How Wellbeing Can Create Competitive Advantage with Dr Richard Safeer

Something about work isn’t working for us.

In this episode of The Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Chief Medical Director of Employee Health at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Dr Richard Safeer. During this conversation, Richard tells us that one key is to avoid thinking about wellbeing in the workplace as a benefit in kind for employees and rather see it as a source of competitive advantage. Richard’s book ‘A Cure for the Common Company (Wiley, 2023)’ delivers a step-by-step roadmap to creating a culture of health on your team and in your company that keeps your people happier and more engaged.

Referenced during this episode:
A Cure for the Common Company (R. Safeer, 2023)
Richard Safeer website
Creating a Well-being Culture (training program)

 
Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)

The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

After more than 5 years of hosting The Evolving Leader, Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are launching their new show The Mindset Economy in January 2026. The new show will explore how to live better, work smarter and be connected in a more uncertain world where machines can think. 

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

Even before COVID, not a week would go by without the publication of a new study highlighting the decline in our physical, emotional, mental and social wellbeing at work. From rising stress levels to loneliness, something about work isn't working for us. In this show, we talked to Richard Safeer who is on a mission to embed wellbeing at Johns Hopkins Medicine at a deep cultural level.

One key is to avoid thinking of wellbeing as a benefit to employees and see it as a source of competitive advantage.

In this conversation, we're looking at how one organization is tackling the wellbeing crisis. Jean, I know this has been a major focus in your team's work over the years. So before we join our guest, can we discuss what you think is working and not working from your experiences? Well, in the past decade, we've talked to thousands of employees, managers and leaders worldwide about their experience of managing their wellbeing as demands and disruption have increased.

And a recurring theme has been the mounting frustration these people have in their attempts to adopt healthy habits which typically fail after a few days or weeks. As workloads mount, they retreat into coping as best they can. Until, as one manager told us a couple of weeks ago, I get too toxic, tired and testy to get away with being in denial any longer.

But often the damage to myself and others has already been done. Growing numbers of alarming burnout studies reflect a negative, normal cycle that defines people's lives, where it now seems normal to feel constantly tired and irritable and detached, depending on the sector between 25 to 80% of employees are experiencing burnout symptoms. And younger people and women are the most likely to suffer the impact.

I think it's interesting that what the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, describes burnout as that feeling of exhaustion, accompanied by a nervy compulsion to go on regardless. And that's the double bind that makes it very difficult for people to know how to cope. Despite differences in the working generations, what we've come to understand in our work with leaders and organizations operating predominantly with a Western culture is that what unites us is a mental model of success.

And that mental model says that you've got to be all in to succeed. So despite all the greater awareness that we have about how overworking adversely affects our wellbeing, being all in is acknowledged as culturally essential. By over two thirds of everyone we speak to about what it takes to make progress at work. The underlying and unspoken assumptions associated with this mental model include that you've got to sacrifice your physical, emotional, mental and social needs to achieve financial success, status, power and ultimately freedom.

Another associated but generally more cloaked assumption is that if I can't get what I need, then others can't either. This is the way it is. So if I can't be with my children, why should you? And I think many men don't acknowledge the advantage they gain from being able to double down on this mindset because their partners take a disproportionate share of the domestic and childcare needs.

And that's contributed to another set of social problems, including rising divorce rates, mental health issues amongst children. This mindsets third component is how our physical feelings and emotions are interpreted, because mostly they're ignored and stuffed down, and they’re justified or laughed away because the primary feeling we experience when we can't get what we need is resentment. And that's a toxic inhibitor of motivation, focus, learning and adaptation.

Instead of acknowledging these feelings, they're often externalized, placing the victims and defining what we can't do at work at home. In the past the balance sheet of being all in may have worked, particularly for senior managers. The rewards often seem to justify the sacrifice. Today, the deal looks broken. Rising lifestyle diseases, divorce rates, addiction, suicide and the impact of unhappy families on children's mental health are just some of the symptoms of sacrifice mindset when it's confronted with rising demand and uncertainty.

For leaders, losing connection with their needs undermines them really profoundly. Because when you fail to acknowledge that your needs, you've got to justify the knowing, doing gap. And it's really hard to inspire other people, and it's impossible to be seen as authentic when you're like this. So perhaps most importantly, the sacrifice mindset, which is shaped by this unconscious resentment, dampens self-awareness and our willingness to accept and respond to change.

