WELCOA Summit 2019 Recap: BE HUMAN

What matters most when it comes to building thriving, flourishing, and fulfilling workplaces?

What do we, as leaders of people and culture, need to be thinking about as we co-create the workplaces of the future?

What can we do to shift the dialogue from wellness-or-else to fostering meaningful human connection and people-first cultures?

Each year, the Wellness Council of America (WELCOA) brings together hundreds of practitioners and thought leaders to cast a vision for how to answer questions like these in their National Training Summit, an event I've attended for nearly a decade. I had the opportunity to be one of the keynote speakers in 2016 and love connecting with my peers each year. This year, I also had the opportunity to join a mentor of mine, Rosie Ward, and speak at her session on rehumanizing the workplace. It was a joy to share our stories of courage and vulnerability and to invite people to shed their masks and be their best selves.

I can capture the essence of this year's Summit in two words:

BE HUMAN.

By the end of this recap post, you'll have a better sense of what I mean by that and why I feel so strongly that this is where this industry is headed.

Josh Levs opened the summit with a critically important conversation about the importance of paid parental leave policies that reflect a new reality that is people-first instead of work-first. His book, All In, would be a great read to dig deeper into that topic.

This year's Summit was focused on the evolution of WELCOA's 7 Benchmarks to shape the future of wellness. Here are some of my key takeaways from each session by benchmark:

1) Committed and Aligned Leadership

For many organizations, effectively engaging leadership can be a challenge. I remember six years ago, when I returned from that year's WELCOA summit and asked my CEO a few questions to get at the heart of what mattered to him. He wanted to make sure whatever we did was fun for people and that it had the potential to change their lives. He wanted to be seen as an organization that leads by example. With those insights, I began to shift how I was positioning wellness in our organization. I started applying for, and we started winning, awards for being a top workplace and healthy employer. We started focusing on fun and outside-the-box ideas Having his support made an impact, but it started with me asking better questions and finding out what mattered to HIM.

Jen Arnold, a friend and colleague, who has had a major impact in the industry through her Redesigning Wellness podcast, kicked off this discussion about leadership support. She shared research from The Conference Board that found "attraction and retention of top talent" and "developing leaders for the next generation" were two of the top concerns among a study of 800 CEOs. Jen challenged us to consider some key questions and insights as we approach leadership:

1. Buy into the Business. Shift from "How can I get leadership to buy in to wellness" (as its motivation is a bit selfish and self-centered) to "How can I better buy into the business and help the company and its people achieve their business objectives?"
2. Connect FIRST. Establish a relationship with your leaders and those you lead before you ask them for anything. Find out what interests them and matters to them. Meet one-on-one with as many people as you can and listen to what they say and how they say it. Listen to their pain points and challenges. Seek to understand them and their business needs. THEN align your "ask" with their needs.
3. Integrate, don't separate. So often, wellness is a siloed program instead of an integrated strategy. Jen shared Cassie Buckroyd's work at Columbia Sportswear as an example of someone who has effectively integrated wellness into the overall strategy of her organization. See the chart below to see how they have integrated wellness into their leadership structure.

Meghna Majmudar added to the leadership conversation with a session about how we define power, strength and leadership to have more influence. Her definition of a leader is "someone who is able to create a future that would not have already happened." What are you doing to be that kind of leader?

2) Collaboration in Support of Wellness

Maggie Gough kicked off the next benchmark conversation about healthy social connection, a topic we have shared hours of conversations about in the past due to our mutual interest in it. She opened with the wisdom of Brene Brown:

"The two most powerful words we can say are ME TOO."

So often, we forget this. We don't realize the power of sharing our stories and inviting other people to share theirs. Maggie invited us to pause and make us think about showing up differently for the people in our lives at work and beyond:

1. Are we amplifying or diminishing people through the work we're doing in the name of wellness?
2. People often aren't to blame for the initial event that led to the cascade of their poor health. What are we doing to be in their journey with them rather than judging them?
3. Self-care is an act of celebration that you exist.

As Maggie reminded us, we have to get past the idea of "When you're done your work, then you can take care of your wellbeing" and instead create micro-moments of connection through which we invite others to feel seen, heard and valued.

