The Emotional Side of Happy, Healthy Culture

A 16-month longitudinal research study titled “What’s Love Got to Do with It? A Longitudinal Study of the Culture of Companionate Love and Employee and Client Outcomes in the Long-Term Care Setting” set out to measure the influence of emotional well-being and behavior of both employees and patients at a long-term health care facility. The study, conducted by Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade and assistant professor of management at George Mason University Olivia “Mandy” O’Neill, looked at 185 employees, 108 patients, and 42 of those patients’ family members. The researchers’ big question was:

Can an organizational culture of happiness, compassion, and love lead to better results?

They found that an emotional culture of “companionate love” or genuine bonds among coworkers—where employees demonstrate caring, compassion, tenderness, and affection for one another—was associated with lower burnout and stress levels. A compassionate culture was not only more engaging but was essential to employee morale, teamwork, and patient satisfaction. In other words, if employees were happy and worked together more compassionately, the organization was more successful. Creating a culture where everyone treats one another with compassion lowers everyone’s stress levels.⁵

According to Barbara Fredrickson, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, strong connections with others create a sense of safety and capacity that become fuel for professional development and growth. These high-quality connections are what Fredrickson calls “micro-moments of connection.” When these connections take place, staff thinking broadens, they absorb knowledge more quickly, their skills are enhanced, or they are inspired to make changes. Connected employees are more engaged, playful, open, and resilient in the face of stress. These micro-moments can accumulate to make a positive impact on people’s overall health and quality of life.

The Case for Employee Engagement

Jennifer Flynn, health management strategy consultant at the Mayo Clinic, said in an interview in Laura Putnam’s book, Workplace Wellness that Works, that key to employees engaging in their own health is “perceived organizational support.” That is, “if employees do not feel supported by their organization, by their manager, or by their coworkers, they are less likely to trust and therefore engage with any wellness efforts on a meaningful level.”

A report called “The State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders”⁶ categorizes engaged employees on the following continuum:

1. Engaged employees are passionate, feeling profound connections to their company, driving it forward.
2. Not engaged employees are “checked out sleepwalking through their workday, not putting energy or passion into their work.
3. Actively disengaged employees are unhappy at work, acting out their unhappiness, undermining their engaged coworkers’ accomplishments.

You have probably heard the saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” attributed to famed management guru Peter Drucker. Culture is the underpinning of everything your organization is trying to accomplish. Culture is the driving force behind your organization’s vision, mission, and values. Culture can make or break your organization from the inside out. Without addressing your organization’s culture, your staff will eat french fries for breakfast and not the healthy snacks in the break room!

Elements of Culture Change

Organizational culture change involves a shift in your nonprofit’s personality and emotional culture but needs an assessment process, education, and changes to structures and processes to make it stick. In Chapter 3, we introduced you to ways of changing your personal habits to happier, healthier ones. Remember how hard it was to change a personal habit like going from skimping on sleep to prioritizing seven to nine hours each night? When you try to create an organizational cultural shift, keep in mind you are not just trying to get one person to change but everyone in your organization.

“Changing culture isn’t as simple as identifying the new behaviors you want to see and articulating a new set of beliefs and values associated with these,” notes Bridgespan’s Kirk Kramer in the article “Strategies for Changing Your Organization’s Culture.”⁷ Nobody said it would be easy!

In Workplace Wellness that Works, Putnam uses the following framework to better understand organizational culture and the potential to shift it into a culture of well-being. The framework is based on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, mapped to an organization’s hierarchy of needs:

• Level 1: Functioning Factor—Do people have what they need to do their job?
• Level 2: Feelings Factor—Do people feel appreciated and respected?
• Level 3: Friendship Factor—Do people feel connected to one another?
• Level 4: Forward Factor—Do people feel like they have opportunities for growth?
• Level 5: Fulfillment Factor—Do people feel like they are inspired and working toward a higher purpose? ⁸

Nonprofit organizations often naturally provide the Fulfillment Factor due to the mission-driven nature of the work. Brian Scios, director of community and communications for Childhood Domestic Violence Association, talks about how people who work for nonprofits are there to do good in the world. They want and get meaning in their lives by going to work every day, working for the greater good. “But then they discover limited budgets, staffing, and mission creep to follow the money,” says Scios. “The advice I give to any new employees who get frustrated: Do something about it. Bring up your concerns, try to come up with solutions, and work to get them implemented.”

