What has changed over the past couple of years that we started to hear more and more the importance of wellbeing at leadership level?

Let me start with a story from my first month working for a well-known international tech company, where my position was outsourced for another giant organization. After completing my new hire training successfully abroad, on the way back, I got a bad cold on the airplane. I’ve lost my voice, had a high fever and I just simply couldn’t drive 60km to the office and back in this condition (that was my daily commute distance at that time), so I called in sick. On the second day, someone called me that they overheard a conversation where my manager’s supervisor expressed their concern that I might have a serious sickness and my manager should consider sending me away during my probation period. So, I decided to break my sick leave, go against my doctor’s advice and went back to work. Of course, I couldn’t heal as fast as I could have by focusing on only getting better, my performance wasn’t optimal for weeks as a result. So overall my company lost more on forcing me back than if they would have let me recover fast or even advising preventive actions to not even get into this situation.

About 20 years later the conversation at my current employer is about how we can avoid people getting sick, how we can support their health, overall wellbeing to prevent similar situations. This shows a big change in mindset: coming from negative reactions, we are now working proactively in a positive manner to contribute to our employees’ wellbeing. At SUSE we put people first. Being the site leader of The Netherlands, I’m working closely together with our HR Business Partner to accomplish our goal: happy and healthy people working at SUSE. This starts with a thorough assessment: we use our half-yearly employee satisfaction survey, asking multiple questions about our employees’ wellbeing, reasons that contribute to the positive answers and the negatives too. Recently we also asked our company doctor to offer a full health assessment of our team members, this includes mental and physical health tests, with online and onsite resources. The employees get feedback during their examination, and we as an employer will discuss with them common challenges (anonymously of course) , areas where we can help our team, focusing on group activities. In our previous fiscal year that we just closed a few days ago, we organized health sessions about healthy eating habits, chair massage, we had a team building event with outdoor exercises etc. Companywide there are Teams (online) sessions available throughout the entire year where we offer yoga, meditation sessions, self-awareness courses, inviting external experts talking about mental wellbeing, we are training our managers and co-workers on being able to identify employees who need support at early stages and provide them with the right resources. We also have a comprehensive program called SUSE Assist: this offers website services and resources, like contact points, wellbeing resources, an application so that you can get access to the service on the go any time, clinical services (counselling, coaching), worklife services, and crisis support. Not to mention that as part of our welcome package we offer our employees consultation about their home offices, an expert assesses the desk, chair, monitor-setup etc. has at our employees’ home and give advice, our employees can order on SUSE’s cost new furniture if we see better options to prevent their health. Last but not least we are very open to any suggestions of our employees, the best ideas always coming from them, so that we can be really flexible and relevant with the services we offer them on a daily basis.

Why Leadership Wellbeing is such an important for an organization? As a snr. leader, what is your perspective on an organizational wellbeing? Is it a forced term at the organizations or is it a real need?

Creating a wellbeing-being-focused organization cannot happen by enforcement. This should come from both directions naturally: employees must have a desire for their work-life-balance and managers must have the understanding why this is important and being able to support initiatives connected to preserving good health, even if it’s an investment in time and efforts from them. So our Leadership Wellbeing starts with recruitment. We are only hiring managers who are leading by example and having their employees’ health in top of mind.

In an organization where employees see their leaders are working overtime and sacrificing their private life for work, they will fear that this is also expected from them, which will cause stress at the minimum, and they start doing the same too. This leads to frequent sicknesses, early burnouts, high employee dissatisfaction, and attrition at the end. Finding the right talents is very difficult these days, keeping them is even more challenging. Providing a safe, secure, healthy workplace environment creates trust with our employees and their loyalty will also pay off in higher productivity and motivation, which will contribute to the overall success of our company. Happy and healthy employees will attract similar people, creating a sustainable wellbeing-focused culture for long term results.

Is wellbeing really an individual responsibility ?

Each of us needs to take accountability for our own wellbeing. However, this is easier said than done. First of all, we need to be super conscious about what’s happening to us and let be honest to ourselves, this is not always the case. We might be in a situation where we just don’t recognize the negative impacts on our health or life, we need an external ‘mirror’ mechanism to be able to watch the signs. Creating a culture where employees can speak up freely, they have trust towards their co-workers, managers or are able to use resources anonymously will help them to be aware at an early stage if anything might go wrong, and also helps organizations to come up with the most relevant prevention activities, support.
Looking back in my early career times, I would have appreciated more experienced employees sharing their experiences, worst and best practices to keep on track on wellbeing path. I was young, extremely ambitious, didn’t care about my health too much, set aside family priorities sometimes. I’m mentoring a couple of early in career talents, this topic is always something I share with them: no need to do the same mistakes and it’s never early to start working on managing stress and balancing private and professional life. That’s the only way to keep up in a sustainable way high performance. The sooner they are aware, the better they will perform at work and living a happy life.

What would you advice to the leaders who are seeking for new ways for success and growth in these challenging climate?

The most important advice would be working on their growth mindset. This is one of the skills that gives the most advantage for today’s leaders managing teams through challenging times. What does it mean? First of all, they must embrace those challenges, with a positive mindset they will be focused on finding solutions instead of complaining about the problem which leads to them nowhere. Then, they need to believe that they and their team members can train their brains and they are capable of anything, no limits inhibit them to achieve their goals. Mastery is more important than existing skills, it’s all about potential and not boundaries. It is very important that they must be open for feedback, actively asking for it and listen to it, even if it’s painful. The only way to learn is to be aware of our strengths and areas where we can develop. Most of the time this is not obvious for us, so makes total sense to ask our colleagues, friends how they percieve us, what would be their advice, learn from their mistakes and cut corners with their best practices. Being inspired by others’ successes just makes life so much nicer, no need for bad competition, we have enough space for everyone’s success, so let’s celebrate together and keep the positive spirit alive!

Is wellbeing needed for happiness or success ? What are your personal wellbeing practices?

As a high performing athlete (I was a swimmer) and top talent in school in my youth, I was always focused on setting ambitious goals and not only achieving them, but exceeding expectations always. This translated very well to my work too. As a result, I experienced unexpected turns in my performance, so I always start my mentoring sessions with a statement: ‘Burnout? Been there, done that, never again and I don’t let you do the same mistake I did.’ Unfortunately, we are not by default set up for long runs at maximum power, we need to be crystal clear on that. Luckily, with proper practice, support and fuel for both body and mind we can achieve more without having experienced serious drops in performance due to health-related issues or losing supportive team members around us from a social perspective.

Usually, I talk about 3 major areas where with more effort we can avoid burnouts.

1. Take care of your body: do regular exercises (I go frequently to gym, do yoga, swimming occasionally), eat healthy, limit caffeine and alcohol consumption, have enough sleep, limit your off-work screentime.
2. Keep your mind healthy: practice meditation, yoga, stay in the present. Know yourself better, be open for feedback. Keeping calm in the most heated situations will guide you through surprisingly easily.
3. Create your social secure network: you’re not alone, life and work are always a team effort. Make sure you have a coach and a supporting team: family, friends, mentors – surround yourself with people that you can rely on and who can rely on you too. Grow these relationships.

Sacrificing any of the above will get you out of balance, and however you might achieve great results on short term, this can’t be sustained on the long run, so my advise is to better take it a bit slower, but you’ll reach much longer as a return.