Business and sustainability are more connected than you think.
I spend a lot of my time as a CPO thinking about employee wellness. I have always believed firmly that your people are your greatest asset – and building an employee-centric business will ultimately lead you to the greatest success in the long term. But with April marking the annual celebration of Earth Day, it’s an important moment to consider a broader definition of wellness – and to think about the ways in which business impacts the greater world in which we all live.
Increasingly, business leaders are aware of – and planning for – the impact organizations can have on the environment. There are countless ways businesses can help to reduce negative environmental impacts, from recycling programs, to cutting energy costs, to investing in green products.
But there is a deeper connection between employee well-being and the well-being of the planet that reveals broader ways businesses might be able to work toward systemic change in ways that could make a serious difference for both employees and the wider world. I sat down with Parneet Pal, a Harvard-trained physician, educator, and scientist, and John Foster, an organizational design expert, and former CPO himself, to discuss the state of sustainability in business today, and dig into the intersection between wellness and sustainability – and what we can learn from it.
Cara: Environmental sustainability and the role businesses can and should play in addressing it, is increasingly in the conversation when leaders are thinking about business priorities and planning. With all the work you both have done in studying the intersection of business and sustainability, where do you think we stand in terms of progress on that front?
John: There seems to be a rising awareness that corporations need to take more responsibility for their impact on society and the world in which they operate. After centuries of industrialization and the recent focus on delivering shareholder value above all else, today’s most successful companies are making environmental, social, governance (ESG) commitments. One of the most obvious leaders is Patagonia, but many others are being transparent and explicit about their goals to limit environmental impact, affect social justice, and drive for greater equality.
Despite these great efforts, I feel most organizations are still reactionary and often deliver “workarounds” or “Band-aids” to some fundamental flaws in how we design, build, and operate large organizations. Sometimes we have to talk our way into new behaviors, so overall, I see this trend as positive, but I also want to understand the framing and make sure we’re approaching these complex systemic issues with the right kind of solutions.
One area I’ve been trying to understand and solve is individual well-being. It seems we know so much about what we should do to keep employee well-being at the forefront, but mostly fail to take the steps to actually make that happen! The common approach to driving high performance in U.S. companies relies on heroic efforts to generate action and overcome problems with the sheer force of hours worked. We celebrate long days, self-sacrifice, and relentless focus as the symbols of success, but this often leads to burnout and all kinds of poor health outcomes. And ultimately, I wonder if it even creates the value businesses are ultimately looking for – consistent, sustainable, resilient growth.
The recent US Surgeon General’s report is a call to action to improve workplace quality, indicating that “work affects both our physical and mental well-being– in good ways and bad.” So on one hand we have companies realizing the way they source, build, and distribute products has an impact on our planet, and on the other, we have companies starting to realize the way they operate affects employee health. It seems obvious to me these two concerns are emerging from the same root cause – and we’d create better solutions if we could better understand the root of those problems.
Cara: The connection between sustainability and individual well-being is one that seems so clear when you spell it out in this way, and yet it isn’t something I hear a lot of leaders in my ecosystem talking about and considering. Can you speak more about how these two concepts overlap and impact each other?
Parneet: In my mind, the question of how well-being and sustainability are linked is one concept that all of us – especially in the workplace – should be asking and reflecting on regularly. Individual well-being and environmental sustainability are inseparable – we can’t be well on a sick planet. And this is not a sentimental statement, but an empirical one.
What gets confusing is that there are various different definitions of “well-being” and “sustainability” – so often we end up comparing oranges to apples, get frustrated when we don’t find easy answers, and give up.
A useful framing of “well-being” is: “a state of positive feelings and meeting full potential in the world. It can be measured subjectively and objectively, using a salutogenic approach.” A salutogenic approach simply means that health is not just an absence of disease, but a result of continuous everyday life interactions between an individual and their inevitable social, economic, cultural, physical, mental, and biochemical stressors.
Similarly, understanding environmental “sustainability” can lead us down many rabbit holes, but we can lean on the United Nations Brundtland Commission definition of sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
In other words, for me, environmental sustainability refers to not just maintaining the current health of our planet but includes many aspects of restoration and regeneration that move us towards being “net positive” to the natural world. And since we are an integral part of the natural world, our individual well-being and environmental sustainability are inseparable – what happens to one, happens to the other.
Cara: When I think about employee well-being, unfortunately, one of the first things that comes to mind for me is employee burnout, and the constant push and pull between leaders looking to increase employee productivity and employees’ desires to manage stress and achieve work-life balance. Do you see this challenge carrying over into sustainability work as well?
Parneet: Our current lifestyles, both at home and at work, tend to focus on endless “productivity” and “consuming” – something that runs counter to our biological design, resulting in personal and organizational burnout and depleting ecosystems.
Our physiology is evolutionarily attuned to the natural circadian rhythms of the planet – our sleep-wake, hunger-thirst, temperature, and all aspects of energy metabolic cycles take their cues from our external environment. When we violate these rhythms (e.g., our typical frenzied workday), we disrupt the basic principle of homeostasis – a balance between “growth” and “repair” in the body. Our bodies are not designed for continuous, never-ending growth, and neither are our ecological systems. But we’ve created an economic system that demands this kind of growth. It is no surprise then that we feel the repercussions of the catastrophic global health crises (physical and mental) as well as the climate, environmental, social, and economic crises.
These effects are being felt at all levels in organizations, leadership included. The irony here is that if leaders and employees were to pause - and lean on the science - they would recognize that the most powerful way to boost productivity is through balancing it with periods of restoration.
