well­be­ing goals and enable them to com­mu­ni­cate their needs effec­tive­ly. Ulti­mate­ly, achiev­ing a shared under­stand­ing of well­be­ing in the work­place will con­tribute to a health­i­er, hap­pi­er, and more engaged workforce.

Now avail­able on: YouTube | Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy

Key ideas and highlights

• The con­ver­sa­tion around well­ness and employ­ee engage­ment has been ever-grow­ing since the pan­dem­ic. But, mea­sur­ing well­ness by engage­ment alone isn’t enough.
• You must imple­ment well­be­ing strate­gies that work in order to get the employ­ee engage­ment you want.
• Employ­ment is des­ig­nat­ed by the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion as a crit­i­cal social deter­mi­nant of health. How can employ­ers max­i­mize their employ­ees’ well­be­ing in the workplace?
• Deloitte Work­force Well­be­ing Imperative

Word of the day

• Immac­u­late — said @28:55 ✅

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 3:31 Why has this con­ver­sa­tion around well­ness become so important?
• 5:03 Mea­sur­ing engage­ment alone isn’t enough
• 7:00 Why engage­ment doesn’t accu­rate­ly mea­sure wellness
• 8:33 How to get the kind of employ­ee engage­ment you want
• 12:03 Why employ­ees need to have a mis­sion state­ment of their own
• 16:10 Employ­ment as a crit­i­cal social deter­mi­nant of health
• 21:26 What actu­al­ly improves our situation?
• 23:36 The deep­er mean­ing of the word shalom
• 25:10 Well­ness is not out of reach for anyone

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work? For near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps, than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to How Peo­ple Work, pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

(00:50):

Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. This is your co-host, Jor­dan Peace. I’m back. The real Jor­dan Peace. Hash­tag. I should have that. I guess so. Yeah. Yeah, that’d be kind of fun. What’s the thing called on Twit­ter? Han­dle? I should have that. Twit­ter, @therealJordanPiece. Some­body prob­a­bly already does. Sit­ting here with Jason Mur­ray as usu­al. Jason has not left you for two weeks like I did. I apol­o­gize, but I am back excit­ed to pick up where we left off. And thank you to Cas­san­dra Rose for fill­ing in for me. She did a fan­tas­tic job and made the job look a lot bet­ter than I do, which is always appre­ci­at­ed for those that see our video clip. But yeah, you guys talked a lot about well­be­ing, a lot about, I was just lis­ten­ing to this clip around, she’s talk­ing about how you can kind of do every­thing right, but if you have poor man­agers, it all falls apart. Which is a very frus­trat­ing thing to hear.

(01:46):

Cause you’re like, wait, you’re say­ing if we do every­thing else right? But this one thing. But at the same time, I think in a strong cul­ture with hap­py peo­ple where well­be­ing reigns, you would­n’t end up hav­ing an ugly expe­ri­ence with your man­ag­er because your man­ag­er would be healthy them­selves. They would be well, they would there­fore be kind and have rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ships with their peers and employ­ees and friends, et cetera. So we want to talk a lit­tle bit more today, and I’ll let you frame it up, Jason, since I’ve been gone a lit­tle bit. But about where this top­ic of well­be­ing has not come into play as if it was­n’t before, but real­ly resur­faced in a very strong way recent­ly. And kind of what that’s about. What’s going on in soci­ety that would lead to that? What’s going on from a research stand­point that would lead to this resur­gence? And we’re going to talk a lit­tle bit about that, hav­ing that pos­i­tive vision of work and that pos­i­tive vision of life and hav­ing some­thing to anchor on and all about how that plays into well­be­ing. But how did it go with Cas­san­dra? How did — I mean, was it nice to be rid of me for a cou­ple of weeks?

Jason (03:00):

Oh, it’s great hav­ing you. Yeah. But Cas­san­dra’s awe­some. It was great chat­ting with her about,

Jor­dan (03:06):

Did you give her a word of the day that she had — .

Jason (03:08):

I did­n’t do that to her.

Jor­dan (03:09):

You were Kind.

Jason (03:11):

Yeah, I was a lit­tle afraid of what she would’ve done to me if I tried to give her that.

