Author: Graham Lowe

5th Annual Mental Health in the Workplace Forum at Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Wednesday, October 20, 2010. 5:00 to 6:15pm. TOPIC: We Don’t Want to Know: The Stigma of Mental Health Issues in the Workplace and What We Can Do About It
SPEAKERS:
Graham Lowe, PhD, President, The Graham Lowe Group, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta; Author, : The Quality of Work: A People-Centered Agenda and : Creating Healthy Organizations (Rotman/UTPress, 2010)
Dr. David Goldbloom, MD. Senior Medical Advisor, Education and Public Affairs, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health; Professor of Psychiatry,
University of Toronto; Vice-Chair, Mental Health Commission of Canada
MODERATOR: Dr. Melanie Carr, MD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Adjunct Professor, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto
FEE: $49 plus HST per person; $39 plus HST per person for Rotman and U of Toronto alumni (fee includes the session and 1 copy of : Creating Healthy Organizations )
TO REGISTER: events@rotman.utoronto.ca or call 416-978-4193
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/events/default.asp

Session presentation at Health, Work and Wellness Conference. MoreVancouver, October 1, 2010. For more information, go to the conference website: http://healthworkandwellness.com/conference/2010-2

Employers have been slow to adopt telework. Only about 5 percent of employees in Canada and the US work at home during regularly scheduled hours at least part of their work week. Corporate lack of enthusiasm for telework reflects the persistence of traditional approaches to organizing work and managing people – despite information technology opening new possibilities for virtual work.

Telework isn’t just another job perk. Companies need to position telework within their workforce engagement strategy, because it has good potential to improve both performance and wellbeing by giving employees greater job control.

There is lots of evidence showing that job control – essentially, being able to make decisions about how and when to work –  is associated with lower stress and better work-life balance. Because job control contributes to wellbeing, it lowers the costs associated with absenteeism, presenteeism, and health benefits. And employees who feel they can manage their job demands are more motivated and committed.

Four changes are required in management thinking and practices to achieve these payoffs.

1. Managers must trust employees to take full responsibility for work results. No more micro-managing. And employees, for their part, have to step up to the plate and demonstrate they indeed can deliver.
2. Any type of flexible work option can’t be imposed as a requirement. What’s important is that employees perceive they have these options available and can negotiate their use as required.
3. Effective virtual work requires a human support system: supervisors and coworkers who provide off-site team members with the information, resources, learning opportunities and other resources required to succeed.
4. HR professionals who develop telework policies must help employees and their supervisors take the steps needed to manage the potential for blurred boundaries between work and home.

Companies focused on cultivating their human capital recognize that an increasingly effective way to attract, retain, engage and develop talent is through a flexible approach to employment. In other words, success increasingly will depend on equating employees’ autonomy and choice with improved business results. That’s the future of telework.

What’s the different between a culture of health and a healthy culture? This is not hair-splitting. Both concepts use the same words – culture, health – but how these words are put together has big implications for employee wellbeing and organizational performance.

A growing number of companies in Canada and the US are reframing their employee health and productivity goals in terms of creating a culture of health. According the July 12th issue of Benefits Canada, a culture of health “encourages employees to be healthy, minimize risk factors and choose appropriate health services.” In short, employers want a healthier workforce and lower health benefit costs – which have always been the business rationale for wellness programs. What’s different now is that the word culture ramps up the responsibility of employees to become fully aware of program options and health plan costs, using this information to make better health-related decisions. Which is fine as far as program cost-effectiveness goes, but it fails to address how corporate culture can help or hinder wellbeing and job performance.

Taking an organizational view of culture is more powerful because it gets at all the ways the shared values and beliefs in an organization contribute to not only employee health, but also support higher levels of performance.

A healthy culture will have higher strategic impact than a culture of health. First, the goals of improved individual wellbeing will be enabled through a shared understanding of the importance of each individual taking responsibility for their overall mental and physical health.

Second, the values that define a healthy culture help everyone to see how healthy employees are a pre-requisite for business success. And third, a healthy culture fosters a commitment from management to ensure that employees have the tools, resources and supports they need to be well and fully productive in their jobs.

Together, these three features of a healthy culture go beyond the popular wellness initiatives found in most large companies. Healthy culture thinking leads to actions by management that will giving employees meaningful input on their work arrangements, job design, and career development – key drivers of wellbeing and performance.

So think carefully about language use. Consider the employee communication and engagement implications of a healthy culture versus a culture of health. And draw your own conclusions about how a healthy culture can benefit your organization.

This article proposes a comprehensive framework for assessing, reporting and improving the quality of work environments in healthcare organizations across Canada. Healthy work environments (HWE) contribute to positive outcomes for healthcare employees and physicians. The same HWE ingredients also can reduce operating costs, improve human resource utilization, and ultimately lead to higher quality patient care. We show how health system employers, governments, quality agencies and other stakeholders can implement effective HWE metrics. The common reporting framework and metrics we propose will enable managers and policy makers to use HWE ingredients as levers to improve organizational performance. Progress requires the active involvement of stakeholders in developing common metrics, integrating these into existing measurement and reporting systems, building in managerial accountability for work environment quality, and supporting on-going improvements at the front-lines of care and service delivery.
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This article in the August 9, 2010, issue of Canadian HR Reporter describes 5 principles to guide the development and implementation of healthy organizational change.
Article PDF

Becoming a healthy organization is both a journey and a destination.  Goals and action plans help, but what’s also needed is careful attention to how you go about change. Here are 5 tips for ensuring that the change process itself is a healthy experience for all involved and, equally important, that intended change goals are actually achieved.

