Welcome aboard
This book is for anyone who wants to create a more human workplace. Chief Wellbeing Officer is a comprehensive and accessible guide for enterprises of all shapes and sizes to improve health, happiness, and to achieve high performance. In an age where everyone is focused on digital transformation and artificial intelligence, the organizations that will thrive are those that increase their care for humans. In fact, the goal is a more human organization.
Our vision is to help create environments that allow leadership to flourish at all levels and functions of a business, in order to make the best of the many opportunities in this exciting age. It will be of particular interest to chief human resource officers, especially as they become more involved in the strategic direction of the company. Indeed, all managers in human resources, and learning and development, will gain value in an age where talent attraction and retention is a key differentiator, and where learning is a lifelong on-demand process.
We also see great value in this book for those outside of management. We hope to be of particular use to those charged with wellbeing in an organization at a relatively junior level, and that the discourse here may help them make the case for a louder voice. In a world where rapid change is the norm, leadership by example, and from all levels of the organization, is very much sought after. The holistic approach offered in Chief Wellbeing Officer will give any workplace professional the means to think about their own life and how that fits with work. Being able to reflect on and change behaviour can reap tremendous benefits through significant improvements in wellbeing.
Why Chief Wellbeing Officer?
The founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, wrote about the Fourth Industrial Revolution in 2016,[1] saying: “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.” We see much of the present focus on the ‘technological revolution’, and present Chief Wellbeing Officer as the human side of ‘living, working, and relating to each other’. Will a societal model emerge that allows our human selves to thrive in the new industrial age? Absolutely. Yet much pain may be endured to get there. As with any competitive context, those who are proactive in seeking the change and asking those tough questions will get ahead. And, for us, getting ahead means greater wellbeing at work, with all the benefits that brings.
We have worked with tens of thousands of executives throughout our careers, and believe that we are all executives now, irrespective of actual job title. Becoming more human at work is, in our view, critical to realizing the executive role that will increasingly be required of any professional.
What does ‘executive’ really mean? Let’s consider the verb instead of the noun. Specifically the term executive function – those cognitive tasks carried out in the main by the frontal lobe part of the brain, and which include creative thinking, planning, strategizing, and judging. Such tasks are of course critical to all human beings, whether or not they are senior business leaders, with a key stage of infant development being linked to the development of executive function. Yet such tasks need to be of special interest to today’s professional.
This is because the efficacy of executive function tasks has a close link to health. Research has shown that sleep deprivation does not significantly affect routine thinking, but does have a great impact on non-routine executive thinking. Exercise has also been shown to specifically benefit the frontal lobe part of the brain charged with executive function tasks. Such benefits dissipate after a few days, however, showing the need to continually invest in exercise as a busy business leader.[2]
So how should we action such knowledge in business? Of course we can try and change our own behaviour, yet the greatest impact may come from trying to implement such an approach in the leadership of our teams. Being an executive will almost always mean influencing and directing others – in many instances a great number of others. If in such leadership activity we include notions of health and wellbeing, we can transform the performance of those teams.
A future in which artificial intelligence (AI) plays an ever-deeper role in work and society will need more of our executive selves. And we need not adhere to the prophets of doom such as Elon Musk, who believes AI is the single biggest existential threat to the human race. The doomsday future scenario is supported by research, including an Oxford University study published in 2013 which found 47% of jobs in America to be at high risk of being “substituted by computer capital” soon.[3]
Another future scenario does exist – one in which the real danger may not lie in robots taking our jobs. Most cases of technology disruption show net job creation instead of job destruction such as the banking industry which we discuss later in the book.
Many observers feel the biggest impact of AI, at least in the short- to medium-term, will be the requirement for people to gain new skills to complement the new technology, and carry out those roles that AI cannot yet do. Highly empathetic jobs certainly. And, more generally, non-routine work. Essentially, a greater emphasis on executive function tasks each and every day. People can be better at their jobs with the technology of today and tomorrow, rather than fearing that their human skills will be devalued.
In an increasingly technological, digital, always-on world, it seems that the human factor will still be critical after all. And health and wellbeing will likely be an ever-greater driver of executive function. So we are all executives today. And tomorrow we’ll need to be even more so.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution often focuses on the massive impact to come for business, government, and society at large. People are of course at the heart of all of these things, yet thinking also on the discrete, individual, human level is often missing. There are signs, thankfully, that caring for people is rising to the top of the agenda. Whether motivated by the need for better talent management or thinking about future ways of working, the best companies are giving their chief human resources officers a bigger say at board level, with some new titles representative of a shift in mindset.
The chief people officer term is becoming more and more common, albeit in the main for smaller start-up companies, and Apple announced in July 2017 a new vice president of people. Reporting directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Deirdre O’Brien will have responsibility for talent development, recruiting, benefits, compensation, and business support, as well as overseeing Apple University.