Sacrifice mindset is also going to reject new realities and ideas and innovation that question the sacrifice they are making. So that's why some of the D&I agenda is so hard to get going within large organizations, because acceptance seems only to lead to a sense of futility. And you can see this dysfunctional pay it forward mentality at work in the dangerously long hours that young doctors, for example, have worked for decades in the belief that they will benefit by learning faster.

A year ago, the British Medical Council research found that 62% of junior doctors were suffering from depression, anxiety, stress, burnout and emotional distress. These are people who are looking after our lives. Aside from the benefits of long hours never having been evidenced, how many of us want to be in a life threatening condition evaluated by someone who's had 4 hours of sleep a night for weeks.

So sacrifice, mindset operating at scale creates a culture where our core needs are not prioritized and met, and meeting them seems an impractical proposition. Regardless of espoused values and goals of companies that are trying to adopt wellbeing in a real world situation needs a rationalized away with pragmatic realism. This is why gender equality quotas attack a leaders sense of value and fairness.

People getting what they need seems to confuse ideology with meritocracy. Why many leaders perceive wellbeing investments as giving people additional benefits rather than increasing their ability to perform sustainability. Does any of that resonate with you Scott? Well, if I start with myself, I can see that it's my mindset and not my intellectual understanding of wellbeing techniques that keeps me from adopting them.

For me, this points to the awareness problem that I describe in my own book that we've intellectualized awareness with a sort of mental comprehension of a problem or idea, but it's so much more than that. And with all the complexity in our world, there's no question that it's not a linear equation of simply do this to solve that.

So, Jean, how in your estimation, do we break this either or dilemma that wellbeing poses in our modern age? How do we move past the mindset that says, Well, it's either my wellbeing or my success that must take precedence? Well, I believe the answer lies in a mindset where meeting our needs is the means to achieve fulfillment, live our values and maintain wellbeing and perform.

So rather than saying needs something to trade for success, we need to make the countercultural move and see them as the means of creating value. Because as artificial intelligence automates routine work, focusing on what makes us unique in this new world further makes a case for tapping into our needs so that we can fuel the most precious sources of human value creation, situation analysis, creative problem solving, judgment, informing and enriching relationships.

A sufficiency mindset is grounded in self-awareness of our core needs, including physical, emotional, mental and social and purpose and a sense of volition have control over these things. The principal mechanism for building this mindset is to increase our attention and sensitivity to our needs, which we become numb to when the sacrifice mindset is at work. So when we frame from sacrifice, which is fundamentally about hours rather than value, and instead focus on meeting our needs, we are ironically tapping into what drives performance when our physical needs for sleep, rest, nutrition and movement are met.

You can just put more energy into what matters into our lives, but our emotional needs to feel valued and safer met we bring more commitment, more of ourselves to the challenges. We feel empowered to create great impact when we have the appropriate information and resources, when our social needs, connection and belonging. I met were happier and suffer less depression.

And when we can get more done as trust and collaborative problems, solving increases and when our needs for meaning and significance of that unlocks intrinsic motivation, which is well documented in terms of enabling greater resilience and creativity. Cumulatively, meeting our needs creates a sense that we're more in control of our lives, regardless of the uncertainty that might be operating in our environment.

This makes so much sense, Jean. Really well said. So in this conversation, we're talking to Richard Safeer at John Hopkins Medicine, who's been working hard to create a holistic approach to wellbeing. What stood out for you, Scott? Well, I think Richard is focused on the strategy and culture of wellbeing. And what I like is that he believes that wellbeing is not a benefit, as many senior leaders see it, but a source of competitive advantage.

What he also pulls out is that many organizations try wellbeing, but they don't really know how to do it. It's often given to a willing and often passionate but under-resourced and inexperienced individual or individuals. And then it's cut or deprioritized after the initial launch. And in his book, A Cure for the Common Company, he lays out the pillars of a strategy that seems to have really taken hold at John Hopkins.

And that's not something we've seen a lot of. Now, what he doesn't focus on is mindset, as you've just been describing. No, but mindset is one crucial component. But without the strategy, leadership, commitment and resources mindset alone is insufficient. I completely agree. This is a really valuable contribution to helping leaders rethink how they can tackle the wellbeing crisis.

Hi friends. Welcome to the Evolving Leader podcast. The show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender And I'm Jean Gomes. Jean, how are you feeling today? I'm feeling, I’m feeling optimistic. I've got a weekend where there's nothing planned, and that's the first time for a month.

