Making the Link: Individual Performance and Wellbeing, and the Evolution of Workplace Culture: A Discussion with Terry Stuart, Senior Partner at Deloitte

Imagine a workplace where leaders prioritize their employees' well-being, setting boundaries and routines to prevent burnout and stress.   Imagine a workplace where leaders recognize that performance and wellbeing are like two sides of the same coin.

Exploring the  dynamics within organizations, we journey alongside Terry Stuart, Senior Partner at Deloitte,  who shares his personal experiences and passion for this subject. We discuss the dual-nature of stress, its impacts and the necessity of stress coupled with recovery for evolution and improvement.

Terry delves into work-life balance, exploring the concept of load management popularized by NBA player Kawhi Leonard while playing for the Raptors, and its potential applications in our daily work. The conversation also highlights the role of technology in managing stress and promoting recovery, emphasizing a healthier work culture that encourages you to work smarter, not harder.

In our final discussion, we emphasize the significance of wellbeing and its connection to performance in a post-COVID world. Terry imparts insights on how leaders can foster a sense of community and connectedness, and the impact of remote work on well-being, career growth and its implications for gender and diversity. 

Join us, as we discover how organizations can demonstrate their support for their workforce by prioritizing well-being, even during times of adversity.

(This is the first of to conversations with Terry - in the next one Terry will share his passion for music and how together with partners he has applied this to create a transformational approach to wellbeing based on music)

Find our more about Wellbeing at Work's Global Summits, our Global Hub Community of C-Suite executives and our Bespoke division at wellbeingatwork.world

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Conversations at Wellbeing at Work, the podcast of Wellbeing at Work World. I'm a member of the team there. I'm responsible for a number of events here in North America as well as the podcast, and we'd urge you to check out our website, wellbeingatworkworld. You can find information there on all our global summits. We've run events in eight regions around the world. There's also a hub community you can join, as well as some information on our bespoke offerings.

Speaker 1: 0:30

This podcast features largely speakers from our conferences in various locations around the world, and it's a pleasure to stay to have with me Terry Stewart, who's a senior partner at Deloitte. Prior to that, he was involved in innovation and digital transformation. Welcome, Terry. Glad you could join us today. Great to be here, John. We're going to have a conversation first of all about largely following the track of the presentation you gave in Toronto in September on Wellbeing and Performance in a Post-Candemic World of Work, and then we're going to have a second conversation about what we're thinking around the future, specifically around the use of music and wellbeing, which is going to form part of the session in New York. So we're going to cut this up into two bits. So, as I mentioned, focus business-wise has been very much on innovation and digital transformation. How did you gain that sort of passion and interest on the well-being side?

Speaker 2: 1:26

It's a bit of a personal journey, john, and, given your audience, I guess we can go into it and get personal and get real with this. So I've always been focused on the technical side of the journey, so bringing new technologies, exponential tech to the world, ai, etc. And then in the last several years I started to get more stressed at work. I have a great job at Deloitte, I have great people that I get to work with great clients, but I was feeling anxiety. Ultimately. Now I know I was actually feeling depression and I went through that journey and ended up having to take time off for my own mental health. And I also had a wake-up call with my family when one of my family members ended up writing a suicide note because they had gotten very deep into some depression, but it wasn't visible to the rest of the family. So I started to get curious about that. I started a charity that we'll talk about later called the Awesome Music Project, which is focused on music and mental health. But ultimately I was trying to figure out how do we actually live in a better world, in a better workplace? So how do we not just focus on corporate performance and sustained performance? And there's a lot of pressure, given what the economy is doing on performance these days. But how do we also and focus on well-being, and it'll be much more sustainable careers, much more sustainable performance for individuals and for corporations if we can figure out that balance between focusing on ourselves, keeping our brains and our bodies healthy, while we're also trying to deliver the results that our companies expect of us.

Speaker 2: 3:05

The curiosity really was driven by personal experience. That was a pretty big wake-up call between my own leave and I like my first mental leave so much I took a second one because I didn't quite figure it all out. So that's been part of the journey. And during COVID I had a great job. I was doing digital transformation for the federal government but of course, like all of us, I was working from home, I was working from my cottage, and so 10 hours, 12 hours of Zoom calls per day by myself at the cottage because I'd recently gone through a divorce, wasn't really helping my mental health and I was. I have said I was getting disconnected from humanity. So I went and did certification on executive coaching, said how can I reconnect with individuals? And so the combination of coaching, combination of my own personal mental health experience and my family's experience has really driven me to say how do we build a workplace that we can be proud of? That doesn't that performs while also breaking people?