1. Understand change readiness

A basic insight from the field of health promotion is the importance of a person’s readiness to make changes in their health-related attitudes and behaviours. Organizations also can be assessed for their readiness to change in a healthy direction. Develop a checklist of the basic features of the organization and assess each as a source of resistance, readiness, or momentum.

2. Align structure and culture

Organizational change initiatives often fail because structural change is given priority over cultural change.  So if you want your organization to get on or stay on a healthy change trajectory, changes in structures or operational processes must be balanced with the values and other elements of culture.

3. Link people initiatives to the business strategy

Many organizations have too many separate “people” policies and initiatives. If HR champions of these initiatives can’t see how all the strands tie together, line managers surely won’t. Needed is a strategy-focused approach to healthy change that makes it easy for all to see how actions to improve the work environment and employee wellbeing also contribute to business goals.

4. Widen the circle of involvement

Successful change requires collaboration.  Healthy change processes move organizations forward because they provide ever-expanding opportunities for others to become involved. While leadership from the top of the organization is a big plus, employees throughout the organization can become change agents, contributing to making their own work environments healthier.

5. Learn and innovate

Successful implementation of change requires time for ongoing reflection and learning. Furthermore, think of your healthy organization strategy as an innovation – it introduces something new, institutionalizes its use, and diffuses the healthy practices and their supporting values more widely.

Last week, I received some interesting feedback on my book, Creating Healthy Organizations. A reader (I’ll call her Kay) phoned me to follow-up on how to implement the ideas in the book. Kay filtered the book through her own experiences as a customer service manager and former small business owner who personally valued the ideals of a healthy organization.

Kay expressed frustration as a result of feeling isolated as a healthy organization change agent – no doubt a bigger problem for people in small businesses but also true in large organizations because of the multiple silos that exist.

Kay’s experience is that while there indeed are many people scattered throughout workplaces who share the vision of a healthy organization, for all sorts of practical reasons it may be difficult for them to connect and support each other. The result is slower progress toward healthier organizations than if these change agents had been able to share experiences, provide encouragement and learn from each other.  And, of course, a sense of personal isolation.

Prompted by this frustration, Kay asked a simple question: what can change agents do to support each other? We talked about the pros and cons of various approaches. Websites (such as the excellent Employee Engagement Network) can help to foster a virtual network, but don’t quite offer the depth of “roll up your sleeves” problem-solving that’s possible in face-to-face meetings. However, organizing a group of healthy organization change agents in your company or community is not easy. How would you start and who would take responsibility for keeping it going? Furthermore, existing professional groups have their own agendas. Here I think of my local chapter of the BC Human Resources Management Association, which offers an active venue for nuts and bolts HR topics on which practitioners must keep up. In short, neither Kay nor I had the answer to her question.

So for the many healthy organization change agents out there, I have my own question: What would be most helpful to you as an on-going source of networking and support? Surely a first step in this direction is a discussion on this blog, so please let readers know your thoughts.

A sustainable organization succeeds by renewing and replenishing its human and social capital. Doing this requires closing the gap between rhetoric and practice regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR). One step toward closing the rhetoric-practice gap is to unite HR and CSR.

Critics are right when they assert that CSR without HR is PR. For example, senior executives make time in their schedules to be on the local United Way board or other prominent community charities. The follow-through in terms of HR is when front-line employees know they also can get involved in fund-raising campaigns or other volunteer activities. That’s because the company’s emphasis on community service is reflected in adjustable workloads and flexible work arrangements that enable employees to take time to volunteer.

Also needed is a unified approach to HR and CSR strategies. Strengthening the HR-CSR link requires a transparent, values-based corporate philosophy that is applied rigorously in by all employees in all their working relationships, inside and outside the organization. At the heart of sustainable success is the integrity with which board members, managers and employees apply the organization’s core values in all decisions and actions. Consistency in this regard expands the possibilities for positively shaping the future of your organization – and society.

Because CSR has an external focus, its internal supports often get overlooked. Yet a company’s CSR practices depend on an enabling culture, supported by committed leadership. Equally necessary is how employees themselves contribute to and perceive these CSR practices. When companies showcase their carbon neutral footprint or close monitoring of human rights among third-world contractors, we also need to understand the role employees played in these accomplishments. And when an organization receives an outstanding employer award, we need to determine if this squares with its treatment of external stakeholders. This happens naturally in a culture that values the long-term goals of people, community and environment.

Providing an employee perspective on CSR makes sense, given that workers increasingly want green and responsible employers. A recent on-line poll of young Canadian workers discovered that most would consider leaving their current job for a more environmentally friendly employer. The kinds of companies that will be attractive are moving at an impressive rate to embed human and environmental criteria into how they conduct business and every step in the product or service chain.

It’s time to expand the triple bottom-line view of “people, planet, profits” by including how organizations can renew their human systems. A sustainable organization looks at its success in terms of what’s optimal for all stakeholders.

Graham Lowe will be speaking and facilitating an interactive workshop at the Ontario Hospital Association’s Healthy Work Environments conference. Toronto, 15 June 2010. For more information:
http://www.oha.com/Education/Pages/CalendarofEventDetails.aspx?eventid=EP194