What if I told you that the conventional concept of workplace wellness is outdated and ineffective and that the responsibility of managing stress shouldn't solely rest on the shoulders of employees?
Perhaps the Job Strain Model is no longer suitable for the contemporary work environment due to evolving job demands, a diverse workforce, and the rapid advancement of technology.
In this episode, we unpack these statements.
We will challenge current wellness programs and turn to the research of Dr. Sonia Lupien and Dr. Meg Lovejoy for insights. We pose critical questions about the work systems in place that contribute to stress, urging a redefinition of workplace wellness.
Tune in for a mind-opening discussion on how we can better support our employees' health and well-being.
Links:
- Work Redesign for the 21st Century: Promising Strategies for Enhancing Worker Well-Being
- Stable Scheduling Study: Health Outcomes Report
- Using Kaizen to Improve Employee Well-Being
If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.
One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.
Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.
Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Learn more about Candice and her work here.
What if I told you that the conventional concept of workplace wellness is outdated and ineffective and that the responsibility of managing stress shouldn't solely rest on the shoulders of employees?
Perhaps the Job Strain Model is no longer suitable for the contemporary work environment due to evolving job demands, a diverse workforce, and the rapid advancement of technology.
In this episode, we unpack these statements.
We will challenge current wellness programs and turn to the research of Dr. Sonia Lupien and Dr. Meg Lovejoy for insights. We pose critical questions about the work systems in place that contribute to stress, urging a redefinition of workplace wellness.
Tune in for a mind-opening discussion on how we can better support our employees' health and well-being.
Links:
- Work Redesign for the 21st Century: Promising Strategies for Enhancing Worker Well-Being
- Stable Scheduling Study: Health Outcomes Report
- Using Kaizen to Improve Employee Well-Being
If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.
One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.
Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.
Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Learn more about Candice and her work here.
The hearth is for you if you're a business leader with a team. Here we have conversations about how to keep growing. When you feel you've reached your capacity, when what you're doing is working but you're starting to see the cracks, when there's a gap between where you're at now and where you want to be, here we find ways to transition through the struggle of survival toward creating a thriving business that supports you and your team as whole humans. Your host is me, candice Elliott. I'm a business strategist and mentor who specializes in working with business owners who are going through periods of growth. Especially when you're adding more people to your team, the practices and systems that worked when your team was smaller just don't seem to fit anymore, and when you're caught in stress and reaction, it's tough to reimagine the way that you created your world of work, both your own personal one and the one that you created for others. I help people align their values and business practices to build practical, sustainable, thriving work ecosystems and no, this isn't just some work utopia talk. To do this, I bring forward my decade-long professional background in human resources and organizational development, working with growing businesses across many sectors, and my decades-long search for meaning and wholeness, which includes researching the history of work and how it came to be what it is today, practicing a trauma-informed approach to business and integrating work, life and spirituality into a meaningful whole. Let's take this journey together. Hello everyone, welcome back to the Hearth. I am overjoyed to be bringing you this episode that is about employee health and the workplace, and since last season, I've been doing quite a bit of research into like in the academic world, in academic papers, into different kinds of studies that have been happening and coming to understand where the current direction is going with what's recommended in the workplace to support employee health in particular. So the next few episodes are going to focus on different aspects of employee health. So today, what I'm going to focus on is within the field of human resources.
Speaker 1:One way well, not just human resources, business in general one way that business for the last 20 or so years, has worked toward supporting wellness for employees is through workplace wellness programs or workplace wellness initiatives, and so there are all of these different kinds of things that can be included in a workplace wellness program. It may include gym memberships, it may include massages during lunch breaks, it may include a weight loss challenge or a step count challenge or a bike to work, challenge or different things like that. And what is coming out of the research is that these types of programs, because they assume that employees can and should manage stressful work conditions on their own, they don't actually have the effect of decreasing the stress that employees are experiencing, because the stressful work conditions that employees undergo are not self-imposed. For the most part, they are a part of the systems that we have created in our businesses, and so the programs and initiatives that are typically part of workplace wellness programs, while they are geared toward health outcomes, they're not impacting health in a meaningful way because they're not addressing the root issue of stress. And there is now so much research. I mean Dr Sonia Lupien at the University of Montreal is one paper that you could look at. She looks at the effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behavior and cognition, and she explains that there's a link between the negative effects of stress on health, both physical and emotional health, and the duration that a person experiences stress for. And that's one study. There's so many more, and if you want to learn more about how stress affects the body physically and in behaviors, you can listen to season one. I believe it's episode three. That really dives into that.
