From Complicated to Intuitive

For example, think of what has happened to computing over the past 50 years. From the late 1960s on through the 1970s, computers represented an arcane, nerdy world of Popular Electronics, tubes, circuits, FORTRAN, COBOL, Bell Labs, and computers as big as boxcars. The UNIVAC computer contained more than 5,000 vacuum tubes, weighed about 30,000 pounds, and cost a million dollars. As strange as it may seem to younger readers, in those days computing was supposed to be hard. And only the acne-faced, too-weird-for-daylight, cultic, basement dwellers could lead the way.

But a revolution led by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and many others toppled the titans of that weird world. To their horror, computers became innate, fun, creative, and cool. The whole earth passed from seeing computers as “wonky technical” to “easy intuitive.”

That revolution, which was largely led by Apple, allowed me and millions like me to start new businesses. We did not need full-time or expensive accounting services, tech support, administrative help, expensive web designers, e-commerce specialists, a graphics department, PR, etc. All those special disciplines have become easy and intuitive. We may still need such experts and specialties from time to time, but we're not as dependent on them as we were in the old days. That interdependent ecosystem was designed to let the individual call the shots.

I see a comparable vision for the future of workplace health, happiness, and high performance. For example, after a long history of distrust, proprietary dominions, and silos, in 2013 medical science and building science worked together, in side-by-side collaboration to create something new. Corporate real estate and human resources discovered they had a common mission. They could build an idea, a whole environment, that released humans to flourish in safe and healthy buildings and furnishings. We are still in the exciting early days of watching the workplace health and well-being ecosystem take shape, become more human, and increasingly allow individuals to manage their own time, space, tools, and preferences. It also allows them to integrate their working roles with their real-life needs and constraints.

The outside world continues to be hostile. Think about it: Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, and other cities along the lower band of America became business centers because of air conditioning. In other words, American ingenuity and business momentum subdued the natural hostility of climate. In the very same way, we no longer have to submit to the status quo. Good work and a good workplace have become a haven for many. The workplace is the one social invention with the resources, reach, and reasons to make those havens in a heartless world a reality. The outliers we have highlighted throughout this book have made employee happiness and health a centerpiece of their culture and business strategies. They have not only broken through old barriers, but demolished our old paradigms about the value of workplace health and well-being. For some, cost was the final threshold guardian. After too long of mumbling “too expensive,” even that has been overthrown as a barrier to worker health and happiness.

The Collapse of the Cost Barrier

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, to build a highly sustainable building meant paying a steep premium of between 10% and 30%. Today that cost is negligible. When CBRE opened their new office in 2013, they were pioneers in the field of creating a healthy workplace by design. Even at that birthing moment, the additional cost was 1.73%. Today, the cost hovers around 1% over conventional construction.

CBRE blazed a trail that became a road, that became an interstate highway. And in just four years. So much progress in such a short time; today WELL design¹ is quickly becoming the starting point. No one has a reason to not build that way.

DPR Construction, one of the nation's premiere builders of technically-challenging and sustainable projects, is one of the latest examples of that new reality. The very culture of DPR brings high expectations to every project, especially their company offices. Each office construction tries to outdo the last project.

Chris Gorthy, one of DPR's project executives and a core member of our Well MindShift team, explained why the DC/Reston project was important to DPR: “We've always been a highly collaborative culture. It's in our roots. Our old office just didn't support the culture. That all came back to life in our new office.”²

“One of the best improvements was a new sense of community. We now find people eating lunch together, interacting more, getting up and moving around. Knowing that five minutes of walking is enough to stimulate blood flow, we worked with our design partners to create opportunities for movement within the office. It was simple concepts; putting the kitchen at the far end of the workstations, allowing employees to engage in ping ping, shuffleboard, or take a walk while on a call. All of those changes were brought in to assist our employees with being healthier while creating opportunities for casual encounters of communication and sharing.

That's a completely different shift from our old office. People came in. They did their job. They went home. There was little dialogue outside of getting stuff done.