Scios’s advice should be a rallying cry for all nonprofit professionals but also for the organizations that employ them. Your organization should listen to your employees, their complaints, and their needs, and not just pay lip service to what they tell you but actually address their concerns. Your employees have a front row seat to the culture dysfunction in your organization, and their feedback should not be ignored. Acting on employee feedback fosters employee engagement and, even better, initiates important organizational culture changes.

When you look at Level 2 on the hierarchy, the Feelings Factor, examine what it feels like to work at your nonprofit. Do people feel appreciated or are they afraid? Do they feel energized or depleted? Justin Chase, president of Crisis Response Network, a suicide prevention line, knew he was not going to be able to implement a WE-care strategy unless the organization’s culture changed. When he was hired as the second executive director, he saw that the workplace culture was fear-based, regulatory, and top down.

“The employee voice was frowned upon. And anytime senior management was seen in the workplace, it was to fire people,” says Chase. “My process was to be very transparent and get feedback from employees. I heard a lot about how people were scared to come to work and fearful about change.” Working with an employee engagement committee, Chase systematically made changes within the organization based on employee feedback. We discuss his techniques in Chapter 9.

Sandra Bass, PhD, assistant dean of students and director at the University of California Berkeley Public Service Center, says the center works at creating a culture where the students feel connected to one another, addressing Level 3, the Friendship Factor.

Says Bass, “We use play to encourage joy, laughter, and lightness—it is a communal way of addressing some of the stress that comes with social justice work. For example, have a space with comfortable chairs, adult coloring books, and nice music. It is a place for students to destress and connect with one another if they are stressed. It creates a space for students to create a community of care.”

Pamela Chaloult, chief opportunity officer at BALLE, an organization that researches well-being in the workplace, says her own organization has created a culture that fosters staff well-being. Doing so makes sense because their organizational core values are based around transformational experiences in the workplace. When new staff members join their team, they already understand that employees respect one another. Everyone treats each other with loving kindness.

Says Chaloult, “We have a hugging culture. We greet each other with hugs. Physical hugging increases endorphins, and it is a way for connection.”

Chaloult admits that hugging may seem unusual in the workplace, but it works for them. Staff is also encouraged to give respectful feedback to one another coming from “a place of appreciation.”

Nonprofits often face challenges with providing Level 4, the Forward Factor or opportunities to move forward, whether this is the chance for career advancement or opportunities for professional development. Lynnae Brown, director of the Howie the Harp Advocacy Center, a social service agency that provides mental health services in New York, says, “We view staff jobs like a well paid internship—where staff are learning, building capacity, and strengthening skills as they contribute so they can move on to greater pastures. Our program staff is small—10 to 12—so there isn’t a lot of room to move up or even around. We all did the StrengthFinder assessment to understand our personal strengths and this led to an appreciation of what we all contributed to the program. From there, each staff person created their own professional development and growth plan based on ‘big picture’ goals.”

Initiating Happy, Healthy Culture Change

Understanding culture change is one thing. Getting the culture shift going is another. It takes time, process, and patience as staff and founders from GlobalGiving can attest. Several years ago, GlobalGiving facilitated an all-staff workshop where they named and made explicit their core values. Their values included: Always Open; Never Settle; Committed to Wow; and Listen, Act, Learn, Repeat. It was not long before the organization’s values—like Never Settle—made staff feel stretched and conflicted about their work-life balance. Staff hit a bit of a crisis point, according to Alison Carlman, director of marketing and communications.

Carlman recalls, “Our executive team heard what the staff was saying, and they allocated time and funding for us to design our own process for identifying our challenges and recommending solutions.”

Staff set out to answer questions like:

• How can we create a safety net to support us when we feel overwhelmed by our values?
• How should we navigate the absolutes like never and always that are part of our values?
• How do we balance what makes sense for our mission and vision and what makes cents for our nonprofit business?