Jor­dan (03:15):

It is a dis­tract­ing thing some­times. You’re sit­ting there, the whole episode going, when am I going to squeeze this word in there?

Jason (03:21):

And she’s very pro­fes­sion­al in the best of ways. And I’m so casu­al. I felt a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ed, hon­est­ly. So I was like, I’m not going to do that to her.

Jor­dan (03:30):

Mom came to the pod­cast. Yes. It made you behave.

Jason (03:31):

Yep. Yeah. So we got into well­be­ing a lit­tle bit. We touched on, in one of the episodes that we did on this Deloitte Work­force Well­be­ing Imper­a­tive, which is a report that they put out recent­ly that I actu­al­ly want to dig back into a lit­tle bit. Cause we kind of scratched the sur­face, but we did­n’t real­ly dive into it. But this ques­tion of why well­be­ing is sur­fac­ing more as a con­ver­sa­tion. I think there’s a whole bunch of fac­tors going into this, and I’m inter­est­ed in your thoughts on it too. But I think one of ​‘em is this sort of his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive of, well, there used to be well­ness. That was kind of the way peo­ple talked about it. And well­ness orig­i­nat­ed as a way to man­age pop­u­la­tion health with­in orga­ni­za­tions. So it was first and fore­most an effort to try and improve health, to reduce claims costs.

(04:27):

And so it was pure­ly dri­ven by cost sav­ings with­in the orga­ni­za­tion. So we might infer maybe there were some good intents that if peo­ple were health­i­er, they live bet­ter lives, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, your med­ical plan is the biggest, one of the biggest costs that you have out­side of pay­roll for an orga­ni­za­tion. So if you could reduce that cost, hey, that prob­a­bly sounds pret­ty good. And so this effort kind of orig­i­nat­ed decades ago, and over time, the evi­dence for improved out­comes around well­ness in that way are sus­pect to say the least. And so that began to shift into more of this engage­ment. Well, let’s mea­sure engage­ment. Maybe that’s a bet­ter way to look at this. Well, what hap­pened most recent­ly is the pan­dem­ic. And so all this time, we’ve been think­ing prob­a­bly since ear­ly two thou­sands, that engage­ment is the thing. We need to mea­sure employ­ee engage­ment and improve employ­ee engagement.

(05:25):

And there’s aspects to that to unpack more than like­ly. But what hap­pened is the assump­tion was always made that engage­ment was a good proxy for well­be­ing. And so if engage­ment looked good or if it was trend­ing in the right direc­tion, that was a sig­nal that, Hey, your peo­ple are in a pret­ty good place. Right? Well, what hap­pened in the pan­dem­ic was all of a sud­den you got this diver­gence between engage­ment and well­be­ing. And so what hap­pened was every­one was work­ing at home as they were actu­al­ly far more engaged in their work than they ever were before because of tech­nol­o­gy, because of prox­im­i­ty. You’re not leav­ing an office any longer. It’s just there all the time. And so engage­ment rates actu­al­ly went up ear­ly in the pan­dem­ic. But what plum­met­ed — cap­tive audi­ence. Yeah, cap­tive audi­ence, all sorts of rea­sons — but kind of mea­sures of health and well­be­ing tanked. So stress lev­els through the roof, right? I mean, we’re all at home with our kids. If you have kids, what do you do? It’s pret­ty stress­ful. And so

Jor­dan (06:31):

Because, you can be engaged from a stand­point of you respond to emails quickly.

Jason (06:35):

Exact­ly.

Jor­dan (06:36):

Or you attend meet­ings or you show up on time. If those are the mea­sur­ing sticks of engage­ment, then you can pro­gram peo­ple, you could pro­gram apes to be engaged from that mea­sur­ing sticks stand­point. But from a rela­tion­al engage­ment stand­point, that actu­al­ly was a huge chal­lenge ear­ly in the pan­dem­ic to feel real­ly con­nect­ed at all.

Jason (07:00):

Well, and what it revealed is engage­ment does­n’t tell the full sto­ry. So engage­ment, we’re not sug­gest­ing engage­ment is a bad met­ric to use, but it’s cer­tain­ly not the only met­ric we should use.

