Whether its new employee orientation programs or leadership programs, at some point during the course there is an explicit or a subliminal call to bring your “whole being” into the job. That’s what every CEO wants. Everything else stems from there.

I’d like us to explore that a bit. What is “whole being” ? Why is that important? Who does it benefit? How can you do it- sustainably? Is it even achievable? Why do corporations struggle with this. Are they really serious about this or is it one of those desirable holy grails whose cause is lost even before the journey to find it starts? Lets start with the what.

What does leadership mean when they ask of employees to bring their
“whole being”?

Merriam-Webster dictionary has a plethora of definitions and meanings for the word ‘whole’. We’ll settle for one:’constituting the total sum or undiminished entirety’.

We human beings are complex. The being is the sum total of our physical, mental, social, financial, environmental and spiritual states and all permutations and combinations of interactions among ourselves from a manifestation of all these states within each of us.

Bring your ‘Whole being’ would mean “Bring your total sum or undiminished entirety to work”. The whole being needs to be focused on producing results for the corporation.

Why is that important?

The oft quoted recent Gallup poll comes to mind. 87% of the global workforce is disengaged and these include all variations of disengagement including presenteeism and absenteeism. If any one of the 6 dimensions called out above are compromised, it impacts the “whole being”. Hence if corporations are serious about having employees bring their whole being leaders and managers would need to take some accountability to enable it besides the employees themselves. We’ll see how in a minute.

Who does it benefit?

The answer to this question may surprise you. The obvious answer is the corporation. The less obvious answer is a whole nation. The reason is because everything in this world is connected. From getting the wonderful news of the complete remission from a life threatening carcinoma of my colleague and friend’s daughter living in a city in the US to News of Michael Schumacher being grievously injured and recently making a recovery. We get it know about it. It takes up mindshare. We connect. It becomes a talking point for many and can detract from our activities. I call these out to remind us of how fragile our attentiveness is. In turn how vulnerable our ability to stay “whole” is. So any investment in bolstering the “whole being” can only yield positive outcomes.

How can you bring your whole-being and do it sustainably?

The tempting answer is..No that’s not possible. And that could well be true i.e. you can attempt to bring your whole being and contribute immensely to your company on one day and another day you could be missing out all the action. So we have a dilemma. The way to tackle that dilemma was partially in my earlier post, CEOs, wake up to Presenteeism in your Organization, June 16, 2014. It starts with measuring Presenteeism. Presenteeism is tactical disengagment. If Presenteeism is neglected or ignored it can lead to chronic presenteeism which then becomes a strategic problem of lack of engagement. So it is the responsibility of the employee to remember and be honest to why they are in the job and here’s what been missing in corporate policy…their side of the wager– which is to not just be interested in the employee’s peak output and opinions but in the well-being of the employee’s ‘whole-being’ as well. In the 100 plus years of the largely western model of large scale businesses, CEOs and managers with very rare exceptions have fought shy of caring for the employee holistically. Some believe that by offering extended insurance coverage to employees’ families its a done thing. It’s neither a done thing nor is it an equitable balance of trade. Employees are expected to give up their discretionary time even to meet corporate objectives and are not expected to get more than what’s on contract in terms of total rewards. So here’s the thing…Corporations cannot expect sustainability until they play their part in nurturing it. The challenge and opportunity is in How can you nurture it? There are some ideas later in this post.

What’s stopping CEOs from making this achievable? Why do corporations struggle with this.

Here are a few reasons why nurturing sustainability is a challenge:

1. Its getting into unchartered territory. In today’s VUCA world, besides few CEOs/ex-CEOs like those of Costco, HCL or Zappos, no one is willing to make that mental shift and walk the talk of “We Value our people”. Its more truthfully rather, We value our people’s contribution. We need to develop the will to change that.