Speaker 1: 4:08

I used to do a lot of events on change management and transformation here in Canada. I used to joke that if you're in the change management, you're really in this stress production business, your job, your role if essentially it involves creating anxiety and stress because it changes an incredibly stressful experience. But it didn't seem to be something that I thought it was funny to say, didn't seem to resonate with the change management community. There seems to be a real blind spot with people around the mental impact of their work. Do you think that's changed? Obviously for you, you've had a, you've come to realisation about that, but is that true?

Speaker 2: 4:45

Do you think more generally, when people look at change, it's a great comment, john, and I think that we are gradually waking up. So I won't say that corporate Canada, corporate America, has gotten a tune with the actual impact of this, although if you're the CFO or the CHRO and many of your clients on well-being at work are the CHROs they're seeing the numbers rise. The costs are rising of the impact of not paying attention to it. The interesting thing on this is we look at this as black or white stress good, bad. The reality is stress is actually very healthy for us, and whether it's stress on our brains because we're trying something new and learning a new skill, or trying a project or a leadership role that is new for us, is actually really good.

Speaker 2: 5:34

But you have to have stress and then recovery. It's just like working out. If you worked out 24 hours a day and you didn't sleep and you didn't rest on days off, your body would break down. However, if you just cruise through and you don't stress your muscles whether it's your brain muscle or your body muscle you never evolve, you never get better, you never can actually run faster, you never can actually push more weight, you never are fitter, your VO2 max doesn't go up, or your intellectual capability or your creative capability or your leadership capability.

Speaker 2: 6:07

So we need stress, but what we need is healthy stress and we need to be doing planned recovery and not just I work at 150% for 11 and a half months and then I take a one week vacation or a two week vacation. We need to actually do breaks and recovery actually every day inside the day, and there's a lot of work now coming out on the notion of flow and how do you get in flow and be more productive, and that notion is 90 minute bursts where you do serious work, and then 20 minute to 30 minute recovery, and not recovery where you're talking to friends or doing games or whatever, but recovery where you're totally letting your brain recharge, and so there's a lot to unpack under that one. But I think we're starting to see in the corporate world programs around how do we do stress and recovery, and my hope is that that becomes commonplace and that would allow us to avoid the kinds of leaves and mental breakdowns, to be honest, that are occurring more frequently than they should.

Speaker 1: 7:12

But there are different tangents around that. So there's that you have the idea you work for 90 minutes, rest for 10, or whatever that is. But there's also more extended reasons where maybe you work on a project for a number of weeks and that's really intense, but then you have to make sure you have some proper downtime. Or even I don't know, I don't like to do it, but many organizations, many, some organizations, offer their employees sabbaticals after a number of years. That kind of creating that sort of rhythm, which is one of the things I think that COVID disrupted with people, was that, that notion of rhythm, which may be connections to the music issue we're going to be talking about later on.

Speaker 2: 7:48

But yeah, and the challenge it's yeah, so the year right, there are daily cycles and inside the day and all treaty and rhythms are the rhythms during the day, human rhythms are the rhythms of day and night and you get into the sleep cycles that are so important, and then the rhythms throughout the year that you have and whether it's project bursts where you have a high burn project or initiative that you're working on, then you have a break, et cetera.

Speaker 2: 8:12

The challenge with COVID, I think, is so many people you know had their work environment like yours and mine right now, where we're doing it at home, and they didn't build separation between their work day and their recovery time.

Speaker 2: 8:26

And normally when we went to the office we had that separation through the commute home or the drive home, whether it's on the subway or whether it's in the car, and we could separate a little bit when we walk from my home office or my table here to my kitchen, which is a meter and a half over there, yeah, there's no separation unless you build it in and you can build it in you can say okay, it's five o'clock, I'm going to do my PM down routine, I'm going to go outside and go for a walk for 30 minutes and then when I come back in with my partner, I'm going to actually be focused in a lure and I've gotten rid of, hopefully, the stressors of the day so that I can focus on being there and being present for my family. So a lot of us lost that. But it's up to us, really up to individuals, and corporations and governments can educate people, but at the end of the day, individuals need to take responsibility for it, and it's not hard to be honest.

