Back in the 1980s and ’90s, wellbeing (not that we called it that then) was all about stress management. You were the problem. You just needed to manage your stress better.
Some of you will have heard this story before, but that whole work-stress-is-a-you-problem thing is something my Dad and I have chatted about a lot.
Dad was the chief financial officer of a large international company for 18 years. Retiring at age 65, he looked forward to more mountain biking, lazy coffees and time to indulge in his favourite hobbies. Even today, on the outside, Dad’s life retired life looks “just about perfect”.
The only problem, though, is he can’t shake off his years of intensity and stress at work. In his words, he feels the stress is still continually switched on, despite all his attempts to calm it. It frequently disturbs his sleep, which he finds compounds the problem, and it’s gradually reduced his resilience over time. He has had multiple medical tests… and the result? It’s the impact of years of stress on the body.
In Dad’s day, particularly as a senior leader, stress was something you had to learn to manage. Sink or swim. It was entirely your problem to deal with.
But the evidence is in – and it’s something we’ve known for a while. Focusing on individual wellbeing initiatives alone doesn’t work. They don’t reduce high workloads, improve relations between managers and staff, reduce customer aggression, improve control and autonomy over work, or have any impact on any of the other major organisation-wide factors that truly impact wellbeing.
We’re not saying don’t do individual initiatives – there is absolutely a place for those. However, doing the organisation-wide stuff is imperative if you truly want to shift the dial and make a difference.
Learn more about wellbeing from a senior leader’s perspective in our great podcast interview with Hugh Goddard, Managing Director at Pipeline & Civil.