Their staff spent a day with a facilitator and came up with some strategies to change their way of working that balanced excellence without excessive work hours and stress. The organization also instituted time and project management systems and tools to help staff avoid stressful work flows and commitments. But more important, says Carlman, “The executive team invested resources into guest speakers, short courses, tools, and staff over the course of a year to help us all become more confident at listening, experimenting, learning, and pivoting or persevering. It has created a workplace that is fun, dynamic, and sustainable.”

Creating a happy, healthy nonprofit culture requires a step-by-step approach. Here are some key steps:

• Step 1. Awareness: Inform everyone within your organization about the issue of stress and burnout and the importance of self-care. Share the science from credible sources to back up the information you provide. For individuals, frame the conversation of self-care as more than addressing physical health but providing energy and vitality in all aspects of life. For organizations, frame the conversation around the benefits of investing in a happy, healthy culture that includes reduced health costs and major boosts in productivity, employee engagement, and talent attraction and retention.
• Step 2. Learning: Create the space and time for assessment and education for employees and help them develop their own customized self-care plans based on the results of their individual assessments. Bring in experts to provide workshops, lunch and learn sessions, brainstorming sessions, interactive retreats, and webinars on self-care topics. Offer short-term sessions that teach stress management techniques like meditation, deep breathing, or yoga that can have long-term effects. Make sure leadership takes part in these activities to encourage wider participation.
• Step 3. Practice: For employees to alter their self-care habits, they need to feel empowered and supported. Remember that education and activities only go so far without employee engagement or an organizational culture that supports individual efforts. Frame this culture change as your organization’s challenge, not as a problem for specific staff members to tackle. Foster the “we are all in this together” feeling to set the stage that allows people to talk about these changes and to support one another. We can’t say this enough: Leadership must model some of the new behaviors. When leaders take care of themselves, others follow and your organization benefits.
• Step 4. Accountability: Turn to your assessment results and retake the assessments after a period of time to see what progress has been made. Set up regular activities for self-care as part of the office work routine such as check-ins about well-being during staff meetings, opportunities to debrief after particularly stressful organizational deadlines or situations, and mentorship between staff members. Encourage staff to find “accountability buddies” to support each other’s quest to be happier and healthier.

Don’t think of the goal of WE-care as starting a traditional wellness program. WE-care is bigger than that. You are embarking on creating and implementing more than an incentive activity or a new health care benefit. You are changing entrenched attitudes, behaviors, and bad habits that are perpetuated across your entire organization and bringing down morale, energy, and productivity. WE-care is a collaborative process to develop and sustain a culture of internal well-being.

Happy, Healthy Leadership in Practice

What does leadership modeling at an organization look like in practical terms? How can leaders lead the charge so all staff models happy, healthy behaviors at the office and to the people and communities they serve? They can do so by practicing healthy leadership and talking with staff about self-care, not just modeling it.

Kara Allen Soldati, president and CEO of United Friends, admits that she did not share enough about how she personally approached the concept of work-life balance and self-care at her previous job. While she did integrate flex work policies, adjusted schedules to meet staff needs, implemented paid volunteer time, and raised time off allowances, a review by some of her staff and board members revealed to her that she didn’t effectively explain how she prioritized her own self-care or communicate how she wanted others in the organization to do so as well.

When she arrived at her new position, Allen Soldati embarked on a “listening tour” to hear from others throughout the organization. She made a point to share a personal example of her self-care strategies with each person, and she asked them two questions:

1. How do you model self-care?
2. What could our wellness plan include that would ensure that you and our teammates are most fulfilled and modeling this to our young people as well?

Allen Soldati found it was effective to not only model self-care, but to start the conversation around self-care at her organization. Torrie Dunlap, CEO of Kids Included Together, made a deliberate plan to spread self-care throughout her organization. Dunlap noticed that her organization’s very passionate staff was falling in the all-too-familiar trap of putting their work before their own health and wellness.

