Steven P. MacGregor's Blog, page 5

Christmas reflections

Episode 23 of the Chief Wellbeing Officer podcast. A 'back to the roots' episode recorded in the childhood home in Motherwell, Scotland as Dr. MacGregor reflects on the seven episodes of the re-booted podcast this year as well as the phase 1 journey from November 2017 before looking ahead to 2020.

Agile Workplaces

Learning and wellbeing: A visit to the World Innovation Summit on Education (WISE)

“Before the invention of cooking, we spent most of our lives chewing.” I laughed out loud, with quite a few others, in the vast main theatre of the Qatar National Convention Centre at the close of WISE, the World Innovation Summit on Education. Jason Silva, of the National Geographic show Brain Games, was delivering a barnstorming closing keynote on our relationship with technology.

With all the recent talk on moonshots, loonshots, and discombobulating visions of our near future world, the cooking joke was a moment of levity which nevertheless spoke of a much earlier significant disruption in human evolution, setting in plain view the theme of WISE 2019 – Unlearn, Relearn, What it means to be human. And this 10th anniversary edition of WISE certainly pulled together a diverse and eclectic audience of practitioners, decision makers and influencers, from the President of Armenia to Shakira and founding member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Steven van Zandt.

In this column over the past few months, we’ve covered our current relationship with technology, considering first the ways in which technology exploits our human weaknesses before looking at a more positive view of technology’s role in our working lives.

Considering learning and education – as well as the role that technology plays – seemed to be the perfect follow-up, and I had the pleasure of interviewing the WISE CEO Stavros Yiannouka on the eve of the summit. “From no hair to grey hair” was his answer on scope when I first enquired about the education focus of WISE. And lifelong learning is certainly a necessary feature of our longer working lives in which disruption requires us to constantly strive to stay relevant. I think learning may also contribute to our wellbeing, allowing us to perhaps define and check-in on our purpose and passion, which may change through our working life.

Unlearning is a key part of this process, which may include hard technical knowledge associated with our jobs, softer skills associated with how we manage and lead, and also knowing thyself, recognizing that we will change, and ideally grow, significantly in our lifetimes. Disrupting oneself may be a daunting, but increasingly necessary action. Like the ‘innovators dilemma’ people, like companies, no matter how successful, must at some point leave behind the old way of doing things and make the switch to a new path.

I believe learning may also help open the door for wellbeing at work. As it is being increasingly legitimized, with the requisite space being given to learn at work, the increased empowerment, freedom, and responsibility to learn will help create space also for wellbeing. I don’t think we can effectively learn when our wellbeing, in whatever dimension, is compromised. Physical health has been shown to support learning efficacy in young children, while excessive stress and more broadly, poor mental health, affects memory and may reduce the likelihood of adopting the open mindset necessary to assimilate new knowledge. The growth mindset espoused by Prof. Carol Dweck includes the comparison between the “learn-it-all” and “know-it-all” kids at school, highlighting the advantage the “learn-it-all” will eventually gain.

The relationship between learning and wellbeing may therefore take several forms. Learning is a part of being well, being our best selves. Learning through wellbeing was the title of the panel on which I spoke at WISE, and wellbeing has been the focus of my own teaching to executives for over 10 years in their own learning efforts. Wellbeing is increasingly being taught at younger stages of education, within an overall appreciation of emotional intelligence for young people. For example, mindfulness practice, even at junior schools, is being taught as a means of tackling indiscipline and in areas where poverty and crime often send children on the wrong path. WISE released a report at the summit with RAND on how wellbeing curricula may be integrated for school-level children.

Yiannouka doesn’t distinguish between learning and education, which may happen anywhere, preferring to make the distinction between learning and schooling. He highlights the importance of socialization in the learning process, an important reminder in an age when content chunks may be consumed via different technological means. Fully exploiting the power of new technology to improve the learning process, both at school and work is critical, but learning doesn’t happen in a bubble. The application of any learning content, by doing, ideally in a collaborative sense is what makes it stick.

