HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
Transforming Workplace Culture with Dr. Alexander Lovell and Dr. Bill Howatt
The boundary between professional and personal life has never been more blurred. As Dr. Alexander Lovell, Research Director at the O.C. Tanner Institute, reveals in this compelling episode, employees worldwide are increasingly operating in "survival mode" rather than thriving at work, and the consequences extend far beyond productivity metrics.
Alex introduces guest host Dr. Bill Howatt to the "Survival Continuum", a framework that maps the journey from mere survival to genuine thriving. This isn't a simple binary state but rather a nuanced spectrum where employees can experience varying degrees of struggle or fulfillment. Through extensive research, his team has identified three critical pillars determining where employees fall on this continuum: compensation, healthcare access, and the often-underestimated power of belonging.
The financial reality for many workers is sobering. While executives might imagine employees dreaming of lavish vacations, Dr. Lovell's research reveals most simply hope for "not having an empty bank account by the end of the month." This disconnect between perception and reality represents a significant blind spot for leaders trying to address workplace wellbeing.
Perhaps most illuminating is the discussion around mental health stigma. Despite increased awareness, employees continue to mask anxiety and depression behind more palatable terms like "burnout" or "feeling tired". This linguistic substitution reveals how far we still need to go in normalizing authentic mental health conversations in professional settings. Meanwhile, the cost of presenteeism—being physically present but mentally elsewhere—exceeds absenteeism costs by 7.5 times.
For HR professionals feeling overwhelmed by these challenges, Dr. Lovell offers practical starting points. Begin by taking inventory of existing resources, then focus on creating genuine belonging through recognition and leader modeling of appropriate vulnerability.
Ready to help your team move from survival to thriving? Subscribe to the HRchat show and Dr Bill's new podcast, Exploring Workplace Mental Health, for more insights on creating workplaces where belonging and wellbeing drive sustainable performance.
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Speaker 2:Welcome, alex Dr Lovell. Did I say that right?
Speaker 3:That is perfect. It's Lovell, Lovell. I have been called so many different things throughout my life. Everything works.
Speaker 2:Okay, so good to have you here. I'm providing a little bit of a guest host for us, my good chap Bill, I thought perhaps to get us going. Alex, if you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit of an introduction of who you are, Tell the audience a little bit about what you would like them to know and kind of sets up today so they kind of understand who you are as an expert and what we're going to perhaps lead into.
Speaker 3:Sure. So again, my name is Dr Alexander Lovell. I'm the research director for the OC Tanner Institute. Oc Tanner is a rewards and recognition company based out of Salt Lake City, and at the OC Tanner Institute we do a lot of work around employee experience and workplace culture.
Speaker 3:And you might be wondering, okay, so that's interesting, what kind of research do you actually do? And I'm a political sociologist and kind of a cross with political psychology too. And now you're wondering what the heck are you doing there? And it's because I do a lot of work around identity and what fulfills us, and work is a big central element of our lives and it's also a big central element of what can either make us really fulfilled or make us really miserable. And so it's a great place for me to land because I can do a lot of work around how we can feel fulfilled and what types of work really help drive us towards purpose and meaning and fulfillment, or what can really drag us down and exhaust us and affect our mental well-being and affect our physical well-being. And I am really privileged to work with a team of researchers. We have a clinical psychologist, a political theorist, we actually have a physicist on staff who's a data scientist, sociologist, human behaviorist, organizational design. We have quite a myriad of researchers at the OC Tanner Institute also working with me.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show Cool. So the employee experience matters clearly to you folks, so it's interesting, with that work that you did to get to what we're going to ask some questions today about all your work around the survival continuum. Is there a little story that you want to share of how you got to the survival continuum and then kind of explain what is the survival continuum, to provide context of the why and what and how this stuff matters?
Speaker 3:You know you would think that in the COVID years, you know you would think that in the COVID years that survival was the thing that was going to pop up more. And it's interesting. Since COVID, employee sentiment has almost deteriorated and what we began to really find out and uncover is employees are becoming progressively worse. Their mental health continues to progressively deteriorate, and part of that is related to, I mean, the outside world.