So I'm hoping that there’s going to be renewal and there’s going to be fun, and I’m going to come back on Monday feeling like I'm fully charged. How you feeling, Scott? Yeah, I'm feeling similar. The only plan I have is to go play a little golf. I've started finally resuming that after a few years off and I've been enjoying it. So I'm looking forward to the renewal and looking forward to next week.

My kids are on fall break, so I'm taking three of the five days and we're going off to a cabin as a family. I'm going to spend a little time out there, so that'll be fun. And I'm really interested in the conversation that we're about to have. I think it's a conversation I need to have. It's a it's a topic that I'm growing increasingly interested in, and it's all around health and wellbeing.

And today we are joined by Dr. Richard Safeer. Dr. Safeer is the chief medical director of Employee Health and Wellbeing at John Hopkins Medicine, where he leads the Healthy at Hopkins Employee Health and Wellbeing Strategy. He also holds a faculty appointment at the School of Medicine and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to arriving at Hopkins, Dr. Severe practiced family medicine in Northern Virginia, and he's been credited by some for bringing wellness into the realm of responsibilities of the managed care industry.

He holds faculty appointments in both the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, as well as the School of Public Health. And he continues to see patients at the pediatric cardiology department and is a fellow of the American Academy of Family Practice, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and the American College of Preventative Medicine. He's also written a cure for the common company, a wellbeing prescription for a happier, healthier and more resilient workforce.

And speaking of wellness, he has also hiked and camped in the Andes, Alaska, Australia and across the western United States. He lives in Columbia, Maryland, with his wife, three children and their dog, Cami. And we are so delighted to have him. Dr. Safeer. Welcome to the Evolving Leader. Thanks for having me here today. Rich, welcome to the show.

We're big advocates of finding new ways of maintaining wellbeing in what is an incredibly challenging world today. So we always like to do a quick Felix check in with our guest. So, Rich, how are you feeling today? I feel good. I feel good. I was lucky and fortunate to have a walking meeting with someone I work with. And getting outside is always gives me some energy and really quickly puts a smile on my face.

We're great fans of walking meetings, so that's good to hear. So let's start with your career. What was the motivation for pursuing medicine and then what did that lead you to focus on wellbeing and wellness in the workplace? I am not entirely sure what led me into the field of medicine. There's no one in the family who's a doctor, so I didn't have a role model growing up.

It's possible that the loss of my grandfather when I was in third grade might have been influential. I do remember as a child asking my my dad why grandpa had to smoke. And so I do have that vivid memory. But I got very interested in biology during high school, and I took it from there. And, you know, you know, I'm here because of employee health and wellbeing.

So my main job is actually workplace wellness. Some people call and it's not seeing patients any longer. So I've been so looking forward to this as I said at the beginning, because there's an increasing amount of conversation about it. But yet it seems to me, you know, many organizations don't have a really thought, thoughtful strategy about how to do this.

And as you point out, most of the time, things don't work out the way an organization had hoped. So can you set some context around the challenge of wellbeing in the workplace and perhaps start with how the original concepts of wellness and wellbeing in the workplace originated and the influence they're having on how we think about it today?

Sure, there's multiple challenges, which we'll get to some of them if we look back post-World War Two, there was a conversation, at least in the United States, about how to support the health of some of our workforce, in particular in Texas. There was a question about supporting the health of schoolteachers, and there was the question was around the cost.

And so was born health insurance, at least in the United States of America. And as we fast forward and employers started to embrace this idea that perhaps if we're able to help spread the cost of health care, it will alleviate the burden for our individual employees and make it easier for them to focus on on work and be attractive to get more employees payments, plus advancements in medicine and science.

Ended up leaving the basic tenets of health like healthy foods, walking and sleeping behind in the dust. And as we started to see the rising cost of health, the question came about What are we doing about this? And a wellness field was born because there was a gap between just not being well and being at risk for disease and then being in the stage where you're already creating medical costs.

I would say that one of the challenges arises from the very beginning, which was that we didn't have a full understanding of what health and wellbeing in the workplace meant. And today we know that it's more than just nutrition and movement and a good night's sleep. Yeah. So you spent 25 years looking at this subject. How is it evolved?

And from that point, yeah. Well, when I started looking at it, it was very programmatic focused, like, here's the problem. Our employees have high cholesterol, here's the solution. We're going to screen people. We're going to ask them for a sample of blood. Then we're going to find out who has high cholesterol. And then here's the intervention. It was very mechanical and now we're at the point where we are.