“If you walk into our ‘living room’ right now, you may find very diverse conversations among employees, contractors, vendors, and visitors. That kind of interaction and community exchange was limited in our old office. Our environment makes it easy to meet new people, to learn from each other—it's just so natural. It's hard to describe, but powerful. It is one of those unintended consequences of creating an environment flexible enough for people to just act natural.

“Our challenge was balancing elements of our project goals. We did not want the design for sustainability, health, and well-being, energy, and a productive workplace to keep us from achieving any of the others. We wanted to provide 100% natural air, and that pushed against our goal for targeting Net Zero (an annual Net Zero certification within the International Living Future Institute Certification program). We also found that natural circadian lighting throughout the space did not work with the varied schedules of our employees. So, we adapted by providing task-adjustable lighting to allow each person to control their light. In the end, our investment to apply for and submit for WELL certification was less than 1% of our total costs for the project. We were already doing so many of the right things. The biggest lesson was, you don't have to choose between cost, wellness, sustainability, and creating an incredible workplace. With the right team, engaged early, you can maximize the benefits of all four goals.”

Chris expressed a core truth about commercial construction. Culture is like Bigfoot to management. It's out there, and we fear it even though no one has ever gotten a good look at it. When you begin planning to move people to new space, all of a sudden all of those once-hidden attitudes and behaviors come out of the woods to protect their turf. With proper leadership, creating new space can expose Bigfoot and also release the positive potential that too many environments keep caged. Chris already knew DPR had a very collaborative organization, but did not see how much their old space was constraining—and damaging—that natural inclination.

Planning how you will work and live together provides the single most effective tool to understand what your organization is today, and what it could be tomorrow. To those who know how to hear it, the workplace speaks. It says, “We'd like to be a little more like this and less like that.” That is why traditional expert-directed approaches too often fail to deliver improvement.

In Chapter 2, we described the CBRE project as a journey. We describe it (and other projects) that way because the outcome was not predetermined. Traveling with purposeful ignorance and curiosity will lead people to unexpected destinations. The difference between the CBRE's journey and DPR's is that better maps guided DPR. And, as we suggested earlier, in time the trail became a well-traveled highway. And, that is why DPR's new building project is a very big deal. It confirms the timeless pattern of how civilization unfurls. It's how things never imagined a short time ago so quickly become routine.

Seven Golden Nuggets

We all know that new eras do not leave the patterns of the past intact. Everything changes when the future comes into view. Most institutions just instinctively fight that process. The coming storm demands we not yield to that impulse. We should do all we can to hasten that transition.

I see seven mind shifts (paradigms, patterns, assumptions, and structures) that are essential to a new era of business. They all confirm a transition from complicated to simple, from wonky to common sense, from siloed to connected, and from bureaucratic to human. I believe they are all inevitable. But those who see and adopt them early will find better positions in the marketplace.