Speaker 3:We cannot separate ourselves from what is going on around us. We like to pretend that once we enter the workplace that we have a whole different life, but that really isn't quite true. We are our personal lives and our professional lives altogether. There isn't a clean break. And so, as we have financial but across the world where the cost of living was just too much, and so people were making too many sacrifices across the spectrum in their lives to just get food on the table, to find even a quiet space in their life, to just exist without, without the noise of the world creeping in. And that's where, when we asked them what word was simply the best word to describe their experience, it was survival.
Speaker 2:Okay, wow. So the external adversity loads are really starting to mount up, and it's before people even get to the workplace. It sounds like your research is finding they're very challenged. So explain what is your thesis around the survival continuum and why should employers care about this thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so survive and really thrive. And I think that's the interesting thing is we put them on two separate poles but there's kind of two spectrums inside of them. You have kind of on the survive side, you have low survive and high survive, and then you have low thrive and high thrive. Where you can be high survive, you can feel like you are starting to get it together, but you're not thriving yet. And I think that was an important distinction'm finally starting to make ends meet. Just because I'm finally starting to feel okay doesn't mean that you've even helped me hit the mark in terms of my ability to thrive.
Speaker 3:It's a multifaceted and very nuanced picture.
Speaker 3:And so, on the survive side, we found that there were kind of three elements that were most important to employees and you'll be unsurprised to hear that compensation was a big component of that, you know and organizations. And as we shared some of this research and as we shared some of this research, I get eye rolls when I say that, but I'm sorry that finances are a considerable part of living in today's world because, you know, money is what helps us pay rent, it's what helps us buy groceries, it's what helps us pay for gas, it's what helps us buy our, like you know, do all those things. And when we talked with HR stakeholders it was interesting the different visions of what money meant. They almost glorify to some extent and senior leaders too lavish vacations and a very different standard of living that they think employees are wanting. And when you talk to employees, the most common types of things that we get is just I don't want my bank account to be empty by the end of the month. I would like $100 from month to month.
Speaker 2:And I think across North America the literature in two constructs is pretty clear. Food insecurity is around 25 to 30 percent and typically between 55 and 60 percent of the population can get their hands on $1,000. So I'm not surprised that you had that finding. I'm fascinated when you talk to me a little bit more, if you wouldn't mind. Around the I like the survival continuum Is the upper end of that continuum. Putting my kind of mental health hat on, is that similar to languishing the upper part of it, like I'm feeling I'm still functioning a little bit. Things are a little bit blah I, I'm doing okay. Where, if you move down the continuum and yours, you're losing more functioning is.
Speaker 3:perhaps you could round that out a bit for me yeah, you, the the further down you go, the I think the closer to hopelessness you get. I, I think that's. I think, um, hopelessness is probably one of the bigger emotions that we linked to that. You know, if you want to go down your more, I would say, typical fight or flight types of mentality and those types of vocabulary vocabulary Also that you, when you look at our qualitative, those types of words are often used to describe. You know, the the further on that side of the spectrum that you go, that is what happens. People get into that fight or flight and that tunnel vision. You can, you can see that tunnel vision happen for people. They can't see anything but getting out of that.
Speaker 3:You know that financial issue, but it's not just financial. That's where I say that's one of those three components we have people talking about. Well, I could make ends meet, but my health insurance was just so bad that I had to go elsewhere. I had to take a pay cut, but this other place had better health insurance and I was able to take care of myself better. Or I have this healthcare problem that this other place helped me access better healthcare. Or like I couldn't take days off to go see my therapist and so I needed to be able to do that Like.
Speaker 3:So. It's interesting how people you know really prioritize their access to healthcare or their ability to pay for healthcare as part of that survival need, and that has even changed right. When I look at some of the work that we did back, even in 2018, I think something shifted for people during the COVID years in terms of the prioritization, even on physical and mental health in a good extent. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a really good shift Terrible thing to go through, but a good shift nonetheless in terms of our prioritization of health.
