How can you look after your wellbeing in the workplace?

In this week's episode of the Happier at Work podcast, I delved into the concept of workplace wellbeing and addressed some of the critical factors that can hinder it. As we celebrate National Workplace Well-being Day in Ireland, it's important to recognise the challenges that may impede our well-being at work and take actionable steps to mitigate them.

One of the primary hindrances to workplace wellbeing is workload. Feeling overloaded with work, working excessive hours, and struggling to achieve work-life balance can significantly impact our well-being. I emphasised the importance of distinguishing between self-inflicted workload and workload imposed by external factors such as organisational demands and client needs. Additionally, she offered practical strategies for managing workload, including setting clear priorities, monitoring time spent on tasks, and learning to say no when necessary.

Recognising our own achievements and finding support within the organisation were also highlighted as crucial in fostering workplace wellbeing. I shared insights on navigating conflicts, seeking opportunities for personal and professional development, and identifying and addressing toxic work environments.

It's essential to create a workplace culture that values well-being and provides support for all employees. I encourage you to actively engage in open and honest conversations with managers, colleagues, and HR to address challenges and foster a culture of respect and support.

The main points throughout this podcast include:

• The challenges that may impede our well-being at work and take actionable steps to mitigate them.
• The importance of distinguishing between self-inflicted workload and workload imposed by external factors such as organisational demands and client needs
• Recognising our own achievements and finding support 
• Insights on navigating conflicts, seeking opportunities for personal and professional development, and identifying and addressing toxic work environments.

 Links: https://hbr.org/2018/04/track-your-time-for-30-days-what-you-learn-might-surprise-you

Do you have any feedback or thoughts on this discussion? If so, please connect with Aoife via the links below and let her know. Aoife would love to hear from you!

Connect with Happier at Work host Aoife O’Brien:

Website: https://happieratwork.ie 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifemobrien/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/happieratwork.ie/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/happieratwork.ie

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HappierAtWorkHQ

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HappierAtWorkHQ 

Previous Episodes:

https://happieratwork.ie/202-leveraging-strengths-and-setting-boundaries-with-lucy-gernon/

https://happieratwork.ie/197-the-journey-to-workplace-happiness-with-rob-dubin/

https://happieratwork.ie/178-fulfilling-your-potential-and-finding-joy-in-your-work-with-soma-ghosh/

Mentioned in this episode:

Skillding

Skillding women

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the happier at work podcast. I'm your host, Aoife O'Brien. And today, I have a very special episode for you because today is National Workplace Well-being Day in Ireland, and I wanted to address some of the issues in relation to workplace well-being. A lot of people confuse what I do with workplace well-being. It's not something I call what I do, but other people call what I do workplace well-being. And I suppose the first thing that I wanted to address in relation to workplace well-being is that I, and often a lot of other people, assume that workplace well-being is something like bringing in a yoga class, bringing in fruit, running sessions on webinars, and things like that. Now when I say I and other people, when I hear other people talking about workplace well-being, that's kind of where my head goes. And why I say what I do is different to workplace well-being is because for me, it's a lot more fundamental than workplace well-being.

Workplace well-being seems like sort of an add on once you have the right things in place in relation to culture, need satisfaction, understanding strengths, psychological safety at work, and really strong leadership. So those to be, excuse me, are the basics that need to happen. Now the first thing I want to address in relation to workplace well-being are really the thing that I want to talk about today is the things that prevent us from having workplace well-being. And for me, the absolute number one thing that prevents us from being well at work is workload. So we are so so overloaded with work and therefore we're working too many hours. We don't have a sense of work life balance and we don't feel like we have time to look after ourselves or maybe we don't feel like we can say no. So I want to address that as as the kind of for me, the number one blocker to creating workplace well-being is workload. And there's a few different ways to think about this.

So number 1 is to think, is this self inflicted workload or is it coming from somewhere else? So by self inflicted, I mean, are you choosing to be busy? Are you choosing to do busy work? Are you not saying no? So are you just saying yes when really you should say no or you should ask to prioritize or try and prioritize yourself as well. And the external contributing factors can be from clients. They can be from other people, or simply the fact that the organization, and I've seen this in a lot of cases, they just don't have enough people to do all the work that needs to be done. And again, for me, I would challenge and say, you have a choice here whether you do the work. You have a choice whether you stay in an organization that is trying to do that. Are they actively trying to recruit additional people to cope with the additional workload or have people left, and therefore it's creating a gap in the team? And this is a temporary thing where you have to kind of step in. But I think finding ways to manage your workload better and let's get back to this idea of self inflicted and doing the busy work because it's so easy to do that stuff. It's so easy to be reactive, to be focusing on your inbox all the time and be reacting to what people are putting on your plate, which is getting things off their own inbox.

