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Healthy Place To Work
86 Plays4 years ago
GUEST / JOHN RYAN / HEALTHY PLACE TO WORK
- https://www.healthyplacetowork.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/healthy-place-to-work-international/
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrtUNAO8sbCDtnDtz3FgVHg
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis
- https://albertbandura.com/albert-bandura-agency.html
HOST / MATT MORLEY
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 25
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to episode 25 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we take a deep dive into the worlds of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico Healthy Buildings and Biofit Sustainable Gym Design.
Guest Introduction: John Ryan
00:00:30
Speaker
In this episode, we're talking to John Ryan of Healthy Places to Work, a consultancy that has developed its own global standard for creating a healthy workplace. So we discuss their interpretation of health that includes mental resilience,
00:00:45
Speaker
the concept of salutogenesis, the sweet spot between a healthy organization with healthy people, so not one or the other, but the two coming together, the importance of purpose at work for employees, human agency and its relationship to mental health.
00:01:03
Speaker
job design for a sense of control with your career, experiments with the four-day week and much more besides. John is a born communicator who sums up complex concepts in concise, clear and memorable soundbites. So I think you'll find this really useful content. If you enjoy the conversation, please do hit subscribe. You can find me at mattmorley.net. John is at healthyplace2work.com. All the links are in the show notes. Let's get into it. Here's John Ryan.
John Ryan's Journey into Workplace Wellness
00:01:35
Speaker
John great to have you here excited to dig into one of our favorite topics of mutual interest and hopefully of interest to our listeners as well so we're talking about creating a healthy place to work which is also brilliantly the name of your own company so just to give us a bit of scene setting.
00:01:52
Speaker
What's your own personal background and how did you get into the workplace wellness space? I know it's been quite a journey over the last six or seven years. A training in consultancy, I suppose, was where I spent a lot of my time working with a lot of multinationals delivering training courses around things, nothing to do with wellness now, things around strategic decision making, influencing skills.
00:02:13
Speaker
negotiation skills, but that gave me a great opportunity to get into loads of different workplaces and you learn about different issues going on in those workplaces. I then was lucky enough to join an organisation and lead it in Ireland called Great Place to Work. You might know it, it's a global organisation and the model is around trust. They certify organisations as being great places to work and produce lists all over the world.
00:02:42
Speaker
And that for me was really fun because for me, the joy of taking an organization from low trust to high trust was a fantastic journey. And when you could see the performance of that organization change with that and improve radically, that gave me my buzz.
00:02:59
Speaker
And I suppose the moment for me of the focus on wellness and health came in 2014. I was in the United States at a conference and a Stanford professor called Jeffrey Pfeffer. He stood up and he put up a slide and it said workplaces are killing people and worse, nobody cares.
00:03:20
Speaker
And I remember sitting there and being Irish, I'm quite cynical. And I was kind of going, I wonder now, you know, has he overplayed a little bit here? But then he started to give data and started to talk about, like, you're never going to see stress on a death cert or bullying on a death cert, but you will see cancers, you will see heart attacks, you will see suicide. And then he broadened it out around the world and sort of saying, you know, Japan and China on death certs, they actually have a place for a thing called karaoshi.
00:03:49
Speaker
which is death by overworking. And just the more he started to share about the workplaces that were actually dangerous places to go anyway and the like, I started sort of asking myself, was there something that we could do to try and improve these workplaces all over the world that were really unhealthy and causing people to become sick and die?
00:04:14
Speaker
And that was where, you know, I had exposure to Great Place to Work, a global brand with a global standard in the area of creating these great workplaces. And I was wondering whether or not there was something similar in the world of healthy workplaces.
Creating a Global Standard for Healthy Workplaces
00:04:30
Speaker
So we studied it all over the world and we found that there were loads of things going on in different countries, but nobody had actually set a global standard with a global brand in place. And that's what we decided to do.