Jor­dan (07:12):

Sure. I mean I could think of times in my own per­son­al life where I was prob­a­bly hyper engaged at work, be specif­i­cal­ly because I was not doing well per­son­al­ly. Right? Whether I was insane­ly stressed about some­thing going on, a health thing hap­pen­ing in my fam­i­ly, or mar­i­tal stress or what­ev­er the case may be.

Jason (07:34):

Work’s a distraction.

Jor­dan (07:34):

Sor­ry, hon­ey, we do fight, but this is, every­thing’s good. But yeah, work is a dis­trac­tion, work’s s a place to hide some­times from the things going on in life. So the thought that engage­ment would just cov­er you in terms of mea­sur­ing well­ness or well­be­ing. When you take a step back and think about your own life. Yeah. It’s like that’s kind of ridicu­lous. Yeah.

Jason (07:55):

Well, it seems self-evi­dent when you step back and think about it in that way. But I guess nobody real­ly stopped to think about it in that way. And so what the pan­dem­ic did is it ele­vat­ed this aware­ness of, oh, the way we’ve been think­ing about this and run­ning engage­ment sur­veys and see­ing improve­ments, and then just kind of check­ing that box, Hey, every­thing’s good. All of a sud­den we real­ized, well, that’s not ade­quate to what’s actu­al­ly going on. Peo­ple are more com­plex than that. The rela­tion­ship between engage­ment and actu­al health, stress, well­be­ing is much more com­plex than maybe presumed.

Jor­dan (08:33):

I think part of the prob­lem is employ­ers are try­ing to ben­e­fit employ­ers as a pri­ma­ry. And I think that if you focus on ben­e­fit­ing your employ­ees as a pri­ma­ry means, the ben­e­fit will come back around to the employ­er as a sec­ondary means. So if you were to say, okay, well let’s mea­sure engage­ment and let’s call it a proxy for well­be­ing. And so as long as peo­ple are log­ging in, attend­ing meet­ings, respond­ing to emails, doing all of the work things that ben­e­fit the employ­er, then we’re just going to check that well­be­ing box because it’s good enough to get the work done. But of course, what’s hap­pen­ing is this slow drift right there, there’s this slow kind of slow work death, if you will, of just like, yeah, I’m here, but I hate you. I respond­ed to that email. But with a lot of cyn­i­cism. And over the course of time, if the well-being itself is not pri­or­i­tized, then all the engage­ment in the world is not going to mean a whole lot. Where­as I think if you focus on the actu­al well­be­ing, the health, the hap­pi­ness, the pur­pose­ful­ness of your employ­ees, you’re going to, as a side effect, you’re going to get all the engage­ment you want. I think it’s just a focus on the wrong thing. And that all goes back to this pop­u­la­tion health idea of in the very begin­ning, why were we mea­sur­ing well­ness to begin with, to save claims cost, right? It was all kind of direct­ly about the employ­ers’ benefit.

Jason (10:10):

First and fore­most, bot­tom line-dri­ven ver­sus what you were say­ing is, well, hey, can we start with a dif­fer­ent end in mind? And maybe that end is, as we’ve sug­gest­ed on this pod­cast, human flour­ish­ing. Ver­sus the -

Jor­dan (10:22):

The bot­tom line will boom, will fol­low. Absolute­ly. Yes. How could it not?

Jason (10:26):

A hun­dred percent.

Jor­dan (10:27):

How could it not? Yeah.

Jason (10:29):

Well, and I think it’s worth talk­ing about, cause I think you said a cou­ple things when you were describ­ing well­be­ing. Yeah. That would prob­a­bly be easy to gloss over. And I sus­pect peo­ple might be nod­ding their heads say­ing, yeah, yeah, I total­ly agree. But there’s some nuance that’s worth unpack­ing because I think my expe­ri­ence in talk­ing with many, many, many hun­dreds of HR lead­ers in the time that we’ve been oper­at­ing Fringe, yeah. Maybe more, maybe thousands.

Jor­dan (10:55):

No exag­ger­a­tion there.