Well, the industry, the thought leaders are at a much more holistic level of understanding the underlying roots of some of our risks for disease or some of our roots for the chronic diseases that many of the employees have developed. Now, I say the thought leaders, because while some employers and companies are there, many organizations are not quite there yet.

So you've come to identify that there are six building blocks for getting there. So can you maybe give us an overview of these building blocks? Sure. And I came to this understanding in the last six, eight years after having studied this area, as you said, for 25 years. So I'll give you a phrase so that you can remember these six building blocks plan for success.

The p and plan is for peer support, the L for leadership engagement, the PN, and Plan for norms. And I I'll skip over to the word success the first ascent success is for shared values. The two C's culture, connection points and the final s social climate. So it's really fascinating. You know, one of the biggest determinants of what behaviors will engage in and our emotions are by the people we're around most of the time, our peers.

So our peers are the people who are our equals. So are a coworker, a friend, someone who's in another company with a similar role, people who don't hold power over each other, but rather associate with each other on a personal level and at an equal level. And the literature is quite convincing and it ranges all these different behaviors that if we want to lose weight and we try to do that with somebody else who's also trying to lose weight, we're more likely to lose that weight.

Same with quitting smoking, etc.. Our leaders, our team managers at all levels are tremendously influential in our health and wellbeing, and most of them don't even realize it. Now, the building block is called leadership engagement, not just leadership support. The difference being we don't need our leaders to say this is important. We actually need them to be involved with the solution.

Norms are for the collect and expectation of a group of individuals. So teams have norms and organizations have norms. The norms. This expectation is, Hey, this is what we do because this is the way you're going to fit in. It's bigger than just one peer who you might associate with more often, because if you're on a team of ten, you may not really hang out with a couple people on the team, but collectively you're likely to all behave similarly during the workday.

If everyone takes a lunch break at lunch, you're likely to take a lunch break. But if no one does, you probably don't want to be seen as the outlier because you don't want your boss to think, Well, I'm the slacker Everybody else is is working. The essence shared in success for shared values. Companies have values. Some of them follow them.

Some of them don't. Presuming that the company lives by their values, it's imperative that they include some form of wellbeing. Employee wellbeing as part of their value. Because the literature bears out the research bears out that when organizations see their employees as humans first, and then workers when they actually understand that the wellbeing is an essential part of their business, they're employees are more likely to be healthy as well and the organizations more likely to be successful.

Culture Connection Points The fifth building block. These are the nudges. These are the different strategies that employers can use to nudge the employees to make healthier choices and have happier emotions during the day. Now, no one can make an employee be healthier, happier, but we can certainly set up situations so it's more likely. And then finally, the social climate.

This is about the general feeling in the workplace or on the team. Is it is the morale high? Is the morale good? Is there a sense of trust amongst the people who work together? Does it actually feel like a team and not just a group of people who are all earning a paycheck? So it might, you know, seem an odd question, but, you know, a company, an organization like Johns Hopkins Medicine, one might assume that this is a given, you know, like in terms of a priority and an understanding of how people should be doing these things, but maybe not.

So what what did you learn? How did this play out this way of thinking? Yeah. What were the biggest obstacles that you had to face? Right. Well, if listeners know about John's Hopkins, it might be that they know about Johns Hopkins because of their leadership in medical research and advancing the field in bringing new treatments to people suffering from rare diseases.

I mean, we are considered a quaternary health care delivery center, and people from around the world come to us because we have the expertise in a variety of areas that can't be found elsewhere. It's it's not likely that people know us for our health and wellbeing. So if you think about the roots of where Johns Hopkins has come from, I would say that it's not a slam dunk that Johns Hopkins medicine has been as interested in a good night's sleep historically.

And so when I interviewed for a job as a medical director at Johns Hopkins Medicine in the role of leading their self-insured health plan, there really wasn't much of a. Employee health and wellbeing strategy. Actually, there wasn't a strategy. There are a few pieces and parts, but it wasn't a strategy. And actually that's what intrigued me to come to Johns Hopkins medicine because the institution wasn't even aware that they didn't have what they needed.

And fortunately, they were receptive once understanding the science behind the area. Listen, you know, fortunately, I work with leaders and and colleagues that if you can explain that something works and why and who's shown that if you can prevent to present the logic, then it's not a slam dunk, but the opportunities to move forward are much greater. So what were the big kind of bars in showing them the the evidence community?

