Workplace Wellbeing

A Relational Approach

James Costello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429886867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Cultura aziendale
• Index: Business

Workplace Wellbeing – A Relational Approach presents the most important, insightful and up-to-date academic thinking and research related to flourishing at work. Italso describes the transformative humanistic skills, values, and attributes ordinarily adopted by counsellors and psychotherapists alike, and shows how they may be transferred from a therapeutic setting to the workplace. Integrating ideas and strategies from counselling and psychotherapy, the book gathers together a wealth of accessible, interactive exercises and resources to help develop the skills and personal awareness to thrive in organisations.

Workplace Wellbeing – A Relational Approach examines how we can create an emotionally healthy workplace for all of us. It will prove useful for counsellors and psychotherapists alike, whether in training or practice in an organisational setting. More importantly, however, it is designed to be of value to the non-specialist, particularly those working in business, education, healthcare, human resources, occupational health, and organisational psychology.

Chapter 1

Do you flourish at work?

Wellbeing – more than the absence of distress

Well … do you flourish at work? Or are you as puzzled and disconcerted by the question as I was when a well-remembered colleague took the time to ask me that question a long time ago? It troubled me then that I avoided answering truthfully by responding yes … I am flourishing. I instinctively understood that flourishing had to mean more than just surviving, or minimising my distress, but unfortunately that is how low many of us are prepared to set the bar when thinking about our wellbeing. So, this seems like the most obvious place to begin our conversation about what wellbeing means. A very senior manager in a large “caring” organisation explained to me how a distressed colleague had “lost their nerve”, sounding oddly like how the military spoke of shell shock over a century ago. Then and now it would appear, people who experience stress at work are seen as weak, having some character flaw or lacking backbone. Thinking of stress in this way is inappropriate and potentially dangerous. It forces the issue underground for some, and promotes a culture of shame in others that gets in the way of people either asking for help, or taking time off to get better.

Presenteeism, where people come to work even when they are feeling distressed, is ironically exacerbated both by the structure that work offers, and the normalising effect of being around colleagues who appear to be coping. At any given time, a sixth of the population goes to work experiencing the physical (somatic) symptoms of emotional distress – sleep problems, not eating properly, headaches and migraines, neck and back pains, tiredness, and more. How often do you hear people say in response to the question, “how are you doing? Oh … surviving”. Sickness-presenteeism has become the “new normal” in many organisations. Researchers who want to explore the relationship between wellbeing, sickness absence, and presenteeism report how frustrating it is to persuade organisations to participate in studies because they fear “opening Pandora’s box” (Collins et al., 2018).

Distress is a normal reaction to abnormal circumstances. Organisations content to promote “Mental Health Awareness” seem all too blind to the ways they may contribute to creating the abnormal circumstances that negatively affect their employees, and instead assume that stress is inevitable, good for you, and only affects those lacking in resilience. None of this is true: every vase ultimately overflows when too much water is poured into it. We can only guess at the true scale of the distress caused by relational abuse in the workplace, because when things go wrong, workers find themselves gagged by increasingly popular non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) which protect the reputation of serial perpetrators. So-called gagging orders are becoming progressively popular in public institutions, and in the UK for instance they are used to prevent workplace abuses becoming public. The UK House of Commons, employing a mere 2,500 people, spent £2.4 million of taxpayers’ money on such arrangements during 2013–17. At the time of writing, UK universities weighed in with a staggering £87 million in such pay-offs in the past two years alone, indicating how they are becoming standard practice for quietening those who they fear may harm their valuable reputations.

Soothed disengagement is not the answer. It is taken for granted that wellbeing is in the control of the worker, and that stress equates to some personal irresponsibility in how you run your life. Affordable spa weekends, yoga courses, worthy yet vacuous slogans, and dry Januarys are just some aspects of the burgeoning industry of stress management and wellbeing products that place the responsibility for being well firmly with you. Nobody argues that having a band play as the ship sinks can help soothe, but doing so is a potentially fatal distraction from the business of avoiding icebergs to begin with. As a hospital doctor explained: “It is put on me as an individual to adapt and survive this environment … rather than making the environment more survivable … sitting in a room trying not to think about stuff is not the answer”. When talking about resilience training she went on to explain: “if someone is beating you with a stick do you offer them padding (i.e. more training) so they can carry on hitting you?” It does not take much imagination to recognise that colleagues too overworked to attend their subsidised mindfulness course or complete their online wellbeing module will soon become resentful about being offered psychological personal protective equipment (PPE) to guard against the emotional risks of their workplace. Organisations recognise the problem at some level, regularly offering expensive interventions such as one-to-one coaching to employees of strategic importance. Yet it is an act of faith to assume that the feel-good factor of wellbeing will “trickle-down” the organisation. The danger of the beer and circuses approach is that we become seduced into pathologising the individual, ignoring the underlying structural causes of distress, and passively accepting palliative care as the solution.

Figure 1.1PPE – Protection from thinking, feeling, hearing or seeing.

A multi-layered phenomenon. I do not accept that the absence of stress is sufficient to render the workplace somewhere we can thrive as human beings. In order to flourish we must consider how the individual and the organisation or groups of people interact and engage with each other. Organisations are not wholly responsible for the stress we experience at work. It is too simplistic to attach blame to either the individual or a faceless monolith. Instead, stress has to be understood in terms of a multi-layered physiological, social and political phenomenon. A Relational Approach, which I champion here, emphasises connectedness, complexity, and mutuality. It considers the holistic wellbeing of an individual and how this is entangled with the wellbeing of the community to which he or she belongs. Organisational and structural factors frustrate and impede healthy ways of organising our working lives (Chapters 2 and 8). Our default relational (Chapters 3–5) and group behaviours (Chapter 6) also contribute to a potent shadow-side of work which manifests itself in emergent behaviours, which includes relational abuse (Chapter 7). You may be disappointed to learn that I am not offering any psychological quick fixes to survive what can feel like an abusive relationship with your place of work. The more ambitious project for us all is to understand, and then renegotiate aspects of how we see ourselves in relationship with our work communities, because such relationships can inadvertently undermine our capacity to flourish.

Neoliberalism and the wellbeing agenda. Forty years ago we seemed to stop trusting governments to organise our social structures and make sense of the world for us. Instead, we put our faith in the free market, where the average of the expressed preferences of countless consumers becomes the process through which we resolve our social problems. There are drastic consequences for our wellbeing as the state withdraws from health care, energy supply, housing, law and order, telecommunications, and public transport. Instead of a share in the prosperity, we get impending climate catastrophe, populist convulsions, public health emergencies and banking crises. We thought we were getting freedom, but instead neoliberalism offers us inequality and envy to spur us on to work harder, be more productive, and so increase our value in the marketplace. The CEO in a FTSE 100 company now earns about of 150 times the average salary compared to only 50 times that amount in 1998. Income inequality – which affects levels of trust, ...