Jason (10:56):

No exag­ger­a­tion. Yeah. That I can’t say that I’ve come across a con­sis­tent, maybe con­sen­sus view­point on what exact­ly is meant when we talk about well­be­ing. And so what I observe is there’s still a lot of con­ven­tion­al think­ing around well­be­ing in that it has­n’t moved far from what well­ness was thought of orig­i­nal­ly, which is real­ly nar­row­ly focused on men­tal health, phys­i­cal health, and finan­cial health. So it was real­ly just tied to what, I’ve got a health plan, I’ve got a retire­ment plan, and I’ve got an EAP plan that gives me a cou­ple coun­sel­ing ses­sions as need­ed. Right? Right. Boom. Check those box­es. Yes. We got well being cov­ered. And what you described, I think was some­thing where you includ­ed words like pur­pose in it. And I don’t think you said holis­tic, but that’s what I was think­ing in my mind was a view­point that was more all encom­pass­ing than just those three kind of silos that I think are typ­i­cal­ly referred to.

Jor­dan (12:03):

Yeah. It’s fun­ny. When we sit down to start a busi­ness, we imme­di­ate­ly go, okay, what’s the mis­sion? What’s the vision? And what are the val­ues? Because it’s some trained busi­ness school thing and a very good thing I think that we do as a com­pa­ny. But how many peo­ple at 15, 16 years old, or 18 or 22 or what­ev­er, sit down and do the same thing for their life? Near­ly no one, unless you’ve got some incred­i­ble kind of men­tors and maybe a coun­selor or some­body in your life that’s incred­i­bly wise that sits down and goes, what’s your mis­sion state­ment? What are your val­ues as you could actu­al­ly write them down and speak them out loud and kind of speak them into exis­tence. You’re not doing that, right? Yeah. So you jump into a com­pa­ny and you’re inspired poten­tial, hope­ful­ly, right? You’re inspired by this idea of, oh man, this com­pa­ny has a mis­sion, and I’m on the mis­sion too, but it’s not deep enough.

(13:02):

It’s not good enough to sus­tain an indi­vid­ual for years and years and years to have a shared mis­sion with a group of peo­ple that is about ulti­mate­ly some, maybe at best, some social change, some world change, some aid of oth­er human beings in some way, and it’s good, but it’s not that indi­vid­u­al’s vision. They did­n’t sit down and cre­ate it. They’re just jump­ing in. And that is a degree of pur­pose. That is more than noth­ing. And that’s great, but oth­er, if you don’t have that in your life, then you are, your life is like you’re, I’m try­ing to think of some­thing light­weight, like a feath­er or some­thing. The wind blows and you’re just fly­ing around the wind of cir­cum­stances, right? Oh, I got a raise and peo­ple were nice to me and they com­pli­ment­ed my shoes today and stuff went well, and I had this new tequi­la. That’s real­ly good, right? Yeah. I’m happy.

Jason (14:02):

It’s a feeling.

Jor­dan (14:03):

It’s a feel­ing. But it hap­pened to you

Jason (14:06):

It’s not sustained.

Jor­dan (14:08):

It’s not sus­tained. Because when the oppo­site things hap­pen, when you feel you did­n’t real­ly dig in your out­fit that day and your boss was a jerk, or maybe not even a jerk. They just weren’t over­whelm­ing­ly kind or what­ev­er the sit­u­a­tion may be. And now we’re down and out. And if those things hap­pen, those cir­cum­stances that are neg­a­tive hap­pen over and over again in sequence in a cer­tain con­text, whether that’s work or whether that’s in a rela­tion­ship or what­ev­er the case may be. Our ten­den­cy, it’s just to run away from the cir­cum­stances in which we expe­ri­ence the neg­a­tive emo­tions because we’re not anchored to any­thing that’s greater or high­er than the emo­tion of the moment to go, well, yeah, you know what? I real­ly did­n’t enjoy the last two weeks at, I don’t know, of col­lege as I’m study­ing to get my doc­tor­ate in X, Y, and Z, so I’m just going to quit ver­sus no, I, I’ve got a vision for this thing that I’m going

towards.