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the first challenges, John, was to not come in and say, this is what I know. It was really more to help the leaders who were kind of in the space understand the opportunities that lay ahead. And so building a collaborative team and showing them the path was a ramp up phase. And Hopkins has some pretty smart people.

So trying to corral folks to understand that if we draw on resources together, we would be more successful. Now, one of the earliest things that we addressed and eventually tackled was the overwhelming exposure to unhealthy beverages. Now, on the grand scheme of things, what we drink probably pales in comparison to how much sleep we get or how much stress level we have.

However, when starting organizational change and I do believe that practitioners and the employee health and wellbeing space are generally not versed in organizational change. And I encourage anyone who's listening to this, who's in this space to get more comfortable with it. You need to find something that will ignite a group to rally around. And at the time it was the right topic.

It was the right scope. And so, John, that's what we tackled first and took a few years because we didn't quite have the infrastructure built yet, but it helped us build the infrastructure because it allowed other people to see how having an infrastructure would make this transition to offering more healthy beverages much easier. So, Rich, let's pick up on organizational change, because that's what was coming to mind as you were talking through all of your building blocks, because there are some organizations that, you know, there's an external pressure to offer some kind of wellbeing as almost an attraction tool.

Like, you know, we do wellbeing here, we care about it, right? But it's sort of bolted on to the side of the organization and it's not really in the DNA, right? So from an org change perspective, how, how can people who are listening and are thinking, gosh, we need to do more of this? How do they start to approach building it into the fabric of everything where we've got to tackle the obstacles that exist, the cultural norms, the subcultures that exist within different departments.

You mentioned what earlier about lunches. You know, a department who might lunch together versus a department who everybody lunches in one person, you know, or nobody lunches and one person feels they can't. There's a lot in there. So how do we start to do that change? Well, I personally embraced the diffusion of innovation theory. I also drew on Carter's eight stages of organization tional change as it was convenient for me.

And I think that listeners need to figure out which model works for them. Now, I don't think everybody needs to learn about organizational change, but at least some of the people who are core to this work and, you know, depending on the size of the company, depends on how many people get involved, obviously. I wrote a cure for the Common company because I did want leaders to have some idea of the breadth and depth of what's needed to transition the workplace culture to a healthier one.

And I think it's an easy read because it's entertaining and it includes stories. So that I think is another opportunity for for where to start to understand the playing field. What's the cost of not doing it? Like, what are some, you know, organizations who do it well? What are some tangible results, like measurable metrics you have versus those who aren't doing it?

Yeah. Now, Scott, I think you just mentioned that, you know, sometimes organizations offer a bolted on wellbeing strategy because they know that they need to do that now to be an attractive employer. And some candidates will see through it and in others won't. But when you're inside an organization, you will definitely see if it's there and feel if it's there and definitely know if it's not.

And so the benefit that's become most apparent to organizations and companies in the last few years is the ability to retain talent because, as you know, employees have gotten fed up with the with the rise of the pandemic. It has made people rethink their lives. And those companies that were situated well in regards to a wellbeing strategy and platform prior to the onset of the pandemic fared much better.

And others that weren't are potentially still catching up. Now the list goes on, Scott, but I think that example alone will resonate with almost everyone, if not everyone who's listening to our discussion today. If you were advising somebody in your shoes in another organization about how to convince the the executive team who may be a bit skeptical about making a major investment in this, what would you say to them?

Well, I mean, the first thing I would not I wouldn't walk up to and say it's not a major investment, but I just want everyone to realize that you do not have to commit a major investment to to do this. Well, you do have to commit resources. So there is a need to approach your leadership, and I'll give you some thoughts about how to do that.

Now, for for one, you need to understand what is going to be important to the leaders that you're approaching for some leaders, it might be about having people drink more water. For others it might be around exercise. Back in the 1970s, when Johnson and Johnson, arguably one of the biggest health companies on the planet, was getting started with their employee health and wellbeing program.

As I understand Stand it, their CEO at that time was a big runner and so starting with physical fitness was a probably a no brainer for the people who were part of those decisions. So get to know the individual or individuals who you're trying to make the case to because something is going to resonate with them. Now, at the Cognitive level, you know, this is about a business decision based on what the evidence shows.