John: The current state of organizational leadership is built on a paternalistic model where a select group of leaders sets direction and everyone else in the organization must follow. In order to get into that elite group, people have to navigate a gauntlet of “survival of the fittest” type demands and often sacrifice their well-being in service of career advancement. Furthermore, the typical top-down dynamic many organizations fall under assumes the leaders know better than the workers and results in extractive labor demands that work against intrinsic human motivators.
A more sustainable view of productivity considers employees in a more collaborative definition of work assignments and centers employee lifetime value as a key metric instead of looking at daily activities like hours in seat or keystrokes. The traditional, industrial model of employment views people on par with machines and “uses them up” by design. The paternalistic model uses command and control to manage inputs and limit distractions to reduce the risk of missing deadlines. Pushed to the edge, we get into a dysfunctional experience that looks a lot like the workplace portrayed in the television show Severance.
Parneet: We can use our biology to understand this power dynamic as well. There is a complex connection between power and moral behavior. One takeaway is that power usually (not always) tends to increase self-interested behavior and decrease our attention, empathy, and concern for the welfare of others. This heightened sense of self-focus can result in a mindset of separation – between me and my team at work, me and my community, and me and the planet. This strengthens siloed thinking, losing sight of the fact that we are part of a broader ecosystem.
From the brain’s perspective, we become more reactive and are at the mercy of tunnel vision, characteristic of the fight or flight biological stress response. This response is reflected physiologically as a rise in adrenaline and cortisol levels, muscles tensing up, and heart rate and breathing quicken. In this state, the only outcome the brain is concerned about is protecting itself from the proverbial tiger in the jungle in front of us (a.k.a. whatever our stress trigger - “the other”- might be). We double down on self-focus, but importantly, from an energy-efficiency perspective, the brain resorts to our old ingrained habitual patterns of thinking and behaving. In that moment of stress, we are less inclined to reach for our creative and other-focused ideas. We make self-serving decisions, relying on short-termism.
John: So this is a dangerous cycle we're in! The more we use the paternalistic approach to create safety from threats, the more worried about threats we become. Overly paternalistic organizations now have productivity paranoia and tend towards micromanagement in our hybrid work environments because they are afraid workers are taking advantage of them in our more distributed post-COVID workplaces. These types of organizations are on high alert with reactive fight/flight responses and spiking mental health concerns. And just to be clear, this type of stress is a significant contributor to burnout. A more productive and human-centered approach is actually more productive. There are mountains of research indicating that rest, recovery, and recreation lead to better pattern recognition, more efficient and effective communication, and higher impact work. Well-being is not something “extra” to tag onto a work situation, it’s an essential component of productivity for organizations to consider.
Cara: Are there changes can we make – either in our mindset or processes – to move away from these negative systems and towards a world and workplaces that better support both individual well-being and sustainability?
Parneet: Yes. That’s really important to emphasize, first and foremost – there are ways we can start to transform these systems. There is hope!
One of the main keys to this lies within our own biological design. Our human biological design - being a part of nature - is brilliant and comes with an evolutionary backup system. When faced with stress, we have at least a couple of responses at our disposal. The usual one is the fight or flight stress response (which has its value in certain situations). The other is what researchers call the “tend and befriend” stress response. And just like the name sounds, it refers to our ability – in the moment of stress – to move from self-focus to other-focus. We can ask for help or offer help – both instances of collaboration and with the intent of moving towards an outcome that is good not just for the self, but for all those affected by the situation – including our ecosystems.
So why aren’t more of us engaging in this response? One, because a lot of us don’t know about it. And second, it is not an easy one. It requires deliberate effort and the ability to lean into discomfort - which is why it is also the basis of the biology of courage and compassion. The good news is that it is a skill that we are all wired for and can train to strengthen. And best of all, when we do, not only do we make better decisions for our workplaces and the planet, but it also rewards our bodies by increasing our immunity, longevity, and health.
In summary, giving to others, tending to our environment, and taking responsibility for our personal and organizational sustainability are some of the most meaningful and effective ways we can move towards well-being for all.
John: Knowing about our predictable human biological reactions should lead us to design workplaces that nurture and leverage our creative strengths as their main premise. I call this “starting from scratch” to build situations, tools, and experiences that avoid the ingredient of paternalism the same way someone might avoid using gluten to bake bread if they are celiac. I think we can build better organizations if we first notice our mindset and what’s in it, and second, explore other ways of framing the problem before we jump in with solutions.
Paternalism is so common that we don’t realize it’s there and it’s a significant driver of our mechanistic workplace practices. When we zoom out and rethink our assumptions about how humans function and what value they can create, we discover other possibilities that put us in harmony with each other and the world around us. I’m inspired by Carol Sanford and her work that points us away from mechanical, fragmented views of dominating the world and towards regenerative, holistic living systems that place us humans within the natural world as a keystone species, not a caretaker of them.
Instead of being overwhelmed and defeated trying to fix the persistent flaws of our dominant mindset, we can literally change our minds and create better outcomes by designing better organizations that are more in tune with our biological needs and natural surroundings.
Parneet: We know from Donella Meadows’ work that one of the most powerful levers to systems change is a mindset and paradigm shift. It’s time for leaders and organizations to reimagine well-being and sustainability in our workplaces. Researchers at Earth4All unequivocally show we have the technology and money - right now - to transform our economic system within one generation to bring well-being to all on a stable planet.
The question then is: will we do it?
Parneet Pal is a Harvard-trained physician, educator, and science communicator. She applies her expertise to optimize human health and performance, and its impact on business leadership and planetary wellbeing.
John Foster is a seasoned organization designer and company operator. A 4x Chief People Officer, he is an expert in talent development, leadership, and communications, and has extensive experience working with the world’s most innovative companies.
