From Surviving to Thriving: Crafting work to support wellbeing

Shifting work to life-centred and asking what would help us thrive not just survive the workday.

My last blog post on a broken system of work and the tragic suicide of a 27-year-old employee at Ernst and Young sparked a groundswell of discussion. And turned into an Op-Ed for Australia’s largest media company. I had been unsure about hitting publish when I wrote it. I felt strongly about the issues with the design of work and the workplace that I had observed for decades, but I had rarely been so outspoken about them. Certainly not in a national media outlet. While I was grateful to have the opportunity to reach a wider audience, I also felt mildly panicky when I heard NewsCorp wanted to publish it the very next day.

For some strange reason (perhaps all those writing books that encourage you to write by telling you to imagine you are just writing for yourself), writing on the blog feels more personal. I worried I would get hate mail from angry managers who wanted to keep things the way they had always been. Be present in the office, work whatever hours are asked of you, and don’t complain.

The opposite happened. I received hundreds of comments and emails, many of them utterly heartbreaking. Many were from managers. All were about the entrenched cultures of overwork I had written about and its effects on physical and mental health.

My plea to shift the approach from machine or system-centred, to not just human-centred, but life-centred resonated with many. But what does it mean, and how do we go about a life-centred approach?

Historically, a prevailing approach to job design centred around the person as a ‘human resource’. The comment I hear most in organisations is ‘I don’t feel valued and I don’t feel heard’. Employees were expected to leave any parts of themselves (including any expression of emotion) at the door when they arrived. Many organisation cultures represented (and some still do) a survival of the fittest game.

Suck-it-up, don’t complain, don’t expect to do anything outside work if you are serious about your job. We should be under no illusion that this approach has disappeared in the new landscape of work. In response to the Op-Ed, one reader wrote to me about a young man in a graduate management training program in a large Italian bank. This young employee took his own life after being told quite directly that if he wanted to grow in his career he would have to set aside his personal life and be prepared to move wherever the company asked them.

A life-centred approach is “regenerative and responsive, bringing together responsible businesses with global goals to design products and services that minimise harm, re-nourish the planet, and foster just and diverse ways of being” (Damien Lutz, 2022). Such an approach offers an opportunity to design organisations and jobs that support not just surviving at work but thriving.

The brilliant Gretchen Spreitzer and her colleagues define thriving at work as “a desirable and positive psychological state in which employees experience both a sense of vitality and learning. Employees who are thriving feel that their current experiences and behaviors at work are intrinsically motivating and supportive of self-development and personal growth.”

How might things in organisations and our lives change if we put thriving at the centre? How many of us feel like that in our jobs?

Creating a benchmark of thriving shifts the conversation in a fundamental way. It brings into sharp focus unsustainable practices and ways of behaving. Raising these conversations is critical.

But what can we also do on a personal level to move toward thriving as a way of being?

A great place to start is to take stock of your days over a course of a week. Keep notes on how much time you spend on things like commuting, Zoom, trying to find things, trying to get hold of people. How are your days filled up?

Also track how much sleep you are getting, how much time you are spending on your phone, what you eat, how much water you drink, how much exercise you are doing, who you are spending time with.

And finally, track your mood and your thoughts. This can be a challenging activity but starting off by acknowledging where we are actually at is essential to create change.

At the end of the week, your notes might leave you feeling overwhelmed at how much time you are spending, or not spending, on various aspects of your life. And how much this differs from how you’d craft your ideal day at work.

But crafting our days to support thriving doesn’t have to be done all at once. We hear it all the time, but small changes really do make a difference.

Burning Man has seen an influx of corporate seekers.

While we might feel tired due to overwork, lack of sleep, taxing relationships, or dietary imbalances, an often overlooked contributor to feeling drained has to do with how we treat our brains.

A key aspect of this is the chaotic multi-tasking nature of our work and lives that we are almost all guilty of. Of course we can type that report while paying attention in the Zoom meeting and also cooking our lunch. Unfortunately, research into how our brains actually work puts paid to this myth. While you may think you are multi-tasking, your brain is just working faster, switching between activities. It isn’t doing two tasks at once. The effect of this constant switching affects our attention and focus, meaning we make more mistakes and take longer to get things done.

A recent study in Harvard Business Review found that office workers switch back and forth between programs around 1200 times a day, which is equivalent to around 4 hours of work a week. Four hours. Companies who are asking their employees to use up to 30 different applications (not uncommon) take note.

As well as taking longer and making mistakes, all this switching and having to work harder to focus drains our cognitive resources.

Shut down all the other applications and distractions that you can, use headphones if necessary, and work on just one thing at a time. Try not to book meetings back to back, especially Zoom ones. The extra effort from trying to read non-verbal cues and sustain eye contact is exhausting.

Crafting our days to thrive means designing our days in a way that supports us in being at our best. Getting enough sleep, getting off our phones, drinking more water, and eating well. All things that we know but that few of us regularly do. Walking enhances our creativity by 81%, and being in nature dramatically influences a range of things from our stress levels to our mood.

Another key aspect that will help us thrive is thinking about the environments that will best support what you need to do. Notice how different spaces make you feel. Do you need a quiet space where you can concentrate without interruption? Do you need to feel more creative? Bounce ideas off other people? Maybe this is working from home for some of the week or even day.

Think about matching the work you have to do with the environment that will best support it. Our physical environments act literally as a cognitive scaffold, influencing our mood, thinking, stress levels, creativity, and performance. Some of my research on this was featured in this New York Times opinion piece last week. Crafting our environments to enhance our thinking, mood, and happiness is also critical. And a topic for another day.

Start with one change that moves you closer to thriving at work and in your life. The benchmark has been far too low for too long.

If you would like more on the future of work and how we can reimagine work to live more meaningful and creative lives follow along here https://www.libbysander.com/newsletter