A new approach to healthy working

This post celebrates the launch of a new approach to sustainable, healthy working. In the article I introduce the core concepts behind the social enterprise, review the journey to date and reveal my plans for the future.

Our modern-day concept of a milestone event is based upon the Romans’ use of mile stones to help travelers know how far they had come on their journey. The launch of the HealthyWorking.Life website is indeed a major milestone in the realisation of a business concept seeded a quarter of a century ago. This article will delve into where we’ve travelled from and where we’re heading to, thus filling in the gaps in the accompanying image.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Isaac Newton, in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke

Brahms’ first symphony was premiered in 1876 and received a positive reception, which was good news as it had taken in the region of 14 to 21 years to compose (depending upon your data source). I gather that a key reason it took this length of time was the esteem held for the symphonies of his predecessor, Beethoven.

I commenced the work that ultimately led to the creation of this website in the late 1990’s. As I write this article in 2022, that’s a gestation period of 25 years. So does this mean that I’m cautious because I’m aware that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants? Well, yes and no.

My intention is to achieve something new, to make a real, measurable difference in the world in a uniquely effective fashion. Brahms achieved this with his first symphony, but this was inescapably in a world that had been strongly influenced by Beethoven, who in turn was influenced by his predecessors, but who created works that are still influential 200 years later. So yes, I can declare unashamedly that I am standing proudly upon a whole pyramid of great minds. My research and development work has been informed by, at the last count, twelve academic disciplines and myriad other sources such as Chinese health systems. I also draw upon the work of many contemporary authors and online influencers. However, the way in which I bring all these many strands together is unique and it has taken 25 years alongside my “day job” to design a coherent system that meets my needs.

So what am I actually trying to achieve? I want to enable you to have a healthier, more enjoyable and rewarding work life (and therefore, for those readers whose focus is on the bottom-line, enable a virtuous spiral of enhanced business operation). For many of us, a significant proportion of our lives is consumed by our work. As described in the main body of this article, ten years into my IT career I took a leaf out of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and observed that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” – something wasn’t right in the world of work and I set out to find a solution that would work for anybody and everybody. As referenced in the neurodiversity post, Neurominorities and social environment, I tend to take on complex projects that few people would contemplate and find it highly rewarding to bring them to fruition, even if it takes a while.

I will now elaborate upon the objectives of this social enterprise, providing an introduction to key healthy working concepts. I also consider the opportune timing of its launch.

My Objectives

With the go-live of this website, I am officially launching a social enterprise with two distinct, but aligned, objectives:

1. To enable sustained improvements in working practices, for individuals, teams and organisations, for the benefit of all – i.e. as per the introduction, let’s make your work life more enjoyable and rewarding, not just through personal change, but through implementing appropriate changes to your working context.
2. To help bring about genuine equity in the workplace for neurominorities, for those of us whose ways of processing information and communicating are atypical when compared to the majority of our co-workers. It’s time to achieve fair play in the workplace for people who are autistic, dyslexic, ADHDers, etc., etc. This is not just a matter of “doing the right thing” – it’s about enabling some wonderfully creative minds to deliver untapped value in the workplace.

While this enterprise has been many years in the making, this is an especially opportune time for launch. Many assumptions and ‘traditional’ ways of working are being questioned and reviewed post-pandemic. There are many competing forces at play as the “new normal” is being defined. I am seeking to shine a light on the underlying motivations behind these forces and the likely outcomes of decisions made. I aim to do my bit to help bring about sustained improvements, achieving real change that will benefit everyone.

The remainder of this post discusses the first of these objectives. I will address the second objective under separate Neurodiversity posts, which will discuss some important collaborative work that is already being initiated.

I will now discuss:

• The Problem
  • The nature of the “unhealthy working practices” problem being addressed
• A Sufficient Solution
  • Why many of the attempts to tackle this problem have not had the intended impact
  • How real, positive, sustained change can be achieved through appropriate application of a comprehensive method
• Next steps
  • Including the planned creation of a Crowd-funding project to help support the significant amount of product development work required to fully deliver the latent benefit of the massive amounts of raw material developed over many years.

Unhealthy working practices – Defining the Problem

Insanity: An action that is stupid and likely to have extremely bad results.

Cambridge dictionary

In my 35 years as an IT professional, I have observed first-hand a lot of insanity in the workplace. Further, as someone who enjoys chatting over coffee, I have talked with many people at all levels in many organisations and, perhaps because I tend to be brutally honest when I speak, I have received in response a lot of unvarnished truths about the realities behind the façades in those organisations. Coherent sets of working practices that I regard as representing good practice are, unfortunately, few and far between.