Speaker 1:Coming to a realization of this is what Dr Meg Lovejoy did in her paper called Work Redesigned for the 21st Century, and what she proposes is a reorganization of everyday work with two aims one of enabling individuals to work productively while also promoting health and well-being, and she proposes to do this through updating what's called the Job Strain Model. And the Job Strain Model is something that was created in 1979. It is a part of organizational development, business management, human resources management theory. It was based on research that was conducted at the end of World War II through the 1970s. So this model was created based on information from about 1950 to about the middle of 1970. And what it shows is that stress is affected by the demands of a job, the amount of discretion that a person has in their decision-making authority and the capacity for social support at work. So these three things were identified. As if you, depending on the demands of the job, the amount of decision-making authority you have and the social support that you have, your job is more or less stressful. And now we have the link of stress is also tied to both physical and emotional well-being. Right, but the original model? It suggests certain actions, which are based on the workplace as it existed in 1950 to 1970s right, which is much different from the typical workplace or worker of today.
Speaker 1:Some of the major shifts that have happened during that time are that there are far less single-earner family households that workers are. There are more workers who are caretakers than there were at that time, both caretakers of children and also of elderly, because now, as people are living longer, there is more of a demand within families to care for our elderly folks, and the diversity of the workforce has changed quite a bit. There also have been shifts in the ways that businesses are run. There have been technology shifts. There have been so many different changes over the course of that time, and so what Dr Meg Lovejoy proposes doing in the update is to take into account all of those changes.
Speaker 1:If we continue to place the responsibility of stressful conditions experienced in the workplace on the employee solely and we don't take responsibility for inquiring into the systems that we have created and whether or not they need to be stressful in the way they are in order to get to the outcomes that we are desiring, there are a few things that happen. So when people are in jobs where their schedules are uncertain, for example I mean for an hourly employee it could mean that they could be called in at any time. Their shifts could be changed at any time. They never know what their schedule is going to be. That kind of a thing. For an exempt worker, a professional worker, it could be that they're always expected to be answering their emails, regardless of what time they're actually supposed to be working. Thank you. They have responsibilities for things outside of times when they should be working, so like, for example, if they're on a vacation and they're responsible for some key thing that there's no one else that's trained to do it, so while they're gone they have to do it. Or, you know, if they're taking time away for a leave of absence, like a medical leave of absence, but they can't actually take all of the time because they are not able to transition all of the responsibilities.
Speaker 1:These kinds of things are associated with an increased risk of poor health outcomes, and those poor health outcomes include things like cardiovascular disease, heightened work, family conflicts and in a few episodes I'm going to talk in more detail about the work, family conflict dynamic and hyperhypothyroidism, hypertension, autoimmune disorders. There are all kinds of things that are linked to these kinds of stressful conditions. It's specifically related to schedule control and control over workload, and so if we don't inquire into this when it's happening, you know we just are saying, well, they're working for me, so I expect them to work these hours and they have to be available all the time because I'm paying them money, which I hear from a lot of business owners. It doesn't take into account the fact that, in order for this person to keep working for you for a long time, in order for them to be healthy, to be fully present and creative and, you know, able to meet the changing dynamics of the workplace and be innovative and deal with stressful like real stressful situations that come up, it means that we're going to burn people out and they're going to leave and they're going to go. Try to find another place to work where they don't have to deal with all of that, right? So what can you do, right? Like I don't want to leave this with. Like, here are all of the problems. This is how, like the way you have set up a workplace, or the way you know we believe that we have to set up work, or, you know, by default it has become this way. Like I don't want to leave us in this hopeless space, right, I want to give us some action, noble steps. So one thing to look at is job control, to give control over the time that work is happening and how it is happening to the employees as much as possible, and that takes a level of trust, right.