Speaker 2:So let's keep pulling on that thread now. So, as we talk more about the survival continuum and what you're finding in this general thematic that you're talking about, the interactions now with mental health, you know, how can organizations start to leverage this type of thing, measuring it and that part of it and why they and I guess I keep I liked how you're putting it You're helping them. Hr folks often need to know the why. So this is a part of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and mental health care. I mean, I think mental health care is going through almost a renaissance in terms of like. We are starting to realize it does matter, just like physical health care matters, and we're starting to become more willing to care for our mental health. But an interesting part of our research last year was this finding that we're still not willing to talk about it as much. We're masking terminology and what we found is that we're substituting words to make them more palatable to talk about in the workplace, and so we found phraseology of being tired or burned out to really actually be substitutes for anxiety and depression and all sorts of symptomology of those two. Our clinical psychologist actually did some really interesting matching components of people's qual and quant responses and found interesting matching of the symptomology of depression and anxiety and the words people would use in the workplace and they mapped together in really interesting ways. But people won't actually talk about anxiety and depression in the workplace.
Speaker 2:They'll focus on burnout, yeah yeah, because it's socially acceptable where stigma is still a major, major barrier. And the thing that I think a lot of people sometimes forget too, alex, is that the you know what comes first metabolic syndrome or depression and I think a part of where your thesis is the employee experience can have a spillover effect on both. I'd like you to kind of keep building on the thematic before we get to what employers can do is how does employees going through this adversity and challenges and we're seeing an erosion by your thesis and you're starting to see more folks are spending time in survival and there's higher intersects, where they're impacting their physical health and their mental.
Speaker 3:How does that all show up in productivity and the engagement and and the employee's potential? Yeah, there's two. There's two fundamental things that we found right. One is in in more presenteeism, where you're there, but are you there? Right, you'll show up, but are you doing the work. And so so many stories of people being like, well, I'm there, but can I actually do my job? My mind is elsewhere. My mind is on all the many things. My mind is on all the many things that I need to get done, or all the things that I'm worried about, or how I'm going to care for my aging parent that is at home that I can't actually help and I don't have the money to put into a home or to pay for care. I mean, there's so many facets here that we just don't have answers for, and so presenteeism is a really big drain on our system and, in terms of productivity, presenteeism is probably one of the worst things, because you are paying for people to be present but not working?
Speaker 2:Oh, 100%. Our research in 2012 found that presentism was 7.5 times the cost of attendance on average, and we were pretty clear in how we defined it as the involuntary motivation to come to work to attempt to do your minimal standards. Seldom ever can. Root cause can be mental health, can be chronic disease, can be mental health, can be chronic disease. Can be respectful workplace fear, other types of things. But a part you're bringing up I think that's important for the audience to be mindful is the amount of distraction that's happening and the energy it's required when you're feeling discouraged and when human beings are feeling discouraged because the construct of hopelessness I've seen patients for nearly 40 years and the thing that's fascinating to me is around that hopelessness. It increases people's risk for automatic suicide ideation, and automatic suicide ideation doesn't mean they're actually suicidal, it's just their crazy creativity system is providing them options. They perhaps are pretty overwhelming and shocking to them. So, while this is stopping, this is pretty heavy stuff for the average hr practitioner sitting there is going wow, you know I, I, you know I got hired. You know, my job is to hire them. Bring them in now.
Speaker 2:Am I supposed to become a psychologist? What am I supposed to become a psychologist. What am I supposed to do? Like, what's your coaching to HR folks Like this is like you and I. I mean it only took me 40 years to get to where I am, so but I mean you know someone who cares and really wants to try to be helpful. Like, what's your coaching? What can HR teams do? How can they start to move Because they can't control payroll my all of a sudden say we're gonna give everyone ten thousand dollars raise raises. Like what can they actually do?