Whereas if you take a proactive approach and really focus on what are the things that I need to do that's going to move the dial towards my objectives, help me achieve the objectives for myself, for the team, for the department? What are the things that I really, really need to focus on? So that is one of the key areas that I would say that you you really, really need to to focus on is reducing the amount of work that you're actually doing. And one of the key ways to do that is to focus on what what priorities you have. What you may find with this is that it leads to a lack of work life balance. I deliberately decide to choose other words like work life integration or work life harmony because one of my previous podcast guests, Kalle Yost, she spoke about this idea of deficit thinking. So if we're coming from this place that we're always out of balance, we're coming from this place that we're never going to get to balance. And it's more about creating a sense of work life fit. So how did the two things work together rather than competing against each other? So I really liked that approach. But most commonly term you know, the most commonly used term for that is work life balance, which is why it's easier to say work life balance.

But this has a the amount of workload that you have has a direct impact then on the sense of balance that you have between what you're doing at work and outside of work. So whether that's hobbies, spending time with loved ones, for me, it would be things like travel, spending time with friends, things like that. So one of the things that I touched on earlier is this idea of saying no. And, you know, sometimes we say yes when we want to say no or we don't know how to say no or we don't know that we can say no. And for me, again, thinking about it in a few different ways, if you are getting loads of work and you have already a lot of work, then you can push back and ask your manager to prioritize or ask them to work with you to prioritize what needs to be done first. Can you change some deadlines around? For example, one great phrase that I learned very early in my career is when will this be used? Because oftentimes, when you're delivering something to someone, it's not going to be used straight away. And what used to really bother me was I would send through a piece of work to a client, and then 2 weeks later, after me really struggling to meet that deadline, 2 weeks later, I would get a question about the piece of work. And I had completely moved on from that already, and it had been deemed really important and urgent at the time.

And then so to come 2 weeks later when they're actually taking the time to look at what I've produced. So it's really frustrating. So ask people when what you're working on will actually be used. So what is a realistic deadline for you to have to meet? But also don't be afraid to say no if you have that option, or like I said, to ask people to reprioritize things for you so you don't have so much. If you want to prioritize things for yourself, have a think about, well, what's gonna help me meet my objectives in my role, in my career? What's going to move the dial in the objectives of our team, of the department, of the organization? We get so caught up in busy work, in responding to emails, in doing things that actually makes us feel really busy, but we haven't actually produced anything. So I think it's important to address that. One way that you can do that is through monitoring the amount of time that you spend on things. I know it sounds tedious and it sounds horrible, and it is.

But that if you want to be really honest about yourself, and I put a link to a really interesting article from Dori Clark that she wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2018. She took 30 days and she tracked everything. So it wasn't just work related. It was absolutely everything to see how is she spending her time. And it's a real eye opener, I think, because sometimes we think we're spending our time in a certain way or we think we have no time to do something specific. But actually, if you track the amount of time and I know oftentimes our phones can tell us how much we're spending on specific types of apps and things like that. So just be conscious of those things, how much time you're actually spending on very specific areas. So if you find that you're spending way too much time on email, for example, that you're responding, like, how is that moving the dial forward? Is that in relation to business development? And if it's not, is it something that you can maybe decide to check twice or 3 times a day and have it shut down? That's another thing that I wasn't planning to talk about is this idea of distractions and how they can capture our attention, and they're designed to capture our attention.

And we get so pulled away from the work that we're currently doing. So closed down distractions so that you don't get sucked into doing something. And I know I'm so guilty of this all the time as well, where if I think of something, I will get distracted. I'll look it up and I'll go down a complete rabbit hole. So what I've started doing is putting a notepad beside where I work and jotting down the thing that I think of rather than immediately immediately going to look that up and to find out where that is. So I'll put it down to come back to later. Another area where well-being can really suffer is a lack of support from your manager. So as I was mentioning earlier, if you work with your manager to prioritize things or if you're feeling really challenged with your workload, you can feed that back.

But sometimes you don't have that support from your manager. So either you don't have a a manager currently, which has happened to me in the past as well, or you just don't feel like you can approach them or they seem really busy all the time. So there are some challenges around that in in relation to not having that level of support. But I think it's so important to find that support. So if you're not getting that from your manager, can you get that from your colleagues as well that you can share the workloads, that you can share what's going on for you? Can you have an honest discussion with your manager? The manager's primary role is to develop the team. So if they're not making time to do that, I think there's something really wrong there. And can you have an honest conversation with them? And if that's not working out, is there someone else that you can speak to? Can you go to HR? Can you go to the manager's manager to have that conversation as well? Another really important area to focus on is expectations. And again, this ties in with the idea of workload.

It ties in with the idea of having that sense of work life balance. So in order to give feedback, in order to have a greater sense of accountability, really clear expectations need to be set. And for me, when I talk about expectations, I always about time expectations and quality expectations. So around how long should this take someone, And if you're new to doing something, it's going to take you longer and factor that in as well. So around how long should this or how long do I expect you to spend on this specific task? And if I think back to my own corporate days, it's really on presentations and with clients. So how long are you expected to spend putting together this presentation, for example, or it could be putting together a report? And then thinking about the quality. So is this going internally and therefore you don't have to go through it with a fine tooth comb? If there's a typo here and there, then it's okay. It's understood.