Likewise with wellbeing – which doesn’t simply regard our own habits and behaviour – though I believe this to be the critical point of departure. We must also consider how our own behaviour and actions impact on others’ wellbeing and how we may contribute to our own through the relationships we develop. In an age of dismantling hierarchies and loosening of the predominant ‘ego-system’ towards an ‘eco-system’, the workplace as a social entity will become ever more important.

The need to elevate socialization may indeed be the factor that links learning and wellbeing closest of all.

And this aspect of connectedness also reminds me of the importance of considering a wide array of perspectives in the pursuit of wellbeing. An aspiring “Davos of Education” WISE contained a much more diverse and grassroots community than the World Economic Forum event, yet all passionate about furthering the objectives of education worldwide. If wellbeing could benefit from a similar luxury, our future working lives will be much brighter. Who knows, we might even have an equivalent to the cooking joke, and wonder how we spent all of our time in meetings.

Will the machines make us more human?

Learning another language isn’t an easy thing to do (and I’m very aware how lucky I am being a native English speaker). Time and environment are key. I studied French for several years, but never lived in France, so remained at a very rudimentary level. I never studied Spanish, but have lived in the country since 2003 – and so have a fluent (yet far from native) grasp of the language.

Yet I still remember those first months, painstakingly constructing the most basic of sentences to send an email, and then translating word-by-word, the reply. Online aids did exist, but rapid use of a paper dictionary would often be just as effective. And you would never – I repeat never – use an automatic translator. The resulting gibberish clearly showing that language is never a pure word for word translation but contains significant nuance and approximations. 10 years and more after my move to Spain, still not an option. Yet in the past 12-18 months a funny thing has happened. Google translate is a phenomenal tool. It’s still not perfect, but when combined with informed human input, it improves the productivity in my bilingual company tremendously.

So, while the frequent commentary on Artificial Intelligence may conjure up images of sophisticated robots, even Arnold Schwarzenegger-type figures for those of a certain age, the real power of AI may be in these more subtle, yet still transformative areas. Think on your own experience receiving recommendations for shopping on Amazon, or watching a show on Netflix – the level of accuracy for something you may not have yet considered on a conscious level can be unnerving.

This clearly shows the phenomenal advances that AI has made in the past few years with recommender systems. Aleksander Matic, Head of Research for Health at Alpha, Telefónica’s “moonshot factory” defines AI as having a “superpower in recognizing patterns.” He says that data is the fuel for this superpower, and that all of the enthusiasm today comes from the combination of AI with the unprecedented datasets we have at our disposal.

So how might we take this to the future world of work? And will increasing AI sophistication improve our wellbeing? Mischa Zielke, co-founder at the Boston based AI start-up enaible, is looking to answer these questions. Believing that “everyone deserves to be led by a great leader”, enaible is an “AI powered leadership engine” which helps drive productivity over time. It puts the human in the center and uses AI for quantification and pattern recognition (the upstream) as well as individualized leadership recommendations (the downstream). This human centricity is the core mantra and anchor point for all that enaible is doing.

Zielke’s vision is a world where productivity as well as wellbeing is actively managed by informed and empowered leaders and the employees they serve. The underlying technology maximizes productivity so that every worker has an opportunity to succeed. Allowing both an individual view for the leader, and aggregate view of the teams they manage, it collects a whole range of data already existing in the organization to give a clearer picture of what’s going on. This increased transparency then allows the leader to make the best decisions to improve performance and wellbeing over time (at both the individual as well as the collective level). Part dashboard and part digital coach he’s also aware of the importance of educating enaible users to mitigate the risks of subjective perception, or even delegating human leadership all together.

One question might be whether we readily receive nudges and recommendations from technology for our productivity and wellbeing, especially when technology (as we considered in last months episode) can be the source of low productivity and compromised wellbeing in the first place. Alpha’s Matic takes an optimistic view, believing in the fulfillment of the original vision from the field of Ubiquitous Computing, that technology will create calm and fade into the background as an “invisible servant.” With his own focus on health as Alpha move towards a Minimum Viable Product to address stress and anxiety before the end of 2019, he simplifies the process to the basic questions: Who are you? What are you doing? How do you feel? after which AI provides an intervention or nudge to “feel better” before repeating the process and learning how to personalize the nudge.