The topic of ‘insane’, counterproductive and unsustainable working practices will be a key theme of future posts and training resources. As a taster, some typical examples fall into the following categories: role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload, work overload or underload, work relationships (across multiple dimensions).

So, I am aiming to educate people and organisations in how to achieve ‘sane‘ working practices.

A quick aside
How does one educate an organisation? In addition to educating individuals, who may or may not have management responsibilities and be members of teams, there are people with responsibility for managing, guiding or defining organisational policies, culture and ways of working. Policies are meant to work for organisations and their people, rather than providing justification for insane practices.

Sane Working Practices: Intelligent decisions and actions that are likely to result in good outcomes that work for all parties.

Peter Berrisford, Healthy Working Practices

In my definition of sane working practices, I refer to “good outcomes”, but what do I mean by this? Many of my forthcoming posts and resources will examine this question in-depth, but as a starting point I would suggest that employees are able to deliver value, sustainably and with appropriate reward. I would also propose that any changes in ways of working be measurable, even if not actually measured. The majority of terms and phrases are surprisingly open to misinterpretation, so I’ll discuss my thinking a bit further.

• Able to deliver Value – The problem here is one of measurement. How do we define and measure the value that a human being delivers to their organisation? An earlier version of this article used the word ‘productive’, however this term tends to focus on quantity and efficiency, concepts which can readily be abused and used to justify discrimination (bear with me if this sounds a bit strong – I will be unpicking and justifying my assertions in future posts). Used intelligently, productivity forms an aspect of delivering value. The outcome we’re seeking is that a person is able to carry out their role (or roles) effectively, in a manner that works for them and for their organisation.
• Sustainably – Pacing and energy consumption are at the heart of the concept of sustainable working. Some roles naturally lend themselves to ‘bursts’ of activity, requiring planned recovery time. However, the idea that a human being can maintain effort at 100% of capacity for a sustained period is seriously flawed and carries high cost for individuals and organisations. Those people responsible for IT operations know that attempting to operate IT equipment at 100% of resource capacity does not deliver great results – amazingly enough, the same goes for human resources. Different types of IT equipment also have differing environmental requirements- human diversity carries similar variation in environmental needs.
• Appropriate Reward – there are a number of dimensions to the concept of reward – a key target outcome is that an employee feels that they are rewarded fairly for their efforts. Both subjective and objective measures are relevant. This is effectively a Return on Investment (RoI) equation at the individual level, for which financial reward is one dimension.
• Measurable – the selection of appropriate measures or metrics to enable intelligent insights as to the success of any change is a balance of art and science. Having had the opportunity to work closely with some very good data scientists in recent times, I really get how important it is to understand what it is you’re actually measuring and any limitations as to generated insights. If your measures are too narrow, or over too short a timeframe, then you receive a distorted picture of the results of any changes.

Defining a Sufficient Solution to enable genuine healthy working

Having outlined the nature of the problem and described what I believe the outcomes of a good solution look like, an obvious question at this point is this – if better, healthier working practices are desirable and feasible, then why are they not already more prevalent?

Understanding why so many others have failed, or have only partially succeeded, is a key part of creating a viable, sufficient solution. As described below, I therefore employed a research and development (R&D) approach that explicitly tackled this question.

Twenty-five years ago, having witnessed the typical negative outcomes of chronically unsustainable working practices and having concluded that the status quo was unacceptable to me, I commenced an R&D project to develop a systematic method to enable healthy working. This process can be broken down as follows:

• Understand the problem domain – delving deeply into workplace issues
• Understand what has already been tried and the outcomes
• Understand why existing solutions have only met with limited success
• Define a method that would succeed in any working context.

