CHAPTER 1
The Ultimate Driver of Organizational Performance

How healthy are you? How healthy are your people? How healthy is your organization?

These are vitally important questions-the answers to which determine the limits of your life, your team's effectiveness, and your organization's success. These questions are interrelated. Your team and your organization have a direct impact on your own health and well-being. And your organization's performance and success are dependent on the health of its people. This symbiotic relationship between your people's health and your organization's health and performance may seem like a no-brainer. You might be thinking, "Of course that would be the case." But in our research and experience in working with organizations over several decades, we find that very few organizations act on this understanding. If they do make some effort, we find that employees are typically offered some sort of wellness or workplace well-being program. These might be useful, necessary even, but not sufficient. And more importantly, they fail to address the organization's strategic opportunity in organizing itself and developing more ways of working that actually promote and support employee health.

What if leaders seriously entertained the idea that higher performance is a result of businesses organizing around their people rather than people having to organize around the business? We have taken as fact that the way to increase productivity and profit is through an absolute adherence to Taylorism, the management theory made popular by Frederick Taylor that is characterized by standards, being mechanistic, inflexible, and precise. These ideas have made a significant contribution to our understanding of organizations and productivity; they have their place. However, the wholesale shift to this organizational mindset has its limits and isn't without cost. We find that an adherence to old ways of working and relating results in a decreased sense of personal purpose and accomplishment, less role and strategic clarity, and disconnection and lack of control over one's work environment. It's unfortunate, as organizations then must invest in programs and interventions just to address the problems that this mindset created in the first place!

A people-centered workplace might seem like a tough shift to make. If you're a leader, manager, or small business owner and looking to realize increased effectiveness with your people or productivity and financial results, reimagining how to organize your business and its culture seems like a bigger project than you might have the appetite for. The usual way of managing and leading may be tempting, but if you have picked up this book, we imagine that you're open to making a shift in mental mindset and aligning your behaviors to achieve outsized business gains and, concurrently, have a more authentic and fulfilling experience as a leader. In other words, it's worth the investment of creating a healthy place to work, and the energy you put into this will yield significant returns. This book aims to equip leaders with a road map and tools to make a demonstrable impact with their people and their organization. We argue here that rather than work and the workplace being the cause of disease, dysfunction, and limited performance, a healthy workplace is the key to unlocking the full value of your people and your organization.

When we ask the question, "How healthy is your organization?" we often hear from our clients' employees that it's not or maybe it's "sort of." Rarely do we hear that they work in a consistently and reliably healthy workplace. Employees at all levels will describe how it is difficult to balance competing demands at work or that their contributions aren't fully valued or that they don't feel like they belong. Sometimes their manager takes credit for their ideas, or they are given unachievable deadlines within a regular workweek, or there is little role or strategic clarity. One leader shared with us, "I'm wiped out and exhausted by the end of the week, and so I need the weekend to recharge, but that's difficult to do because I have family responsibilities on the weekend too."

DEFINING "HEALTHY WORKPLACE"

A healthy workplace is one that incorporates a strong sense of alignment to organizational values and purpose. The leaders and managers in healthy workplaces role-model a supportive and healthy workplace culture. They also support people in being the best version of themselves. They give employees opportunities to contribute their best and create an inclusive and just workplace. Employees in these workplaces feel like they have a strong supply of productive energy. They operate in an energizing physical environment, and they have a similar level of energy at the end of the day as when they started. They can attend to the demands of work and their families and communities with equitable attention. They also have healthy relationships at work, and they often feel like their work just flows.

You'll notice that this expanded definition is more than just physical health. Quite often, leaders think health is equivalent to physical health. In reality, that is just the beginning. When we look at healthy organizations, we find there is a clear sense of purpose. There is a way in which employees are aligned with the organization, both in terms of values and how their work contributes to the larger whole. Health is also made manifest in how the organization bolsters employees' mental resilience. The organization encourages a learning mindset and encourages employees to grow and expand their contributions. Work requirements are manageable, and employees have control over how they work. Healthy workplaces encourage connection. Employees feel like they belong and can develop authentic, productive relationships. Beyond inclusion, healthy workplaces do not tolerate racist or sexist behaviors or ways of engaging that are oppressive or unjust. These and other aspects of a healthy workplace will be explored further later in this book, but you'll note that we are taking a much larger lens when we think of health.

Key to understanding all of this is that our work affects our health, and in turn, our health affects our work. In some organizations, this reciprocal relationship creates a virtuous cycle whereas in other organizations, the relationship creates a vicious cycle. The symbiotic nature between worker health and organizational performance is something that will be explored throughout this book.

For managers and leaders who understand that the biggest driver of organizational performance is developing and maintaining a healthy workplace, decreasing whatever organizational friction exists and increasing employee well-being yields a powerful flywheel effect. The upside value to business can be substantial in terms of increased worker productivity, decreased sickness absences, reduced health care costs, and a compelling employer brand that attracts and retains talent (see www.hsph.harvard.edu/ecpe/the-business-benefits-of-a-healthy-workforce/). Research into the business benefits points out that healthy workplace cultures are 1.9 times more likely to innovate effectively and 2.8 times more likely to adapt well to change. (See https://joshbersin.com/2021/10/the-healthy-organization-the-next-big-thing-in-employee-wellbeing/.)

KNOWING VERSUS DOING

We find that many managers and leaders think they see how this works, and yet our experience is that they act counter to their understanding. Perhaps it is because leaders are looking at this problem entirely the wrong way. It may be an issue of awareness and knowledge of what health really is and understanding the individual and collective impact on organizational success. We'll discuss the science of well-being in Chapter 13 and what we've learned about this area; it is broader and deeper than most people think. We'll also differentiate this idea from the current wellness, well-being, and lifestyle trends that we see. They're related but not the same.

Perhaps, however, it is something more intransigent than knowing what to do. Perhaps the disconnect between "if we provide a gym and a mindfulness app, we've covered our bases" and then sending out an email at 10:00 p.m. at night is more of a "knowing-doing gap" as Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton call it (see www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/knowing-doing-gap). As leaders and managers, we know that our actions have both intentional and unintentional consequences and that how we integrate an understanding of health into our own personal models of leadership needs to be refined and sharpened. The bigger issue is how we act or execute on our understanding-in real time-to support employees' mental, emotional, financial, and physical health. Perhaps, though, our organizational systems are intentionally designed to be unhealthy. Our business processes, policies, procedures, and practices-our workplace culture-aim to support the opposite of employee health and well-being. This is a tougher problem to solve, for sure, but it is vitally important for leaders and managers that this be examined and addressed. You can't be healthy in an unhealthy and toxic work environment. At the same time, an organization can't be healthy (and all the tangible value that brings) with a workforce that...