Enhancing Work-Life Harmony: Integrating Personal Well-Being into Professional Success
I’ve been reading Quantum Body by Dr. Deepak Chopra, and two of the key takeaways I have gathered so far are the importance of a good night’s sleep and the strong need to reduce chronic low-level stress. This is so interesting to me because it put into words the feelings I had when I embarked on starting a business. I wanted to build a company that places a focus on looking at the whole human—whether that is a client, consultant, or community member. In fact, our mission boils down to this one idea: helping our clients (and consultants) sleep better at night.
But how do we do this? I’ve spoken before about how even on a weekend afternoon, I’ve had what I’d call a low-level hum of stress or anxiety. The reason? That I shouldn’t be relaxing. I should be doing something “productive.” It sounds kind of silly to say that I’m having to really work at being OK with doing nothing! But it is a mental, physical, and emotional shift to accept that rest is required. That having downtime can help with creativity as well as overall health.
Right away I feel the privilege here—who am I to take downtime and rest when for so many people it is not an option. Again, that’s why when I started Blu Pagoda (now Collabry), it became a mission to both model and effect change in how we work. Not just for me as an owner, but for our employees, consultants, clients, and community at large.
When we begin working with a new employee or consultant, we have a questionnaire that not only asks about what they have done in their career, but also what the rest of their life looks like. We include that information in the profiles of each person to reflect their story. Likewise, our annual DEIB survey looks at the whole person—it helps us all to understand what the day-to-day life looks like for the folks that we work with, and it also helps us to focus our efforts on breaking down those areas of systemic oppression individuals are dealing with every day.
Of course, we are a “for profit” company also; we are in business to provide a service to our clients, income opportunities for our employees and consultants, and philanthropic efforts in our community. We have found that integrating personal well-being into our workplace leads to better results for all three of those dimensions.
Another aspect to personal well-being is flexibility and personal sovereignty. A lot of the parameters in the workplace today—such as the 40-hour workweek, working at a physical location you need to travel to, the two-day weekend, and limited vacation/non-working time—are holdovers from hundreds of years of extractive capitalism and the industrial revolution. Without the courage of early workplace activists and union members, it would have taken even longer to bring some humaneness to the workplace.
Today, we can leverage the flexibility that technology allows us, such as the choice to work from a different location, to enhance our work life. We can also use technology to simplify our work, whether that is setting parameters on calendar bookings or using AI to shift some of the mundane or complicated data tasks to a machine while the human provides the creativity, strategy, connection, and management needed for successful outcomes. Providing flexibility as part of a new way of working to folks who have historically dealt with daily microaggressions in the workplace is a clear example of how new models of working can lead to better well-being.
At Collabry, we think about what well-being means to each person. For one of our employees, it’s a four-day workweek so she can manage her family life and pursue other interests like learning a language. It’s a pilot, which means we are learning and adapting as we go. For others, it’s the Courageous Conversations we have on the topics that usually get pushed aside or ignored because they are so difficult in the workplace setting. We hear from the consultants they appreciate knowing there will be a safe forum to discuss important topics.
As a professional services company that is dedicated to excellence in delivery, we consider these types of initiatives essential to enabling the highest quality work. They aren’t bolted on, but endemic to the way we want to show up for our clients, our communities, and each other.