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Health and Work · Humanity Working

• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, Paul, last week we talked about well-being, and what stuck with me is this uh health is still fundamental to doing great work, but it still feels ignored.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is that fair?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think that if you spoke to most larger organizations, they would disagree with that a lot, right?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason that I think they would disagree with it is they would say, well, hang on, we've got employee assistance programs that we that we never had before.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we've invested in mental health in the workplace, um, you know, programs associated with that.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they've got like the free gym memberships for uh for people.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: They've got this slew of services that have been hard fought for and hard won inside organizations that are radically different than was around when, you know, I'm old.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: So like when I started in the when I started in the workplace, those those things didn't exist.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: And now they're commonplace inside inside organizations.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that is one side of that uh of that debate.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're saying, look, look, this is like we've never looked after our employees better um in terms of their physical and their mental health than we than than we ever have.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you can even add additional things onto that, like things like ergonomics programs and you know, all of that kind of stuff.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, and yet we live in a world where the world in which people are going to work is significantly less healthy than it was.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Mental health stats aren't are terrible.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Obesity stats are terrible.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um the i in the US, but also increasingly in some other countries as well, uh life expectancy is down.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and not just related to the pandemic, but down more broadly.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um over the course of the last 20 plus years or so, maybe a little bit more, the number of people who are having to care for an elderly relative, right, or that are full-time carers uh while they're trying to do their work has doubled.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: So the so it is an environment, the work environment, which is part of the broader environment, um, is an environment that involves people that in general are much less healthy than they used to be.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that that is um that's the challenge here, right?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Those things that we're talking about are almost like a response in a way to the fact that we are working sicker than we were before.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, if if if we're supposedly prioritizing it in the workplace and showing up sicker, something is wrong.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in that sense, right?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, precisely.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's just that that it's we've looked we've looked at it as employees are requesting this, employees are asking for this, um, whether that's direct employees directly or unions on behalf of employees or associations on behalf of employees, we're responding to this because employees are asking for uh for this.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: But we are what we should be doing, I believe, is we should be thinking about the fact that um people are spending you know X percent of their waking hours with us, and there is some form of a of a duty of care associated with those people with those people spending that time with you, right?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Most of us spend more hours engaging actively in work than we spend engaging actively with our loved ones.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So there should, you know, there the theoretically there should be some duty of care associated with that.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And the real question is, do we believe, and I personally do, do we believe that work is part of the problem here?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: The working is work is actually making us sick in many cases.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh if you can directly tie a line to that, then there's obviously the duty of care, right?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, if you send people down a coal mine and and they get lung disease, there's, you know, there's there's a duty of care associated with that.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: In this case, it's a little bit less clear what that through line is, but there were everything that I've seen over the course of my work suggests that there is a strong through line.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So how do we approach this differently?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh I think what what I would suggest is that everything I'm about to say here is an and, not an or, right?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's great that we have all of these programs that are um that are important.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's a little bit of a I think it's a little bit of a cultural reset.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that cultural reset um starts with um with under with embracing the concept, even.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: I understand why organizations don't want to do this.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: They maybe are worried about things like litigation and all that kind of stuff, right?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: But identifying the idea that work can be hazardous to our health, including the work that involves you just sitting in front of a computer, right?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And and therefore, and how do you go about taking steps in order to be able to mitigate that?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and ironically, steps might be might be one of the things you do, right?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Which is okay, if sitting at your desk is is making you sick, then then moving helps uh you know, is one of the things that um that helps mitigate that.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that um this is um again, if you look about the the challenge we have here, the programmatic stuff that I was talking about, that's done at an organizational level.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of what needs to happen here is actually much more local than that, right?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's what happens in your group, it's what happens in your team, and it's what happens um for you as an individual.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got to kind of localize this idea of healthy work practices, and we need to embrace it as a critical part that uh that allows us to be able to do good work.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that ties back to some of the stuff we were talking about before, right?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Not everybody is gonna be like wanting to focus on wellness and well-being and so on.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't talk about this last time, but there's almost a fear among some people that if you do focus on things like well-being and health and you know, and so on, you're not gonna look as good as you're, you know, if you're carrying 20 extra pounds, the focus is gonna draw attention to you because you're not as uh not as healthy as other people.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe you're worried about even talking about those things because it starts to draw you to think about your mortality.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: But what you can do is you can reframe it in the ways that we were talking about last week is like, okay, well, in order for us to be able to do this stuff well, we need to be ready to do it well.