A simple looking process but with many open questions on the right interventions and channels. The key for a superpower whose fuel is data, is finding out which specific data points, out of potentially billions of possible data-sets, is the right ‘fuel.’ The output will be a clearer line of sight on the patterns which make us tick. For Matic and Alpha, this will help address stress and anxiety. For Zielke and enaible, to improve productivity and wellbeing. And in the case of Google translate it enables mapping of complex patterns between different languages. Google translate also shows that, however accurate on a technical language level, it still doesn’t fully identify sarcasm, irony, and humour – certain traits that make us uniquely human – and so the optimum power of AI is in the technology with an informed, educated human user.

The machines, therefore, really will make us more human – as long as we, as humans, use them in the right way, and for the common good. Yet therein lies the challenge. The phenomenal effort in developing such advanced technology in the first place may actually turn out to be the easier task. Zielke, like Matic, is an optimist. He detects greater self-awareness in leaders worldwide, and higher levels of spirituality. Perhaps the greatest things that the machines will do for us is give us the space and insights to fully realize our human potential.

Less digital, more well? A conversation on digital wellbeing

I still remember the anticipation of opening the pack. I’d often look at the five cards side-on first to see if there was a foil badge. That thrill at having, in order of desire 1) the Glasgow Celtic badge, 2) any Glasgow Celtic player 3) any foil club badge would, more than 90% of the time end in disappointment. And so the dilemma would begin on whether to sacrifice another hard-earned 20p for another pack. I would surely get what I wanted next time.

Pannini Scottish football stickers in the 1980s. Who was I to know that this experience would foreshadow the daily digital existence for me, and a large chunk of humanity, over 30 years later.

Micro-doses of dopamine are central to both these seemingly worlds-apart experiences. Dopamine is the reward hormone and plays a role in many forms of addiction, from drugs and food to social media and smartphone use in general. It is more than the pleasure chemical, a common misconception, as it represents the first part in the process, where reward is noticeable or better than expected. The brain is told to pay attention to the stimulant in question as it may be important for survival in the future, prioritizing it over older, more predictable rewards.

Many researchers believe it is more about drug wanting than liking. The anticipation and unpredictability of the drug in question – say social media use through red bubble notifications – is therefore the main reason for persistent use in spite of negative consequences. The negative consequences of drug or food addiction are of course well known, with greater understanding now beginning to emerge on digital device addiction – compromised wellbeing being the main result. Many social media designers play on the brain function associated with dopamine, with features such as notifications appearing after a short delay (likened by some as playing a slot machine) in order to maximize the brain’s anticipation and levels of dopamine.

This is part of the reason that the Vodafone Institute’s chief scientific advisor Dr. Nuria Oliver believes Big Tech is often “not on our side” designing products that exploit our weaknesses and leave us disempowered. The random reward and positive re-enforcement (a comment, like or share) from social media use in particular leads to us checking our phones over 150 times per day, decreasing the richness of human to human interaction.

This is not to say there is no benefit to digital technology use. Yet there ought to be a more nuanced relationship with technology that is more than the binary ‘on’ or ‘off’. Impending changes in the labour market and the increasing need to re-invent ourselves during a longer career requires mental toughness, yet mental health seems to be getting worse rather than better, especially for young people.

Many of the points raised by Dr. Oliver are echoed by the Center for Humane Technology, a US-based think tank comprised of former Big Tech employees who believe we are in a “race to the bottom of the brain stem to extract human attention.” Their work focuses on actions to reverse human downgrading and help drive a new generation of humane technology that embraces human nature.

Research will play a big part in a more positive digital future. Some of Oliver’s research on smartphone addiction has looked at boredom. Perhaps not the first aspect that comes to mind in terms of our positive human nature, yet “killing boredom” through smartphone use has its consequences. Some researchers have found it to be a necessary transient state for creativity to flourish, while countless serendipitous conversations at the bus stop or other queues have not taken place due to our new waiting habits in the smartphone era.