2. Belief systems that are rooted in old-world thinking – The demographics of Most CEOs of large successful corporations world-wide are para-Baby Boomers. These folks did not have to carry laptops and get pinged 24×7 in their most productive years of their lives. I am one of them. Once you have lived long enough in that rarefied orbit and made it big, its an entirely different world of priorities. It scares the daylights out of us to even imagine how complicated the life of a Gen X/Gen Y call-center employee is in trying to balance his 14 hour work day with a working wife, a pair of elderly parents and a new born kid to boot. Multiply that by the number of employees in that mode and we’ll choose to steer away from it.

Whereas Gen X and Gen Y folks have inherited a different work culture. One that demands them to be ON 24×7, one where its relatively easy to be substituted, one where change is the norm. Yet they get to see very little in terms of support on several of the essential dimensions of wellness. So here’re some ideas worth sharing on what motivates these folks: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/206502

3. The tools of nurturing are still being invented. The best tool corporations have today is Mentoring. Its a great start. The opportunity to take this forward and deeper is there. Dr. James Prochaska and team uncovered 11 factors that can act as barriers to sustained productivity in their paper “The Well-Being Assessment for Productivity: A Well-Being Approach to Presenteeism”. Look out for means to uncover these in ways that Gen X and Yers are comfortable participating in i.e.mix of using electronic means to communicate with them and face-to-face meetings. This generation is far more fluent and comfortable with technology than any other group and today forms the bulk of the workforce. CEOs should invest in looking for the means to uncover these barriers. The investment will pay back with interest over time.

Its doable with the following simple things in place:

1. Senior Leadership’s collective will to truly value employee’s sustained well-being and Not an employee’s sustained output alone. The former precedes the latter. The evidence of this collective shift will be seen when this will prompt Strategic initiatives and allocation of funds to take action, create metrices and provide the necesary trainings and alignements in HR policy to support the “whole-being” while on the job and beyond even.

2. Choosing the most suitable partner(s) to provide an unambiguous process, the IT framework, and governance to periodically run assessments, guide targetted mentoring and training and measure outcome and trends. Start small with a pilot over 6 months and 100 employees and test the results. Learn from it, iterate and move forwards.

3. Look for associations between this strategic initiative and business successes over a couple of quarters and feed it back to the employees that the new actions fostering and nurturing the “whole being” are a true win-win!

4. Encourage everyone to become ambassadors and Multipliers of the new initiative. In the book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Wiseman and McKeown look at various types of leaders and identifies two different types of leaders, Diminishers and Multipliers. Multipliers see genius in others; create intensity that requires best thinking; extend challenges; debate decisions; and instill ownership and accountability. On the other hand are so called Accidental Diminishers. Those who hinder and otherwise keep their employees’ productivity at a minimum. The authors give what they consider to be solutions and guidance to the issues they bring up in the book.

Recall that Merriam-Webster dictionary has a plethora of definitions and meanings for the word ‘whole’. We settled for one: ‘constituting the total sum or undiminished entirety’. So lets refrain from hindering action or ignoring the effort needed to foster the “whole-being” and lets refuse to become a collective accidental Diminisher at such a most foundational level.

In conclusion: Whether its a new employee or senior leaders and mid-level managers there is an ever-present call to bring your “whole being” into the job. That’s what every CEO wants. Everything else stems from there.

What has been your experience…what actionable ideas might you suggest to make you sustainably whole at work?

I’d like us to explore that a bit. What is “whole being” ? Why is that important? Who does it benefit? How can you do it- sustainably? Is it even achievable? Why do corporations struggle with this. Are they really serious about this or is it one of those desirable holy grails whose cause is lost even before the journey to find it starts? Lets start with the what.

What does leadership mean when they ask of employees to bring their
“whole being”?

Merriam-Webster dictionary has a plethora of definitions and meanings for the word ‘whole’. We’ll settle for one:’constituting the total sum or undiminished entirety’.

We human beings are complex. The being is the sum total of our physical, mental, social, financial, environmental and spiritual states and all permutations and combinations of interactions among ourselves from a manifestation of all these states within each of us.

Bring your ‘Whole being’ would mean “Bring your total sum or undiminished entirety to work”. The whole being needs to be focused on producing results for the corporation.

Why is that important?