1. Change the environment: Trying to shift human behavior through rational approaches turns out to be expensive and futile. We will all save time and money when we see humans as they really are, irrational, but predictably irrational. If people naturally take the path of least resistance, it is infinitely better to design environments that make healthy and wise choices as natural and easy as possible.
2. Well-being comes before wellness: The corporate focus on physical health is pointless if employees hate their job, fear their boss, or feel isolated and lonely. As Sylvia's story affirmed in Chapter 4, leaders and managers must reduce friction, provide competent and caring supervisors, and make work meaningful. Happiness and health follow. Naturally.
3. We must care for people before we can help them: And we can't care for those we don't know. Some things just take time; like wine, diamonds, and pearls. And knowing and caring for people. Wise leaders and managers know you can't delegate or organize care. Leaders must be willing to be themselves and take the time to discover the gifts and life experiences the employees bring with them. That human touch will create a positive domino effect that radiates beyond the workplace, on out to the family and rolling right on into the community.
4. Build a healthy building: After reminding us how much of life is lived inside of four walls and a roof, Paul Scialla asked, “What if we could activate that space to provide a passive and constant delivery of preventative medical benefits that wouldn't require the occupant to do a thing? An individual, just by being in the space, whether at home, office, or school…could have positive exposure to cardiovascular health, respiratory health, immune health, sleep health, cognitive health. This is a slam dunk!” That is one of the largest pillars of this book.
5. Design work for a person's natural strengths: Perhaps the most compelling motivation behind this book is the need to allow people to work at what they do best and enjoy most. So many stories in this book examine the wisdom of releasing people to work in their strengths. The hardest leadership, management, or parenting habit we face is the twitch to fix what's wrong instead of patiently building on what is already strong.
6. Build social capital: Civilization has always required trust, reliability, connection, collaboration, and reciprocity. When those features are active in human relationships, they build hothouses of social networks, entrepreneurialism, barn raising, and devotion to the common good. That's why human resources, corporate real estate, organizational development, facilities, occupational safety, and procurement function best when they work in harmony. Social capital is the least expensive and most effective asset an organization owns.
7. The age of balancing cost and wellness has ended: Investing in people is exactly that, an investment. Like good seed sown in good soil, that investment produces an exponential harvest. That may be the core insight shared by Apple, Google, and many of the companies we have profiled in this book; they see human resources as an asset to leverage, not a cost to contain.

The Power of a Psychologically Safe Workplace

In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for…most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people's impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.

—Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey³

DaVerse Lounge, located in Dallas, works with severely traumatized kids. Most are deeply hurt, damaged, shamed, and angry. Will Richey, cofounder of DaVerse Lounge, found a key to making it safe for those kids to finally embrace relationships with others. He uses their story as their road to identity, confidence, inclusion, and community.

In that new zone of safety, Will and his team show them how to draw strength from the pain. Imagine skilled lion tamers who enter a cage with abused and starved lions, and then slowly turn them into a healthy, playful, and loving pride. That is what DaVerse Lounge does kid after kid, year after year.

He encourages participating with a rhythmic and appealing promise:

“When I share my joy,

I multiply my happiness.

When I share my pain,

I divide my sadness.

And when I embrace the two,

I become whole…

WE become…Whole.”

—Norman Bouffard and Will Richey

Will's poem sets the tone for a friendly and safe time together.

Many workplaces could benefit from their own DaVerse Lounge, a safe place and a way to embrace community. I've found Will's approach—a simple template that makes it easy to create an engaging personal story—with kids in that early stage of fear and shame also works for people in any organization. Step 1 follows the template as a way to write a short personal story. Step 2 is to share those stories. I like to start in small groups and let each cluster group report a summary to the larger group. The stories create immediate interest and emotional resonance. They shine a positive spotlight on everyone. You can find a sample of the template in Appendix C.

The Story of a Good Workplace: The Promise of the Future

What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change.

—Seth Godin

The wellness ship is turning. But it is a big ship. We see firms, like DPR and others in this book, turning their own ships and discovering the old barriers simply don't exist anymore. The better workplaces they create, in fact, gives a measurable boost in employee engagement and productivity. Ryan Picarella, president of the Wellness Coalition of America, believes this is no longer a perk for companies, “it's a business imperative.”⁴ That's why we must bring clearer definition to how organizations get beyond the focus on programs and deliver on the promises of health and happiness.

Until 2013 we were stuck in a story on workplace wellness that had a tragic ending. However, one small project created a “disturbance in the force.” That became a beacon that invited thousands. I was one of them. Although I missed some of the ramifications, I did see the possibility of a new story for American business. We have done our best to tell you that story. The artifacts we leave to you include some secrets, maps, experiences, and a few warnings to prepare you as you explore the safe haven your organization can build. Our mission was to find a new narrative with hope, humanity, and high performance as a testimony to a new order. A new future begins with a new and believable story, and once that story takes hold it will also guide our imaginations, our conversations, our decisions, and will create new ways of working and living.