But maybe if it's going to a really important client, then you really have to have that higher level of quality. But showing what that quality looks like and really explaining how to get to that level of quality is important as well when someone is setting those clear expectations. And I think it's a two way street. If you're if you don't have that clarification of those expectations, by all means, don't feel like you're really stupid by asking. I think it's so important to to be really clear on the expectations of the role, which helps you then in turn to reduce the workload. What are the expectations? What is the number one priority that we need to work on? Not the multiple priorities. What's the number one priority here? Another kind of serious thing, I think, in relation to diminishing our well-being at work is not being recognized. So, again, tying in with the amount of work that we have.

So if we have a huge amount of work to do, but there's no acknowledgment for the amount of hours that we're putting in, for the quality of work that we're delivering, for how we're working as a team, I think it's really important to just recognize people and say, well done. Thank you. And show some sort of appreciation for what they're doing because oftentimes, employees feel so undervalued. If you are one of these employees who's feeling like, well, my company doesn't value me, how can you value yourself? How can you recognize your own achievements? How can you create some sort of accountability like a Friday wins or something like that where you're sharing with your colleagues? These are the things that I have achieved this week. Another, another area that gets in the way of our workplace well-being then is conflict. So when we have run ins with our colleagues, when there's people that we don't particularly get along well with, then it can really have a negative impact on our impression at work. And I know I've had this where I've been bullied in the workplace. I've had it where I just don't feel like I belong.

I just don't feel like I get along, or I really get the people that I work with. So it's important. And, again, you know, I haven't always done this in my career, but it's important to tackle those issues head on if there is any sort of a conflict to actually talk about it. And I know it's really, really hard to do that. And as I'm recording this, I delivered a talk yesterday all about impostor syndrome. But one of the parting thoughts was around this idea that it's okay if you feel uncomfortable doing things, you can still do it. You don't have to wait till you feel comfortable doing something because that's not how you learn. That's not how you grow.

And conflict is one of those key areas. So have a think about where that conflict lies, how you can turn that into a positive conflict, how you can have a constructive conversation with someone, to address that area of conflict as well. Another area is not feeling like you're progressing in the role or not feeling that is challenging enough. And I've had that in the past where I I felt like I wasn't really learning that much in the role that I had. And I went externally and I sought out my own ways of learning new things. And if you've listened to the episode a couple of episodes back, I talked about going out and learning of all things Python, computer programming, and statistics. And it was a way for me to develop my own skills. It wasn't directly related to the role, but it was something that I was interested in.

And I know that it's a transferable skill that if I were ever to do something else, that I could take that with me. So have a think about how you can challenge yourself and how you can develop. And if you're not getting those opportunities to develop internally in the organization, what external opportunities can you seek out as well? Whether that is studying something new, whether it's learning a new skill, whatever that might be. It could even be in a voluntary role, just trying something completely new. The last point that I want to leave you with today is this idea of just being in a generally toxic environment. And a couple of points on this. So first of all, if you're in a toxic environment, and again, I talk often about the different types of toxicity that I've experienced. So one that was actually a toxic environment and, you know, really high turnover, misogynistic type of culture, male pale and stale, and then another environment where it just wasn't the right fit for me.

I wasn't thriving in that environment where other people were really thriving in that environment. So it just wasn't a good fit for me for how I am. So recognizing the difference there, making a choice. So are you choosing to stay there? Are you looking for something else? Are you choosing to look for something else? How active are you, and how do you make sure that you don't enter into another organization that is the same type of toxicity that you're trying to get away from as well. So I think it's so important here to understand what your values are, to understand why you don't like where you are working and what needs to be different in the next place that you go into. And being really honest about that, having an honest conversation as you're going in. I think any organization that is worth going into, that's worth working for will totally understand if you explain that you're in a toxic situation where you are and that you're trying to get out of that toxic situation, and you're trying to make sure that you don't go into another toxic situation. I think they would be very, very understanding about that.

Another thing, if you're staying in that organization, is to really promote an atmosphere of respect. So treating colleagues as you would like to be treated. So being the role model for how you would like to be treated in an organization, you know, focusing on the positive, contributing, and being really supportive of your colleagues. I know I've been in situations where I've got on brilliantly with the colleagues, but it was actually the leadership that was the challenge. And that to me was the challenge. That was the toxicity and I had to get out of it. And then equally, there have been other situations where I just haven't felt like I was being supported or that either I wasn't contributing to the supportive cultures that we had in the organization either. So it was kind of a two way street.

And, again, I chose to leave that situation because it didn't really suit me at all. So they are some of my thoughts on the things that get in the way of workplace well-being and some of the action steps that you can take to tackle those issues specifically. I really hope you enjoyed today's episode. I always love to hear from listeners about what you might do differently. Is there something that has particularly inspired you? Do let me know. I'm very active on LinkedIn. You'll find all of my social links on my website, happieratwork. Ie, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you.