Speaker 3:that that's that you're seeing in the evidence that small things matter yeah, I think part of the I mentioned three pillars in the survive spectrum the. The third one was belonging, and that one's an interesting one, but it has a really fundamental part of survive too is we are more likely to feel like we can survive when we feel like we belong, when we feel like we're part of something. And that's not going to fix compensation issues, right, and this isn't going to glorify, you know, deficiencies in mental and physical health care, but it can still help us feel safer, yes, and it can help us at least feel like we have a place to be. And that can go a long way. And there's a lot of ways that we can help people lean into belonging. One is recognition. We know that peer-to-peer based recognition can really help, and we know, probably more powerfully is leader to employee recognition and leaders just taking a moment to say hey, I see you, I value you, what you just did is meaningful. This is how it's meaningful. This is how it creates impact. This is how it's meaningful. This is how it creates impact.
Speaker 3:The other thing, from a leader perspective. You know we don't want leaders becoming therapists that's way out of their job, responsibility and they're not going to be good at it. But leader modeling on talking about harder stuff when leaders can be a little bit more vulnerable about their own, like, wow, I just really struggled with that. Yes, and this is how I overcame that. Right, you know. And creating a culture, or injecting into the culture, because I hate creating culture. Culture is there, but injecting into the culture more vulnerability from the top and then letting that trickle down that it is okay to be human and that humans have emotion and that in this culture we actually welcome emotion and that we can talk about the hard things, that we're not just robots, that we can work through hard things together and that when you're having a hard time, there's resources and support here.
Speaker 3:I love mental health awareness months, but it's not just about the month, it's actually all about the year. This is a great opportunity to surface all the different programs that maybe we're forgetting about that and really connect people back to all those rich resources that I trust most organizations already have um employee, you know, employee access points or those different eaps um, a lot of people haven't used they're very underutilized. A lot of health insurance in the United States and a lot of other countries have a lot better, more robust mental health access points now than they used to. How do we get people back into those? Can we use this month as a reorientation to those new resources? I think this is where HR can actually do a lot to reconnect people back to how we can really help.
Speaker 2:What's for someone sitting back and saying, okay, I like this, what are one or two practical things they can do? To start, let's say they just listen and they go. Oh great, you know, because it's interesting when you talk about an emotion. You know all an emotion is is a neurochemical. You don't pick them, but you can learn how to react to them, and so it's fascinating that, the concept that, as you start to make this shift, I like what you're talking about shift and adding to the culture. And what are you going to do and adding these micro decisions or intentional steps? Because I'm getting that your, your coaching is going to be you. You don't eat an elephant all at once. You're going to eat it one bite at a time. So, what's one or two things? Someone would start to say, hey, I get the joke around mental health, I get all the things that are happening, but what can we do? What are a couple? What's some coaching?
Speaker 3:Well, I think first is just simply take an inventory of what you have. My guess is that you probably have forgotten everything that you actually have, so reorient yourself to just what you already have. I think that's a very simple place to start. Then you're remembering, then you realize. Ask your peers, because they probably know even a couple other ones that you're not even thinking about. I think that's the perfect first place to start.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like that because I think what happens is is you do your inventory and then you can determine what the level of engagement is, because it's kind of the I find often doing this the low-hanging fruit is actually trying to make sure people are aware of it. And one of the things that it seems to me I don't know if you found this in your data is that the conversation around having access to programs creates confusion around the word access, and what I mean by that specifically is I'm getting? When am I allowed to access these programs? So my employer might have a bunch of programs, but you know, I'm driving, I'm eating my lunch and I'm not having any time to stop. I'm in survival mode. I need my paycheck. I may not feel I have a lot of purpose. What's your coaching around making sure we also pay attention to giving space for people to discover this stuff?
Speaker 3:You know, two years ago, when we looked at this population, we called them the 80%. And it's the part of the population that doesn't have ready access all the time to all these organizational tools. They often work offline or just part of the time offline. And so we looked at access and the second word was enablement Okay. And because what we found is that organizations made a big access push but they forgot about okay, so great, people can access it. Sure, you have all these manufacturing people, for example, that now have organizational email addresses. So what have you done to make sure that they can access their email, that they can actually access their email? Great, you gave them a password. How have you enabled that?