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's gonna mean different things to different people, but it's gonna uh but it's something that we agree is important, right?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's important to uh for for people to not get sick and die.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we talked you you mentioned RMS, the the rest movement socializing as a simple stack for readiness and and being uh helping this out, but is is that too simple?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when do you move to something deeper like your your eight dimensions?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: It can be too simple in some cases.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about the the um the value of it last time, and I think it's a it represents a great starting point and a great measure, actually.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's the other thing as well that is really interesting about RMS is that like I can track the rest I have, right?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, I'm I'm wearing an aura ring right now.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's telling me, it's it's telling me, am I rested?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's also telling me, am I stressed?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right, it's telling me, you know, it's it's telling me a bunch of stuff about myself, and I can track that.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it's telling me, am I moving?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's telling me the number of the number of steps that I have.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a metric that is associated with that as I'm looking to see how sedentary I am, how much I'm moving.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I can track the other things too, right?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: I can track um, you know, the the the uh well after we just mentioned the rest and the movement, but I can track the socialization piece as well, right?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Did I, you know, you and I are are, yes, we're doing our podcast, but we're socializing, right?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: You and I chatted for 45 minutes before we started this, right?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was a social activity that was benefit that was beneficial for me and hopefully it's beneficial for you.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the the these things can be tracked, right?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's one of the things that is uh that is really, really helpful.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, where eight dimensions comes in and eight dimensions is is is really helpful.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: We'll we won't go into details of what eight dimensions is on here, but you can look it up.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: We've got stuff about it on our on our own website, on the Billy and Minds website.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: We'll put a link to that into um into the show notes.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Where they where that can be helpful is is the completeness of it, right?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, for example, one of the dimensions is wealth is financial, right?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: So um it's you it can be useful as a diagnostic aid to help you understand where you're struggling, right?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: In and maybe it's not one of the dimensions that we talked about here, and maybe it's something else, like you're struggling to pay the bills or whatever.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: So these different sort of viewpoints can happen individually, um, really understand um where where they're doing well and where they're struggling.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Where RMS comes in really well is the sort of ability to be able to rally individuals and rally even teams around the idea of like, this is what we're gonna do to make sure that we're ready to do good work.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And you can set targets around that, and you can have sort of competitive and collaborative stuff associated with it.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there's actually kind of a role for both.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Good, good.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, in general, do you see this shifting and changing?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what's what's gonna force the shifts uh in in this from treat it when it breaks to generally genuinely designing for health, despite the current uh kind of suck it up climate?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean I mean culture shifts all the time.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: So like anytime we think that we're you know we're in a particular culture, we're probably half of our way out of it.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm sure that that um I'm sure part of this will be um will be cyclical anyway.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um but um but I do think that um we're it's going to be very, very interesting as people really, really internalize the fact that the stuff that is in quotes coming for our jobs, robots, um, AI, etc.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things about them that is fundamentally different to humans is they don't get tired and they don't get sick.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so now humans will always get tired, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like, like you can't work if you if I work you 24 hours a day, you're gonna get tired, right?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: If I work you 12 hours a day consistently, right, you're gonna get tired.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: But what I think I'm saying instead is that um if if you have this understanding that the thing that is part of your world doesn't have doesn't function at 70%, right?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you then start to to think about what does it mean to function really well as a human.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think part of where the shift is gonna come is where organizations go, you know what, what I really need in order to be able to differentiate myself from my competition is yes, I need a good, I need good technology, I need a good stack, but I need a set of high-performing individuals that and high performing teams that are gonna really use that.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And in order to have those higher performing teams and individuals, those high-performing teams and individuals need to be able to function well, which means that they need to be well.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think once we sort of get to that idea that um that being well is a stri is some form of a strategic advantage, and that it doesn't mean driving everybody into the ground.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: It means being aware, awake and alert enough that you can make that interesting connection between thing A and uh and thing B, right?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: It means being able to be able to work without fear.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: It means being able to work in an environment where you're not always not feeling semi-burned out.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then we start to treat our employees like athletes, yeah, and making sure that they're ready to um to be able to do their best work.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: That'll come, I think, I suspect, once we really start to internalize a lot of these lessons from sports science, but also see um the impact of these uh of this new technology.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: As always, very enlightening.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right, thanks, Paul.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, man.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Have a good one.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neo.
• 14:24
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• 14:28
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• 14:30
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