00:04:43
Speaker
So there's quite a lot to unpack there. There's a number of key concepts, right? So I guess in a sense then, the primary piece is how you define or think about a healthy place to work and perhaps to zero down on it, whether your concept of it has changed.
00:05:03
Speaker
fundamentally over the last 12 months or rather has it just been a case of accelerating the thought process that you were already going through or have you had to take a step back and adapt your thinking post-COVID? My thinking changed probably fundamentally about a year after the presentation with Geoffrey Pfeffer because
00:05:24
Speaker
Initially, I had the similar view to everybody else that health was about, you know, fitness and been able to run a marathon and maybe, you know, a touch of I thought it was quite progressive, you know, maybe a touch of mental health in there, too, you know, that might come in. And then suddenly, when we started studying and this, you know, to create a standard, it requires a lot of study and looking at all of the literature that's out there and looking at all the different models that are out there. But we came across a guy called Aaron Antonovsky.
00:05:54
Speaker
And Aaron Antonovsky, unfortunately, he's passed, but he did a lot of research, particularly around World War II and the people who had, and particularly women, who were in concentration camps. And what he was looking at, obviously a lot of people who came through that experience were pretty well-rooned as individuals, but some weren't.
00:06:14
Speaker
And some were able to come out and even though they went through the horror that they went through, they were able to actually still live a reasonable life afterwards. And he was really interested to know what was going on here. And he shared with the world his concept of the Salugenic model of health. So in other words, what he wanted to do was have people to stop thinking about health as being the absence of illness.
00:06:38
Speaker
but rather look at the drivers, the things that make you truly healthy as an individual so that when life, as life will, life will come along and it'll hit us all in ways. The question is, are we going to be able to actually keep going? Are we going to be able to respond? Are we going to be resilient enough? And obviously COVID has told us that
00:06:58
Speaker
For elderly people who are frail, they were the first to be really badly affected by this. People with underlying health conditions, again, really badly affected by it. So for me, that completely changed my view, and that's where the model that we built around health, which we can speak about in a moment, but it really changed. So I was operating like an awful lot of people with a really, really narrow definition of what actually health is.
00:07:26
Speaker
And I had to expand that hugely. And it actually brought me on a journey of learning an awful lot more about this. But also then the question was, can we actually implement this within workplaces to try and make them healthier? Because probably the core belief we've come to is that you actually can't be a healthy individual if you're operating and working in an unhealthy organization.
00:07:50
Speaker
And equally, you can't be a healthy organization if you're full of unhealthy people. So that sweet spot that we're trying to get people to understand where it is, is when you have a healthy organization full
The Four Pillars of a Healthy Workplace
00:08:02
Speaker
of healthy people. And that's the sweet spot of resilience and sustainability and the thing that everybody wants, obviously, which is ultimate high performance of an organization.
00:08:13
Speaker
So you set out, you've obviously got quite an informed, research-driven, theoretical approach. I mean, referencing various authors and leading thinkers in this subject. So you're sort of gathering all of this information.
00:08:28
Speaker
And you mentioned the concept of creating a standard. That's a big statement. So what is the standard that you've created in relation to the healthy workplace? And what are the individual components? So I suppose there's two definitions which are handy to get out of the way first. And that's sort of our view of a healthy individual is an individual with the vitality to flourish at work and beyond. So this isn't just about work, it's also beyond because it's all the one. It was something I was talking to somebody
00:08:58
Speaker
recently and they were just talking about in workplaces how it used to be the case that you'd sit down with your manager and you'd mentioned something that was going on at home and you'd kind of be told, I will just leave that at home now. The workplace isn't something where you bring your personal problems. I think we've moved on now and we understand that we're not these people who can compartmentalize all our different parts of our life.
