Leadership and Wellness with Tiffany Nugent

File 17:  In today’s file, we begin Season 2 of the podcast.  Today, the team welcomes Tiffany Nugent, an HR practitioner for over 20 years.  The discussion is going to focus on leadership and wellness.  They’ll explore the challenge of creating a wellness-focused organization.

Meet Tiffany Nugent

Tiffany has experience in a broad range of industry sectors, including retail, manufacturing, fulfillment, healthcare and healthcare technology.  She led a healthcare organization through a rapid-growth phase, then through the COVID pandemic.  Afterwards, she transitioned into healthcare technology.  That organization was experiencing double-digit growth before closing down.  Currently, Tiffany is working in the virtual, mental health space.

Interestingly, Tiffany is also the owner of the Louisville Salt Cave and Salt Wellness.  They partner with organizations interested in bringing wellness into the workplace.

Molley comments on how so many leaders neglect wellness within their respective organizations.  She blames this on the previous 4-years, post pandemic, and that we haven’t shifted back. 

Jamie notes that often leadership underestimates their impact on the wellness of others.  It’s not simply something quick, such as direct feedback.  It may take someone time to digest the feedback before deciding to act.  It could take years.  She advises leaders to be mindful of creating a spark that could eventually grow into forest fire.

Being Intentional about Organizational Wellness

Jamie remarks on Tiffany’s focus on how organizations support wellness, especially when resilience, adaptability and culture belong at the forefront.

Tiffany describes a scenario from the pandemic.  It heightened her awareness of how an organization has a responsibility to support its leaders, so they in turn can support their employees.  HR is typically under-resourced because it’s not viewed as revenue-producing.  Alternatively, leadership expects HR to lead culture and wellness.  In response, Tiffany views the opportunity exists for HR to equip leadership with tools to lead wellness and to create a healthy workforce.  The HR staff and C-suite can’t be everywhere, so by equipping other leaders in the organization, the feedback, needs and recommendations can be more quickly communicated.  They are the frontline.

During the pandemic, Tiffany was approached by many leaders asking for direction and/or advice in dealing with the situations such as the death of family members.  Her primary response, was to approach the situation as a human, first.  There are many things that need to get done, but we’re dealing with real people experiencing real situations that could impact their ability to remain focused and engaged.

Providing psychological safety in the workplace, providing space and understanding all mesh to help employees realize the company cares about them.  This is how the organization ultimately benefits.

Tiffany explains that sometimes, feedback isn’t necessarily required in the moment.  It may be time to pause and to consider what’s going on in the person’s life.  Could external issues be impacting how that employee is showing up?  If you can meet them where they are and think through it, the opportunity for feedback will present itself.  At the same time, that feedback might not take years to resonate within that individual (or ignite that forest fire Jamie mentioned).

What Does Wellness Really Mean?

Molly comments that leaders need to be told what “wellness” means.  It’s not about the cafeteria, the gym or the air hockey table.  The key for leaders is to take the whole person into consideration.

Mid-level managers and down are need you to be mindful of leading your people.  It’s typically a mix of ages, generational experience and demographics.  Molley points out that the wellbeing of the human in these group is “all of their environment.”  It’s requires a holistic view.

Jamie adds that there are small nuggets to consider relative to wellness in the workplace.  She recommends assuming the individual wanted a situation to work out well.  It’s easier to have a dialog from this starting point, rather than just hammering them.

Good Feedback Loops Create Healthy Environments

Tiffany points out that people need to feel a sense of psychological safety in order to want to speak up.  If that’s absent, it’s a marker of an unhealthy work environment. 

That trend toward superficial wellness (i.e. the air hockey table in the breakroom) only served to mask existing problems. 

When people feel comfortable enough to raise their hands and voice issues that are problematic, there’s a good sign you have a healthy workplace.  Especially if surveys indicate people plan on remaining with the company, but they want to make it even better.

A manager who feels the need to give feedback regardless of the size of the issue, is just feedback for the sake of feedback.  Consider how your immediate, albeit well-intentioned, desire to provide feedback may lack an assumption of positive intent.  You need to slow down and consider the impact of your feedback, overall. 

Molley explains how Incipio favors employee surveys.  Helping leaders to understand and analyze the results of the feedback is critical.  The pure fact that only a small percentage of the surveys were completed and returned is not a good sign, regardless of what the answers are.  It may be a case of the non-respondents assuming their feedback won’t make a difference anyway.  Worse yet, maybe they simply don’t care because they’ve disengaged with the mottos posted on the walls of the office or plant.  This place is only a stepping stone in their future careers.

So NOW You Want My Opinion?

Why to employers usually only focus on feedback during the annual survey and the exit interview?  If you’re waiting until the exit interview, it’s already too late.

Leaders should generally have to care about the survey results.  Jamie advises that if you’re not going to do something based on feedback to a particular question, don’t ask it.  Tiffany points out that that non-action degrades the trust in the organization. 