Speaker 1: 9:20

But it does seem as if in many organizations rest is a four-letter word, and yet in so the athletic and sports communities. You said it's seen as an essential part of performance.

Speaker 2: 9:32

And it's a fantastic point, john. We were looking at the whole notion of flow for teams and corporations and organizations and as we started to research it, we looked at sport as one of the areas that we thought we might be able to learn from and bring it to our organization. And we ended up fortuitously getting connected with Tessa Virtue, the iconic Canadian ice skater, with Tessa and Scott that won many gold medals. And Tessa and Scott their quick story they had been skating four, five, six hours a day to train for the Olympics and they'd been doing super well compared to anyone else in the world standards bronze metal, silver metal, et cetera but they hadn't cracked the goal right and they hadn't been able to get that top, top podium peak performance right that they were capable of. And they ended up connecting with people and the people said, hey, here's the deal, you need to skate less. So they told them yeah, you need to skate and I may get the numbers a little wrong here, but two or three hours a day. And then we're going to spend an hour on psychology. We're going to spend an hour making sure your nutrition and your other things are correct. We're going to spend some time on meditation and breathing and actually deregulating your body. And suddenly they skated less and they won more gold medals. So we ended up Tessa said, hey, I like what Deloitte's doing. We liked her thinking, and so we ended up taking that and creating what we called state of performance and we did a whole re we've done a whole research project on it of how do you build proper I'll call it flow, but proper behaviors and habits into the workplace at a team level and at an organizational level, and at its simplest, so that you're not injecting in your normal way of working things that are actually detracting from performance and hurting mental health.

Speaker 2: 11:27

Simple example emails, right? So I have ADHD. I like to send emails out as soon as I think of them, right, send them out. That might be at noon, it might be at three o'clock in the afternoon, it might be at eight o'clock at night. When I send that out, because I'm a senior person at Deloitte, I don't send it saying, hey, get back to me by tomorrow morning. Some people do, actually, and that's even worse. But even though I send it at eight o'clock at night, if it gets to that person, they happen to see an alert. By the way, everybody should turn off their alerts after they go home.

Speaker 2: 12:01

Number one task reduce the distraction. But if I send that, somebody says, oh, he's a senior part. I better respond Suddenly. They're going into to work mode at eight o'clock at night. That is not good for recovery, Not good. So that's a simple thing. But there are many others that we need to be baking in. And so work smarter, not harder. We were already working. The average Canadian is working 50 to 60 hours a week. We can't actually work harder and sustain our health, so we have to work smarter.

Speaker 1: 12:34

Yeah, it seems to me, as you know, one of the issues I know I mean in a constant argument with someone about around work life balance. A lot of people like to talk about work life integration or harmony or something. It seems to me, you know, you have to have those boundaries that you have to have in the same way, test and have those skating time. And then there's the meditation. We need the work time and the home time to turn off the phones and actually create that kind of rhythm that supports us in a way that I think in many ways the world of work is pushing us to do, to break those things down when that's working from home or all the other stuff that's going on. Do I comment?

Speaker 2: 13:14

Yeah, it's, yeah, no, it's. It's important to have the right routines and I would say, while I'm very focused on this topic, I'm also I also want to make sure your audience knows I am absolutely a work in progress. So there is there is so much that I have to learn on these spaces. But setting those boundaries and we can talk like sleep is my current bugbear. I know how important it is. I focus on it. I've had an aura ring to track and I've had a whoop band to track it. I do a lot and what we know is your PM routine sets up your AM routine and those two things juxtapose how good a sleep you get, and if you don't get good sleep, you're not actually going to perform well at work, you're not actually going to be happy and be supportive of your folks, and so there's a ton of very basic stuff that people need to do on that front.

Speaker 1: 14:05

But in this issue. I think that sort of metaphor around sports has been with us for a very long time. Remember when I started doing events 23 years ago lots of people talking about learning from sports, sports people, which essentially involved around training really hard and trying giving 110 percent and everything for the theater. That's changed, that there's a recognition now that that's unhealthy and it's also, but it's also maybe more important. Maybe more important it's actually unproductive.