She researched corporate wellness practices and interviewed wellness consultants to develop a program to encourage everyone at her organization to lead healthier lives. On a nonprofit budget, they could not afford extravagant measures such as catered organic lunches and weekly massages. Dunlap instead identified a list of healthy—and affordable—activities that everyone, including herself, could take part in. She also considered how to give permission to staff to be healthy at work.

Says Dunlap, “A light bulb went off. What if we made physical activity a part of people’s paid time at work?” She worked with her senior leadership team to put together a plan for her entire staff, including senior leaders. It included:

• Three paid hours off per week to exercise, and the employee must match that with two hours per week on their own time.
• Adding exercise time to their work calendar so people could monitor how they were progressing.

Her organization offered these things as a three-month pilot and made them optional to anyone who wanted to take part. They also asked staff to log their exercise hours and track outcomes. At the end of three months, they took a survey of all participants. All of them reported feeling a reduction in stress. They also tested biometrics like blood pressure, cholesterol, and other indicators and saw positive outcomes. One staff member was able to successfully discontinue her diabetes medication under her doctor’s supervision.

The important thing, notes Dunlap, is staff reported they felt the organization truly cared about their health, and it wasn’t just talk. Dunlap adds the program has been a successful recruiting tool for new talent. “Candidates for new positions have told us that the charge to exercise during the workday is an attractive perk.”

Improving internal and external relationships, enhancing employee wellness and well-being, and attracting and retaining talent are just a few of the benefits of WE-care in the workplace. People-focused leaders know this and make self-care part of strategy. But they can’t operate in a vacuum. They still have to answer to their boards.

Board Buy-In

To make a happy, healthy organizational culture sustainable, it has to be endorsed, nurtured, and supported at the top. A nonprofit’s board of directors has a fiduciary responsibility for the nonprofit and its mission. To succeed with culture change over the long term, the board members must become stewards for ensuring that their staff is taking care of themselves. Yet too many times the board’s leadership compounds the stress levels in the organization.

Says one nonprofit executive director, “In our organization, we try to maintain work balance, but every quarter before a board meeting, the entire staff is paralyzed preparing for the meeting. You can feel the fear.”

Dr. Suzanne Allen, president and CEO of Philanthropy Ohio, addressed the topic of self-care with her board by integrating it into the strategic planning process for her organization. By doing so, she involved her board in the discussions from the start. She asked her board to consider this tactic: ensure all staff has the energy and appropriate professional development for sustainable performance as part of a retention strategy.

“It was a tough sell. They felt that ‘ensuring energy’ was a bit vague because people come to work to work,” admits Allen. “As a relatively new leader of an organization, I’ve learned that this is the only thing I really can do for my staff. To create a culture that rewards ulcers is not only not creative, it is not sustainable. My leadership team and I shared with our staff—and with the board—that this is important to us, and [staff] professional and personal development plans should reflect the desire we all have for their continued growth and renewal.”

Scaling a happy, healthy culture begins in the boardroom. Changing the culture starts with a board conversation. Board members need to understand and endorse the importance of self-care as part of the organization’s strategic goals and way of working. Says Hildy Gottlieb of Creating the Future, “We have spent many board meetings hammering out policies and processes for ensuring that we are bringing out the best in our staff.” In Chapter 9, we’ll discuss well-being policies in more details.

Education and Coaching

Put simply, if you want people to change, they have to understand the reason for it and why it is important. That’s why informational seminars and one-on-one health coaching are the backbone of culture change as well as being a component of workplace wellness and well-being programs. These educational activities are part of a strategy to shift the organization’s culture to embrace happy, healthy ways of working.

“Walking as work” is part of the organization culture at The United Way in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Every day at 10:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M., everyone at work leaves the office and walks a mile together. That’s every day of the year. The walk takes 15 minutes. In warm weather, they walk in a nearby park. In cold weather, they walk the hallways in their building complex. This daily practice has been in place at the organization for 15 years.

How did it come about? The agency initially brought in a health coach to counsel employees on a quarterly basis as part of its wellness program. Some of the discussions focused on the importance of avoiding the dangers of a sedentary work style. The walking breaks began as an experiment and became an integral part of the way they work.

