Change the system, not the person. Why well-being needs to start with organizational change.
Key takeaways:
Individual interventions to enhance employee well-being are common but potentially ineffective.
Changing the organization in order to redesign work is a more powerful way to support employee well-being and brings benefits to organizational outcomes.
Psychological safety is foundational to employee well-being.
Use Team Topologies to design effective team boundaries and reduce cognitive load.
Focus leadership on providing the why, not the how.
Build social networks to enhance employee learning and support.
Introduction
Over the past decade, organizations have given increasing attention to employee well-being. Recognising the importance of fostering a healthy, happy and supported workforce, and the obvious benefits to business outcomes, employers are keen to emphasize how employee well-being is a key focus of their organization.
Yet over half of employees believe their employer is guilty of well-being washing and a recent research study by William Fleming Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre concludes that individual well-being interventions have little to no impact. Putting some possibly justifiable cynicism to one side for a moment, what could be causing this gap between intention and impact?
Perhaps it’s because organizations have their focus in the wrong place. In this article we’ll explore how a focus on improving organizational factors could deliver more for employee well-being than pushing the onus onto the individual. Through approaches such as reducing cognitive load, supporting psychological safety and fostering community, we’ll look at how both individuals and the business can benefit from a much greater impact.
What is well-being and why does it matter?
In the study on employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions mentioned above, work well-being is “best conceptualized as a holistic construct of how good (and bad) someone's working life is for them”. Adding to the obvious moral angle that aiming to make work life more positive is clearly the right thing to do, it also benefits the organization — happy workers have been shown to be more productive.
What’s the problem with supporting individuals?
Technically, nothing. We should start off by saying that any initiative that aims to support the physical and mental well-being of individuals is a positive step if it’s put in place with genuine intention to help, and so long as it doesn’t bring about negative outcomes.
It’s also worth clarifying, as the above article highlights, that interventions designed to help manage specific problems are clearly a good thing to have in place, for example access to counseling and/or Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs). Where someone is already struggling with their mental health, having access to the right professional support can make a huge difference.
The challenge comes when organizations adopt a similar individual focus on what the research refers to as “promotional and preventative” interventions, geared towards promoting “positive mental health” and “good psychological functioning”.
Think things such as mindfulness classes, relaxation or massage sessions, well-being apps or stress management training. The study found that “results show that those who participate in individual-level interventions have the same levels of mental well-being as those who do not.” Interestingly perhaps, volunteering time was the only such intervention to show a small positive impact.
So if we want to support employee well-being, have we simply got the wrong interventions in place? This seems unlikely – the real shift in thinking comes in the implication that by focussing on individual interventions, organizations are missing out on the benefits they could gain from instead improving their systems, and themselves.
Worse, by “supporting” the individual to improve how they cope with the stress and demands of work, the organization itself is implicitly signaling it doesn't have, or want, to change. Instead the expectation is that the problem lies with the worker. Not exactly a message that’s going to help with either employee well-being or in fostering a culture of innovation and high performance.
How then could we aim to improve employee well-being through organizational change?
Organizational interventions to benefit well-being
Once we turn our attention to the organization itself and consider how changing the system could bring about meaningful benefits to individuals, teams and the business alike, thankfully there is loads of great thinking and experience to draw on.
With the lens on employee well-being, but with undoubtedly other benefits to be had, our aim here is to redesign work so that it reduces the demands and stress placed on the employee, and also increases the motivating aspects that can make work more satisfying and enjoyable.
How to go about doing so? Here are some key approaches that could provide high impact.
Consider psychological safety as foundational
Psychological safety, as defined by the term’s originator Dr Amy C Edmondson, is ‘the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes’. In a psychologically safe environment people feel comfortable to be themselves and empowered to ‘pursue excellence’ as Edmondson puts it.
This is a significant factor in allowing people to feel in control of their work, rather than powerless to the demands of the organization. While having obvious benefits to supporting well-being, such as in reducing stress and potential burnout, it’s also a critical factor in high performing teams. Google’s study of high-performing teams found that “psychological safety was by far the most important factor” in determining whether a team would be high-performing, underpinning everything else.