As American poet Dorothy Parker once remarked, “the cure to boredom is curiosity.” It is an emotional state that signals that your current activity or goals do not satisfy your needs or sufficiently motivate you. It is through the process of being bored that we look for other more interesting, fulfilling, or challenging activities. Yet today we flee from being bored and are increasingly subjecting ourselves to continual stimuli. This may defeat the actual purpose of boredom and lead to behavioural states representative of compromised wellbeing, including addiction, anxiety, and attention deficit disorder.

Through the use of experience sampling, Oliver looked at users’ emotional states throughout the day – including happiness, excitement, and boredom – together with information about their context and mobile phone usage. In their work, they build machine learning models to automatically infer boredom from the patterns of usage of the smartphone and the operating context at that time – including information on location, movement, temperature, humidity, and screen time. The ultimate goal is to help users by providing content and appropriate suggestions. This doesn’t mean, however, that the aim is to “kill” boredom or provide constant stimuli. By better understanding boredom, Oliver may better help people when they need to disconnect and so rather than endlessly cycle through social media and other frequently visited sites, provide nudges to other interesting and relevant content, or even suggest to turn the phone off, relax, and engage with the real world instead. The overarching aim is to develop technology that adapts to people and has peoples’ wellbeing at its core, not the other way around.

Such nudging strategies are increasingly coming into the digital realm after being firmly established in our physical environment the past few years through the work of Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler and others. Former Head of People at Google, Lazlo Bock founded Humu a firm which specialises in digital nudging to ultimately improve workplace wellbeing and performance.

There may also be a part for regulation. Oliver notes that the now powerful Food and Drug Administration didn’t exist 100 years ago, and that similar checks and balances may yet emerge from a central body to help guide the technology that is “food for our brains.”

And we all have a role to play. Maybe I shouldn’t expect too much from my 8 year-old self regarding my Pannini purchasing habits – much more worryingly an 8 year-old today and their social media habits – yet as the adult digital consumers of today, we need to appreciate our own responsibility, developing a more mindful approach to our technology use. Willpower is a muscle that can be strengthened. Digital wellbeing – more than just minimizing use, but thinking on how and why we use technology – presents us with the perfect gymnasium to work out.

Podcast content with IE Insights

Steven’s views on wellbeing, responsibility and purpose were recently published on IE Insights, the knowledge hub for IE University. You can listen to the English and Spanish versions below.

Summer podcast: The Global Food System

As we come to the end of our summer break, yet still keen to broadcast an August episode of the podcast, we make available Chapter 13 from the SEP audiobook. This also marks the imminent release of the new paperback version, substantially re-worked from the 2014 Financial Times Press hardback and available on Amazon from mid-September. The Kindle version is available for pre-sale now.

The global food system is in even greater need of overhaul today in 2019, than when first published in 2014, and is the chapter with the least amount of edits in the new paperback version.

Episode 34 of the WISE Words podcast

Steven recently appeared as a guest on WISE Words, the podcast linked to the biennial World Innovation Summit on Education in Doha where he will be a speaker in November. You can listen to the full interview with the CEO of WISE below.

Who owns wellbeing? Reflections from Heineken

“A company has someone to look after money, strategy, and marketing etc. But soon there will be another title. A Chief Wellbeing Officer to look after humans. To create a culture that stops burnout, to create a culture of learning, to create a culture of thinking long-term. To put people before anything else. The pioneers already have them. They may call them another name, but they are one step ahead.”

Michael Townsend Williams

When I had the idea of Chief Wellbeing Officer for the title of my last book, inspired by the above quote from Michael Townsend Williams (and now of course the title of this column) it was all about envisioning a future state. The vision that wellbeing rise up the business agenda – becoming a more strategic concern. What better way than putting the words “Chief” and “Officer” either side?

If anyone used it to create or support a Chief Wellbeing Officer position in a company, then fantastic. Yet equally as valuable in my view was anyone being inspired by the title and intention to elevate wellbeing through their existing role, be that in human resources, learning & development, facilities management or health and safety.

As wellbeing is increasingly recognized as being important to business success, so different business functions and units may have something to add, some piece of the puzzle. Who will lead the charge? Who owns wellbeing in the organisation?