Speaker 3:And so it's all about building into the flow of work really organic ways to be able to do that. You know, in our kind of technology, in our flow of work right, we do employee recognition as a technology how do you actually build recognition into that flow of work in a way that makes it possible? So, making sure that there's kiosks. If you're in a fully offline environment that doesn't have any space for anything else, kiosks matter and they're actually very effective. Mobile apps matter, because sometimes people need that Integrations into your payroll software, because if that's where people are because they have to submit a time card you can integrate with that type of thing. You can get creative with how you build different types of structures in when you look at where people actually spend their time. You just have to look at where people spend their time, because my guess is that people spend their time somewhere they have to. So it's about building the experience around where people already naturally are.
Speaker 2:That's a great point. I think, alex, sometimes we forget to change management. When listening to you, I think about the at-care model. You have to have awareness and then you have to have your desire, and then you have to have your knowledge, then you need the ability, which is your point, and then you need to reinforce this and kind of keep going that. Well, this has been amazing. We're coming down to almost the end of our chat. I want to make sure I give some open space to something or a couple of points, as you reflect on this conversation, that you really want to make sure the audience hears that's important from you to them that you think could be helpful as they start to hopefully move more towards thriving than surviving with their workforces.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I mean. The first thing that I would just love to reinforce is that mental health care and mental health conversations are just still stigmatized. That's something that, as we continue to study mental health in the workplace, the stigma is still there. No matter how much our openness to those conversations continues to be open, that stigma still remains a big barrier. So, as we reinforce to HR and as to leaders, to senior leaders, to frontline leaders, that we need to have these conversations, we just need to realize that there is a barrier. Still, it's uncomfortable and it's okay. We need to just continue that journey.
Speaker 3:Um, we are about to release our next report in september and it's interesting we're going to have kind of a continuation on the mental health component. Uh, and it's really exciting because we're tiny, we're tying it to, uh, organizational performance management and some really interesting. We pulled some from some psychological components, from parenting almost, because what we were interested in is how do you balance mental health and really supporting mental health with also a high performance culture? How do you kind of have your cake and eat it too? Right, because I think a lot of organizations have been struggling with supporting mental health but also wanting high performance. Can you get both? And I think we have an answer for that you can, so I'm really excited about that. I think the answer lies in, you know, having high expectations but also marrying that with high support safety component, and it's not really what you're doing.
Speaker 2:when I'm listening to you, it's focusing more on the how and starting to move it, and you know it's interesting. I'll reflect on your thinking. I think one of the things that resonates from the conversation that you said to me today that I think is really important for people is around belonging. We have a scientific study we're publishing through SMU coming out and we have found that low belonging to high belonging is predicting disability claims, lost time, et cetera, and it's amazing that it doesn't take a whole lot for a person to feel welcomed or valued. And it's that intentional behaviors, as you were saying. I think that's really important. You don't need really complicated superstructural systems. You just need human beings who are slowing down and paying attention to other human beings, one interaction at a time. So that's awesome. I really enjoyed this conversation, alex. Final thoughts for the audience before we say our goodbyes.
Speaker 3:Well, actually I want to echo your thought on belonging, because what a simple thought it is and what a reality that it's so easy to make somebody feel like they belong. You just have to lean in and show that they're valued, and then that can start with a simple thank you. I see what you did there. Recognition is just so simple, so why is it so hard to do?
Speaker 2:Well, sometimes it's just people forget the value, I believe, is when they get caught up in their own thinking and that appreciative inquiry of finding good in other people can actually release nice oxytocin in your own brain by acknowledging and acts of kindness for other people. So I like what your, your folks, are on to and it's it's fascinating work and I'm super grateful. Bill gave me the chance to have this conversation with alex and I know your organization is doing some great work, so keep up all the good stuff you're doing. So thank you for your time, sir.
Speaker 2:Thank you I had a great time, thanks.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