Speaker 1:So there have been quite a few different studies around scheduling. That's like one of those things that's measurable, right, but there were. There was a stable scheduling study at GAP retail stores in San Francisco and then there was another stable scheduling study that happened, I believe it was, with Best Buy Stores in the Midwest. But basically, throughout these studies they showed that there were positive outcomes when schedules were stabilized. The way that schedules were stabilized was by and these are all part-time shift workers, so giving two weeks advanced notice of when someone needs to be working, eliminating on-calls, introducing tech-enabled shift swapping, and so you know some kind of a program where people can access their own schedule and shift and swap shifts with people directly through that schedule that there was a stable shift structure and core scheduling. So this means that basically the shifts were the same week to week and people were generally scheduled for similar shifts week to week, and then everyone was working part-time plus, so more than 20 hours, rather than potentially being scheduled for like eight hours one week and then you know 20 hours the next week. And they added additional targeted staffing for busier times and what this showed like what came out of this was that at those GAP stores this is the GAP study sales increased by 5% and the margin with this retail kind of situation is 1% the profit margin.
Speaker 1:So when you're increasing by 5%, that's pretty significant. The amount of productivity that was increased was 7%. And then on top of that, employees self-reported some positive health outcomes. So there was an increase in people's rest, like their. Their quality of sleep increased. And then also they reported decreased levels of stress, and stress levels decreased across the whole employee population. They decreased more for people who had more than one job. I think it was 9% decrease for people who had more than one job and a 15% decrease for people who had care-taking responsibilities, like children or elderly that they were taking care of. This is really significant Having control over when I'm working, knowing when I'm working, knowing when I need to be on and when I can be off. You know when I can be taking care of my responsibilities outside of my job is integral to making significant changes in the amount of stress that people are experiencing at work, and a lot of these studies have been done on shift work.
Speaker 1:But that doesn't mean that the principals do not apply to exempt employees, people who are earning salaries. So I encourage you to think about your salaried employees as well. You know, if you're considering making some shifts and thinking, you know, like, how do I request that a person does something for me? Do I send a demand or am I asking in what way this person can get it to me? Thinking about the lines, the varying lines of communication that there are and again, this also applies to shift work but thinking about all the different lines of communication, like when is it appropriate to text, when is it appropriate to call, when is it appropriate to send an email? When is it appropriate to, you know, get on Slack or Google chat or you know whatever systems you're using for communication? When do you go there? And then what is the expected turnaround time once you're there? Thinking about your timelines, like do you need to ask someone to do that this afternoon, or is it okay if they get it to you in three days or early next week or by the end of next week.
Speaker 1:I think we live in a time of, you know, immediacy, right? It's like I can go on Amazon and order something and have it tomorrow, like basically anything I want, and people are more stressed the more immediate needs and the more immediate demands there are on their time, and so we can't treat people like this resource that is a never-ending source of energy, because it's not. People become depleted the more demands and less control they have over their time. That brings us to this next piece, which is job demands. In this space of job demands, we look at what are all the components that make up this job, what are the types of skills that are required and what is required of the person physically in the work environment in order to be successful in the job, and then this also gets into autonomy. So, within this space of job demands, in order to create a less stressful environment for someone in their work, we look at what are those physical components Like.
Speaker 1:Is this, for example, a job that is happening where they have a lot of travel, where they are exposed to a lot of heat or exposed to a lot of cold? Is it a job where the person does not have very much autonomy, where they can't decide when to do something or how to do something. And when we look at job demands, some of them are not gonna change, right, like, if I'm a roofer, I'm gonna be working on a roof, it's gonna be hot, I'm gonna need to be safe and secure in my work. That's not gonna change. Something that could change is the amount of autonomy, for example, that a person has over the specific gear that they're using, because they have a preference for certain gear over other gear. Right, this is kind of a dynamic one to look at. With regard to job demands, it's really specific to the particular job the person has and the work environment. But generally, what you're trying to look at is, among the demands that there are on this person, are there ways to decrease things that bring more stress and increase things that bring more autonomy? It's through autonomy that people are able to feel like they have control over the demands of the job, and so, really, if there are ways for you to either change the demands or give more autonomy, that is the way to go. This is why it's so beneficial to start to create training programs, to create resources where people can find information themselves, to create peer and mentor networks within the organization so that there is more support for job demands.
