What does employee wellbeing in the workplace mean to you?
Do you know how to focus on your own wellbeing, while remaining productive?
We live in a time of constant change that affects many employees at work. With the rapid speed of change, many companies need to ensure that their people are ready to perform at a high level. In this episode, you will learn about the fundamentals of employee wellbeing and how leaders can improve wellbeing in their organization.
Our host, Porschia, discusses the significance of employee wellbeing in the workplace with our guest, Dr. Linda Hoopes. Dr. Hoopes shares her journey into becoming an expert in resilience and wellbeing, along with how she supports her clients.
Dr. Linda Hoopes is Founder and President of Resilience Alliance. She is also author of the award-winning book, Prosilience: Building Your Resilience for a Turbulent World. Dr. Hoopes enjoys sharing her unique perspective on creating human energy sustainability at work.
What you’ll learn:
- What employee wellbeing is and how it affects the workplace
- How to navigate wellbeing and resilience challenges
- What positive energy spirals are and how they can help you
- How leaders in companies can improve employee wellbeing internally
As a thank you for listening to this episode of the Career 101 Podcast, we are sharing our FREE master class – Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have! It’s a training based on solving the common problems our clients have experienced to reach their goals. You can get access to the master class here!
Episode Transcript
Porschia: [00:00:00] Hello, I’m Portia Parker Griffin, and I want to welcome you to the career 101 podcast, a place for ambitious professionals and seasoned executives who want an edge in their career. We’re talking about all of the things you were never taught or told when it comes to career growth, development, and change.
Now
Linda: let’s get into it.
Porschia: Today we are talking about Employee Wellbeing 101, Employee Wellbeing in the Workplace with Dr. Linda Hoops. Dr. Linda Hoops is the founder and president of Resilience Alliance and author of the award winning book, Prozillience, building your resilience for a turbulent world. She weaves her background in IO psychology, organizational change, resilience, massage therapy, and sailboat racing into a unique [00:01:00] perspective on creating human energy sustainability at work.
In her spare time, she enjoys family history, photography, and playing mandolin and guitar with her friends. Hi, Linda. How are you
Linda: today? Hey, Portia. It’s nice to be here. Great. You have
Porschia: such an interesting bio, Linda. I love it. I love it. It’s like after the podcast, we’ve got to talk about all of these cool, interesting things that you’re doing.
Linda: Life is just so full of interesting things. Uh, I’m
Porschia: excited to have you with us to discuss employee well being in the workplace, but first we want to know a little bit more about you. So Linda, tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you started
Linda: your business. I’d be glad to.
My background is in industrial and organizational psychology and I moved into that because I really enjoyed the human side of things and also the workplace side of things. I [00:02:00] really wanted to bring together those interests. And when I finished grad school or during grad school, I got a chance to do some consulting and get some experience in doing that and realized that I liked it.
And then I went and was a professor for a few years in, Organizational behavior and statistics and research methods and geeky things like that. And then I went to work for a consulting firm that was focused on the human side of organizational change. And I went in as their research director. So I got to learn a lot about how humans move through transition and what’s going on in the workplace that might be.
stressful for people, helpful for people. And then that moved me into the zone of studying resilience and trying to understand how it is that some people move more easily through challenges and changes in the workplace than others. And then I moved into that space and have continued to study resilience for the past 25 or 30 years.
Porschia: Wow. That is so interesting. [00:03:00] And Linda, some, some listeners of the podcast know that I’m finishing up my master’s degree in IO psychology. So all of that nerdy stuff that you mentioned about the statistics side of it and the organizational behavior and change, I’m with it all day and I can really see how that is in alignment with what you do now.
Linda: So very cool. Absolutely. And then I add the massage to it because there’s a whole physical dimension of it and sort of how we, how we move in our bodies through the day, how we, how we avoid having our shoulders up around our ears and knots in our stomachs when we’re dealing with things. So, so that’s been a fun layer to add to it as well.
