The Human side of work, grief, resilience and becoming a people leader

So I want to zoom out a bit from the grief part, because obviously it's usually quite a heavy thing to talk about.

And I just want to talk about now the aspect of being human at work and just also from your experience, I think for me, one of the core things I think about is that all these things are choices.

You could have a company where you're give mental health days, you could have a company where you don't.

It's a choice and people will still show up and do the work.

And I think for you and based on your experience, what do you think leaders sometimes miss, especially when it comes to performance and people continuing to show up anyway? Like nobody's holding a gun to your head to do all these things.

So you really decide.

But for you, what have you seen change? in your quest to build this human-centered workplaces in terms of the things that leaders miss, especially if they talk in the lens of return on investment, P&Ls and things like that, and just how these things then fit into productivity.

That's a great question there.

A little bit of grief as well sits there, but I'll move away from grief because there's also more problems or issues that people are struggling with at work that are not necessarily grief-related.

Things like even burnout, things like life stressors.

You have people who are going through either things like divorce or illnesses.

We have employees.

And again, I think I always start with people asking questions what is the generation that works for you, right? In your workplace, what generation sits there today? A lot of it is going to now be Gen Z for sure, millennial for sure, a little bit of X, and I don't know if, and maybe boomers, a little bit of boomers as well, yeah? But boomers are on their way out.

There has been a balance that's beginning to shift between who are more.

Is it 50-50 split between the millennials and the Gen Z? Maybe, but over time, it's going to be the Gen Zs are going to be more at work.

That is important to understand and identify because then those different generations approach wellness and well-being very differently.

And it's how we've been taught and how we've been raised.

So that mix of of having Gen Z millennials at work, yet the leaders are Xs and boomers, becomes where the clash comes from.

Because the leadership level, which is full of maybe your Gen X and maybe older millennials, approach wellness this way, while then everybody else who they're... designing wellness programs for approach wellness differently and so these ones at the top are pushing down something that these ones at the bottom are like what is this thing you're giving us yeah we don't want that we want something else but the leadership is saying that thing you want that doesn't make any sense because again ideologies are different anyway where those two don't mix and find some meeting point, I would call it, congruence, I'll call it.

The cost to this is actually what you said, performance and productivity, because then you have a continuously burnt out Gen Z millennial worker coming to work every single day.

They're exhausted.

They're emotionally strained.

They're disengaged.

Then that ultimately will affect their performance, their productivity, and eventually your profits as an organization, if it's like a for-profit organization.

So then what people miss is that all these things cannot be separated.