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) offers employee education and training as part of its wellness program. Every year, the organization identifies a wellness theme—topics like vegan nutrition or financial wellness—and hosts a series of free webinars related to the theme. If employees participate, they receive points that give them a discount on their health insurance plans. According to Cecilia Royal, senior manager of the organization’s HR department, HSUS also provides wellness coaching to employees who request it.

Offering workshops and webinars is not enough. Pairing these with individual coaching for those who need the extra guidance helps change take hold. Bringing vendors in from the outside to provide this support may not always be financially viable. Luckily, there are other ways to shore up staff efforts to make positive strides toward happy and healthy.

Group and Peer-to-Peer Learning Support

Building and sustaining new habits among your diverse staff requires a multilayered approach that keeps everyone motivated. Peer support or positive peer pressure is a potent force when it comes to shaping happy and healthy in the workplace, plus it is cost-effective if expense is a concern. Bryce Williams, vice president of well-being at Blue Shield of California, says of wellness support that “peer-to-peer equals results.”¹² When you work at an organization where positive behavior is viewed as the norm, where it is encouraged, rewarded, and expected, it influences your behavior and seeps into your daily routine.

Gretchen Rubin, author of Better Than Before, says that one of the best ways to build good habits is to join or start a group for people who have the common goal of changing their habits. She notes that habit groups have many benefits, including exchanging ideas, providing energy, and giving encouragement. More important, a habit group offers the secret sauce to habit change: accountability. One way to start a peer-to-peer model is through “accountability partners,” where two peers in your organization meet regularly to celebrate achievements and work through challenges.

Rubin says while accountability partners can work, she doesn’t think pairs offer the same stability as groups. If there are only two people and one person loses interest, gets distracted, or is absent for a time, the accountability benefit disappears. With a group, you’re not as dependent on one person’s engagement.¹³

A peer support group is a group of employees who can learn from each other and provide a structured environment where people who share self-care goals can safely discuss their experiences and learn from one another. Research shows that talking with others who have been through similar experiences may make all the difference in sticking with something like habit change.¹⁴ Lucy Nolan, executive director of End Hunger CT!, says her staff supports each other as an informal accountability group for healthy diet and exercise. “One staff member quit drinking 10 sodas a day and started to exercise and has lost a lot of weight,” says Nolan.

According to Blue Shield of California, employees are more likely to participate in a wellness program if a work colleague invites them. Their commitment to their self-care plan is deepened if there is peer-to-peer accountability. Having a peer group component as part of your wellness strategy can:

• Increase motivation
• Reduce stress and anxiety
• Boost confidence in sustaining new habits
• Remove barriers to forming new habits

Incorporating peer engagement models in a strategy for embracing wellness and well-being increases the chance of success.

“Peer support can build in accountability and commonality, reduce isolation, and provide encouragement and connection while providing guidance from the more experienced for the less experienced. We have different types of groups for patients with different diagnoses such as diabetes or post–heart attack. They offer an instant social network and access to other perspectives,” says Tina Kenyon, LICSW, ACSW, and faculty at New Hampshire Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency at Concord Hospital, who has over 23 years of experience facilitating peer groups for health professionals including teaching stress reduction practices and work-life balance strategies.

Kenyon adds, “As far as influencing organizational culture, one factor is whether or not a group coming together with common goals and aspirations directly impacts their ability to establish and reinforce a positive culture.”

Kenyon has observed dramatic results in the peer groups of medical students she facilitates:

They learn they are not alone in their struggle, and that bringing one’s humanity into daily work can be so powerful. Through supporting one another, they tap into their own resilience, and connect with the resilience in peers and patients. We hear from graduates, now in residency after medical school, that they realize what a key role peer support played in preventing burnout and maintaining a sense of hope in many situations.

Peer-to-peer and group support provide the cultural cues and prompts for employees to regularly practice self-care at work, contributing to a happy, healthy culture. Based on the results of your organizational assessments and what your staff determines should be in their self-care plans, map educational topics to employee needs. Then determine if one-on-one coaching is viable. Even if it isn’t, you can still form pairs and groups to provide additional support for habit change and fundamental culture change.