Troglobites are fascinating creatures. After so many generations living in caves, most of these organisms have completely lost their eyesight.
More specifically, these species have undergone what is referred to as “regressive evolution,” which is when unused traits are reduced or lost over time. Such adaptations are awe-inspiring, but their only goal is to allow cave beetles and blind crayfish to endure their environment. It doesn’t set them up for success — it simply sets them up for survival. Under different circumstances, it’s possible their potential would have been something altogether different.
Working cultures can have a similar impact on the individual members of an organization. If your employees feel like they’re working “in the dark,” you shouldn’t be surprised when they start evolving backwards. If you aren’t promoting mental and physical wellness in the workplace, you shouldn’t be surprised when satisfaction and productivity start to take a dip.
August is National Wellness Month, which is set aside to encourage healthy habits, stress reduction, and overall well-being in the workplace. For startups, workplace wellness can be especially crucial, since the organization’s culture is still being built and more prone to volatile ups and downs. In fact, academic analysis of startup culture reveals that disruption is a natural part of the process, which means workplace wellness is never a foregone conclusion.
Beyond that, the 21st-century workforce has much higher expectations for compensation and personal wellness in general — and for good reason. Employee wellness is increasingly linked to overall retention, and a healthy workforce is much less costly in the long run.
So how can startups support more wellness in the workplace? After decades of consulting with successful leaders and founders from around the world, these are the three ways I think every startup can create a culture rooted in mental and physical health.
1. Talk about mental and physical health from the beginning.
No matter where you’re at in your startup journey, you have to be sure your workplace-in-progress is supporting mental and physical health. Even if your organization is currently just you toiling away part-time to make a dream come true, it’s still setting the tone for the future you’re creating. If it takes an unhealthy working environment to achieve the results you need, you’re baking dissatisfaction and burnout into the system before it even gets taken out of the oven.
The result is poor worker health, and worker health has an undeniable impact on the bottom line. Depression and anxiety create a global loss of over $1 trillion in revenue every single year. In the United States, it’s estimated that poor mental health accounts for a 35% reduction in productivity across all economic sectors.
Despite this direct connection to success, mental and physical health continue to be taboo topics around the workplace. Full-time workers think it is important to discuss mental health, but the vast majority of leaders and senior employees have no training in facilitating those sorts of conversations. That’s why startups must make a conscious effort to put systems in place from the very beginning to support workplace wellness.
Simple things to start doing right now:
- Initiate conversations about mental and physical wellness, encouraging others to share their experiences without judgment.
- Set aside time during each workday to promote physical activity and discuss simple ways for everyone to participate.
2. Stay hyper-critical about what becomes a part of your culture.
If you’re making soup, everything you add to the pot influences the flavor of the very first bite. If you add a lot of soy sauce or heavy stocks, your soup is going to be a bit on the salty side. If you add liquid smoke or worcestershire sauce, the dish will be much more savory. For startups, which begin as a tasteless bowl of boiling water, every addition or omission can be critical.
A lack of honesty can create toxic positivity, whereas a lack of positivity will fail to keep workers happy and healthy. Studies show that nearly three-quarters of U.S. workers are pessimistic about their jobs, and 80% of all workers would leave their companies for a more empathetic employer. So if you want your startup to achieve sustained success and retain top-tier talent, you need to be very serious about the influences you allow to impact your workplace wellness.
Negativity in the workplace can spread like wildfire. Meanwhile, inspiring media and empathetic leadership can create a feedback loop of safety and innovation that transforms the working environment. This is why the best leaders are highly purposeful about every decision with the potential to impact mental and physical wellness.
Simple things to start doing right now:
- Develop an agreed-upon set of criteria for accepting or rejecting potential additions to your working culture.
- Evaluate and re-evaluate different components of your organization’s culture on a recurring basis.
3. Be a role model when it comes to lifting others up.
After the serialization of The Pickwick Papers in 1836, Charles Dickens was well on his way to becoming one of the first modern celebrities. By 1867, when Dickens would make his now-famous visit to the United States, he had already published nearly all of his most iconic works. Once he returned to England, he was officially an international superstar — an individual with popular power once largely exclusive to government officials and business executives.
One of the primary ways Dickens chose to weaponize his celebrity was by becoming a passionate opponent of child labor. In doing so, he penned a single sentence that sticks with me to this day and reminds me of my responsibility to my own working culture: “No one is useless in the world who lightens the burdens of another.”
Fighting off negativity and encouraging workplace wellness isn’t easy, and it isn’t something that can be done without buy-from the community. That’s why the most successful startup leaders make sure to model uplifting behaviors at every turn and put a premium on those who do the same. This role modeling creates a chain reaction in which emotional support becomes readily available for everyone, meaning more retention and greater productivity overall.
Simple things to start doing right now:
- Make it a point to lift up a different employee every single day, providing praise and opportunities for growth.
- Encourage participation in enterprise social media communities (ESMs) that revolve around celebrating others and generating authentic communication.
Which Way Are You Evolving?
Startups move fast, and their culture can seemingly shift overnight. You might start off with the intention of building a wellness-centered workplace. However, if you aren’t purposeful about your approach to mental and physical health, you might end up with just a really dark cave. As a result, your organization will become dragged down by its own regressive evolution.
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