Five Essential Guidelines for the Well-Led Organization

Welcome to Part Two of our blog series on wellness in the workplace.  In last week’s blog, we discussed just three of the reasons that a focus on employee wellness was good for the bottom line.  This week’s blog examines the first five of fifteen guidelines for a well-led project, program, or organization.

We at Wellness Leadership, LLC believe that today’s best-led organizations focus on the wellness of their employees first and foremost! Gone are the days when you had to decide between mission and people.  The best way to accomplish the corporate mission is to enable your people to fulfill their purpose! 

Our well-led guidelines operate within the risk management domain.  Every Project Management Professional knows that there are three critical constraints of project management, also known as the Iron Triangle of Project Management: scope, schedule, and budget.  They also are aware of the significant risks that impact these components.  For example, we all know that disagreement among stakeholders over requirements or vision can lead to scope creep and, in turn, impact budget and time.  Likewise, a delay in an external dependency, such as a related project, can impact the schedule and cost.

Yes, the average PMP can rattle off the key risks from the PMI manual and may even be able to come up with a mitigation plan for that risk.  But in my thirty years of experience running and QA’ing projects and teams, I have seen more projects and organizations go off the rails by inadequately accounting for employee wellness.  Here are just three examples.

1. A project scheduled its critical initial deployment one week after Diwali.  Consequently, when a problem arose just before the release, the vital resources from the India delivery center were not on hand to correct the problem.  The US-based leadership team had addressed the timing for Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks but forgot the key holiday time for most of the resources for their global team.
2. A key developer and informal leader of the project did not trust the underlying architecture and had voiced his opinion to management.  Instead of discussing and addressing the concern, the project lead indicated that the architecture was used on thousands of projects.  The developer only wanted to make a minor recommendation, but due to the lack of attention, they left the project, taking some critical resources with him.
3.  A project pushed toward a tight deadline and shifted to a mandatory work schedule.  The new schedule impacted the employee’s non-work appointments, such as school and daycare pick-up, causing anxiety and resentment.  As a result, absenteeism increased, and productivity decreased, impacting the schedule even more.

I could name many more examples, but our 10-15 minute podcast would turn into hours and not be very inspiring.  Instead, I have categorized the top fifteen wellness considerations for projects, programs, and organizations, along with approaches to address these considerations.

Here are the first five guidelines for wellness and corporate success!

1. Acknowledge overwork is counterproductive.  We all know the pressure of tight deadlines and schedules.  The first inclination is to work harder and longer to finish the job on time.  However, overwork is counter-productive and leads to burnout.  A Gallup study found that employees are around 2.6x more likely to search for other jobs if burnt out.  Also, overworked employees tend to make more mistakes and errors in judgments.

I first learned this lesson from my high school football coaches. One year, the new and full of fire coaches conducted a  football camp with three daily hard workouts.  The team lost two critical early games due to injuries, resulting in the team missing the playoffs.  The following year,  the coaches adapted and added a rest period each day at a pool the following year.  Even though the team on paper was less potent than the year before, they won the playoffs. 

The lesson of the football team applies to the workplace.  Overwork in the office can lead to critical mistakes, rework, problems with retention, and absenteeism.  It also can lead to people falling asleep on the job.  Before I got the message on overwork, I remember being on a late-night troubleshooting call and hearing snoring in the background.  Our testing lead, who had been up for almost a day, had fallen asleep.  What are some tricks to avoid overwork?

1. If someone is allocated as a part-time FTE, do not schedule them for full-time.
2. For Full-time FTEs, load them in the schedule for no more than 6.5 hours a day. If you are working in an Agile structure, ensure you account for non-productive time in capacity.
3. If the resulting schedule after correct loading is too tight to hit a deadline, either pull in additional resources or make the hard decision at the start to move the deadline.
4. Ensure you account for key holidays for all groups on a global team. An excellent way to do this is to subscribe to an online service such as GlobeSmart or your organization’s equivalent.
5. During a crisis, ensure only the people critical to solving the problem are on the call.  Let the rest off the hook.  Sometimes, this takes some prodding since, in my experience, most people feel vested until they become resentful for too much work.  If people want to stay involved, set up a rotating pool of team members to spell each other.