Porschia: Yeah, I’m sure I’m sure that I know that there are psychologists that just study kind of the mind body connection and all of that good stuff. So you mentioned, you know, different challenges and whatnot before, but what would you say has been your biggest career challenge before you
Linda: started your business?[00:04:00]
Moving from academia into consulting was a huge challenge because in academia, you’re supposed to know the answer to everything. You’re never supposed to show that you don’t know the answer, right? And so I walked into consulting and realized that I needed to have a little bit more humility and be able to show up and be much more of a learner and shift into that growth mindset and know that there’s always new things to learn.
And so that was probably my biggest challenge. I can
Porschia: definitely see that because it, there is a difference, you know, in consulting, you’re asking questions and kind of co creating that solution with clients. And yes, in academia, you’re presenting the research that you, you know, have studied or you remember.
So I think, yeah, that could definitely be a challenge. And we see that Linda with our clients. So we have a lot of clients that are actually transitioning from academia into. Other industries. So, you know, we work with a lot of scientists. I used to be a career contributor [00:05:00] for a life sciences publication, and there, a lot of them are trying to get into industry, right?
So they’re trying to get out of academia or research or whatever postdoc they’re doing. And to your point, it can be very challenging for them because the environments are so different. So, um, it’s great that you, you made that career transition.
Linda: Absolutely. The other piece of it, I think, and related to what you’re saying, is learning to really be a collaborator with people with very diverse perspectives and ways of doing things.
It’s a lot of fun, but it takes some doing when you’re used to being like the person that has first authorship on things. You sort of have to let go of, you know, whose name is at the top of the list and figure out what can we do together. So
Porschia: we, we heard about the transition to consulting, but what made you want to start a business, Linda?
Linda: It’s a little bit complicated. Working in a consulting firm that was founded by a thought leader in the organizational change [00:06:00] field meant that I was growing up professionally in a firm where there was somebody whose ideas were already front and center. And I found that I had more and more things that I wanted to say and find a place where my own voice would be heard and that I could focus on the things that I wanted to focus on.
And so the company was changing its strategy at the time. And so I found an opportunity to move into a contractor role with them and then on very good terms to leave as a friend of the family. And I’ve continued to do work with the people. that I used to work for, I just found that I really needed my own space to, to, to think and to create and to pursue the ideas that really lit me up.
Yeah. And I
Porschia: hear that from a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, that they’re creative and they just kind of want to get out and do their own thing. So Linda, how did you decide to focus on
Linda: resilience? My first assignment when I joined the company as their research director [00:07:00] was, we need to understand how to help people understand their predispositions around resilience from the organizational change standpoint.
And then it just grabbed me as a topic. And so It became something that I was intensely curious about and the more and over. I mean, think about what we’ve learned over the past 25 years in terms of mind body stuff in terms of the brain, in terms of just all the ways that humans deal with adversity and stress and so on.
It’s an endlessly fascinating topic. And because I’m licensed as a psychologist, I need to do continuing education. And so I have felt like I spent six it. Continuing education class on calming the overactive brain that was talking about chronic anxiety and some of them, what’s going on in the brain. And so I just, I get to continue to learn and then figure out how to share what I’m learning with people in ways that are practical and applicable to what they’re doing.
So [00:08:00]
Porschia: how would you describe resilience for someone who either has a vague idea or someone who’s not really
Linda: clear on it at all? Lately, I’ve started to say resilience is a verb. Resilience is the way that we move through the various kinds of challenges that we face, both the challenges that we choose, taking on important struggles in the world or having things that we want to do and say, or challenges where we’re not COVID comes up and turns our world upside down or challenges like bullying and, you know, things where people are actively seeking to do ill to us, there’s a whole range of challenges that we face.
And so, to me, resilience is the set of tools and skills and muscles that we use to work our way through those so that we can achieve higher levels of well being, which I think of in terms of. Both both feeling good and being productive, [00:09:00] bringing our best selves to the world. So Dr Martin Seligman talks about flourishing as the intersection of sort of emotional well being and productivity.
