We are delighted that Ian will be speaking in Sydney next month for day 2 of our Wellbeing at Work Summit Australia. We caught up with him to see how he’s feeling in the runup to the event.
Hi Ian, we are thrilled that you will be speaking at the Wellbeing at Work Australia Summit in November. As a leader based in the region, what are the main challenges you are facing when it comes to employee wellbeing and mental health?
Job insecurity – the very real fear you could lose your job at any moment.
Low trust workplaces – a posture implied by the norms and policies of the company that you are not trustworthy.
Low empowerment – people get bored and disillusioned when they aren’t stretched.
What strategies have you seen developing over the past 6 months, both internally and externally, that are moving the dial on wellbeing in the workplace?
Make trust a default – “Best way to find out if someone is trustworthy is to trust them” (Hemingway).
Delegate design principles, not decisions – tell people how to decide what good looks like and let them figure it out.
Align, align, align – people will frame challenges more positively when they understand what’s going on and why.
Why is employee wellbeing so important to you personally?
I have worked a lot of jobs where wellbeing was secondary or worse.
In all of them, we found ways to achieve wellbeing while producing more than our peers (i.e. it was possible to succeed with wellbeing).
Given that, what’s the point of not having wellbeing? We spend so much of our life at work.
Once that penny drops, wellbeing becomes a super power in most organisations.
What impact is AI having in your organization and how are you managing that?
I’m a startup founder so I personally feel a lot of wellbeing from AI: It amplifies my productivity, Gives me confidences in what I produce and I have fun learning new ways to work.
In clients I serve, AI isn’t being taken seriously enough to worry most.
I think you need to be closer to the front-line workers to hear the concern… but it will soon hit everyone.
Other than AI, are there any challenges that you are seeing for the first time and how are you addressing them?
Performance reviews – the way most companies do reviews and rem is a major source of pain, but companies are unwilling to change.
An improved step is moving to collective reward.
They reward individuals even though we supposedly use teams because “whole is greater than the sum of the parts”.
They are subject to every cognitive bias (recency bias, salience bias, in-group biases).
What areas do you think employers should be focused on over the next 12 months?
Create an improvement habit around mental health – choose an area to improve on for 2-4 months and set 1 hour aside per week to work on it.
Do you feel that investment in employee wellbeing in the region is increasing or decreasing and is that a direct reflection on HR leaders’ increasing ability to demonstrate effective returns of their strategies to leadership?
In terms of investment – I don’t know. I’m sure there are statistics on this.
In terms of demonstrating returns broadly, statistics may also have answer here.
In terms of proving the returns between intervention X and outcome Y – no one is doing that. The machinery to do that kind of analysis exists, but in my experience, cross too many functional disciplines to get organisations rallied behind it (it is powerful when done).
How has your organisation been leading the way?
My organisation is obsessed with true, objective measures of output, done simply and easily.
How is that connected to wellbeing? – When you have such measures, you can start showing, objectively and simply, linkages between wellbeing and output.
It makes a lot easier to rally people to the subject when you can prove the dollar linkage.
Ian will be speaking in Sydney at the Wellbeing at Work Summit Australia.
View further details about days one and two of our Australian Summit in Sydney and book your tickets here.
Click here to learn more about day three of our Australian Summit which will be in Melbourne. Book soon to avoid disappointment.