However, it's really hard for a lot of leaders to separate their own personal health and wellbeing experience when it comes to the workplace and what's good for everybody else. So we have to kind of play to them to a degree in order to at least get started. John Does that suffice as a good opening because there's so many different directions to go?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's that's a really interesting take because I think where most people go to is trying to make a business case for this rather than thinking about the personal motivation for somebody to kind of translate their own understanding of wellbeing into a motive for doing something for others. Yeah. And that's going to be necessary.

And the first step, which I think people skip over and often what I see is people saying this is the most important thing because this is what our data says or this is what the public health data says. So that all may be true. And yet you really need to make that personal connection with the decision maker or decision makers.

And then once you do know where you're landing on to want to make a business case and you do want to draw on data, if you can get data from the health plan, then I think you're going to be in better shape than if you can't. Now, depending on the size of your organization, depends on whether or not you can get data from the health plan.

Now, depending on the country you live in, data from a health plan may may not be as important. So maybe you have to look at employee retention information. Maybe there's a certain part of the organization where the turnover rate is much higher than in other parts of the organization. And maybe you need to talk with human resources and determine or have a discussion.

What do you think the problem is? And I wouldn't be surprised if it was somehow related to employee health and wellbeing, whether or not the organization was actually measuring that at the time. Because we know from market research, from large reputable organizations like Gallup, that this is a big deal if you're enjoying the show. You might also appreciate Scott's new book, The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence, which provides simple, powerful tools to help us better understand ourselves and others.

Available online at all major retailers. How do we how do you how do you recommend approaching some of the education components to people? You know, there's I think most people understand on paper, like they know what healthy and good looks like. And yet they they they tell themselves stories, I don't have time to do it. Or in many organizational cultures bordering on near burnout is still seen as some kind of badge of honor.

Right? You work yourself to the bone. You don't you know, if you if you tell people if you're only sleeping four or 5 hours a night, that's somehow evidence that you're a better worker. There's there's still a lot of these norms that need to be broken, you know, so that people can find the space and freedom and to engage in wellbeing practices.

Right. So there's that that delta between knowing and doing. I'm curious about the educational or anything else. You have to right about that. Right. So providing education is a very low barrier. It's very easy to do, but it doesn't work very well. I mean, most of us know that we're not supposed to be smoking, right? And most of us know that we should be eating our fruits and vegetables and getting up and walking.

So I think that the utility is low and that's really one of the major reasons why organizations need to focus on creating a wellbeing culture in the workplace. Culture is the shared behaviors, beliefs and attitudes of a group of people. And in the context of our conversation today, the group of people are people who work together, and it's about supporting those norms that point towards health and happiness and trying to pull apart the norms that are unhealthy and don't support our happiness.

And it's it's a lot easier said than done, but education is just not an awesome strategy in of itself. But I do want to say something about communication. Communication is an example of a culture connection point. One of those six building blocks and communication can help nudge people a little bit closer towards doing something. But our communication needs to be a little bit more clever and a little bit more creative in order to make an impact.

So if you walk into a cafeteria at Johns Hopkins Medicine in one of our hospitals and you want to have a food that has low sodium, then you can look at the board, the menu, and you can see a green dot next to those foods. And that's really important because we know that high blood pressure is one of the most common chronic diseases in developed countries around the world.

Half of the people don't know they have it. It's a highly undiagnosed condition and many people are in the pre hypertension or at risk. And this just makes it easy. This green dot is a form of communication. So instead of writing a whole newsletter about hypertension and I'm not opposed to that, but we've got to get more creative to communicate in different ways and get the attention of folks and make choices more easily.

It's always surprising to me that unhealthy choices are even an option in a medical place, right? I've spent more time in hospital waiting rooms than I care to would have wanted to. But, you know, I go to the cafeterias and I'm astounded by the level of unhealthy choices that are even available in. That space. It feels like they're trying to create their own future business to me.

Is there a is there any collective push, you know, at John Hopkins to I love the I love the green dot? You know, I think that that makes so much sense because it reminds you in real time, like, here are my options and this one's better. Is there a gradual push towards trying to make all of the options healthier?

Yeah. So we have a nutrition policy. We've gotten to that point where we actually have a policy that spells out what we should be offering to our employees and the policy allows for flexibility. So I can understand why I got my undergraduate degree in nutrition. And that actually was influential in my pivot from being a full time family doctor to the role I'm in now.