(15:05):

I can suf­fer through two weeks. Damn it. I’m going to do it. I’m gonna work hard. So I think that’s what I mean when I talk about pur­pose and when we talk about hap­pi­ness, and I wrote a blog, I don’t think we’ve pub­lished yet, but about degrees of hap­pi­ness, and there are a lot of mean­ings to that word. As you look back through the Latin or the Greek or how­ev­er far back you want to go, there’s lev­els of that, and none of those lev­els are sus­tain­able until you get to that place where there’s pur­pose. All of it is just sort of that windy feather…

Jason (15:40):

Yeah, we talked about that a few episodes ago. There’s those dif­fer­ent kind of lev­els of hap­pi­ness in the Greek.

Jor­dan (15:47):

Yeah. I think, was it? It was Aris­to­tle. Yeah. I can’t remem­ber who exactly.

Jason (15:49):

It was. Yeah, I think that’s an impor­tant point. So one thing I think is, I had­n’t actu­al­ly seen this until a cou­ple weeks ago, but the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion actu­al­ly uses a def­i­n­i­tion of well­be­ing that’s very much aligned with the way that we’ve been talk­ing about it, which was sur­pris­ing. I did­n’t expect to come across that, but actu­al­ly, but -

Jor­dan (16:07):

You think it’s some­thing pure­ly med­ical in nature.

Jason (16:10):

Well, and here’s the fas­ci­nat­ing thing. There’s kind of a cou­ple lay­ers to it, but one is they name employ­ment as a crit­i­cal social deter­mi­nant of health. So they have all these kind of deter­mi­nants of health or what they call social deter­mi­nants of health that are kind of fac­tors that play into what like­ly deter­mines health out­comes for an indi­vid­ual or com­mu­ni­ty. And so employ­ment is one they name explic­it­ly. So your degree of employ­ment or unem­ploy­ment, obvi­ous­ly, but then also the con­tent of the work that you’re doing has a real­ly pro­found impact on well­be­ing in the case of phys­i­cal, men­tal, social, finan­cial, et cetera. But they also name your sense of pur­pose and abil­i­ty to grow in that def­i­n­i­tion of well­be­ing. And I think it’s awe­some. And I mean, I’m just curi­ous your reac­tion to that description.

Jor­dan (17:05):

Yeah, I’m a lit­tle shocked about the source of that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s pret­ty amaz­ing that an orga­ni­za­tion that I just would real­ly expect some­thing kind of very clin­i­cal, very med­ical. So that’s pret­ty neat actu­al­ly, to think about. Some­one’s think­ing more deeply about it. And obvi­ous­ly there’s a lot of data to sug­gest that you could have per­fect health and you could eat all the right foods, and you could all of that even work­out non­stop and get maybe the endor­phin endor­phins and every­thing from that. And that’s great. But even that is just that lev­el one kind of hap­pi­ness, that lev­el one. So I think that’s great. I think about what’s going on in our soci­ety that leads us to this place where well­be­ing is more of a con­ver­sa­tion. I think Covid is part of it. You’ve got a men­tal health cri­sis, you’ve got a lot of peo­ple focused on men­tal health. The focus on that expands the def­i­n­i­tion of health a lit­tle further.

Jason (18:07):

I think it just brought it to the fore­front. It’s not that peo­ple did­n’t have these no issues before, but we’re talk­ing about it now.

Jor­dan (18:13):

Noto­ri­ety, right? Yeah. It got more atten­tion. But I think too, just kind of cul­tur­al­ly in the West, at least, we’ve kind of made up our minds for or wrong, and I’m going to argue wrong, that what­ev­er we feel is kind of the truth and para­mount and most impor­tant, and as we just described around cir­cum­stances, feel­ings, they change like the weath­er, more often than the weather.

