Nobody loves their job for the wellness benefits

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Say it's it's probably been my entire career, if I'm honest about it, as I reflect on it. It probably was been, I think as a child, I wanted to do three things in my life. I wanted to either be a filmmaker, which hence the reason the background's pretty bit of an obvious giveaway, so I've become a film collector instead, or become a pilot. I'm a huge passionate flight enthusiast. or become an organization psychologist. And and I fell into doing what I'm doing, and I've stayed in this career my entire life, everything from workplace health related benefits and support services right through to today, where we do a lot of work around well-being strategy and organizational culture. But what drives me and my business partner Sophie is very much helping organizations understand the things which are getting in their way of their businesses and their people thriving and then of course helping them address those. And when we looked because Sophie and I have been working together for nine years and particularly in the last two years we've worked very, very closely and we spent a lot of time talking and exploring about the concept of big picture lab. Big picture lab essentially came from I think a conversation over a glass of wine about a year ago where Sophie and I were sitting there and thinking about, you know, what would what would we call it if we went independent and set up our own practice to do this. And I think it was it was one of those epiphany moments. I think it quite literally was as simple as, you know, we it we need some big picture thinking. And then It just fell into place. But fundamentally, we we looked around in terms of are there other organizations that do the breadth of what we do with organizations? But generally not. We were finding that most organizations do excellent things in particular pockets. Whereas we help bring all of that together from organizational culture to OD to well being strategy and so forth. So we felt The best way to do what we could do is set up his independence and and and and set up big picture lab.

It's probably a bit cliche to say it, but well-being is one of those words, not just in a workplace context, but also in wider societal perspective of it means very different things to different people. When we talk about well-being, and actually, ironically, although we do well-being strategy, we actually tend not to talk much about well-being because it can actually be a detractor to what we're trying to achieve. The big challenge with well-being not only is the fact that it means different things to different people, that also means, well, where are we actually focusing on? And well-being also is commonly seen as more a sort of tertiary or a sort of additional support thing an organization might do. So, for example, it could be anything from we have yoga or particular initiatives, for example. It could be things such as Companies' counseling support services, their employee assistants. You might put occupational health in there, you might put health-related benefits into there. But what's not commonly done by organizations is looking at actually wellbeing strategy, which is much more about aligning what are our key people risks, what are the factors getting in the way of our people performing optimally, not just our Teams on the ground, but our managers and our leaders, and then unlocking those. And then there's a really strong link into psychosocial risk management, as well as elements like psychosocial safety as well. But psychosocial risk management or workplace stress management, which of course in many countries there are legal duties of care in order to identify exposures to those risks and put in place measures to address them. Really, when we talk about wellbeing from our side, it's really about helping organisations perform optimally. And if we look particularly at psychosocial risk or stress management, all the things which drive stress in the workplace are exactly the same things, different side of the coin, of all the factors as to why our organization isn't performing optimally. So from our perspective, key challenge with well being is it still has a a such a broad embraced area, which is why partly we actually kind of avoid talking about well being. Commonly, what we do when we go into organizations, the first question we're going to ask is tell us about you. What are your key risks? And the last thing we're there to do is sell a product. Fundamentally, it's about helping them reflect on their challenges, sitting down with them, helping them build their picture, replay their narrative, and find together with them the solutions to the real need. So rather than an organization coming in and saying, We're gonna have some yoga or we're gonna put a new well-being-related app in, it's more about Making sure the interventions fit the narrative. Well, why are you doing that?