It’s also not simply about being ‘nice’. Where perhaps a focus on individual well-being incentives fail by offering ‘perks’ and thinking that’s enough, nurturing a psychologically safe environment is a continuous process, requiring leaders to constantly think about things like open communication, creating the conditions for learning and actively encouraging input from everyone. This benefits not only individual well-being but also has the potential to redesign how work is done.
Use Team Topologies to create boundaries and reduce cognitive load
Image taken from the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, 2019. Used with permission.
Another organizational intervention with significant benefits comes from thinking about teams rather than individuals as the fundamental means of delivery. Team Topologies offers us a practical way to consider the design of the organization and the work of effective software delivery, so as to reduce cognitive load and support fast flow. Cognitive load is a key factor in how teams, and the individuals within them, experience stress. When cognitive load is manageable, the team can perform as an effective unit; when it isn’t, teams start to fracture as individuals themselves try to cope and manage with the demands.
Team boundaries are key to reducing cognitive load. Explicitly designing the boundaries around teams based on their capacity for cognitive load rather than, for example, a software application or technology, means we can aim to maximize the potential for the team to perform effectively and also benefit the individuals. While there’s no one formula to doing so, Team Topologies prompts us to consider things such as limiting the number of domains owned by a team based on domain type, and to design systems with the available cognitive load of the teams in mind.
Focus on leadership to provide the why not the how
Leadership can also have a significant impact on people’s well-being at work, but again not simply in how they implement well-being initiatives. Autocratic leaders, focused on controlling ‘subordinates’, giving orders and assessing performance not only increases work demands and stress but is detrimental to anything other than procedural work. Once again, where we switch to seeking to provide the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’ we provide people with conditions to find autonomy, mastery and purpose.
It turns out that leading with humility and curiosity, and turning the dial towards “ask” rather than “tell” creates both the conditions for learning and high-performance and also helps people’s well-being at the same time.
Adopt social practices to create a network of support and learning
Thinking further about how conscious practices at work can help with well-being and high performance, there are further organizational interventions we can consider in this regard. Shifting the focus away from supporting the individual directly, giving careful consideration to setting up structures which allow people to support each other can also be highly effective.
Rather than the individual feeling alone in how to cope with the demands of work, encouraging groups of people to come together helps people feel like they’re not alone and shifts the focus onto working towards a collective goal.
Here are some examples of social structures which can help:
Communities of practice — bringing people together around a shared practice or discipline helps people align around learning, knowledge sharing and improvement.
Improvement forums — regular opportunities for people to reflect, raise concerns and suggest ideas to work together to improve are core to events like team retrospectives and blameless post-mortems. They can also work at a company wide scale too, further reducing the separation between individual and organization.
Networks — championing support networks can provide people with shared experience to feel more included, amplify their voice and to share their knowledge and learning more widely. Examples could be around gender, ethnicity or neurodiversity but don’t need to be limited to these. As long as the network is built on a foundation of inclusion, learning and support then generally they can be encouraged to form organically around what people feel is valuable.
Beyond the organization — thinking about work on wider scale
We’ve explored ways in which people’s well-being could be supported through effective organization design and adoption of practices that empower people to work together rather than as individuals dealing with the demands of work alone. Yet perhaps there’s more still we can do if we think wider still. In the neverending quest for growth and productivity, organizations can also be guilty of always pushing for more – more growth, more scale, more profit.
In doing so we forget that for most people while work can be a meaningful and enjoyable part of their lives, it’s not the only part. Tom DeMarco in his 2001 book Slack talks about the importance of setting clear boundaries around working hours and respecting the need for downtime, arguing that these boundaries are crucial in avoiding burnout and improving employee well-being. And once again there’s an upside for the organization too. If we allow people the space to think, reflect and to switch off, both in work time and outside of it, they in turn are able to be more creative, productive and adaptable.
It would seem actually caring about people enough to want to change the system rather than asking them to change might be both the right thing and the most effective thing to do all along.
Find out more
Upskill your Enabling teams to explain the value and importance of psychological safety in IT. Create the foundations of a strong culture of psychological safety across your organization. Enable your people to use their voices (and brains) to build high-performing teams with high psychological safety.