Would we like to see a more formal take-up of the Chief Wellbeing Officer role in business? Absolutely. Yet it is not our only aim. We see the beliefs and tools that comprise this book as being assimilated by people across the business. Is wellbeing a necessary term? We think it is, and prefer it to wellness, which is sometimes used instead, believing it to highlight a greater connection to human being, and to be a broader, more serious term, especially for business. The fantastic UK-based think tank Do Lectures nicely sums up the rationale as follows:[4]
“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.”
Happiness is a theme we introduced earlier and one we will return to later in the book. Chief Happiness Officer is another term that has surfaced in 2017. Some companies have created this new position as a result of a closer look at employee engagement and experience in recent years, while a range of recent global surveys seem to support the term, including Jones Lang Lasalle which found that 87% of people want such a position in their workplace.[5] We’re open-minded. Our main intention isn’t to argue vehemently for Chief Wellbeing Officer as the global standard, rather to put forward the vision of what that term represents. Though ‘happiness’ as a term seems to include many notions that will be covered in this book – including workplace design, which is a current area of focus for large real-estate consultants such as Jones Lang Lasalle, CBRE, and ISS – we’re not sure it is a serious enough business term to be adopted in the long-run. Time will tell.
Structure of the book
The book contains three parts, moving from presenting the big picture towards concrete action. Part one is ‘Chief’, which highlights the top-level view of wellbeing, and discusses the key organizational and societal issues for more humanity at work. Responsibility and purpose are key themes in discussing the role of business in society today and into the future. This first part of the book will set the foundations by focusing on the WHY, allowing us to address any cynicism over the presence of wellbeing at the top table of business.
We set the scene in chapter one through ‘The Best Time to be Alive’, an overview of our present age, and a quick look back at history and forwards to the future. Health and happiness, key themes throughout the book, are introduced. In ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’ we dig deeper on this critical inflection point in human history, considering our technology-driven future world and areas from death to education. Chapter three on ‘Restoring Humanity to Leadership’ reminds us that leadership is about other people, and details the purpose, values, and vision that may guide one’s own life and that of others. The fourth and final chapter of part one, ‘The ROI of Wellbeing’, turns towards the business case, looking at how progress is measured in business and society, and some of the strategies currently being developed by leading organizations around the world.
Part two of Chief Wellbeing Officer is ‘Wellbeing’ and focuses on the WHAT. We look more closely at human nature, which sets the template for what the future of work must look like.
We start with two chapters developing the idea of total intelligence, something that has guided much of our own work over the past ten years and has helped develop thousands of executives around the world. Chapter five, ‘Leading Through Emotional Intelligence’ focuses on the emotional part of intelligence, again developing the human dimension of leadership introduced in chapter three. The following chapter six, ‘Leading Through Physical Intelligence’, looks in greater depth at our physical selves and the importance of considering leadership, of both ourselves and others, from an athlete’s point of view. Learning is a key part of wellbeing today and ‘Learning to Live’ considers the life-long need for learning, and how S-curves, a concept first developed to look at technological change and innovation, can help us navigate through the rollercoaster of our longer lives. Navigating highs and lows is an area that continues in the final chapter of part two, ‘A Day in the Life’, where we look at our daily rhythms. We take a chrono-biological look at our current ways of working and how future patterns of work in a technologically-driven, always-on world will depend even more on these natural rhythms.
The third and final part of the book is ‘Officer’ and is the HOW of ownership and implementation. We aim to highlight good organizational practice and provide guidance for the reader on the myriad challenges and opportunities presented in the book. It is the prescriptive part of our discourse, but we try and detail the right questions for you, as opposed to thinking we have all the answers.
Chapter nine, on ‘Design for Wellbeing’, discusses how a design-thinking approach may be useful in implementing a more human-based workplace. Design is, above all things, human and key design skills may be used to guide a different type of daily leadership activity. In ‘The Seven Hacks of Highly Effective Habits’ we detail the seven elements that need to be considered to sustainably change behaviour in the workplace. Much has been written in recent years about the habits that are required for success on a personal or professional level, but much less exists on how such habits may be implemented. In chapter 11, ‘Environmental Design’, we focus on two of these elements to show how we may build the optimum workplace environment. In a digital world, a detailed look at the physical environment matters more than ever, and needs to be complemented by a similar approach to the social environment. In the 12th and final chapter, ‘Leading in the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ we bring our discussion to a close by reflecting on the main points of the book, summarising the key leadership attributes needed to fully realize the vision of Chief Wellbeing Officer. We hope it is a strong call to action to make your own contribution to that vision.
Let’s get started.