This is a question that could be asked in different contexts and my first reflections come from Heineken where Fernando Lallana, a Spaniard working for a Dutch company who has just returned from several years working in Ireland, gives us his views on driving a more wellbeing-focused operation.

Moving from procurement to his current role as head of workplace services and reporting to the HR director of Heineken Spain, Fernando sees a series of wellbeing layers in an organization. The first and most basic layer is essentially health and safety. Ensuring people have preventative and treatment-based healthcare services, and that they work in a safe environment – especially important where many employees work in a plant setting.

This is complemented by another layer which looks at different elements including nutrition, the workspace, exercise and financial aspects. The top layer is termed ‘happiness’ which Fernando sees as including the purpose and Corporate Social Responsibility related elements such as environment and community.

So is this an organizational design issue? Each of the above layers includes actions and initiatives that are carried out in different areas of Heineken. If we return to the opening quote from Williams, “looking after humans” though generic enough to be anyone’s responsibility is arguably the domain of HR, as stated also by Heineken’s Lallana. Yet “culture” “learning” and “thinking long-term” may sit in other parts of an organization.

Is ownership important? When I was interviewed about Chief Wellbeing Officer for the Spanish business newspaper Expansión in December last year I caught some of the online reaction from some in the Occupational Health & Safety community evidently distressed that they had been omitted from the discussion. Weren’t they after all the business unit that looks after the wellbeing of employees? A part of the puzzle certainly, but when countless Health & Safety company functions worldwide prohibit the use of stair climbing to minimize the risk of accidents it shows they don’t have the necessary mindset to lead the charge for a holistic treatment of wellbeing at work.

Lawrence Prusak, a leading researcher in the field of knowledge management at the turn of the millennium remarked that the practice might be “so thoroughly adopted—so much a natural part of how people organize work—that it eventually becomes invisible.” Similar sentiments could be applied to areas including innovation and safety. Depending on the sector and culture of the company such focus areas become the natural way of doing things and so everyone, when the organization becomes sufficiently mature, becomes an owner. Could the same happen with wellbeing?

As the notion of wellbeing itself becomes more mature I’ve seen a convergence of interest from previously disparate service providers, from real estate providers who consult on healthy building provision to consultants and coaches focused on lifelong learning and the search for purpose. We are complex beings, and to be well necessarily includes a range of elements, both internal and external to the organization, and in and out of work itself. A uniquely competitive view of service provision for wellbeing, thereby only getting one piece of the puzzle, may not get us far down the road.

In the Heineken case Fernando believes the key is to have a strategy and a vision which allows all wellbeing related actions to be better coordinated and pull in the right direction. Indeed, many actions at the company, such as the measurement of food waste, may be promoted by HR and workplace services yet also overlap with areas of Corporate Social Responsibility, operations and communication.

Much of the wellbeing vision at Heineken culminates in the Employee Value Proposition with Fernando believing in the importance of a solid yet flexible EVP that is authentic, and helps to attract and retain talent. Such a concept sits at the level of the executive committee and, as discussed in the SAP case of April and May 2019, goes beyond wellbeing, at least in the traditional sense. Examining the employee journey allows the company to see the gaps, which may or may not be addressed through wellbeing actions.

And this is a journey that according to Fernando doesn’t have a finish line. The needs are always changing and there’s a lot to do. Yet that doesn’t mean that the journey is not rewarding. Based on some of his previous experiences in making wellbeing-focused changes at the company he says: “The exciting part is that you can transform peoples’ lives. Culture, innovation, productivity, it’s all connected and improved.” With a result like that, wouldn’t we all want to be owners of wellbeing?

Designing culture for 202,000 employees at Santander

Dan Strode couldn’t believe Monday had rolled around again so fast. Sleep had been at a premium during a busy ‘working’ weekend as a parent, yet his mood lifted considerably at seeing a small piece of paper on his desk. It read:

Good morning! Even the greatest weeks start with a Monday, so let’s go for it!