00:09:16
Speaker
work life, home life, they're all mixing together. OK, so you get you get it all together in one. The healthy organization, our definition is that an organization that enables its human capital to sustainably deliver on its objectives. And this sustainability piece has been absolutely a crucial piece. And a lot of organizations now who we're talking to want to buy into the U.N. goals and sustainability. And they see us as being a mechanism where they can report on a number of those goals.
00:09:47
Speaker
ESG reporting wise. In terms of the model, there's four key pillars to the model. And the first one is actually purpose. And this is kind of probably a lot of people are quite surprised at this, but it's critically important. And the more we take into this, the more we realize it. I don't know if you've ever seen a film called Six Sense. There's a little boy in it and he says, I see dead people.
00:10:10
Speaker
And effectively, for the last 10 years when I've been going through workplaces, I effectively feel I see dead people, right? I look at these people in their eyes and they just, they hate their job, they hate their role, they hate their manager, they hate the culture, they hate the company, they hate. And you kind of go, why are you still here? And they say, I have to pay the bills.
00:10:31
Speaker
So you see that somebody is kind of trapped in an organization and that's not good for your help, right? We all have an ideal version of who we are, but then there's the real version. And if there's a big distance between those two things, we have dissonance in our life, okay? Whereas,
00:10:49
Speaker
If they're pretty closely aligned, well, then we have a level of coherence. Coherence is something that is critically important to the performance of you as an individual. An example of that disconnect would be if you join an organization and the values and behaviors of people in that organization are completely different to yours. Every single day, you're going to be struggling because you're being something that is not true to yourself. That's a big problem. There's two factors here that play into this.
00:11:19
Speaker
One is organisations need to be really honest about who they are so that people can judge that that's the right place for me to go. But equally, individuals need to get to know themselves well enough so they'll be able to judge what are the best environments where they can actually flourish.
00:11:35
Speaker
And the truth of it is, from my experience, an awful lot of people don't know themselves well enough at all. And a lot of organizations are putting themselves forward in this kind of vanilla way of, oh, we're great in all ways. Whereas they need to be clearer about who are the people who can thrive in that environment and who are the people who won't. And that doesn't mean they're not good employees. It just means they're not suited to that environment and that job at the particular moment in time.
00:12:00
Speaker
So that purpose piece and that sense of meaning in the work you do, because I honestly believe that one of the biggest health decisions of your life is where you're going to work. Because work can be the best thing in your life or the absolute worst thing in your life. And it's too important to just leave it up to random choice. The second piece and the pillar is mental resilience.
00:12:25
Speaker
There's a couple of concepts. I'm not sure if you'd be familiar with the concept of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy, as a term, Albert Bandura was the guy who came up with it. Basically, it's about this concept of agency. Some people see that life just happens to them.
00:12:43
Speaker
and that there's not an awful lot they can do about it and they're like a boat going down a you know a rapid or something to get buffered at either side whereas people with high levels of self-efficacy it's like as if they have they're in that boat too but they've got an oar and they start to direct things so they believe that their decisions really matter and particularly their decisions around their job their career and their health
00:13:05
Speaker
And that's really important. With the pilots we did initially with this back in 2016, they were really surprised to see that there was a correlation between their high performers and people who had high levels of self-efficacy. So they've actually started now selecting and recruiting based on the capacity of people to have that high level of self-efficacy. Other things that are included in mental resilience would be optimism. As a frame of thinking, it's an incredibly important thing
00:13:32
Speaker
you know, pessimistic people tend to believe, oh, no, like that, that's another thing that's happened to me and that, oh, that's my fault. I take it on very personally. I think it's going to go on forever. I'll sort of say, oh, yeah, that's one bad thing that happened to me today. There's another two coming because they always come in threes.
00:13:47
Speaker
And they just have this kind of negative way of looking at life, whereas optimistic and this guy called Martin Seligman, who wrote a book on learned optimism, you can become more optimistic and it's incredibly aligned to your health outcomes. And people wouldn't know this, which is quite interesting.