(18:40):

And so I think we’ve come to a wrong con­clu­sion in West­ern soci­ety that we can trust our feel­ings to guide us, guide our deci­sions, guide how we see the world, inter­pret the world, teach oth­ers about the world. So I think that’s prob­lem­at­ic. And then I think also the polar­iza­tion polit­i­cal­ly and social­ly that we’ve seen over the past 10 years has also been real­ly harm­ful because I think there’s so much anx­i­ety induced by the idea that I might say the wrong thing, or I might say the wrong thing to the wrong per­son, or I might trig­ger some­body through some­thing that I’m just kind of try­ing to share, or I’m at my worldview -

Jason (19:22):

We’re los­ing our social moor­ings in all this. I mean, we’ve kind of gone to such an indi­vid­u­al­ized, the degree to which we inter­pret our expe­ri­ence of the world through an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic lens is so great that it’s just my hap­pi­ness is para­mount and hap­pi­ness not in the way that we’ve been talk­ing about it in terms of a sense of ful­fill­ment and pur­pose that involves local com­mu­ni­ty, your fam­i­ly, and so on and so forth. It’s lit­er­al­ly just how do I feel right now? But I think when we step back, it just does­n’t even make sense. So when I was dri­ving over here, that’s fun­ny, com­ing to record this with you. I was lis­ten­ing to a pod­cast and these folks were talk­ing about well­be­ing. I was kind of curi­ous to see what they were talk­ing about. And one of the peo­ple on the pod­cast ref­er­enced a sta­tis­tic that said, well, 44% of peo­ple when you poll ​‘em, say they expe­ri­enced stress at work the pre­vi­ous day. And 22% of peo­ple say they expe­ri­enced sad­ness or anger. And so they were using that to sup­port this sort of sense of, yeah, there’s a huge prob­lem. Peo­ple feel a cer­tain way, and those feel­ings real­ly need to acknowl­edge them, and so on and so forth. And it’s like, yeah, that’s true. We do need to acknowl­edge what we feel. But when I look at my own expe­ri­ence, and you allud­ed to this ear­li­er, it’s like

(20:47):

Some­times I’m doing things that I love at work and insane­ly stressed at the same time. Both things are true. And so how do you hold that togeth­er? And yeah, you can’t live under a con­stant state of stress, but in some respects, what do you do with the fact that a lot of peo­ple don’t have any con­trol over their cir­cum­stances, or a lot of us have kids that can stress us out of our minds at times? What are you sup­posed to do with that?

Jor­dan (21:13):

I mean, 100% of us have no con­trol over at least some of our cir­cum­stances, get­ting a dis­ease. There are things that, yeah, it does­n’t mat­ter what you do in life, you don’t have con­trol over everything.

Jason (21:26):

So, well, this thought just popped into my head is, so we often think in terms of what improves our sit­u­a­tion is the absence of the thing that we don’t like. And so I think the default sort of posi­tion that peo­ple come to is, oh, stress makes me feel bad. And so there­fore, the opti­mal posi­tion is get rid of stress. But when you think about these def­i­n­i­tions of pur­pose and hap­pi­ness, none of them are about the absence of some­thing. They’re actu­al­ly about the pres­ence of some­thing better.

Jor­dan (22:01):

Some­thing better.

Jason (22:02):

Right?

Jor­dan (22:03):

Some­thing more pure.

Jason (22:04):

Exact­ly. And so -

Jor­dan (22:05):

I saw an Insta­gram video, and this is about rais­ing chil­dren, but the point stands had this guy had a glass of water, and the water had leaves and grass and all this stuff, and you would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly want to drink it. And so basi­cal­ly what he was show­ing was, Hey, I can sit here with a spoon or tweez­ers, and I can try to pull all the dirt out of this water, or I could just take a glass, clean water and pour it right over the top, and all the crap just comes out of the top, and I’ve got this crisp cup of water. And he was using that as an anal­o­gy to say, Hey, just love your kids because the love poured in is actu­al­ly what’s going to kind of get the impu­ri­ty out, which is a beau­ti­ful con­cept. But here it is the same thing. It’s this idea of, yeah, you can sit there and go, man, anoth­er leaf, anoth­er piece of grass. And just with tweez­ers your whole life just try­ing to pick the unpleas­ant things out, right? Or you can pour in pur­pose, you can pour in the thing that you actu­al­ly want into your life, right? You won’t even notice the impu­ri­ties by com­par­i­son, at least, right? Yeah.