Yeah, that's a really good point. I would say there are a lot of common themes that we find. as a sort of starting point, the sorts of questions companies might come to us with at the outset might be things like we've got a divide between our say our leadership teams and our teams on the ground. There's an us and them dynamic and that's having an impact. Or it could be we've got a customer service team over here and The client customer outputs have been declining over the last year. We're not really sure what's driving that. We've got some ideas, but we're not really sure. It could also be a company comes to us, and we do have one of these at the moment, that has said, Rachel, could you deliver some employee resilience training for our employees? And then obviously we never say no, but fundamentally it's about, okay, tell us more, and then exploring and then building on that. What we commonly find within organizations is their approach to well-being is not often directly linked to the business and the business priorities. You tend to see a lot of tertiary-based support approaches, which actually have very little to do with well, why aren't we performing optimally? Why do we have dwindling customer service numbers? Why have we got high turnover? And at the fundamentally, at the end of every day, employees don't generally go home and say to their friends, their families, I love working for this company because we've got great wellness benefits. You know, we'll go home at the end of every day and say, I love working for this company because I'm empowered. I have control and influence over all over my role. I've got a great team around me. You know, we're solutions focused. When we've got challenges, we all get together and work together collaboratively. We're creative. I've got the space to think. My manager, my boss trusts me, and we have a really good working relationship. And this is what we ultimately un uncover in organizations is some of those factors might not be in place. And these are the conversations where the people are going home at the end of every day and saying, I can't believe my colleague again has done this. I've been stabbed in the back, my boss has done that. This is happening. I've got too much work to do. I don't have the capability. I feel like I'm picking up everybody else's work and 101 other variations. So our our role is predominantly to help unlock that. And what we find with most organizations is they tend not to have a full, complete picture of that. So the way in which organizations will typically look. At many of those factors and really understand their people will be on the one hand the anecdotal work that comes through. Big parts of it will tend to be performance data. It might be data relating to things like turnover, absence, as well as obviously business bottom line performance, which is where the board are looking primarily. And then of course, you'll also have things like engagement surveys or employee voice initiatives, all of which is great. But they're all telling a slightly different part of the story. And and some of those pieces might be fully complete and very robust, some might be incomplete, and then assumptions can be made, which is why you commonly see some interventions organizations put into place fail to work, because they aren't really based on a complete informed picture. Our role is to essentially go into an organization and replay their narrative. It's to look under the hood, so to speak. It's a bit like a jigsaw. We go in and we look at all the different fundamental pieces of their puzzle, and often we're not reinventing the wheel. Often we're not going in and doing more surveys. If a client's already got a lot of data, we will look at all the existing sources. There might be gaps where we identify and say, actually. Actually, you don't have you've never done an employee survey, or your current employee survey isn't ex isn't really understanding certain areas. So it might be worth testing some of those areas in some additional employee voice sessions. But essentially, our goal is to see how what condition their jigsaw is in, build the jigsaw, and look at it holistically, and then replay that to the organization so that then. We can work with that organization to help them figure out the solution. And commonly, what we come back with might be 30 or 40 key areas. And this is where it gets really muddy. And we see this a lot when organizations get their engagement surveys back. It's crikey, I didn't expect to see that. Or my God, what do I do with the outputs? And And then you tend to and that can sometimes end up in, well, we ne we we then don't really publish the results or we only publish elements of the results or actually we put a bit of this under the carpet because it's a bit too challenging for us to deal with right now. And our role there is to help them Simplify and break it into what's important, what's urgent, what's going to have the biggest impact for your organization right now. And that could be simple adjustments. And this is another misconception with well-being, is you'll commonly hear the leader or the HRD might talk about, why are we paying for that benefit? Has no impact whatsoever, that's costing so much. And that leads to this perception of well-being potentially being expensive. Strategic well-being is closely aligned to OD and to culture change. It is often the simplest of things which can have the biggest difference. So, a client we're working with at the moment, one of their key challenges is the disconnect between shop floor and leadership. Both have great intentions. Shop floor, very passionate about what they do. They love their work, but there are lots of barriers for them. Barriers such as certain management styles which are micromanaging, certain dictatorship styles that they're seeing, not enough visibility, not enough voice. So to some extent, it's becoming a bit more of a chore. You know, these are the kind of things that these employees are going home at the end of every day and saying, actually, I'm getting really frustrated working here. I'm losing my will to live. I'm losing my passion for the drive. But then fundamentally, what we also explore with both with everyone in the organization is the why. What's your why? And it doesn't matter, you know, whether you are making toilet rolls or whether you are making components for aircraft or whether you are a financial advisor. People fundamentally get a lot out of their work. And we've worked with different people in different settings and different organizations globally. And you see passion at all levels. But we're often where the passion goes is where some of those barriers tend to come in. Whether it's the amount of control or influence or say that they have in their role, whether it's the relationship they have with their co-workers, whether it's just the behaviors The actions or inactions of people around them. It could well be workload, the amount of work demand that they have and their leadership management not necessarily understanding that individual's capacity. There'll be lots of 101 different reasons. But what we tend to find is, you know, that piece about what do leaders tend to miss when trying to really understand what's going on is that bigger picture.