Now to look at each of these in more detail:

• Understand the problem
  • To gain comprehensive insight into the problem, I:
    • Documented case studies based upon my own direct experience and upon the experiences of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, across all work sectors and multiple geographic regions.
    • Carried out an ongoing review of academic research, articles and books into the nature of unhealthy working practices and the typical consequences.
    • Attended conferences and, more recently, webinars that discussed relevant topics.
  • Based upon the outputs from the above work, I developed a set of models that provide a useful abstraction of the problem space, including typical consequences.
  • Over time these models stabilised, such that each new case study supported the models or only required minor adjustments.
• Understand what has already been tried and the outcomes
  • I found it relatively easy to find lots of great material that raises awareness of workplace issues and highlights consequences of poor ways of working. I also found that there’s often reasonable awareness within organisations that operational realities are not ‘ideal’, but it’s often not acceptable to discuss this openly (note the critical importance of workplace culture). Identifying a problem and knowing how to address it effectively are two very different things.
  • I’ve experienced and studied many attempts to bring about positive change within organisations, some of these organised in conjunction with well-respected third-party businesses. Unfortunately, the majority of these initiatives have not had the intended outcomes (to the extent that these were properly defined), or, where there was some success, the changes were either not ‘sticky’ or had unintended side-effects.
• Understand why existing solutions have only met with limited success
  • The reasons identified for limited success turned out to be interestingly complex, which in itself goes some way to explaining the observed lack of real change. Some of the key factors are:
    • Insufficient understanding of the problems to be addressed, often through focusing on symptoms and failing to dig down to root causes
    • Flawed underpinning theory as to how to achieve the desired effects
    • Only tackling part of the problem, leaving key causal factors unaddressed
    • A workplace culture and assumptions that inhibit positive change
    • Insufficient emphasis on ensuring that the desired changes have been achieved and have taken root. Appropriate metrics are required, tracking impact over time.
• Define a method that would succeed in any working context
  • I set about creating a problem-resolution framework that reflected the learnings from the above activities. This framework underpins a systematic method to successfully address workplace issues.
  • While the framework design largely stabilised in 2017, the method has continued to evolve, undergoing revisions based upon testing and feedback.
  • A third critical component has been the development of a set of principles or heuristics that help define a supportive work culture that maximises the effectiveness of the system.

Identifying a problem and knowing how to address it effectively are two very different things.

This has been an ambitious undertaking, but it is highly rewarding to finally be in a position to realise the potential of all this work. There’s one additional “secret ingredient” that has enabled me to bring this work to fruition – I am autistic with ADHD. While this presents challenges on a day-to-day basis, it does mean that this is the latest in a string of projects over a period of 35 years that few people would even attempt, let alone succeed at. Realising the true value of neurodiversity in the workplace is an incredibly important topic that I will be addressing as a core element of this enterprise.

Next Steps

With the launch of the HealthyWorking.Life website, a major milestone has been reached. This provides the necessary platform, a hub, from which I can communicate with my audience. So what next? I am now entering a fresh development phase to deliver the required training resources and ‘tools’ to achieve the objectives described above, enabling training recipients to not just grasp key healthy working concepts but be able to apply that knowledge in their day-to-day working lives.

It is one thing to have a well-developed system, a methodology that can meet my stated objectives. It is quite another matter to package up and present that knowledge in a manner that will be accessible to a diverse audience, with different interests, perspectives and learning styles. However, I’m an experienced solution architect and that is a key aspect of the role, not just defining an appropriate solution but also determining how best to present the solution in a manner that is accessible by and will engage all ‘stakeholders’ – i.e. everyone with an interest in understanding and being able to apply the solution.

As a social enterprise, I need to be able to support myself from the proceeds of my work, fund ongoing product development (a range of training courses are in the pipeline), plus fund collaborative projects with like-minded organisations and individuals – it is a business with ethical, social objectives. In the relatively near future, I will be enabling the paid membership options on the website. Members will obtain access to additional resources that go beyond awareness of issues, enabling successful application of the framework-based method discussed above.

Neurodiversity Note
The manner in which neurodistinct people make a living has become a hot topic recently, as it’s been recognised globally that there is a degree of disparity in the manner in which neurodiversity can impact earnings – I will comment on this in future posts and provide updates on developments in this space.

In the very near future I intend to launch a crowd-funding project. The plan is that backers will be granted membership access for a period (length depending on pledge amount) and will obtain early access to member-only resources. My vision is of a community of investors who engage on an ongoing basis to help ensure that the planned services and products are delivered and achieve their intended goals. I have learned to value open and honest feedback! I may not always implement recommended changes, but I need to be able to justify at least to myself why I continue down a specific path and ensure that I resolve any miscommunication of concepts.

As stated earlier in this post, given the recent pandemic-driven ‘shake-up’ in how organisations operate, there is a real opportunity to mould the predominant ways of working. I intend to do everything I can to help ensure that people can enjoy a healthier, more enjoyable and more rewarding work life, one that balances with and integrates well with all other aspects of our lives.