Jason (23:16):

Remem­ber one of the first con­ver­sa­tions I had with my coun­selor when I went and they were talk­ing to, they asked me, Hey, what are you try­ing to accom­plish here? And I was like, I have no idea. I dun­no, I don’t know what I’m here for.

Jor­dan (23:25):

If you told me I was sup­posed to show up, some bad stuff happened,

Jason (23:29):

Some stuff going on my life. And I don’t know, I think I’m just sup­posed to do this.

Jor­dan (23:33):

I hate that ini­tial ques­tion. Like, I don’t know.

Jason (23:36):

So there’s all kinds of good stuff and ancient kind of wis­dom tra­di­tions. And so in the Jew­ish tra­di­tion in par­tic­u­lar, there’s a word shalom that we often trans­late as peace, but in the Hebrew lan­guage, it actu­al­ly has a much deep­er and rich­er mean­ing. And one of the things that came out of my coun­selor ask­ing me about this was the fact that Shalom actu­al­ly rep­re­sents a view of well­be­ing, let’s say. Hmm. That’s actu­al­ly very aligned with the way the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion described it. So that was one of the things that was shock­ing to me. And then the oth­er thing that’s real­ly inter­est­ing about it is the word shalom in the Hebrew tra­di­tion actu­al­ly isn’t about the absence of any­thing either. It’s about the pres­ence of full­ness of life, full­ness of health, full­ness of pur­pose. It’s basi­cal­ly full­ness of fill in the blank. And so I think that’s real­ly rel­e­vant because I think about maybe a sin­gle work­ing mom, and the only job that she can get is this kind of shit­ty job. And what else is she — Prob­a­bly, she hates it. Yeah, prob­a­bly. It’s super stress­ful. And so is well­be­ing for that per­son sup­posed to be like, oh, you’re just in a dead end job. You got to get out of it. What options -

Jor­dan (24:58):

Change your cir­cum­stances right now? Go, right.

Jason (25:01):

Or Is there a bet­ter Right and deep­er way that every­one has the oppor­tu­ni­ty to expe­ri­ence wellbeing?

Jor­dan (25:10):

Clear­ly. Clear­ly there is, because stud­ies, time out of mind have all come back and shown that the hap­pi­est peo­ple on earth are the peo­ple just above the pover­ty line. So it is not about get­ting the best job, mak­ing the most mon­ey and hav­ing the most what­ev­er, free­dom over your time, pos­ses­sions, et cetera, et cetera, that clear­ly there’s some­thing else, right? That peo­ple can be plen­ty hap­py in a sit­u­a­tion that maybe you would, from the out­side-in say, well, that’s not an envi­able place to be.

Jason (25:40):

Those aren’t cir­cum­stances that I would will­ing­ly take on.

Jor­dan (25:44):

Yeah. Right. Yeah, exact­ly. So any­way, I think there’s a lot of rea­sons why this con­ver­sa­tion is more and more rel­e­vant than ever. And I think what I’m proud of about, cause I said some neg­a­tive things about our soci­ety, but what I’m proud of about our soci­ety is I think the courage that’s come in our gen­er­a­tion and the one that fol­lows us to actu­al­ly take a look at the deep­er things, at the more emo­tion­al things at the, to look at work and life inte­grat­ed and go. So we’re ask­ing the right ques­tions final­ly, as opposed to this tough guy, Hey, just stuff it and work. That’s not sus­tain­able. Right? And we don’t want a pen­du­lum swing to the oth­er side either, where it’s like, well, our employ­er is now our par­ent, and their respon­si­bil­i­ty is to kind of cod­dle us and make every­thing in our life okay.

(26:39):

That’s not it either. But I think good man­age­ment, good train­ing is tak­ing that mis­sion, vision, and val­ues kind of busi­ness school thing, and turn it and democ­ra­tiz­ing that into, Hey, employ­ee, let’s fig­ure this out for you. That’s what train­ing should look like ini­tial­ly. Help peo­ple be ful­ly inte­grat­ed adults, right? And then we’ll see what kind of stress­es they can han­dle at work, what kind of lead­er­ship they can take on, et cetera, et cetera. But no skillset in the world, plus a bunch of grit and deter­mi­na­tion is going to get you all the way where you want to be if you don’t have no idea where you want to be.