Speaker 2: 14:34

Yeah, my favorite example on this one and it involves a little bit of technology. But all of the discussion. I am a pretty big basketball fan and when the Raptors finally got Kawhi Leonard to come, they had this notion of load management. And what is load management? It's just okay. Kawhi can't play every single game for the season and then perform at maximum performance in the playoffs, so they did load management. So there were games where our number one player wasn't actually playing because he was in recovery and they knew it based on measuring his vitals etc. So he needed more recovery that day, even though they've got lots of regimen in between the games etc. And it worked. Kawhi Leonard actually was the critical element to win the NBA championship that year and he also little known fact.

Speaker 2: 15:24

You and I are going to geek out maybe a little bit on neuroscience, what we can do our brains we think our brains after 2030 become very rigid and the old add-ins. You can't teach a new dog new tricks. Kawhi Leonard spent an hour a day inside a VR headset watching videos to look with of games to actually learn shoot, pass, should I shoot or should I pass? Just so his brain would process a half a second faster. So tying in so we can use technology, we can use all these things, but stress and load management is super important, whether it's in the sports, whether it's in our day-to-day lives, etc. And we have to listen to our bodies to know when we need to do it.

Speaker 1: 16:10

And that speaks to that notion of that cadence of his activity and that during the season he was getting the rest when he needed it and that was very carefully managed. But once you get the playoffs, that's preparation for that intense yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:24

And how long?

Speaker 1: 16:25

the playoffs go on for several weeks right.

Speaker 2: 16:27

Yeah, but who's managing your load management, or my load management, or employee X's load management? Right Nobody unless we do it, Unless we do it right and corporations are here.

Speaker 1: 16:41

When you say we do it, do you mean we ourselves, or do you mean like you as a leader?

Speaker 2: 16:45

But see, I think leaders are starting to wake up to this. So they are starting, hopefully through education programs and everything, to say, oh, you know what that person seems like they're a little bit sick, seems like they're much more tired for a number of days in a row than they normally are. Maybe there are signs of burnout, Maybe there are signs of anxiety or depression. Our leaders are starting to do it, but we still have corporate culture, corporate taxonomy.

Speaker 2: 17:17

Oh, I pulled an all nighter this weekend to get that proposal out. Aren't I a hero? Oh, you're actually somebody who doesn't plan well, Didn't delegate well and didn't actually put together the structure. And you're demonstrating to people that you know the behaviors that they should not be doing right. But that sort of bra I'm a tough guy or gal in the mix is still very much of the corporate lexicon. I'm trying to call people out now and they say I just asked the question. So what could you have done to have avoided that? Like what? Why did that happen? Is that a desire outcome? Is that a high performance outcome? No Superhero stuff, Sure, but it's not actually the right behavior.

Speaker 1: 17:59

We hear a lot of talk still about and understandably about creating high performance cultures and it seems that there's a sort of siloed approach that you have this sort of performance. It's not always neither. Or there's a sort of performance side of things and there's the well-being side of things and you don't never the twain shall meet For his actual fact they are. They're joined at the hip, they're instantly linked and you can't have one without the other, right.

Speaker 2: 18:25

Absolutely. And how many times do we hear somebody say okay, I'm working really hard on this project. Okay, it's five o'clock, I should go for my run. Oh, I don't have time to go for my run. I got this work I got to do, I got to get home and see the family. I don't have time for the run. You, in fact, don't have time to go for the run Because when you go for the run you're going to flush through the stuff in your brain and you will actually perform way better the next day or that night if you have to do it that night, if you've had all of the stuff going when you go and work out, people just don't understand that, that you're actually a it's.

Speaker 2: 19:04

I don't know, I'm not a huge gamer, but a lot of the audience may be gamers. When you get on games and you can turbocharge the character or whatever. I used to pay, what was it? The Mario Kart? Right, you could turbocharge the Mario Kart. So when you turbocharge it, that's what exercise does, that's what music does, that's what nature does.

