The Terrifying Link Between Organisational Change and Mental Health

But what the heck can we do about it?

It’s clear that our workplaces are making us sick. More people than ever are taking time off work for depression, anxiety, and burnout. It doesn’t need to be that way. We can reshape our organisations to be better for people and profit. But how? Doesn’t that mean more tumultuous and exhausting organisational change initiatives and expensive consultancies?

You need to spend time and money on looking after your people. This is me guiding 380 people through reflection at a recent session with Hyper Island for Brandwatch.

The data’s pretty grim

Look at this juicy stat from a Canadian research organisation:

40% of employees who have experienced organisational change say it negatively affected their health and well-being.

That’s not good. Especially when you consider this fact from the Mental Health at Work Report 2017:

60% of employees have experienced a mental health problem due to work…(and) of those employees who disclosed a mental health issue, 15% were subject to disciplinary procedures, demotion or dismissal.

In short, companies make people sick. Then they punish them for being sick. Then they try to change things and that makes them sick too. What a grim state of affairs.

Our first-hand experience

Organisational change is hard. Jon and I experienced this when we worked at Hyper Island. It seemed like things were constantly in flux, with new visions and strategies, working practices and processes. It was a good organisation and we desperately wanted it to be a great one. We were engaged pretty heavily in organisational change, and it was exhausting.

After a year or so of working hard to make things better, we’d made ourselves ill. I had a spell of vertigo and Jon was depressed (there were other factors at play here, but work played a massive part), so we decided to walk part of El Camino in Northern Spain to relax, reflect and have a good time as pals.

Jon snoozing after a long day walking along the ‘way’.

A few years later and we’d left that company and set up this one, specialising in helping organisations to change the way they work. But in a different way to what we’d seen in corporates and consultancies. We set up Flux to explore how we might help people change organisations in a way that puts people first, and makes business sense because of that.

We stand by the simple belief that happier people do better work.

But how can you build a company that makes people happier? How can you ‘do change’ without making people sick?

This is why we say that we: help people change companies, it’s with people that our allegiances lie.

The way it’s usually done is…

Normally, when an organisation recognises the need to change they do something like this in an attempt to survive:

1. Start at the top. Get the CEO to create a ‘burning platform’ to build a sense of urgency amongst the leadership team.
2. Put together a crack team of managers to come up with a vision and strategy for the company. This is ‘the way’ that we’ll fix the problems we have.
3. Gradually spread the message down through the hierarchy, using an extensive army of middle managers who will champion the case for change.
4. Indoctrinate everyone in the organisation through a comprehensive internal PR campaign, firing anyone who resists and promoting sycophants.

There are some fundamentally shit beliefs at work here:

• Top-management knows best and employees exist to serve their will.
• There is only one way to change, and all other ways are failures.
• If we plan and strategise enough, we can figure out the best way forwards.
• Change is a project that starts and ends.
• Fear is the best motivator (there is literally a school of thought that one should increase “survival anxiety” in order to trigger change)

The results of a Google image search for ‘management consultant’. Look at them with their plans and smug smiles and suits and MBAs and egos.

There’s a much simpler way…

There’s a stat flying around the business literature that “70% of change efforts fail”. If you dig into the data it turns out that’s not true. It’s actually more like 10%. The actual fact is that 50–70% of change efforts don’t quite achieve their intended goal.

They don’t fail, they just succeed differently.

At Flux we believe in a different way of changing companies. It’s part of a practice we call Indie Consulting (you can read our manifesto here).

We want people to be healthy and happy at work, and for companies to be as successful and make as much money as they need to. We think money’s great! There are a few principles that we have when we approach change with our clients: from multi-billion dollar global tech companies to tiny startups.

• Work with the senior leadership AND people at all levels to develop solutions.
• Run multiple experiments in different areas of the business to see what works.
• Expect initiatives to fail. Learn from them when they do. Celebrate successes with as much energy as possible.
• Aim for 1,000 tiny changes instead of 1 big one.
• Work with the leadership to remove the barriers they’ve put in place to people doing great work.
• Do what’s necessary to make stuff happen. If they need coaching and founders’ therapy, do that. If they need staff training and new IT systems, do that.
• Cut through the complications and bullshit that most companies have developed over time. Typically this lightens the vibe and helps people get perspective and see the importance of work being a human thing
• Focus and prioritise on what people need and care about, they will tend to get healthier and get more energy, or they might leave because it’s better for them (it’s also better for the company, so everybody’s a winner)

“Simple, smart, and wise” is our motto. Humans are masters at over-complicating things. Humans in business, even more so. Change is weird and messy. It makes people angry and sad and happy and liberated. It’s also inevitable, and the worst thing you can do is try to not change.

Me on stage in Amsterdam pre-warning the audience about the messiness about to unfold.

In a nutshell: people first, then companies will follow

Our mental health is perhaps the only thing that matters in almost any situation. If it’s bad we see the world in dull black and white. If it’s good we see the world clearly, in full HD colour. Since most people we work with are ‘knowledge workers’ or from the ‘creative economy’ this goes to the core of what creates value and money in that world: healthy, balanced people who are seeing the world clearly, with a healthy perspective. Having a mentally healthy organisational culture is a great business strategy. Any efforts to change your company should be in that direction. The rest will follow.

We’ve collected some of our favourite change-hungry companies in a mini-book. It’s called Tales of Cool Companies. Inspired by that book I’ve made a little video with some of the top tips for sparking change in your organisation. You can find it here.