In closing, you may be able to overwork your team or organization to hit one project deadline.  But rest assured, a good chunk of your team will not be around for the next project.  They will be looking elsewhere as soon as the project is over.  Don’t overwork your team. Instead, build an organization for sustainable success across multiple projects.

2. Build-in time away from work.  A corollary to the first rule is to build dedicated time away from work so people can complete their non-work commitments.  The best way to do this is to plan this approach upfront.  Provide each team member with a block of time during work hours to get non-work commitments done.   You could choose 3 or 4 standard blocks and let people choose their blocks.   The individual schedules would then be loaded into the schedule.  Most people need some time during work hours to get family commitments done.  It is best if a time is built into the schedule so they can rely on it each week and others on their team know.    

For those projects and organizations that must collaborate heavily, look for time to build an organizational non-work block during regular hours.  Even though it was over 30 years ago, I remember when General Shalikashvili used this concept effectively as Commander of the 9^th Infantry Division.  All commanders in the division had to cease work while in garrison for three hours each week to allow soldiers to go to the PX or do other family business.  This was quite effective in building morale and allowing soldiers needed family time when not in the field.  It was affectionately known as Shali Day.  Later, General Shalikashvili went on to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.    One last thing on this topic.  Once you establish work hours, set policies to not call, send emails or hold meetings during non-work hours except in real emergencies.  Once the policy is set, lead by example!

3. Incorporate fun and incentives.  Even when you properly plan not to overwork your team and give them appropriate time off, challenging projects and programs can be a slog! It would be best to find a way to make the project fun as the organization strives for a common goal.  One of my first bosses was the master of building fun into the project.   Here is my favorite example.  For one project, she made a poster of the Empire State Building with a stage of the project (design, code, test, etc.) every 30^th floor.  She then gave each team a small cut-out image of King Kong with the name of their assigned work stream.  We would gather twice a week at the end of the day to move our King Kongs up the Empire State Building.  You got a lottery ticket for each stage you progressed.  It built fun into a challenging project and built camaraderie.  Some people won up to $100 on the instant lottery ticket.   

4. Offer healthy, culturally appropriate snacks/food.  Projects that run on time need people with energy.  Almost everyone who has been on a project has had a pizza or wings lunch at one time or another.  But that is not what I am talking about.  Pizza and less nutritious foods can be occasional treats, but look to providing your team with healthy snacks.  They need nutritious options to do their best work. When planning outings, include healthy food that fits your team’s dietary needs.  I will never forget the first two times we had a team outing in Texas; the leadership in charge of the food choices ordered barbeque.  That is ok for some people.  But half my team was vegetarian.  After fretting that they only had potato salad for sustenance, I made the rule that all outings were to have a vegan option.  Food that fits a team needs vegetarian food for Indians and healthy snacks.

5. When it Snows, Stay Home.  Don’t risk your employees’ health from a pandemic or weather risks.  In addition, you should build a schedule contingency for such an occasion and a weather risk with an appropriate mitigation plan.  We should all know about this risk from the recent pandemic, but weather and its impact on employee safety are sometimes not always considered.  Here is a real-life example.  We were pushing for the deadline on a major project, and there was some indication that an ice storm would hit that evening.   Our project team decided to hold a meeting to determine how to deal with other project risks when the organization we were working with left early to avoid the storm.   The risk management meeting went long, and we did three things wrong.

a.  All Southerners, we blew off the risk of the ice storm.

b.  We were so immersed in other risks and their mitigation that no one checked if the risk materialized.   

c.  Once we left for the night and the roads had become exceedingly dangerous, there was no plan to accommodate people in a nearby hotel.

The result was three key people were injured, either walking to their cars or slipping into a ditch.  Bottom line:  Do not discount the ice storms of risk!  Have a mitigation plan and take care of your employee’s safety.

If you want to hear the associated podcast, find it here: Next week’s blog will cover Well-Led Guidelines 6-10. Until then, remember to Change Well.