3) Collecting Meaningful Data to Evolve a Wellness Strategy

Sara Rauch and Jennifer Pitts, who played integral roles in reshaping the benchmarks, led a discussion about measuring the value of caring and asking better questions. Most traditional wellness metrics are clinical in nature - changes in health risks and health care costs and ROI. Emerging metrics focus more on the value on investment and the value of caring. Here are two powerful reframes to consider as you approach what you're doing in the name of wellness going forward:

1. What lens are we using to judge the success of our approach? Sara shared a story about a company that was tracking the number of employees using their fitness center, online portal and who was meeting standards for physical activity. With lower-than-desired numbers, they assumed employees didn't care about wellness. Once they started talking to employees, they found out that work readiness and strength and agility were high priorities, that people weren't around computers all day and that they wanted to use empty spaces to create their own onsite fitness centers. Stop assuming and start asking.
2. What a society chooses to measure will, in turn, influence the things that it seeks. If you're measuring changes in health risks, HRA completions and biometric screenings, employees will quickly realize that your initiative is more about your bottom line than their health and wellbeing. Consider exploring questions like these to use measurement as a mechanism of caring:

4) Crafting an Operating Plan

A panel of several industry visionaries came together to weigh in on how to elevate wellness from a nice-to-have program to a meaningful business imperative. The panel consisted of WELCOA President, Ryan Picarella; Jim Purcell (Founder of Returns on Wellbeing Institute), Colleen Reilly (President & Founder of Catalyst Consulting), and Soma Stout (VP for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)).

It was facilitated by Anna Greenwald, CEO of On the Goga, a super cool company that creates innovative wellness experiences.

Here are a few of the key insights these leaders shared:

1. Position wellness as a long-term, cutting edge, socially responsible, legacy-building, fiscally impactful strategy...because it is.
2. Culture has to be conscious. You can't drop programs into a toxic culture and expect them to work. That's why focusing first on the culture of your organization and what matters to its leaders is an important first step. Consider how your leaders want to be viewed and positioned. (See benchmark #1 above for an idea for how to do that.) What are your leaders' biggest challenges? What are their interests? How can you help them get what they want?
3. The three most powerful metrics to measure to determine success are turnover, employee engagement and customer service and satisfaction. So often, organizations cut employee-related expenses when times get tough, but that is not a long-term play and almost always has negative implications long-term for turnover, morale and performance.

My friend (and incredibly talented) graphic facilitator and scribe, Michael Lagocki, captured the key takeaways from the panel in the art below:

5) Choosing Initiatives that Support the Whole Employee

So many of our wellness initiatives and strategies focus more on physical health and wellbeing than emotional health and wellbeing. We have often been more concerned with scaring people into health than we have about casting a compelling vision for what it means to flourish and thrive.

Stella Grizont kicked off the morning with a discussion that is near and dear to my heart - how to foster human flourishing at work through applications of positive psychology. One of my favorite parts of her session was the framing of the evolution of employee development from hard skills to "soft" skills to INNER skills. If we can equip people to manage their mind and mood and take ownership over their own experiences rather than being victims, we shift flourishing to being an inside job. Stella walked us through the 3 Cs we can shift in our lives to lead to greater happiness and less self-sabotage:

1. From complaining to gratitude. Complaining is a state of grievance or suffering. It gives us tunnel vision and puts us in victim mode. Stella challenged us to take a "complaint vacation" and write down daily three things we are grateful for to counteract our negativity bias.
2. From criticism to optimism. Criticism is a form of learned helplessness, but we have the power to develop new neural pathways that develop learned optimism. We can shift our mindset to reframe a negative situation with 3Ps: Personal ("What happened was an unlucky situation and is not a reflection of who I am at my core."); Pervasive ("This is one of many goals I have and failing here doesn't mean I'm a failure."); Permanent ("And really, this is just a setback, not the end!"). Teaching people to shift their mindsets in these ways is one of the most powerful things we can do.
3. From comparison to celebration of our uniqueness. Comparison is an analysis of where we stand relative to others but we don't have all the data points to make an accurate calculation. It's a faulty equation to compare only what we can see from the surface of someone else's like with all that we know about our own situation. Instead, each of us needs to arrive at our own definition of vision using this as a guide:

"A vision is an expression of success where you're being most engaged and alive."