00:14:04
Speaker
So the learning mindset is another aspect of mental resilience really important that people have this ability to learn and grow and develop not just like you know you leave college and you're finished learning you're learning all the time and you're adapting to the world outside because there's so much change going on you really have to be willing to embrace that change and change with it.
00:14:24
Speaker
We look at control and stress has been critically important in this model. So the time you're going to feel most stress in your life is the time where you feel out of control. So as an organization, the more control I can give you in terms of, let's say, job design, so what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, where you're going to do it, who you're going to do it with, those aspects give you a sense of control, and that's critically important.
00:14:52
Speaker
There's two more aspects. One is the demands and resource model that we talk about where this is a very mature model, as in this isn't a paternalistic organization who have to provide everything for you, right? You have to turn up ready to go. So you have to be personally resourced to actually deliver at this workplace. Your organization matches that with resources, but
00:15:15
Speaker
brilliant organizations get the demands resource balance piece absolutely bang on. So they challenge you enough so they're stretching you so that you kind of hit flow on a regular basis but they're not overwhelming you and equally we've seen in a lot of the public sector unfortunately that we've been working with the people are underwhelmed there they don't have enough challenge in their life and that's equally as dangerous too.
00:15:39
Speaker
Financial wellbeing is a key critical part of mental resilience, too. And we see that as a big, big factor for people. Lots of worry, lots of worry in that space. And the third pillar is actually connections. And this has been the piece that's been, you know, just hugely affected by Covid. And people have lost their social networks.
00:16:00
Speaker
And particularly the data that's coming back to us, which compares completely differently with the data before COVID, is actually saying that the sub-25, the under 25-year-olds are having a miserable time of it in workplaces right now. Because they don't want to be living at home with mommy and daddy, right? They want to be in the exciting, buzzy workplace where maybe they meet their partners for life or they have really good fun. They are learning and growing at a
00:16:27
Speaker
radical rate, and there's a randomness of a workplace that's wonderful. And that's where innovation thrives and the like, and they're not getting that. And there's in the model we have with this five statements that actually, if they're all come back low, it actually combines to say that those people are potentially depressed. And there's a lot of that in that age group. So just to people out there, please watch those people. So we're looking at relationships.
00:16:56
Speaker
One thing people talk about diversity and inclusion, it's fantastic and the model test for that. However, it's much easier to be around people who see the world the same way we do. If we're around people who see the world completely differently to us, which is good, that's diversity, but we need to have the skills to manage those rich relationships so that they don't end up with conflict. Belonging we're testing for, social well-being, emotional well-being, people within their authentic selves,
00:17:22
Speaker
all the way through. So that peer support and manager support come in there too. Last pillar is actually the physical health. So the usual suspects around weight and diet and fitness are in there, but also sleep and energy, because this whole model is based around people turning up and being energised with that vitality to really perform. But rest and reflection and recovery
00:17:48
Speaker
and also then general safety. So the model is built around those four pillars, 21 elements and 66 statements driving those along with 11 demographics that we're looking at. So what we bring back to an organization is a big, big data set on their
Conducting Wellbeing Surveys in Organizations
00:18:04
Speaker
people. So no longer are they just kind of saying, well, I think my people are okay. They're going, I'll tell you exactly how they are because now they have an evidence base and they can strategically respond to the real issues that are affecting their people.
