Workplace Well Being - Why It Matters - August 2023

Cultural Insights Podcast

This month, Cynthia & Will share their culture insights about:

• Leadership acknowledging/ recognizing the importance of well being in the workplace
• Actions leaders can take to better understand well being
• C5 Dashboard mettics that help a coach and/ or leader understand well being and anxiety, next steps and feeback

Articles referenced:

Employee well-being is so critical to some organizations that they’re turning it into a new C-suite role

A company replaced all of its managers with coaches. Employees became 20% more productive–and much happier

Listening/ Transcript Read Time: 9 Minutes

William Gladhart:
Hello and welcome to August's Connect2Metrics Cultural Insights Podcast. I'm Will Gladhart, the CEO of Connect2Metrics, and I'm here with Cynthia Kyriazis, the director of client experience for The Culture Think Tank. We're so glad you joined us.

We have some really fascinating insights to share with you this month, as we begin to look at the last half of the year and also refocus and retool after summer vacation. We thought a really great topic to visit would be wellbeing and what we're seeing in the marketplace about what is happening around employee wellbeing. Cynthia, tell us what you've been seeing, what you've been reading, and also you have noted several articles that really piqued your interest.

Cynthia Kyriazis:
I did. Thanks, Will. I had some time this summer to read. I thought one thing that's been coming up that I don't know if our coaches have been seeing, but it was interesting to me, is several articles about how enterprise organizations are now hiring in the C-suite for chief wellness officers. Some of us might say, "That's long overdue," but now they're actually doing it. So I wanted to talk about that just a little bit.

When we first started talking about the Culture 5, we talked about the engagement. There were a lot of people talking about engagement until I said, "Well, okay. Engagement is the outcome." The core thing that kicks that off is how well communication takes place, how connected people feel. It's about their feelings. Well, we've also been talking for a very long time about wellness. Of course, we define wellness as how secure and confident an individual feels in their role.

And that's the outcome. They feel good in their role. They feel secure in what they're doing with the organization. But the root cause of that is how high the levels of anxiety are in an organization for whatever reason. I think it's probably safe to say, and nobody would argue, that there's been plenty of anxiety hanging around for the last few years.

William Gladhart:
Yes.

Cynthia Kyriazis:
I don't really think it's going away. I think it moved to managers and not just staff. There are a couple of things that came up. Number one is, yes, there are several articles about very large organizations the size of, let's say, Google, Amazon, Verizon or AT&T, that have hired somebody to put on the C-level staff. They've hired what they call chief wellness officers, and they are responsible for exactly that. The wellbeing of the staff and of the individuals.

Really, in reality, it is something that's far beyond and far more specialized than what one HR position can do, because HR has a variety of things that happen. But I think this chief wellness officer, again as I've said, has been probably long overdue. When I started to think about

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