So I am all for healthy eating, and yet we know that there is some need to give flexibility in these types of strategies. What what would be ideal is for the organization at large to be behind the effort for making it easy for people to have a healthy and wild day. If you were to do something like eliminate choice and whether it's whether it's your food choices or you tell everybody at 8 a.m., if you're an employee, you have to do ten push ups, you're creating some conflict, and that alone decreases the social climate.

So social climate is another part of the building blocks. Employees, individuals, humans want to have some autonomy. We all want to have some control over our own day. And so that's really the essence. Scott, as to why we wouldn't go that that route. Now, I will tell you, there's also another reason. You know, our cafeterias are open to the visitors in our buildings.

And so there's also some practical implications. Yeah, that makes sense to me. But listen, my mom was recently if my mom's listening, I'm not going to give any of your your private health information. But she was recently in the hospital. And listen, I visited her, of course, and I was in a Hopkins hospital. I was really disappointed with what was on her tray.

And she knew because I've been you know, because she's got to live with me anyway, it's not great for most patients. Yeah, I think that's the same in a lot of hospitals, certainly in the UK, having spent a lot of time there with my both my parents in the last five years looking at the food that I was bringing in and so let's get into it into a kind of quite specific tactical thing that you talk about in the book, which I thought was interesting, which is at there, there isn't just one culture and one norm.

There are multiple in organizations. So how do leaders optimize for subcultures that exist? An organization with the norms may be very different from the rest of the company. How do you how do you tailor it in a good way, right? So this is why it's important for at all levels to have some type of training or reading on their role and responsibility and supporting the health and wellbeing of the people on their team.

Because without knowing what to look for and what to do, it's really difficult to create a space where our employees reside most of the day. One thing that leaders can do is identify the norms on their team. There are going to be some healthy norms and there are going to be some unhealthy norms. And as you mentioned, John, they may these norms that exist in smaller teams may not be consistent with the with what the organization is trying to achieve.

And so if a leader can identify an unhealthy norm, let's stick with this. Not taking a break idea that's on my mind lately because that's a challenge. Honestly, it's a challenge at Johns Hopkins Medicine for a couple of reasons. Everyone wants to do a good job and you're in health care and some people have this challenge. If we don't work through a break, you know, what does that mean to our patients?

So it's it's a little bit of a quagmire. But nonetheless, if a leader can identify that, listen, my folks aren't taking a break and this isn't good, because if I notice that when they take a break, when they come back, they're in a better mood, they're more creative, better able to focus in. Overall, they do a better job.

And when they're in a better mood, they're better able to be good teammates, right? Because our emotions impact the people we work with as well. Yeah, I was going to bring up the emotional component piece of it, which is a harder area I think, for organizations to traverse into, But it's critically important in in this topic, obviously. Right.

The the interplay of decision making and emotional wellbeing are so correlated. I remember having a clear thought of my own when I had gained some weight. You know, it's like I need to lose weight to get healthy. And it became very clear. No, no, no. I need to get healthy to lose weight. Right? I am eating habitually. I'm snacking out of, you know, anxiety, whatever the case might be.

I have to be able to focus in on the whys of my bad choices. Right. And so and I know that's harder because it can get a little invasive and a little personal for org leaders to get there. But without us addressing it as a topic, then we missed the full breadth of the topic. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that.

So Scott, first of all, congratulations on the introspection. I mean, I wish everyone could have introspection in the context of the health challenges they're facing because many people don't understand the underlying causes of the health situations that they're currently in. This is a little bit challenging in the sense that, you know, we're all I mean, many people grew up thinking, okay, we're not supposed to talk about politics and work and we're not supposed to talk about people's health at work.

And I am not suggesting managers by any means ask their employees, Hey, do you want to lose weight? That would not be a good thing. However, I do think it's important to have managers have meaningful conversation points with each employee on their team at a periodic time. And I don't mean once a month. I mean something more frequent, like maybe once a week, maybe once every other week.

Because if if you're successful in building a connection that goes beyond getting the work done and goes into what you know about each other as people, if a leader is able to share their health and wellbeing, challenges allow themselves to be. Varner able. What you're doing is you're setting up an increasing likelihood that you are building trust. And when there's trust between a team leader and an employee, then it's more likely than an employee might offer.

What's causing the stress that is in the influence of their manager? Now, I'm fully aware because I'm a manager and no matter how much trust you have with an employee, then it's not always for sure that the employee will share that. What's frustrating me is access. And so there are other outlets like Human Resources and Champions. These are volunteer employees who've been trained as a health or wellbeing champion that people on your team could turn to to get that support.