In that instant Santander’s global head of culture and strategy was energized. In that instant he looked forward to tackling the challenges of the day and week ahead. And he allowed himself just a little satisfaction that this note was part of a burgeoning positive company-wide culture that he had helped to design.

Culture is of course a big, complex and difficult thing to manage and shape – especially in a company of 202,000 people that operates in 32 different countries. Jon Katzenbach and colleagues at PricewaterhouseCoopers advocate looking at a few critical or keystone behaviours that are representative of culture rather than tackling culture head on. They say that once identified and implemented these will positively influence culture across the organization.

The Santander Way is comprised of eight behaviours; actively collaborate, bring passion, embrace change, keep promises, show respect, support people, talk straight, and truly listen. One of the key benefits of focusing on the behavioural level is that it allows people to land loftier goals on a day-to-day basis. It allows action and clarity. It’s also beyond generating value purely for the business, in that these are positive behaviours that allow people to navigate the complex issues of business today. If an employee is having a bad day, perhaps encountering difficulties with a colleague or customer, these eight ways of acting may help find a way through. They may even help at home.

Recognition of positive behaviour is also important and helps to consolidate culture. In the past two years over 1.5 million instances have been formally recognized, by simply saying thank-you to a colleague with Dan adding that “what you recognize gets repeated.”

Yet specific action also requires a more general frame of reference, space to breathe. This is where values come in. In Santander these are simple, personal and fair, and allow all actions in the company, big and small to be measured against. For example, in the recent push towards digitalization of the HR function a constant question is whether things can be done simpler, without the advancing complexity and feature creep that might characterize such an operation.

Success in a large company also comes down to alignment. As a strategy specialist Dan was able to bring a strategic approach to Human Resources that aligns with the overall corporate strategy and culture. Values also offer an opportunity for alignment. Peter Drucker recommended that managers identify their own values and also check alignment of those values with the context in which they operate. He noted that misalignment results in frustration and poor performance, and that belonging is a key concept for all of us to consider.

In all of this the key context is creating a culture that not only facilitates performance but one which is healthy and positive. Positive cultures are defined by their focus on people where everyone is able to become their best selves and so contribute to the success of the organization. In the case of Santander that desire for engagement extends up to five different generations of people. Talking within the context of the company wellbeing program, BeHealthy, Dan notes that, “giving people just a little empowerment creates an incredible level of engagement.”

Yet Santander go beyond even what many organizations are doing in this space. Senior leaders are currently evaluated 50% on what they achieve and 50% on how they achieve it. It’s fair to say that big, successful companies have often been characterized by a “win at all costs” attitude, yet there are signs that society may hold business to greater account in the future. By incentivizing leaders to consider the means by which they get results Santander are providing a pioneering, and positive, example. This 50/50 evaluation will be rolled out to the whole organization within the next 3 years.

Leadership is a key ingredient in creating a positive culture. A gap was identified which recognized the need to better support the organization’s senior leaders, for their own and teams’ performance. A nine-month project involving hundreds of people around the world was undertook during which they asked what they want a leader to look like, the leadership skillset needed to prosper, and other key factors. Dan is proud of these commitments, “not just for what they are, but what they represent: a truly crowd-sourced, made by the people, piece of our culture.”

Together with the eight behaviours and three values, the four leadership commitments that resulted from this exercise form the overall cultural framework for the company. Being open and inclusive, Inspiring and executing transformation, Leading by example and Encouraging your team to prosper are the final pieces in the cultural jigsaw.

In today’s agile, collaborative age, the need for leaders to become more emotionally intelligent is well known. The machine age will require more heart and humanity from our leaders, to be more of a servant than hero, bringing a positive approach that will prevent any framework from being a static blueprint, maintaining the pulse of the organization and getting the best out of others with their many small, yet critical actions. Like leaving a note on someone’s desk on a Monday morning.

That note on Dan’s desk was a part of Santander Week, a company-wide initiative to share their common culture, bring colleagues together, and see they are part of a global organisation helping people and businesses to prosper every day. Dan knows there’s a way to go, but prides himself on the framework that is now in place. Can you begin to shape a positive culture for 202,000 people starting with a tiny note containing 15 words? Absolutely.