The oft quoted recent Gallup poll comes to mind. 87% of the global workforce is disengaged and these include all variations of disengagement including presenteeism and absenteeism. If any one of the 6 dimensions called out above are compromised, it impacts the “whole being”. Hence if corporations are serious about having employees bring their whole being leaders and managers would need to take some accountability to enable it besides the employees themselves. We’ll see how in a minute.

Who does it benefit?

The answer to this question may surprise you. The obvious answer is the corporation. The less obvious answer is a whole nation. The reason is because everything in this world is connected. From getting the wonderful news of the complete remission from a life threatening carcinoma of my colleague and friend’s daughter living in a city in the US to News of Michael Schumacher being grievously injured and recently making a recovery. We get it know about it. It takes up mindshare. We connect. It becomes a talking point for many and can detract from our activities. I call these out to remind us of how fragile our attentiveness is. In turn how vulnerable our ability to stay “whole” is. So any investment in bolstering the “whole being” can only yield positive outcomes.

How can you bring your whole-being and do it sustainably?

The tempting answer is..No that’s not possible. And that could well be true i.e. you can attempt to bring your whole being and contribute immensely to your company on one day and another day you could be missing out all the action. So we have a dilemma. The way to tackle that dilemma was partially in my earlier post, CEOs, wake up to Presenteeism in your Organization, June 16, 2014. It starts with measuring Presenteeism. Presenteeism is tactical disengagment. If Presenteeism is neglected or ignored it can lead to chronic presenteeism which then becomes a strategic problem of lack of engagement. So it is the responsibility of the employee to remember and be honest to why they are in the job and here’s what been missing in corporate policy…their side of the wager– which is to not just be interested in the employee’s peak output and opinions but in the well-being of the employee’s ‘whole-being’ as well. In the 100 plus years of the largely western model of large scale businesses, CEOs and managers with very rare exceptions have fought shy of caring for the employee holistically. Some believe that by offering extended insurance coverage to employees’ families its a done thing. It’s neither a done thing nor is it an equitable balance of trade. Employees are expected to give up their discretionary time even to meet corporate objectives and are not expected to get more than what’s on contract in terms of total rewards. So here’s the thing…Corporations cannot expect sustainability until they play their part in nurturing it. The challenge and opportunity is in How can you nurture it? There are some ideas later in this post.

What’s stopping CEOs from making this achievable? Why do corporations struggle with this.

Here are a few reasons why nurturing sustainability is a challenge:

1. Its getting into unchartered territory. In today’s VUCA world, besides few CEOs/ex-CEOs like those of Costco, HCL or Zappos, no one is willing to make that mental shift and walk the talk of “We Value our people”. Its more truthfully rather, We value our people’s contribution. We need to develop the will to change that.

2. Belief systems that are rooted in old-world thinking – The demographics of Most CEOs of large successful corporations world-wide are para-Baby Boomers. These folks did not have to carry laptops and get pinged 24×7 in their most productive years of their lives. I am one of them. Once you have lived long enough in that rarefied orbit and made it big, its an entirely different world of priorities. It scares the daylights out of us to even imagine how complicated the life of a Gen X/Gen Y call-center employee is in trying to balance his 14 hour work day with a working wife, a pair of elderly parents and a new born kid to boot. Multiply that by the number of employees in that mode and we’ll choose to steer away from it.

Whereas Gen X and Gen Y folks have inherited a different work culture. One that demands them to be ON 24×7, one where its relatively easy to be substituted, one where change is the norm. Yet they get to see very little in terms of support on several of the essential dimensions of wellness. So here’re some ideas worth sharing on what motivates these folks: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/206502

3. The tools of nurturing are still being invented. The best tool corporations have today is Mentoring. Its a great start. The opportunity to take this forward and deeper is there. Dr. James Prochaska and team uncovered 11 factors that can act as barriers to sustained productivity in their paper “The Well-Being Assessment for Productivity: A Well-Being Approach to Presenteeism”. Look out for means to uncover these in ways that Gen X and Yers are comfortable participating in i.e.mix of using electronic means to communicate with them and face-to-face meetings. This generation is far more fluent and comfortable with technology than any other group and today forms the bulk of the workforce. CEOs should invest in looking for the means to uncover these barriers. The investment will pay back with interest over time.