Employees don't want to feel like projects to fix. They want you, as their leaders and employers, to genuinely care about them as human beings and supporting them to thrive and flourish. That will, in turn, benefit your bottom line through retention, engagement and morale.

Brian Luke Seaward contributed to the discussion by exploring the art of healthy boundaries in a digital age. Most of us struggle with being too attached to our digital devices, and it's taking a toll on us. Screen dependency disorders, marked by too much screen time, are damaging and literally rewiring our brains. We cannot stay turned on all the time, yet many of us do. As a result, we are in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness, isolation and alienation.

Without realizing it, many of us are turning to technology as an "adult pacifier", so we don't have to face the boredom, loneliness or lack of purpose in our lives.

Here are a few questions to consider as you reflect on your own digital habits:

1. Is what I'm doing with technology appropriate or inappropriate? (hint: Talking on the phone to a client in a bathroom stall - as Brian shared - or taking pictures of your kids so often that you miss interacting with them - would not be considered appropriate.)
2. How do you practice downtime unrelated to screen time?
3. Are you setting healthy boundaries in your life, such as not responding to emails and texts about work late at night? If you're a leader, do you encourage phone-free meetings or make it clear to your team that they are not expected to respond at all hours? One company implemented a policy of no texts to employees after 5pm, and it was a game changer for them.

6) Cultivating Supportive Health-promoting Environments, Policies and Practices

Rachel Gutter, President of the International WELL Building Institute, shared updates about the evolution of the WELL Building Standard and WELL Portfolio and how they can be used as frameworks to combine design, wellness programming and policies to foster thriving organizations. Check out this video to learn more about the role of our spaces in shaping our health and wellbeing, business performance, and productivity.

7) Conduct Evaluation, Communicate, Celebrate and Iterate

Scott Rigby, CEO and Founder of Immersyve, closed out the deep dive of the evolved benchmarks by challenging us to think differently about how we approach wellness.

So often we use threat and pressure to try to motivate people to do what we want. We use carrots and sticks and incentives, thinking that those things will lead to long-term change and sustained motivation. But the science of motivation is much more complex, and those low quality forms of motivation are not the answers. In fact rewards hurt and undermine goals in the long run through something called "the undermining effect."

What can we do instead?

The best way to support and facilitate motivation is through internalization - by leveraging three fundamental psychological factors that drive motivation in ALL humans, regardless of age, gender, generation or other differentiator:

1. Autonomy. Humans want to be self-directed, autonomous decision makers who are the authors of our own actions. Command-and-control cultures undermine our desire and need for autonomy. If you're implementing an initiative at your organization, give your people the rationale behind it in a way to wing them over vs. trying to control them.
2. Relatedness. All of us want to feel like we belong. We want to feel connected and respected. How is your strategy enhancing relatedness among your people?
3. Mastery / Competence. People want to feel effective at what they're doing and exist in a comfort zone of success. If every initiative we roll out seems like an impossible challenge, people will be defeated before they even begin. What can you do to implement strategies that give people a sense of success and feeling of effectiveness?

To learn more about how to more effectively measure the impact of your wellness and engagement strategy, check out Scott's platform, motivationWorks.

Here's the bottom line:

The future of wellness and the future of work is HUMAN.

Earlier this year, I shared this post and wanted to reshare it here as a final thought because of how it captures the essence of this year's summit:

Take Action

Here are some ideas for you to take action based on reading this post:

1. Which of the ideas above resonated most with you? Feel free to leave a comment below!
2. To learn more about the topic of workplace culture, check out one of the articles I've linked below:

• Rehumanizing the Workplace: Hope for the Future of Work
• What Employees Really Want from Work
• The 3 Cs of Wellbeing: A Return to What Matters Most

3. If you're interested in learning more about the dynamic keynotes, trainings and leadership development sessions I facilitate, send me a direct message and check out my speaker reel.