Beyond Perks: Employers Must Achieve a Values Alignment
By Scott Poynton, Skytop Contributor / October 14th, 2021
Scott Poynton is an Australian forester. He founded The Forest Trust (TFT) in 1999 and grew it into a global non-profit working in 48 countries, impacting more than $1 trillion in supply chain transactions.
Scott supported some of the world’s largest companies to be more environmentally and socially responsible. He brokered major transformations across the wood and agri-commodities sectors, pioneering responsible sourcing and launching the world’s first No Deforestation, No Exploitation commitments.
In 2020, Scott founded The Pond Foundation. Its My Carbon Zero program helps individuals and businesses take their own strong, credible climate action. He also leads a different way limited, supporting c-suite executives and their organizations to grow values-based leadership while sharing the lessons of his experience through writing, presenting and lecturing.
Well-Being and Achieving Great Results with Resonance
The employee well-being industry has taken off in recent years as businesses recognize that mentally and physically well, happy people create outstanding results. This has only been enhanced with COVID-19.
Well-being officers have been recruited and programs developed while staff, engaged in a range of offers, complete surveys – for we must have data – to measure effectiveness and create feedback that is used to refine and improve program outcomes. Company leaders point proudly to the good care they take of their people. Often though, companies adopt a narrow approach, focusing on perks such as gym memberships, in-house yoga and the like, that address symptoms without tackling bigger, cultural root causes.
Deeply embedded issues that affect well-being remain and a failure to understand and address them can create dissonance and cynicism that, paradoxically, undermines otherwise well-intentioned efforts.
We Can Create Resonance In Our Lives
Resonance comes when people feel connected to who they are and live from that place in everything they do. When people feel their life is aligned with their values, they live and work with passion and intensity, they go the extra mile. Resonance pumps up people’s tyres.
People, profits and the planet thrive when people find resonance. When people are the best, happiest version of themselves, they not only live more fully but inspire those around them to do likewise. Resonance breeds resonance that drives performance and delivers great outcomes for everyone.
When people feel dissonance, for example when they work every day at a job that requires them to do things that don’t resonate with who they are, well-being and results fall sharply away. Sponsoring a dinner or some other perk helps, but these are band-aid, short-term fixes. Missing a yoga session can be annoying but doesn’t create feelings of long-term, insidious, draining dissonance like doing something that just isn’t you, day in, day out. A higher salary, an annual bonus, or a promotion can help ease the suffering for a time, but if you have to drag yourself to work every day because you feel what you’re doing isn’t aligned with who you are, both personal well-being and company performance suffer greatly. You collectively just don’t ever achieve the heights.
The path to real well-being and great results lies much more deeply within. How might we fathom those depths and travel that path most effectively?
Understanding Connection to Self
We can’t make good well-being programs unless we better understand well-being, but that’s difficult, because so much of it is intangible, so much of it is a matter of the heart, or even deeper, the soul. There’s not a lot of data we can measure for those things.
This notion that people experience a greater sense of well-being when they feel connected to themselves – what does that mean? It is just too difficult for many people to grasp. If you can’t see it, can’t touch it, if you can’t put it in a spreadsheet and analyze it with your intellect, you can’t measure it and what can’t be measured can’t be managed, so it gets left aside. From my experience, that’s a mistake and sees us masking and missing fundamental issues that need addressing.
We can get closer to some understanding of this notion of connection to self by feeling our way forward rather than thinking. When something’s not right, we often feel it first in our body, often in our gut, long before our intellect can rationalize the problem, long before we can say “It’s not right because…”. We’ve all experienced that. We just know, we feel something’s not right, or conversely, we for sure know when something feels right. It lifts us up, inspires us, and gives us a warm glow.
Feeling Resonance and Dissonance
These feelings are important in our search for well-being. I describe them as feelings of resonance and dissonance, the former for when something feels right, the latter for when it doesn’t.
To help grasp this notion of resonance and dissonance, this feeling of something being right or not, I remember what happens when I go on a long walk. I love walking, and being in the forests and mountains really does lift me up. I feel great out there, very much connected to nature, and connected to myself. That’s resonance.
At some point, I inevitably get a small stone in my shoe. It’s annoying. That’s dissonance. But it’s only a small dissonance, a small stone. If I move my foot around a bit, I can get the stone into a place where it doesn’t hurt, and I can keep walking. I don’t need to take any major action. I don’t need to stop, take off my shoe and empty it. We all live with some dissonance in our lives and a small stone, wiggled into a good place, is not enough to stop me. Or is it?
Some stones aren’t as small as I imagine when they first sneak into that gap between foot, sock and shoe. I think, “It’s nothing, I can keep walking” but before I know it, it’s hurting. Maybe a second stone has piled in there, dissonance on dissonance.
But I keep walking, sometimes belligerently, “Not going to let a small stone slow me down!” Before long, I’m suffering. It’s painful. I wiggle my foot, shake it about, but nothing seems to work. I’m in a hurry. Stopping to remove my shoe is an imposition, I don’t want to. I keep going but then it really starts to hurt. Inevitably, I’m forced to stop, take my shoe off and free myself from the dissonance. If I’ve left it too long, there could be a blister in there, or worse, blood.
That’s a good metaphor for resonance and dissonance and how it can affect well-being. We can even imagine what might happen if we live too long in dissonance. That blister could burst, the rubbing might continue and before long, there’s a serious issue. We can imagine that if we really leave it, we could end up with an infection and long, long, long-term, possibly gangrene.
Dissonance, left unchecked, really can have harmful impacts.
It’s easier to feel that physical pain, when we’re physically unwell, than to notice and understand what to do about emotional, spiritual or mental pain. Well-being is such a multi-faceted concept and a narrow focus on our physical state can see us missing important signals that there’s a stone somewhere that needs addressing. Stones can find their way into our shoes from many sources, many directions, just when we feel all is well. Likewise, poor well-being can creep up on us and from one day to the next, we can go from thinking all is well to sliding down the well-being ladder.
Going Beyond the Office Perks
This is why physical actions like perks, salary raises and promotions don’t always generate overall well-being. They don’t touch deeper emotional, spiritual or soul-felt dissonance. These dissonances enter our lives when there’s a disconnect between where we want to be emotionally and spiritually with where we are.
When we work in a place where deeply embedded cultural issues prevail, all the perks in the world will still have us feeling like there’s a stone in our shoe. The key question is whether it can be endured with a foot wiggle, or whether, left unattended, it will grow toward pain and ultimately gangrene. In such cases, employees come to see the perks on offer as a ruse, a cunning plan to get them to endure the pain longer. That cynicism further undermines efforts to improve well-being and the pain only grows.
Company well-being programs thus need to go beyond the prevailing ‘perk’ focus to better understand the values of the people they’re seeking to support. Trimmer waistlines, better eating habits, yes, these all help and are great well-being program outcomes. It’s a struggle to be dancing if your physical well-being is challenged.
But we can only reach and remain at the well-being heights and achieve the great outcomes that come with them when people feel truly aligned.
The first step in helping people feel aligned is to define your company values.