Speaker 2: 19:24

So when we look at those three modalities, if we take advantage of them in a thoughtful, purposeful, intentional way, it actually turbocharges our productivity, our creativity and our recovery. So people are thinking about it and I have to. I probably don't have. I have a day or two where I go through not having to explain that somebody, but certainly not a week. Every week I have to explain to people that not taking the time to do those things, okay, you don't have time for the hour workout that you want, take 15 minutes. Take 15 minutes, do some breathing, get on, do some stairs, whatever works for you. It doesn't have to be the full on hit or marathon journey, but but you need the exercise. Moving like sitting is the new cancer. We know that. Right, getting the exercise, getting out, and whether it's nature or in the gym doesn't matter.

Speaker 1: 20:17

And also I'll throw this in here because it's a personal thing Also connects you with other people as well. Preferably don't do all that stuff on your own.

Speaker 2: 20:26

There is a ton of talk right now on the epidemic of loneliness, and so I don't have a silver bullet to this one other than obviously you need to connect with people. I moved up north during COVID to cottage. I was fortunate enough to have a spot I could go to get out of the city, get into nature and so on, and it was amazing. But I was living by myself and for two and a half years turns out, john spoiler alert I'm an extrovert and there I am on zoom calls all day, so you're getting screen time, good, you're by yourself in a place. Now I have a couple neighbors that I could connect with periodically, so that was good.

Speaker 2: 21:11

But I needed to come back into the city, into Toronto, to be able to go to a restaurant, go to a concert, go to the office and connect with people, because we get a different kind of energy when we connect with people, and they actually have shown that the single most influential factor for longevity is connectedness either to family or to others. So it's great that we exercise, it's great that we're eating right. If we're doing all of it by ourselves, those are good, but but it won't be as good and as impactful in your long term health, like it can add five to 10 years If you have healthy relationships in the blue zone I think it's on Amazon or whatever, like the blue zone series talks about the countries that live to 100 and the common factor across all of them is the cultural and societal connectedness, whether we call it tribes or clans or whatever you want to call it, but that connection with your friends, your people, right.

Speaker 1: 22:12

So, again, that connects us to the. That's one of the other roles that leaders have is to create that Community in an organization. Right, that's a part of the changing role of leaders in organizations such as yours, surely?

Speaker 2: 22:26

Absolutely, and it's not just about okay, because some people had the flaw of okay, we're going to be on a Zoom call, there's going to be 10 of us, we're going to be talking about all the issues, etc. So that's connected, right. There is a very different level of connection when we are physiologically boxed, missed to one another, and I think it's going to be five or 10 years before we really see the impact of the hybrid environment. Because a lot of people were like hold on a second, I can work from home, I can cut out the commute, I can do my laundry during the day, cook a meal, whatever Isn't that great? What they are missing is that connectedness, that sense of community, and how it actually lets us thrive.

Speaker 2: 23:12

I had three different people that were offspring of friends that I know that have recently entered the work market, some with our company, some with others and three of them said oh, that's great, my company can, let me work from home all the time. I'm going to just work from home. I said absolutely not like you. You, for your own health and for your career, need to actually go into the. You don't need to go in five days a week, and certainly if there are days where you're sick or the days when you're really not feeling it. Work from home, Absolutely. I'm working from home today.

Speaker 2: 23:42

I love it, but yesterday I was in. I got so much energy being in our Bay Adelaide office and I walked through. I had some meetings, of course, but I walked through and there were unintentional collisions and there were 10 people. I took a list of the people I needed to get a meeting with after. There were 10 people that I hadn't thought of, but I saw them and I ran into them and some of those people will help me on the work that I'm doing with my charity and also with music and well being. And it's the same for the youth coming up. If they go pure hybrid and they're not coming into the office, they will not build those connections at the same level and it will slow and maybe controversial for our hybrid fans out there, but it will slow their career growth down and, yes, their mental health and well being.

Speaker 1: 24:30

Yeah, and there are gender implications for that, as I said, as I understand it absolutely more inclined to pick remote working, predominantly remote working options because of childcare responsibilities and all sorts of other things going on. So there's a diversity component for that.

Speaker 2: 24:52

And it gets exacerbated if they're not comfortable having a voice, if they don't speak up in the Zoom calls when they're working from home. Then suddenly people say, oh, that person, he, she doesn't matter, that person doesn't know as much, isn't as bright. Maybe I don't bring them on my next project. Not the right answers. So we have to work on all of these cultural changes as we go through it. Don't get me wrong. I think the remote worker. We've been a virtual organization for a long time because we do our work at client sites at home and so on. But we're at an interesting inflection point.