And I think of resilience as all of the things that we do that help us move more into that zone of flourishing.
Porschia: Wow. I love it. I love it. And I know that in, in positive psychology, they do a lot of research around flourishing and, and things like that. So I, I like the connection you made in your definition of resilience, but are there any other ways that you think resilience and employee wellbeing are
Linda: connected?
Oh, 100%. Employee well being involves navigating a set of challenges. So every day we navigate challenges of how do I deal with this new situation? Or I’m feeling stuck here. Or what’s my next role? Or gosh, they just promoted me. What do I do now? So employee well being rests very much on our ability [00:10:00] to navigate through the surprises, the unexpected, the learning opportunities.
And it’s the same toolkit that we use. The same toolkit that we use when our dog dies is the toolkit that we use when our boss calls us into the office and gives us some feedback that we didn’t particularly want to hear. Or, you know, or we, we have an unplanned job loss, or we, you know, whatever it might be, or we feel stuck or plateaued.
So resilience is, it’s, it’s integral to employee well being because it’s, it’s a, it’s a toolkit that we use every day. How do
Porschia: you think being more resilient can help executives and professionals in the
Linda: workplace? All right, so I’m going to, I’m going to take, I’m going to go in two directions on that. The first one is that I have coined the word pro zillions to talk about the things that we can do to intentionally prepare for dealing with challenges.
Oftentimes when we think of resilience, we think about something happens and then resilience is how we [00:11:00] respond to it. I think of prosilience as the ways that we build the muscles and the tools that allow us to be ready when things like that happen. And so there’s a model that I have that’s in my prosilience book.
I’m not going to go into all the detail here, but they’re the building blocks are being able to calm ourselves. Knowing. How to what we can control and sort of what to let go of and what to dig into. There’s a set of muscles that we build. And then there’s managing our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual energy.
So it’s kind of a big waterfront to think about all of the things that help us in resilience. The other thing that I would say is that. Resilience is contagious. So I’ve done some work with leaders lately, and one of the things that I talk about is how their resilience influences the resilience of their teams, which in turn influences the resilience of their vendors, their supply chain, all of the other people that they touch, and then ultimately to the larger world, to their clients, to their [00:12:00] customers, to their communities.
And so you. I see resilience as a, as a set of things that can start to create positive energy spirals. I know that may sound a little woo woo, but our energy is always moving upward or downward. It’s easy to get into negative energy spirals. In fact, that’s kind of the signature pattern around Depression around anxiety.
We get into places where something happens and we tell ourself a story about what’s wrong and we get a knot in our stomach and we interact awkwardly and we continue to get into a spin like that. And those things can become self sustaining. Our energy can get sucked into those whirlpools very quickly.
And so I think about resilience as all of the things that help us slow those things down, slow those cycles down and start moving things in a positive direction. So I have focused a lot lately on the idea of creating lift, the idea of starting to move spirals in a positive direction, so something good [00:13:00] happens, and then we feel confident, and then we step forward and, and say something that needs to be said, and then a good result happens from that, and we start to move things upward.
And so there’s so many places that that can go. So I’ll stop and see what, where you want to take it.
Porschia: I mean, I, I loved all of it. I definitely agree that leaders have a lot more influence on their teams than they realize. And to your point, you know, whether they’re bringing positive energy or negative energy to their team, right, to the workplace and meetings and emails and everything.
Other people pick up on that and they feed off of that. And. You know, personally, I’ve had the experience where, you know, some of the members on my team, they said, Hey, I don’t know how to do something. And then because of how we handled another project, they were positive about it and went and figured something out.
So I see like that ripple effect that you’re talking [00:14:00] about with the energy and the, the creating lift concept with the positive energy spirals. I love it. I love all of that. So from your perspective, what would you say are some of the biggest challenges you’ve seen executives and professionals have with their wellbeing in the workplace?