Consistency and Cadence

Tiffany recommends maintaining a consistency of the questions along with the frequency of the employee feedback surveys.  If the questions keep changing, there’s no way to measure the trend or progress toward a better solution set. Once you’ve defined a way to address specific issues, it’s important to communicate the changes the company is implementing to address the issues.  At the same time, be transparent about what you are unable to address in the short-term and why.

This also shows up in benefit surveys.  Even after the feedback was provided, there’s a good chance the benefits won’t change or may even get worse.  One approach Tiffany uses is to assemble the benefit survey results and determine which benefits add the least value.  Get rid of it and redirect the expenditure toward benefits people actually want.  Is there an opportunity to implement a type of total rewards package that would be more beneficial to a generationally-diverse workforce?

Initiatives are Good, Right?

Jamie comments that companies often hear about ideas that are implemented as initiatives.  The unfortunate part is they forget the “…so that…” aspect when justifying the initiative. 

Focusing on Wellbeing without Sacrificing Productivity

Tiffany has a worked the past couple of years in a remote workforce environment.  This topic is particularly important to remote-first or hybrid workforce organizations.  Fundamentally, without a focus on wellbeing, you won’t get the productivity you’re expecting.  You’ll experience high absentee rates and higher rates of leaves of absence.  It’s often a reflection of the employees’ mental wellbeing. 

Leaders should look at their workforce as human beings first.  Assume positive intent and ask how the company could better support and help.  Tiffany recounts an engagement in which the executive team did a listening tour to try to figure out why the leaders were becoming less cohesive as group.  They were all feeling over-stretched and it was beginning to show in the way in which they interacted. 

Once the feedback was assembled, Tiffany noted that the feedback focused on symptoms.  She challenged the executive team to consider the demands being placed on the other leaders.  Did they have the right tools to handle the responsibilities?  She encouraged the team to dig deeper to uncover the root causes, not just the symptoms.  Sprints involving extra effort hours or higher-levels of stress may be possible, but extending that expectation over the long-term leads to burnout and worse.  Jamie comments, “You can’t pour from an empty cup.”

Leaders should take time to understand the weight of the words they carry and the shadow they cast on the organization.  Even though they may be well-intentioned and want to help, sometimes simply being there is scary or otherwise disruptive.  Be self-aware and remember we’re all humans trying to work together.

How Do We Strike that Balance?

Molley asks about practical ways to accomplish wellness goals for the organization and organizational performance.  The topic of the 9-box tool surfaces.  Tiffany often works with start-ups and rapid-growth organizations.  The typical 9-box approach doesn’t really work for these types of organizations, in her opinion.  The place to begin is with training your leaders on how to be good people-leaders.  It’s not uncommon for high-performers to get thrown into leadership roles without the proper tools and training for that role.

The better approach is to consider how the organization sets its leaders up for success.  Are there minimum expectations for being a good leader?  Do we communicate what we see as their competencies?  Unfortunately, the answer is often no.  However, by taking this alternative approach we are prioritizing wellness in the workplace.

In a recent executive leadership engagement, Tiffany held an impactful exercise.   They reflected on what they’ve done, what could be learned from it, what should be continued, what should they stop doing, and ultimately take those lessons into planning for the next year or quarter.  This should be done on a consistent frequency.  It’s about investing in yourselves, regardless of how busy it may be.

At Salt Wellness, Tiffany provides a space for people to get away from the chaos of work and find a place to connect with each other.  They do corporate events and leadership training there.  It’s a place for organizations to do teambuilding exercises and related programs. 

For more information:

Website:  www.SaltWellnessKY.com

In closing, Molley comments that 2025 is the year people need to make the change.  It’s time to focus on slowing down to speed up.  It’s time to move beyond the Band-Aids.  It’s time to pay more attention to the wellbeing of the organization and its workforce.  Tiffany observes that we’re already experiencing high turnover rates.  People are simply burned-out.  Organizations must intentionally slow down, identify the root causes and fundamentally fix the foundation that’s negatively impacting our workforce.  Unless we do, we’re going to continue to see organizations limit their potential, experience decline and some ultimately won’t make it. 

 

We’d like to thank Tiffany Nugent for joining us on the Workforce Therapy Files podcast. 

That’s where we’ll leave the conversation for today.  Before we close the file, we invite you to reach out to us with questions, suggestions or other comments.  We’d love to hear from you.

We hope you found this file insightful and helpful.  Thank you for listening!

 

Did You Enjoy Today’s Conversation?

Visit www.WorkforceTherapyFiles.com to listen to additional WTF files or to let us know you’d like to be a guest on an upcoming file.

Need Help Supporting Your Company’s Recruiting and Staffing Goals?

We’re here to help.  You can contact us via our individual websites, depending on your specific needs or questions:

·      Jamie Swaim, SPHR – www.ParcelKnows.com

·      Molley Ricketts – www.IncipioWorks.com

·      Jason Heflin – www.CrowdSouth.com