Jason (27:20):

Right. Exact­ly.

Jor­dan (27:21):

It’s not going to just hap­pen to you. And if it did hap­pen to you, if some­how you willed your­self into some­one else’s def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess, you just got to get there and be mis­er­able because you nev­er want­ed it in the first place, and you still don’t know who you are or what you want.

Jor­dan (27:37):

So it’s just such a core thing and such an impor­tant thing, I think, for employ­ers to focus on. And to not be scared of that, and to not go well, that’s none of my busi­ness. That’s too per­son­al. This is work.

Jason (27:50):

Yeah,

Jor­dan (27:51):

You can’t man­age that way.

Jason (27:52):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (27:53):

You know, you just can’t. You have to get into the heart of the mat­ter, into the heart of peo­ple, and real­ly reach ​‘em. Oth­er­wise, they’re just going to keep bounc­ing around and look­ing for some­body who will engage them fully.

Jason (28:06):

And there’s a top­ic there that I think is going to be excit­ing to talk about in our next episode, because some things that you just point­ed out are ref­er­enced in this arti­cle that I want us to dis­cuss. And one of them is, well, what’s the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the indi­vid­ual and the employ­er as it relates to well­be­ing? Because tra­di­tion­al­ly, it’s like, that’s your thing. You just do what you need to do to be well. Right? And I think what the acknowl­edge­ment is, well, if we’re going to say work and life are togeth­er, they’re not sep­a­rate, then there’s a more com­plex rela­tion­ship that involves both the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the indi­vid­ual and the employ­er in that relationship.

Jor­dan (28:49):

I real­ize I’ve failed ful­ly. Let me go back to my anal­o­gy where I was describ­ing water and puri­fied water, and immac­u­late water was right there. It was right there and avail­able to me, and I missed it.

Jason (29:03):

I was going to call you out on it, but I’ve got­ten burned on that before, and I was like, no, I actu­al­ly did. He prob­a­bly slipped it in somewhere.

Jor­dan (29:09):

I did­n’t miss it. And I’m shocked that we’ve been going some­thing 26, 27 min­utes already. So,

Jason (29:14):

Oh, and Jor­dan, your word of the day for the next episode is going to be auspicious.

Jor­dan (29:24):

Aus­pi­cious. Alright. How oppor­tune. So tee up the next episode for us so that way we can just kind of march right into it. So we’re going to go from here, which we cov­ered maybe one or two ques­tions that we had planned to dis­cuss out of my 10.

Jason (29:38):

So we’re going to stay on this top­ic of well­be­ing, but we’re going to ref­er­ence this Deloitte work­force well­be­ing imper­a­tive specif­i­cal­ly, which we’ll make sure we include in the show notes. And we’ll prob­a­bly unpack this over the next two episodes. Cause there’s a lot of con­tent here, and I think it’s stuff that’s real­ly inter­est­ing and excit­ing, but I know the way that we get going on these things. Yeah, we’re not going to do it all in one episode. So the plan is over the next two episodes, we’ll con­tin­ue this thread of well­be­ing and unpack some of the things that I think we agree with, maybe some things that we don’t agree with or have some cri­tiques on in this article.

Jor­dan (30:12):

Great. Well, it seems to be our style to plan, like I said, 6, 7, 8 ques­tions that we’re going to dis­cuss and dis­cuss exact­ly one, maybe two. So in that light, if you’re lis­ten­ing, you’ve been lis­ten­ing for a lit­tle while, you kind of under­stand the gist of the things we like to talk about from a philo­soph­i­cal stand­point and from a work and employ­ment stand­point, please do sub­mit a ques­tion. I would love if that was our world where we just got on and looked and said, oh, here, that’s a per­fect ques­tion. Let’s do an entire episode about that. So would love to do that. Thank you all for lis­ten­ing to how peo­ple work. We’ll catch you next week and look­ing for­ward to talk­ing to you again soon, Jason. Thanks.

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