Well, that's a really good question. So we we will build the picture or paint the picture, I should say, very much by starting starting out with actually why are we having this conversation to begin with? What's you know, what's what's the challenge? And that could be any of those things we talked about earlier. There could be 101 different different reasons. Then it's about okay, what do we already know? What measures do you already have? What's informing? That helps us work with the client to unpick, okay. We start to see an emerging jigsaw, if you like, through those initial early conversations. That helps us get to a place to agree with the client. Okay, it sounds like we've got this part of the picture, and it sounds like these might be some gaps. And then that will look different for different organizations. And And it could be, for example, it could be an organization has done an engagement survey, but they don't know what to really to do with the outputs. It could be that they've never done an engagement survey, everything that they're exploring and expressing is all based on anecdotal feedback. So it could be a mixed mixture of everything. So once we've understood that, it's then working with the client to determine how do we best paint this picture? What brush do we need? What color do we need to focus on? Or what colours should we be focusing on? So we can then help them pull together, if you like, complete their picture. And then that helps us get to a place where we can then replay the story with the leadership team. Your story, Mr. Klein, is this. Your potential solutions are these. And importantly, because those solutions, the approaches. Things to do, there will be multiple things on there. And that's often ironically one of the biggest barriers to organizations with things like engagement services. cracker, what do we do with the outputs? This is where we help keep it really simple. we work with the leadership team to unlock to an extent, Sophie and I go into those replays. Knowing what the optimal solutions are most likely going to look like. The goal for us is actually not to go in and tell them that. Our goal is to go in at that point, replay the story, explore with them, help them determine what the priorities are, and then they own it. If we go in and say, This is a story, this is what you've got to do. We've discovered it just doesn't work as well as if now bearing in mind we kind of know what that is, but we're not going to necessarily release it. In fact, we've never had a client replay session where we've had to go to the back end of the deck and actually give them the answers because they most clients will unlock it themselves during the replay. And that's what's really critical because we're not there to tell them what to do. We can do if a client absolutely needs it and needs that hand holding. And sometimes that's that can be common if we've got particularly organizations which are under very high pressure and you perhaps have a lot of dysregulation amongst leadership teams because they're very much focusing on the next thing, next thing, next thing, next thing, and they're not able to see and put themselves in. Spend much time in their front part of their brain to be have a have a broader picture. Sometimes it does happen. And then we will we're there to sort of hold their hands and help them navigate. But the key is not overcomplicating it, painting the picture and working with them to unlock the solutions. So ultimately they own it. And of course, we then are there behind the scenes working with them on particular elements. They might come back and say, okay, priority number one for us, guys, is we want to. We we we need leadership coaching around these particular areas. And then that's where they might then bring us in to support them further. It might be we need to build a a legally compliant for this country stress risk management framework. We don't have the capability or the capacity in-house. Guys, can you help us? And then we will help them build that. As a couple of examples.

Best place to reach us is either on LinkedIn or through our website, which is just big picturlab.co dot uk.

Nothing nothing, Sophie, I like more is a curious conversation with a client.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.