Its doable with the following simple things in place:

1. Senior Leadership’s collective will to truly value employee’s sustained well-being and Not an employee’s sustained output alone. The former precedes the latter. The evidence of this collective shift will be seen when this will prompt Strategic initiatives and allocation of funds to take action, create metrices and provide the necesary trainings and alignements in HR policy to support the “whole-being” while on the job and beyond even.

2. Choosing the most suitable partner(s) to provide an unambiguous process, the IT framework, and governance to periodically run assessments, guide targetted mentoring and training and measure outcome and trends. Start small with a pilot over 6 months and 100 employees and test the results. Learn from it, iterate and move forwards.

3. Look for associations between this strategic initiative and business successes over a couple of quarters and feed it back to the employees that the new actions fostering and nurturing the “whole being” are a true win-win!

4. Encourage everyone to become ambassadors and Multipliers of the new initiative. In the book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Wiseman and McKeown look at various types of leaders and identifies two different types of leaders, Diminishers and Multipliers. Multipliers see genius in others; create intensity that requires best thinking; extend challenges; debate decisions; and instill ownership and accountability. On the other hand are so called Accidental Diminishers. Those who hinder and otherwise keep their employees’ productivity at a minimum. The authors give what they consider to be solutions and guidance to the issues they bring up in the book.

Recall that Merriam-Webster dictionary has a plethora of definitions and meanings for the word ‘whole’. We settled for one: ‘constituting the total sum or undiminished entirety’. So lets refrain from hindering action or ignoring the effort needed to foster the “whole-being” and lets refuse to become a collective accidental Diminisher at such a most foundational level.

In conclusion: Whether its a new employee or senior leaders and mid-level managers there is an ever-present call to bring your “whole being” into the job. That’s what every CEO wants. Everything else stems from there.

What has been your experience…what actionable ideas might you suggest to make you sustainably whole at work?

What is Presenteeism

Presenteeism has been called “working while unwell,” and is meant to refer to the lack of productivity, and cost to employers, when employees show up to work at less than full steam.

It represents disengagement with the task at hand for whatever reason, not just during cold and flu season. Simply put, it is a multi-billion dollar global concern and your company is more likely than not, contributing to that statistic. Yet, try dropping the word presentee or presenteeism in your day to day conversations with your leadership team and you’ll typically get a bewildered look. I get that half teasing statement even, ” You made that word up, didn’t you”. I didn’t but Prof. Cary Cooper did in the mid-nineties and it is now a mainstream term. Dictionary.com defines pres·en·tee·ism [prez-uhn-tee-iz-uhm] as a noun:

The modern day Presenteeism is a result of barriers to an employee’s wellness. In a seminal study, “The Well-Being Assessment for Productivity: A Well-Being Approach to Presenteeism,”James O. Prochaska, et al, captured a holistic set of well-being related performance barriers. Their study revealed two distinct clusters—personal barriers and work-related barriers. Each of these barriers were chosen from many other factors based on how strongly they co-related with productivity loss. In the end, 11 factors were cited between the two clusters. One cluster cited personal related causes of presenteeism.

1. Health
2. Caring for others
3. Financial
4. Personal issues
5. Depressed/stressed

… while the other cluster cited workplace related causes of presenteeism.

1. Lack of Resources
2. Issues with coworkers
3. Not enough time
4. Issues with supervisor
5. Technical issues
6. Lack of training

A Quick Practical way to measure it

There are simple yet smart ways to assess Presenteeism in your company. Once that’s done its an easy task to quantitatively estimate the $ impact to your business from the loss of productivity.