00:18:18
Speaker
And we just asked them to do a simple, healthy place development plan whereby they say these are the presenting issues and over the next 12 months, six months, whatever period they want, this is what we're going after. So we're not going to take everything on. We're just going to really be focused on trying to move the dial in these areas. I think we sort of touched on that before we started recording today, but the idea of
00:18:41
Speaker
the value and importance of starting a project like this where the strategic aim is to create a healthier, more positive space in which to force staff and employees to work every day. The importance of beginning that with effectively listening. You're helping an organization to listen, perhaps in a way that they can't do themselves because of
00:19:09
Speaker
people perhaps not feeling comfortable sharing about these things or just you're creating, you're giving them a space in which to some extent open up and share concerns or worries that might not be appropriate or easy to share on a day-to-day basis because they're just not, they're just not there mentally and that then becomes the foundation
00:19:29
Speaker
that's often what i wish was happening before i get involved which is more like okay now we we know what's happening in the organization now it's time to actually implement some changes but if you haven't got that first piece right then you're sort of floundering you just
00:19:43
Speaker
You're just throwing some things at the wall without quite knowing where you should be focusing. So your approach is to first of all go in and what is the process itself? You're interviewing stakeholders, it's a series of questionnaires. How does it, in practical terms, how do you roll it out? We go in and we survey through an online survey, everybody in the organization, total.
00:20:08
Speaker
That data then resides on a platform and the actual people in the organization themselves, the CEO, the HR director, they can actually access their own data and they can slice and dice it in whatever way they want. Obviously there's suppression there so that confidentiality of all of this information is number one for us. But they can go in and sort of see how's that team in that geography compared to this team in that geography. And we'd give them benchmarks too so that they can
00:20:35
Speaker
compare because you know there's some scores that come back and they might look low but then suddenly you see well actually you know that's low for everybody that's that's a hard thing to pull off and so you've got to understand that and actually one of the ones that's quite low is that piece around turning up to work every day really energized and ready to go and there's an awful lot of people who aren't this pandemic has just sucked the life out of them
00:20:59
Speaker
And you kind of hear an awful lot of the good stuff out there from organizations saying, oh, people working from home, they've been fantastic. There's a lot of guilt. People are killing themselves working, trying to prove that they're actually working at home. They'd never be working that hard in the workplace.
00:21:17
Speaker
and you need like the best performers and athletes and sports people they can't run at a hundred miles an hour every single moment of the match or whatever they actually need that time just take break go have a coffee have a chat and whatever that's the cadence of a good healthy workplace.
00:21:34
Speaker
But what we're seeing is people who are quite exhausted and they're trying to pull off this impossible task of, I mean, the homeschooling stuff. What we saw from talking to a lot of recruitment agencies was that a lot of, and unfortunately this is the case, that unfortunately a lot of women were actually packing up and leaving the workplace because they just felt that they weren't doing anything right. They weren't doing their work right and they weren't looking after the home right.
00:21:59
Speaker
Unfortunately, I say it, it should be everybody's job, but a lot of females left the workforce. They will come back hopefully when this is over, but rather than trying to muddle on through that, there was too much stress that was been placed on them. So really, for us, organisations at the moment take a very ad hoc approach to health and wellness.
00:22:19
Speaker
they do a lot of talking they do a lot of an awareness building we actually think it's way past awareness people kinda know what they should be doing in some ways but now it's about helping the organizations understand. Where should we invest and where should we focus our intentions on a one quick example of this is we have one organization and we ask them you know so what are you doing.
00:22:39
Speaker
And they said, oh, we're doing this, that and the other. And we're doing a big thing on mental health. So we're getting somebody in to do a speech and we said, OK, and what supports are you going to have after that? And they were kind of going, well, we weren't really thinking of any supports necessarily. We just thought they'd come in and do the speech and leave.
00:22:58
Speaker
and that would be interesting. But the problem with that is you surface issues for people and you need supports after you surface issues for people. And actually when we did the assessment, that wasn't the biggest issue for people at all. Financial wellbeing was the biggest issue in that organization. So they were actually gonna spend time and effort
00:23:14
Speaker
on a particular issue that, yeah, might have been interesting, but wasn't what was going to actually hold back their performance as an organization. Instead of that, what they actually managed to do was bring in tax consultants to actually help. And they ran tax clinics for their employees. And they actually found out that even though these employees were really smart people with big degrees and masters and the like, they were really rubbish at organizing their own finances. And loads of them were on credit card debt.