Speaker 1: 25:27

I mean, we couldn't be doing this podcast in a real world, right, we'd have to agree to meet at some studio somewhere. It goes all that.

Speaker 2: 25:35

And how many people. It would be fun, though I'd love to be there with you in a studio.

Speaker 1: 25:37

I would love to do it, and I'm sure you would, but a lot of people who maybe aren't so keen on spending that much time with me in a confined space, come on, come on. It's one more thing I want to touch on, because we're going to have a second conversation about the music piece.

Speaker 1: 25:50

I want to wrap this one up, and one of them is to what I think, what I've tried to frame this conversation and is that in this sort of post COVID moment, that increase focus on well-being and the sort of merging of it with the notion of performance is really important and that's one of the shifts I think that's happened Certainly in the work I've done in well-being is that recognition that this is no longer like something that you've built on the side. Something you need to agree with work which I think you've done a great job of explaining. But the situation with now is a lot of organizations are cutting back right News yesterday, cbc were laying off a few hundred people.

Speaker 1: 26:27

I was reading about an organization the other day that they said they were letting some people go but it was a tough time so they were going to cut their involvement with pride They'd cut back on benefits. But yes, we agree that these things are important, but when the government gets tired, I think there's a tendency for leaders to start cutting back on these things. So how do we? Am I misreading that situation? And if not, how do we resist that?

Speaker 2: 27:00

It's. I'm going to try and go through this without being preachy. Tough times, recessions, if we want to use the R word, economic slowdowns, whatever you want to believe, which is clearly what we're in Canada, us and globally. They show the true values of a company and of a leadership team, and how you go through the tough times, how you support the people that are leaving your organization as well as the ones that are staying, actually demonstrates what kind of an organization you are and will predict how you come out of the recession. So if you, for example, cut pick a number 5%, 10% of your staff which is the numbers I'm seeing out there these days, often it's because people haven't necessarily spent as much time ruining some of the poor performers. But if you cut 5% or 10% and you choose to cut on the benefits side that you have for mental health benefits, being health care, spending accounts, etc. What is the message you're sending to the people that are still with you? Your health doesn't matter as much. I just cut some of your friends and we're just all about the results. And if you've done the research and studying the science, we as an organization don't understand performance.

Speaker 2: 28:36

So I think, john, there are lots of great examples of organizations that are doing the belt, tightening in the right way and working through it and making sure that they still look after their employees while being fiscally responsible. Like we have to do things. We have shareholders or, in our instance, partners that own equity in the company. We have to do the right thing for the future of the company, etc. But if we understand the linkage between how we treat our people, being and sustained performance, and how those two need to be intertwined and we keep that focus on it, then the people will say, okay, tough times, I don't like that.

Speaker 2: 29:16

We're cutting people, but they're still looking after me. We're doubling down our things. We have a $4,000 mental health benefit. We have well-being at work programs that we're implementing and I'm not trying to put us on a pedestal by any means, but those are the things. By the way, when you're in tough times and you're cutting people, what happens? It's more stress and anxiety on the people left behind. I hear all kinds of companies that I deal with where the person's doing two or three jobs, no longer just one, and so we have to actually double down the support for them.

Speaker 1: 29:51

Yeah, it's not always. I think it's a useful analogy, but the idea of sustainability, the idea is you'll be creating a workplace and a workforce that's sustainable, and the same way that if a company has to cut back because of we're in a little bit of a tough time, you wouldn't expect them to stop some of the environmental initiatives that they have. You'd still expect certain organizations to be good stewards of the environment. So I think that's probably maybe I don't know if that's.

Speaker 2: 30:16

Those behaviors and values will pay off in spades in the long run is my belief. And yeah, Okay, thank you Terry.

Speaker 1: 30:26

We're going to wrap up this half of our conversation now. I'll press pause. We'll create a lovely recording for our viewers in the case of viewers and listeners and then we'll hop right back on and dig deep into this notion of I guess, for you and your work, what's next in terms of the music side of things and how that impacts well-being, Because I think it's an exciting project that we're going to be sharing with some people in New York in a couple of months.

Speaker 2: 30:52

So come and listen to part two. Come and listen to part two. Come and listen to part two.

Speaker 1: 30:56

That's right. Yes, thank you.