In a letter to persons interested in “content and scoring rules for the WHO HPQ absenteeism and presenteeism questions,” dated May 1, 2007, Ron Kessler, Maria Petukhova and Keith McInnes of the Harvard Medical School, and T. Bedirhan Üstün, of the WHO gave a quick way to compute presenteeism as shown below. They extracted the key questions from the WHO HPQ survey. Try this simple one-question dip-stick test with a sample of your workers and see what you get:

The scoring rules are pretty straight forward: Absolute Presenteeism % scoring rule: 10 x B9

1. Start by thinking about your role.
2. Walk through the above question, and answer it with honesty.
3. What answer did you get for Absolute Presenteeism?

Ask each employee in your team to answer the question with all honesty. Compute the average Absolute Presenteeism. Taking the average Absolute Presenteeism as a percentage times the sum of annual salary of the employees in that team will give you the estimated gain in productivity if you removed the individual barriers leading to each employee’s presenteeism.

My research efforts into how these barriers get addressed today resulted in a shocking revelation. These range from being totally ignored to pill-popping lip-service. Addressing the root causes of the factors is the way to go. Its non-intuitive but doable.
How does your organization estimate the prevalence of presenteeism?

How it should be:

For days this week the Pollutant Standard Index (PSI) hovered between 100+ to 400+.  Singapore’s worst environmental crisis in more than a decade saw acrid smoke seep into people’s homes.

How it is:

Pic Courtesy: Straits Times

Environmental wellness is often under valued.  How important is the air we breathe? How often do we even stop and think and feel grateful for the excellent quality of air that Mother Nature has bestowed on us.

This is a good time to bring home the value and importance of environmental wellness and make it touch down in our individual private lives.  At goholisticwellness.com we defined Environmental Wellness as  “Environmental wellness is a state in which a person realizes the need to alter his/her dwellings of work and living to bring about harmony and efficiency in a way that does not pollute other people’s environment and utilizes environmental wellness to drive his/her other wellness dimensions.”

If every individual were to adopt the above definition in the way they go about their lives, would it have prevented the situation that we started out this post with?  Wouldn’t it have automatically encouraged innovative thinking on the part of the farmers who are slashing and burning forests and their keepers for years now?  The current happenings can serve as a good way to appreciate why the way to view Environmental Wellness the way we do, is so special.

Creating financial wellness by burning trees in a way that results in stealing an unrelated individual (in the case whole cities of millions of people)’s Environmental Wellness, will be disallowed if people followed the wellness principles stipulated in @ goholisticwellness.com. By allowing slash and burn to happen year after year, every time it happens, you can see the negative impact on not just the obvious environmental Wellness dimension of Singaporeans and Malaysians, but its negative impact on other wellness dimensions such as their social, physical and mental dimensions!  These are our Wealths, our WELLths!

How true is that? How can that be? check out these: Air pollution strains Indonesia–Singapore relations – Channel 4 News ,  Singapore Haze Craze Lights a Fire on Social Media … – Yahoo!

Take the goholisticwellnessTeller(c) assessment and get a snapshot of how WELLthy you are today.

Call to Action:

1. Recall the activities you indulged in in the recent past to improve your Environmental Well-Being and check to see if in doing so anyone else unconnected with your Environmental Wellness was adversely affected.

2. Plan any future EWellness pursuits to be executed in a way that does not impact another’s. By doing so see your Social, Mental and physical Wellness also benefit, from this simple act.

i was caught up with a series of classes i had to run for Enterprise Services. Time for reflections.

One of my goals of a Wellness pursuits for mind and body has been Archery. I got my chance at professional archery practise for the first time at the HP clubhouse this friday. i believe some pictures were posted. i’ll upload them once i have them.

Share with the team how you have been these recent weeks.

– Winston Churchill

She almost never took it off, but it was giving her a bit of a rash so she did, zipping it in her coin purse for safe keeping. Later, she absentmindedly emptied the contents of that purse into the collection cup of Billy Ray Harris, who is homeless and often stays under a bridge in Darling’s hometown. — A good deed– that gave her happiness. It wasn’t until the next day that she realized her ring was gone. These were her words then. “It was horrible. It was such a feeling of loss,” Darling said. “It meant so much to me beyond just the financial value.” Was she happy after losing the ring?