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Linda: One of the biggest challenges is at the [00:15:00] senior most levels, the challenges are that there’s a lot of demands. And there’s almost nobody to talk to about them. So one of the things that senior leaders face is a certain amount of loneliness and an inability to have trusted people that they can confide in about what’s going on.
As you get to the next levels of the organization, what you get is the demands from both sides, right? You get, you have the strategic, strategic. Picture, and you’re trying to fit into that. You’re trying to reconcile that with what’s going on in the day to day. So you’re getting pulled in a lot of different directions.
It ultimately comes down to energy challenges. It comes down to more energy drains on the system than there are replenishments of that energy. And so that can lead us into places like how do we set boundaries? You know, how do I protect the time that I need for my own, uh, for my own mental health? How do I protect the time that I need to balance my work and family?
And so those are [00:16:00] some of the common challenges. Other things have to do with making decisions that affect people’s lives and having to struggle to balance the needs of the organization with the needs of the people in it. So those are a couple of the things that come to mind. Oh yeah,
Porschia: I definitely have worked with clients where each of those challenges have been kind of top of mind, like the number one driver for different clients in different situations.
So what are some tips that you’d give an executive or professional if, you know, perhaps they had some of those challenges or maybe they just said, you know what, I want to proactively enhance my wellbeing at
Linda: work? There are a set of resilience muscles that we use. And so one of the tips I would give is work on practicing those, moving those muscles.
So the first muscle is positivity, and that’s the muscle that helps [00:17:00] us see possibilities in situations and frame things in terms of opportunities, rather than just in terms of problems. The second one is around confidence, around knowing your superpowers and continuing to develop and learn as a human.
The third one is around priorities. And that has to do with knowing what to say yes to and knowing what to say no to. That’s the boundary setting muscle. That’s the muscle of not trying to take on everything and to be able to delegate, to be able to hand things off. And I’m going to, I want to come back to that one at the end, but let me just talk through the rest.
The, the next one is creativity. And that’s the ability to, to think outside the box, to look at things from different perspectives, to come up with. Unusual ideas for how to approach things. The next one is connection. And that’s the muscle that we use to to draw on support from other people to collaborate with other people to ask for help when we need it.
Then there’s a muscle around structure. And that’s the muscle that we [00:18:00] used to put systems and processes in place that enable us to use our energy efficiently. And then the final one is experimenting. That’s the risk taking muscle. That’s the muscle that lets us say, Hey, I wonder what happens if I do this and rapid cycle learning from experience from failure even, and moving forward.
So the advice I would give is take an inventory and think about which of these things come most naturally to you. And are there some muscles that you’d like to build? And I’m going to circle back really quickly to the priorities muscle because it’s a great example of how organizational cultures can enable or undermine people’s ability to stretch these muscles.
So if you’ve ever been in an organization where there’s 100 different things going on. There’s a couple of different ways that that that can play out. One is people say, Oh, I can’t do everything. Um, which things are most important? And the answer is, okay, these three things are most important, but sometimes it plays out.
I can’t do everything. And the answer is, I’m sorry, you just have to do [00:19:00] everything. So in which of those settings is it easier to stretch that priorities muscle? Well, we set the tone as leaders. We set the tone in terms of how easy is it for people to say yes and no to things? How easy is it for people to reach out for help?
How easy is it for people to take risks and try new things? So developing our own muscles. And creating an environment that makes it easy for other people to flex their muscles are sort of the two halves of the, of the, of the whole. Yeah.
Porschia: And I, in thinking about what you said about, you know, someone’s ability to kind of prioritize and say yes and no to things, you know, I think there’s probably a really big connection to burnout, right?
Because if someone is not, putting up those boundaries, like you said, then I could just easily see them burning
Linda: out. You know what’s interesting? And because you’re in IO, you’ll appreciate this. I’ve, I’ve been reading some of [00:20:00] the literature on burnout. And what I found is that we often focus on one half of it, which is the demand side.