So, Scott, just let me follow up with one more thing about this idea of emotions. I do think, you know, if managers are paying attention, even if you're not having these meaningful conversations once a week or every other week, if you are attuned with yourself, it will make it easier for to be aware of your employees. If we slow down enough, if we take a breath before we go into a team meeting and take a breath before we go into a one on one meeting with an individual on our team, we should be able to recognize facial expressions, body language.

We should be able to know when someone on our team is not quite right, which would invite the question Is there anything I can do to help you? You don't look the same as I've seen you in the past. Yeah, I mean, I think it's so important that we normalize leaders taking care of their own needs because then they're unable to take care of the needs of their people if they are suppressing that knowledge and, you know, and so on.

Yes, I think yes, One of the things that we're hearing a lot of from guests on the warming leader is that the reduction of these kind of natural boundaries between work and home and other aspects of our life is so great now that the sacrifices that we're making to achieve it work. They don't just affect us. They affect our families.

They affect our communities. They affect, you know, our kids and grandchildren even. How how does an organization, you know, kind of like take responsibility or does it, you know, for for extending wellbeing to the whole of our lives? Yeah. I mean, we can't separate our family from our workday or our workday from our family. I mean, it's this gets into for some communities, professional community, I guess, in the discussions, we call it work life balance, work life harmony, work life integration.

So you are right, certainly to bring this up, John. I mean, at its core, if an employer does a great job of supporting the health and wellbeing of their workforce, then the individual is going to go home and that family is going to have a happy and healthy mom, dad or older brother, whatever it is, whoever's living in the household.

So right there, there is a connection. I'm not sure that I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant, though. And so depending on the circumstances or the context, you know, many employers extend certain benefits to the entire family in order to show their support. Now, I don't know what it was like in your communities growing up or even 20 years ago, but in the communities and the community I grew up in and the communities I've worked in for the last 25 years, gone are the days of the company picnic.

Gone are the days of the holiday party where employees could bring a guest. We don't really have the opportunity to help others upfront, see our family members are the important people in our lives. Now, what some employers are doing, and I've seen other employers do different things. I give examples in the book at Johns Hopkins Medicine, I have seen many teams in their breakroom.

They have pictures of someone in their family or their dog, and I think it's great. I mean, it's not only good to help other people see who's in your life, but it helps us during the day to see one of our loved ones or our pet. I mean, I don't know. You guys might have just seen me instantly smile.

I mean, it is hard not to smile when you see a loved one smiling, especially during the day when you're running around. And there it is. There's that picture. It's such a nice grounding to just slow you down for a minute. And so John, a very simple way. I've just given you the whole spectrum of ways we can work this with our with our loved ones.

I've been trying to get John to take me on a picnic for years, but he just can't. So given that you've you've been studying this for 25 years, I'm curious, you know, in the next 25 years, where do you think this will evolve to? Where we going? You've hinted at it with what you've been describing, of course, but what are your predictions?

Yeah, I did allude to the idea that I believe that we have to allow more leaders to understand their role in supporting the health and wellbeing of the people they lead. There's no way that companies and organizations to get to that next level without embracing that Their leaders are part of the solution. Folks like myself and the team that I work with, we can do a lot, but we can't do everything and we are certainly not able to impact the day to day behaviors and emotions of the people in our work community.

Now, if you're a leader or manager, listen to this. You're probably like, I can't do one more thing. I'm being asked to get trained on this and I'm asked to be doing that. You know, obviously I'm biased, but if you look at the literature, it'll bear out the fundamental foundation of an organization's success is the health and wellbeing of the people they lead.

And there are a variety of reasons for that. Just the first one that I'll give you, the only one I'll refer you back to is the previous discussion about retention. If you don't have people on your team, then you won't have this problem about how figuring out how to. So once you create this wellbeing culture on your team, a lot of other management issues will start to disappear, including whether or not there's a challenge for your team to be more productive or more effective.

Those things will fall into place. So Scott, there is some movement on this front, but I believe this has to be the next big thing in order for us to move forward. Yeah, that's a good challenge and call to action for our listeners. I think it's a great place for us to land our discussion. Thank you so much for your time, Rich and everybody, you know, go get your copy of Cure for the Common Company.

There's a lot more depth in the book that we didn't get to cover in detail here. So so do read it and think about how you can apply this tier to your own workforce. And until next time, folks remember the world is evolving. Are you.