00:23:43
Speaker
And this spiral of debt was actually just every single day weighing heavily on them. So they actually managed to get consultants in to restructure their staff's debt, take it from credit card to medium term loans. And it was like as if they said it was like as if you just took this huge weight off people's shoulders. And suddenly they were coming into work smiling.
00:24:06
Speaker
and actually really contributing, because the organization had responded to a clear and present issue that was really causing them a problem and affecting their health. And that's what this is about. It's about being really smart. We're living in a data age, so it's about responding to the data, picking the right measures, so you're making sure you've got the right things, and then interrogating the data in a smart way so that you're spotting the correlations.
00:24:34
Speaker
you're seeing the trends that are actually happening. And actually, a lot of organizations tell us that this is the best predictor going forward for them, you know, because they're maybe at a board, they're looking at revenue and profitability and all a lot of measures that are sorry, in the past, but this is the one that directs you and lets you know what's probably going to come down the street in about six or 12 months time if you don't deal with it.
00:24:59
Speaker
So you're effectively you're gathering all of this data. The data then allows you to generate insights and then you your what goes back to the organization. I believe you call sort of healthy development plans right when you're, which are essentially almost like a sort of an action plan like a list of recommendations like how do you then structure that feedback so that you can
00:25:20
Speaker
prioritize or are you putting budgets against things? Like what's the next step in that? Just to be clear, that's not what we do. What we do is we're experts on, we've created the model and the standard and we give you the data and the insight. So we come back to you as an organization and we sit with your leadership team and we say, this is you. This is exactly how all your people are, including by the way, the senior leaders of the organization, because sometimes they can be the most unhealthy people. And we know that to be a healthy place to work,
00:25:49
Speaker
your employees have to look to the senior leaders and see health role models. So don't think you can get away with this as a senior leader if you're not going to live the dream yourself. And that's really important. So we sit with them and we say, based on our analysis and the benchmarks and everything we see,
00:26:05
Speaker
These are the things that you're brilliant at and your people are really doing well at. Celebrate that because all these organizations focus on what's wrong straight away. They jump in there and they don't take a moment to recognize what they're getting right. OK, but then we highlight the issues and we sort of say, OK, these are the top three or four things that we think are the biggest that you've got to go after in the next period of time. However much time and effort and energy you're going to put into this will depend how long that's going to take.
00:26:33
Speaker
and you then need to actually put the healthy, we give you a framework and a healthy development plan, but you fill in the bits, you decide what you're going after, because it's your decision, it's not ours. We're going to tell you what we think are the priorities, but you've got to nail them down and then communicate it to everybody, and you've got to build a coalition around the organization, because this isn't the leadership doing this, this is everybody. Everybody's got to go on this journey, and we've got to decide what are we going to support, what are we going to go after, what are we going to promote,
00:27:03
Speaker
And what are we going to try and move the dial on and then we're going to measure again to see that we're going in the right direction and we're really actually making a difference. So that I think that's really interesting. Yeah, because there's almost a temptation in my mind to sort of go, you know, leap ahead a couple of steps. Whereas in fact,
00:27:20
Speaker
you're providing, for example, a chief people officer or an HR director, you're providing them with data and understanding about what's happening in their organization. You're helping them to see through the various barriers or between the cracks or whatever it might be so that they can really kind of get the temperature.
00:27:39
Speaker
of where they're at and then it's in a sense up to them. You kind of collaborate a little bit or help them understand what's going on and then in a sense you sort of pass the baby on. It's then up to that HR team to take on the challenge of resolving and also communicating the good stuff.
00:27:59
Speaker
but also resolving some of the bad stuff is that correct yeah i mean it just imagine if you were running this in any health organization you know who been subjected to what's going on. The leaders of the these hospitals and like they might be presuming that everybody has been affected in a similar way but that's probably not the case.
00:28:19
Speaker
Some people have been affected much differently than others and you can't presume those things. You need data so that you need to ask the question so that you know then how you're responding and you're responding in the right way with the right people.