Um, which is having too much to do, too many demands on our time, too many demands on our energy. But there’s another side of it, which is too few resources. Okay, so there’s a job demands and resources model that I really like. And reducing burnout is not always about subtracting. It’s not always about taking things off the table.
It’s about recognizing what a well resourced environment looks like, which has to do with. You know, a collaborative team and a supportive leader and psychological safety and learning opportunities and all of the things that that help us help us replenish and restore, um, because burnout is really kind of the combination of too few resources and too many demands.
Yeah,
Porschia: I love that. I love that. That is so interesting. And. I think you’re right, a lot of people overlook the too few [00:21:00] resources part of that, they just think, I’ve got too much to do, I’ve got too much to do, but you could have too much to do because you don’t have enough resources, also, right? Right, right,
Linda: exactly.
The metaphor that I use for that sometimes is, you’ve got a phone, and the phone’s running out of battery. Right? You can’t possibly shut down enough apps, put it on airplane mode, whatever, to, to, to recharge the battery. What you’ve got to do is to plug into a power source of some sort. And so you think about what does the power source feel like for you, for your workplace or whatever, and it has to do with people who nourish you, it has to do with Work that lifts you up.
It has to do with, you know, having a sense of meaning and purpose. All of those things are the, are the things that we often overlook when we, when we ask the question about burnout. I agree. I agree.
Porschia: So now let’s Linda take a look at this from the perspective of the company, right? Or of the organization.
How can companies improve the well being of their
Linda: employees? [00:22:00] I think leaders need to role model. Taking care of their own well being because it doesn’t matter what a company says about taking your vacation and taking time off and being there for your family. If the leaders aren’t doing it, if they’re showing up every day and burning themselves out.
So, so rule number one is model it from the top. The second thing is really think about all of the places that people’s energy goes. So I think about physical energy as an example, what do we feed people in meetings? You know, how long do our days run? What are we doing to to make sure that we’re protecting people’s ability to, uh, to spend their physical energy wisely.
Then we have mental energy, you know, what are we doing to make sure that people have interesting things to think about, that they have downtime, that they have time to just sort of learn and develop. There’s emotional energy, what do we do to create an environment where it’s okay for people [00:23:00] to have emotions, you know, to feel sad or angry about things to to talk about those things and for that to be an okay part of it, but also to make sure that we are tending to that, you know, if we’re getting ready to take people through a stressful passage, we need to be mindful of what do we need to do to provide support, how do we listen.
And then finally, spiritual energy, which has to do with connection to a sense of meaning and purpose. And so organizations can do a lot to help people have a clear line of sight from what they’re doing in their work to a larger purpose. Uh, so some of the things about what makes a job meaningful for people are being able to see how what you’re doing fits into the bigger picture and actually touches a client.
I
Porschia: think those are all great tips. I think sometimes, and this is probably, you know, taking the consulting angle that we could both take. I think it’s a really hard for organizations to kind of see some of these things [00:24:00] themselves because the culture, the environment is so pervasive, or it’s the status quo that people don’t even realize some of these aspects that you mentioned, right?
So leaders will modeling, you know, taking care of their own wellbeing, right? Or really being mindful of these different types of energy. So I think it’s probably most helpful to bring in outside consultants on this kind of topic.
Linda: Sometimes some objectivity can help, you know, for somebody to come hold up a mirror and say, Hey, you know, as I look at this situation, it occurs to me that and then and then make some suggestions about what to do.
And I think it’s important for people to be able to speak up to for people to be able to stand up for their own well being and ask for what they need. And
Porschia: we, I mean, we could have a whole podcast episode on that because, you know, there’s so much to that. Like you mentioned confidence before, [00:25:00] but, you know, really feeling confident to, to even do that.
I think you also mentioned that psychological safety, you know, as well, because what we see with a lot of clients and then when we work in organizations is that, you know, sometimes multiple people have an idea, but. No one feels safe to to kind of state the obvious great point. Great point. So tell us more about resilience Alliance, Linda.