Billy Ray Harris, who is homeless and often sleeps under a bridge, however noticed the ring in his bowl and instead of pawning it off and making a few extra bucks, kept the ring safely, hoping for the owner to return for it. How usual is that for a homeless man to do?

Darling however went back to the place she had given her money to Mr. Harris, He was gone. But she returned the next day and found Billy Ray Harris there. Sarah Darling asked him … ‘I don’t know if you remember me, but I think I gave you something that’s very precious to me,’ and he said, ‘Was it a ring? Yeah, I have it, I kept it for you “. Imagine how Happy Sarah would have been when she heard this? Imagine how Happy Mr. Harris would have been seeing Sarah so happy and relieved? That was Mr. Harris’ moment of perfect Happiness in his imperfect life.

What do you think?

The story did not end there. Sarah and her partner were so touched by Mr. Harris’ honesty that they started an online donation campaign for Mr. Harris and in a week over $140,000 has poured into the account. Sarah and her husband will give all money raised to Billy Ray Harris at the end of a 90-day fund raising campaign. More Happiness for Mr. Harris and his benefactors!

Here’s what i liked most. When asked asked him how he felt about all the attention he’s attracted since returning the ring.“I like it, but I don’t think I deserve it,” he said. ”What I actually feel like is, ‘what has the world come to when a person who returns something that doesn’t belong to him and all this happens?’” Harris said.

Anyone who would like to recognize homeless man Billy Ray Harris and his humble belief in honesty and honor can donate to the account.

Sarah Darling is thrilled at the response from people all over the globe and told CNN, ”I actually feel like I’m especially lucky to have this ring now. I loved it before. I loved it so much, but I love it so much more now. I feel like it has such great karma.

Perfect Happiness!!

what do you think?

Lets talk a bit about the last one..Spiritual Wellness. VIktor Frankl invented what’s called Logotherapy. What might be the connection between Logotherapy and our group’s theme? A lot. Logotherapy is the powerful psychospiritual wellness aspect of existential psychology that was developed by Dr. Viktor Frankl who was the successor to Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler in the Third Viennese School of psychiatry. The core of this therapy lies the belief that besides Maslow’s Motivational theory of Needs, there is one other need i.e. to live with a consistent sense of meaning. You can find more practical resources here;http://www.logotherapy.fulfillmentforum….Next week we’ll touch on more ideas to maximize our Spiritual wellness. Before i go i share a story

My Son, 11-year old, was going thru his growing years and was out of school last week overcoming mild case of chiken pox. As we did not want him to miss out i called his form teacher and let him know what’s going on. We talked about options to get his home assignments to reach him. After assessing various options the form teacher suggested the following: He will swing by my apartment twice a week and drop this assignments in our letter box. My son will complete these assignments and send in scans of his work via Email. The form teacher would then distribute the work to the respective teachers. i thought that was brilliant on many fronts. Above all was the meaning that both the teacher and my son were deriving from this. My son will grow up and am sure will recall this gesture when he gives talks as an adult and for his form teacher, he is going to have one father of his pupil, who is on the way to idolize him in all of Singapore by writing about his care and effort in the main newspaper forum. Here’s why. On the second time he tried to drop in the assignments he found the slot was locked–something i do to prevent spammers– He smsed me when i was in a meeting. 10 mins later when i responded her replied..”not to worry, i have handed over the assignment to your wife”. In this day and age? WoW!! That was way beyond anything i expected. My son’s gone to school today after this ‘break’..Lets see what he comes back with 🙂

Perfect happiness for him while undergoing a phase of imperfect life!

By derivation from a perfect life earlier..an Imperfect life could be one either not having all the required or desirable elements, qualities, or characteristics and if it did have all the required or desirable elements, qualities or characteristics then its not as good as it is possible to be OR a combination of both.

So the question is how do you fill in all the gaps in elements or possibilities…and make it whole…?

One could think of doing this if one knew how much i am exceeding in some element and how much i have a shortfall in another, and knowing how one could ‘transfer’ the excess into the shortfall and make it whole..