00:28:36
Speaker
I wanted to pick up on one piece that you mentioned, the idea of recovery and the importance as a sort of rest and reflection and how that relates to physical health.
Best Practices for Workplace Recovery
00:28:48
Speaker
It seems to me that recovery in a sense is a combination of mental and physical wellbeing. If you're not recovering, a bit like the sportsman and the performance analogy,
00:28:59
Speaker
You're just unable mentally to perform well. So what sort of things do you see in terms of best practices around how you can foster a culture in which recovery is not deemed almost something to be scoffed at, but is in fact to be embraced? Because I think we've seen, especially in sort of classic high-performing management consultancies and things where sleep is almost for the weak,
00:29:28
Speaker
You know, that's a mountain for you or an HR team to overcome, right? So what sort of strategies might you think about in terms of, well, here's what recovery could mean for you in the context of this workplace.
00:29:43
Speaker
I think workplaces are kind of getting the deal that it's not about turning up and how much time you spend in there. It's actually where you're using your brain power during a day and the recognition that, yeah, I can turn up. I could do a 16-hour day if you want me to, but I'm not going to be really performing all that time. And the smart workplaces are the ones who realize that, look, you can control a lot of those factors. So if I give you the space to sort of say, you take time out and take the time out that you need,
00:30:11
Speaker
to be able to do whatever it is you need to do. I mean, like I was in Denmark with a company who had moved to the four-day week. And that was really important because they were proving that they could make more money with people working four days a week than they could with people working five days a week. And it was all to do with effectively using the time in a completely different way and bringing a level of transparency to it. But the Friday day,
00:30:38
Speaker
was a day that the employees said, and when I was talking to them, they were saying the thing that was really important about Friday was that their family wasn't around. So when suddenly it's Saturday and Sunday, and you've had a hard five days at work,
00:30:54
Speaker
You come home and you can't rest. You're actually, you're up for it again. You're bringing kids to football or whatever. You're shopping, you're doing all those things. Whereas this day was like a secret day where they could just do what they needed to do. And that was where they really recharged their batteries. And they used that time, even though they could do anything they like, they used it to educate themselves.
00:31:19
Speaker
and to learn and grow and develop themselves on a personal level. I thought that was a great one. But one of the things about reflection I think is important that oftentimes organizations will celebrate a project when it goes really well. And then if a project doesn't go well, they completely ignore it. Whereas in one organization I love, they celebrate failure. So the same party that they would have had if the project had been a huge success,
00:31:47
Speaker
They have the same party, even though it's a failure. And what they do is they recognize that even though they haven't actually got the result they wanted to, still an awful lot of people in that group have done huge work to try and achieve the result. And they specifically kind of go through what everybody has done and contributed to that, even though it wasn't a huge success. But they stop and say, now, if we were to do it all over again,
00:32:14
Speaker
What would we do differently? And to me, that's an organization who's actually learning. They're actually learning and reflecting on what's just happened. And they're now going to be stronger and better at making sure that they're not making the same mistakes over and over and over again, because they're moving at such speed. They've stopped, they've reflected, they've learned, they've grown, and they move on. And to me, that's the way it's got to be.
00:32:40
Speaker
I love it. That's a great one to end on. I think you just sort of as a mic drop moment, I think in many ways.
Contact Information for John Ryan
00:32:46
Speaker
So listen, if people want to reach out to you and connect or perhaps get involved or bring you on, what's the best way for them? Well, I mean, like they can come through healthyplace2work.com or if there's a, you know, I don't know what way you work this, but if there's not too many, John at healthyplace2work.com is OK. So I'll let you be the judge of that.
00:33:08
Speaker
Very cool. All right, well, listen, thanks again. We'll put everything in the show notes so people know exactly how to contact you. And yeah, thanks again for your time. Brilliant. Thanks a million.