Linda: Resilience Alliance is about building a worldwide community of people who are supporting resilience in different ways. So, the book that I’ve written, an assessment that we have called the Personal Resilience Profile, some materials that we have that help people have conversations around resilience.
What I mostly do is to teach other people to do that work. So, we have people around the world. I, every quarter I have a global call of people that are part of our community that are doing resilience work [00:26:00] in different places. And what’s really fun is that although a lot of it’s corporate, I work with coaches.
I work with people who are internal HROD and external consultants and trainers, but I also work with people who are bringing resilience to other populations. So I’m teaming up, for instance, with a woman who is a interdependent woman. 24 year pancreatic cancer survivor and coaches senior leaders who have serious medical diagnoses.
And we’re looking at what are some of the resilience challenges of that particular group. I’m working with somebody who, uh, is focused on the needs of parents who have special needs children and bringing resilience to that environment and understanding the particular challenges. So, so that’s, that’s my passion, really.
My, my metaphor for what I do is a spider plant. You know, so, so you sort of have all these little shoots and then they go out and root and they do other things and they’re sort of bringing these ideas and, and this energy to different parts of the world.
Porschia: That is [00:27:00] amazing, Linda. And I didn’t mention this earlier, but I have read your book, Prozilliance, as you know, years ago.
I love the book and all that, all the tools and knowledge that you have. It’s just so interesting to me. So interesting. We’ll be providing a link to your website and other social channels in our show notes so that people can find you online, but what is the best way for
Linda: someone to get in touch with you?
The best way to get in touch with me is to send me an email. I’m Linda at resiliencealliance. com. You can find me on the website. I also, um, have been really having a lot of fun, um, with a newsletter that I’m doing around resilience, writing about energy spirals and resilience is a verb. So, you know, finding me through that and just popping me a note is, uh, I really would love to hear from anybody who’s listening into this podcast and have a dialogue about.
Resilience about well being about any of this stuff. Yeah, well, we
Porschia: will provide all of [00:28:00] those links so people can reach out. I’ve got a couple of other questions that I want to ask you. Um, one, and I’m really interested to know this from your perspective, Linda, but what is your definition of career success?
Linda: To me, career success is doing what you’re meant to do in the world. In a way that allows you to live abundantly, it really has, you know, those two parts to it. It really has to do with your heart being out there in the world, doing the things that you’re called to do, but not doing it in a way that leaves yourself feeling scarcity.
You know, I, I think that there’s, there’s room for, for all of us to, um, to live well and to do well. So I, I guess that’s, it’s not a very articulate answer, but that’s kind of what comes to mind for me. Yeah. I like
Porschia: that answer. And then my last question for you, and this is a question we ask all of our guests.
[00:29:00] How do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in
Linda: their career? I guess I’d have to say by strengthening your resilience muscles, by becoming more intentional about how you work, work your way through the things that get in the way of flourishing. You know, I think that the more you know how to manage your own energy to replenish it when you need to, the more you know how to encounter challenges and find opportunities in them and move through them with ease and grace and no more energy than you need to.
I think that that’s. That puts you head and shoulders above people whose energy is getting drained by things and who, you know, and who who struggle with that. So, so it comes back to that resilience piece around sort of intentionally building your challenge readiness because the challenges aren’t going to stop.
Well,
Porschia: Linda, you have shared a lot of wisdom with us today, and I’m sure that our [00:30:00] listeners can use it to be more confident when it comes to their own well being and also their careers. We appreciate you
Linda: being with us. Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Porschia: This episode was brought to you by the Brave Bird Career Alliance, the go to membership designed for seasoned executives and ambitious professionals with everything you need for career planning, strategy, training, and support. Thank you again for listening to the Career 101 Podcast. I hope you have at least one key takeaway that you can use.
In your own career. If you enjoyed hanging out with us, please rate, subscribe, and share this podcast. Until next time, here’s to your success.[00:31:00]