Speaker 1:The third thing that we can look at which is a part of this job strain model and updating this job strain model to reflect the world that we live in now is looking at social support. So creating well, really, it starts with prioritizing supporting employees, personal and family lives and supporting social networks within the workplace. You have to make social support a priority from both. It has to be from the bottom up and the top down. So this means in some organizations people are expected to be, for an example, an organization where you have billable hours, where you're expecting everyone to be like 100% billable hours. Well, that means there's no time for anything else. There's no time for checking in with your boss, there's no time for meetings, there's no time for emails, let alone is there really time for you to get lunch or have a coffee with a coworker, because it's impossible really to have 100% billable hours. It means that you're gonna have to work hours that are not your work hours in order to be able to get it that high. So what you can do is look at a utilization rate and determine like, okay, maybe we'll have a 70% utilization rate for billable hours where people are billing to projects, and then people can have 30% of time to do other things. Some of those things can be work related things, and then other of those things can be social things where people are connecting.
Speaker 1:The US surgeon general, at the time of recording this a few months ago, released the loneliness report that just says that people in the United States in general are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, and in the end of that report there are all of these sections for different, for ways that different types of organizations can assist and help to curb this impact of loneliness that's happening. And one of them talks about the workplace, and it talks about not just creating time and space for these kinds of social networks to be created within the workplace, but also giving managers the tools that they need in order to be able to support employees' personal and family life more broadly. Businesses are a part of a network. We're not just the place where a person works. Right Through that person, we are connected to the broader community. So we're connected to that person's family and we're connected to the social groups that that person is participating in and we're connected to the different places where they're spending their time. The more we're able to support our people to fully experience the fullness of their lives in our communities, the better off we're all going to be. If our employees are so drained by the end of the day that all they're doing is sitting on the couch and watching TV which that is totally fine Sometimes we all need that right but that doesn't provide the same kind of support as if they're going to their chess club or their knitting circle, or even going to the brewery and seeing their friends having dinner somewhere. There's not so much of a dynamic experience of community if people are so stressed that they're not even able to get out of their house. Right, and this is really a way that business can impact the vitality of community, and I'm going to be talking more about that, actually, in the next episode.
Speaker 1:Before I finish, I just wanted to talk a little bit about. You know, in addition to these things, one of the things that I have some experience in and just like love, my brain loves is lean management practices, and I just if like there are things about efficiency that just make me so excited, especially when people are able to be efficient in a way that saves them time, so that they are able to be less stressed and so that things can work better. Like that just makes me so excited. But I think that when we implement lean management practices, we still have to orient toward the workers well being, because we can, you know, be so into creating these lean management practices and this efficiency and saving all this time and, you know, all these wonderful outcomes. But if we don't also build into that the space for people to connect, the space for people to learn and to become autonomous, the space for people to have control over their schedules and the ability to shift them as they need to, and then we're ultimately doing ourselves a disservice because we're going to be increasing our turnover and decreasing our ability really to be profitable.
Speaker 1:So just to kind of conclude this talk there, you know, in this research that I've been doing, there is some data about cost. The data on like wellness initiatives versus work redesign initiatives is that employee wellness programs now typically cost in the realm of $700 per employee and I'm pretty sure that's per year Whereas work redesign efforts are more on the side of $340 per employee. It's also something that, with a workplace wellness program. That's an investment that you're making year after year after year, whereas if you're going through a process of redesigning the work that's happening in your organization, it's something that's not going to happen every year, right Like you're going to do some kind of a work, redesign effort and then, typically, if you're going to expand significantly again, then you would have another look at how the work is going to happen. So it's not something that happens every year. Something that maybe happens every time there's a big shift and depending on how much your company is changing would determine how frequently that would happen. There's just like so much research on this link between the workplace and employee health.
Speaker 1:This is really what I'm going to be focusing my solo episodes this season on, at least the first part of the season. If any of this was of interest to you, if you would like me to send you any additional resources, we're going to link a lot of things in the show notes, but if there's anything specifically that you wanted to ask me about or want to know more about, please reach out. I would love to have a conversation. Hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out and, if you're feeling generous, please leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Speaker 1:If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart and you'd like to connect with me, there are a few ways to do that. One is my newsletter, where I put most of my time and energy when I'm not working with clients or with my family, or working on this podcast Sorry, social media. The newsletter is a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and, of course, updates on what's happening with the podcast. Whenever something's going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first. Another resource that I have for you is my guide to doing work differently. This guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place if you're looking for somewhere to get started. Last, if you've got a burning question, a comment or a situation you'd like my eyes on, you can email me. All those links are in the show notes. Take care, brave a soul, catch you next time.