This isn’t an article on our wellness intelligence platform that catches burnout & mental health issues before performance crashes. It’s an article on empowering folks like you to do that without us.
First a little background: LEON is like Moneyball for fast growing companies. What I’m saying is we help you figure sh*t out when it comes to your employees’ happiness, well-being and performance.
“So what’s that look like?” you might ask. Well, I’m here to peel back the curtain and tell you.
First, you need to become a burnout, stress, and physiological adaptation expert. A brief scan through LinkedIn is all that it takes to see that words like “burnout”, “workplace stress”, “recovery” and our favorite “culture” are being thrown around carelessly while your people suffer. Accuracy here is the foundation for all else to come, and you need to be a true expert.
Next, you study load management from the people who know it best - elite sport coaches and athletes. While sports as a business analogy may not be your thing, taking responsibility for the holistic approach to performance is the only way to truly maximize your team’s potential. Olympians measure their sleep, diet, training blocks, recovery blocks, heart rate variability, and a whole bunch of other things that all lead to being an elite performer. Peak performance starts small, weeks before competition; and ends weeks later once your people are recovered and back to their new baseline. You need to design a similar program but for your employees.
What’s next? Surveys. Your people aren’t all the same, and they’ll all experience stressors differently. They also recover differently. Complex huh? You’ll have to baseline for each individual, team, and the company as a whole. You also need all of that same data, by industry, to benchmark against. You’ll be designing short surveys to minimize the time spent answering surveys and maximize time spent winning. Make sure to cover all the different constructs that go into health, culture, and performance; and also make sure to have an idea of what all the various ranges your people will rank mean. Having fun yet?
Congrats! You’re now an expert statistician, sport scientist, and possibly an MD at this point. Good stuff.
Now go grab a copy of “Data Science for Dummies'' because you’re going to need to dig into these survey results to find trends, opportunities, and needs. You’ll also later need these same skills to re-evaluate whether your strategies for addressing whatever insights are uncovered are properly managed. Don’t forget, this is your people and their well being that we’re talking about, so you’d better go through it with a fine toothed comb.
One of my favorite things about you (yes you, dear reader) is that the whole reason you’re doing this is because you care about your people. You see them as HUMANS. You and I are similar here, and I want to take this line to thank you on behalf of humanity, because together we’re changing the world.
Use those trends and insights from the surveys and design custom tailored wellness playbooks from both an organizational and an individual level. The classic “double whammy”. With most teams remote, it’s never been more important to have a strong performance and engagement presence that keeps people aligned, crushing goals, as well as mentally and physically healthy. They go hand in hand, not that you need telling. Here I might suggest bracketing your approach based on a 3-tiered ranking system that identifies people ready to push, those who are in a healthy medium flow state, and those suffering from any of the constructs you decided to measure. At LEON, we’re looking at mental health, burnout, leadership, teamwork, grit and resiliency.
This next part is a little time consuming, but since you haven’t called me saying “Please just take this off my plate, I get it, you guys do some really cool sh*t!” yet I can only assume you’re hellbent on not working with us and therefore I will reluctantly continue writing.
You need to build out a network of hundreds of people’s favorite health and wellness resources. Things like apps, brands, services, quotes, articles, videos, podcasts, and of course memes are the solution to your woes; so long as you carefully select and serve the right ones to the right people at the right time. We do this using our proprietary AI, but maybe you can do something like pick random things out of a hat if that’s outside of your wheelhouse? Idk. You’ll figure it out. Maybe.
What a month right? Oh! Did I forget to mention that you’re doing this over and over again on a monthly basis? At least that's what we do. One of the biggest problems right now is that it takes too long to collect employee feedback, design, implement, and then reassess things (we put this on autopilot for our clients). I’m sure you can find the bandwidth if you forego things like sleeping, eating, exercise and bathing… sound ok?
If you’ve gotten to this point I’m thinking you’re in one of two camps: either you feel empowered and ready to tackle all of the above to which I bid you the best of luck, or you’re practically begging for one of those cheesy call-to-action buttons that marketers sneak into blog posts to sell you something.
Sorry, but we’re above that. Please do not click here to schedule a time to meet and discuss how LEON can help you keep your people happy, healthy and at peak performance.
Cheers,
The LEON Team