The Whole Person Workplace: interview with author Scott Behson

An Interview with Scott Behson Professor of Management Silberman Global Faculty Fellow, Management and Entrepreneurship Silberman College of Business Fairleigh Dickinson University

by CUWFA staff writer

What is a Whole-Person Workplace?

Employers can value their employees in different ways. Bad employers only value them as a part of the machine. Many employers view employees as valuable assets, which is good, but that’s still investing in people only to the extent that we get a return on the investment. I propose that the best employers value their employees as whole people, which means they recognize, appreciate, and try to help employees with their challenges, responsibilities, priorities and passions outside of work.

If we can do that, it opens up a whole host of ways that we can support our employees ranging from small accommodations, changing meeting times, just listening to employees, and making short term informal decisions to, larger efforts like building world class wellness programs, and everything in between.

People are a physical body, you need to make sure people are physically safe, psychologically feel safe – particularly those who work with the bodies. Next, people’s minds and hearts, the things that are important to them, their professional development, their personal development, the caretaking that they do, and their other priorities in life need to be recognized.

“We have to recognize and get the whole person to the door, get their hands and their backs and their minds and their hearts and that they’re all at  different places in their life” 

“Valuing someone as a whole person, as an employer, means that you take on some of the responsibility for care of our employees, in ways that maybe workplaces didn’t feel the need to consider before.” 

Scott addressed that he started the book pre-pandemic and he had to toss that and start over because the pandemic changed things about the way we view work, the way we engage in work, and our relationship with work:

We recognized that the pre-pandemic assumption that—work is work, and the rest of your life you take care of on your own time—is a fiction. We learned we need to recognize how work and life affect each other and if someone is really struggling, say with inconsistent childcare, how much can they really concentrate or be present at work when they have challenges like these hanging over their heads? The pandemic makes it really clear that struggles at life affect work, and struggles at work can affect life.

Can you discuss the concept of identity and how it fits in the whole person workplace? What are steps we can take to acknowledge identity in employees?

Right, so the other side of the whole person workplace is that people need to be valued and respected for all of who they are and everyone needs to be welcomed and feel included in the workplace and everyone needs to be put in a situation where they can do their best work. The second part of that is that we need to address diversity and inclusion and part of that is to include into the decision making process, people from different backgrounds and different life experiences. Because, even people with good intentions have blind spots. If we do that, we’re going to make decisions that have fewer blind spots that have fewer people left out of solutions, and fewer negative impacts that may have not been foreseen. If we have lots of diversity in our decision making processes and teams, that is what will really advance diversity and inclusion, I think, more than a training program.

For example, not to stereotype, but the fact is, a lot of sixty-something male leaders have not experienced the same type of work-family challenges and juggling that the thirty-somethings in their organization encounter. If only leadership is making the decisions, they’re not going to have the same range of considerations if they involved people of different  generations, different types of family situations, even different race, gender identity or gender expression. They might even wind up making decisions that affect these groups negatively.

What are some of the remote work lessons we can use moving forward?

In The Whole Person Workplace, I profile some organizations that went remote or extremely flexible well before COVID. I think most places aren’t going to 100% back in the office or 100% remote, most are going to be in the middle and now the trick is, it takes a little more work to figure that out because you need to balance a lot of different priorities: How does the work get done here? What does my work look like? What is the culture? What do my employees want? Fundamentally what I’m saying is, in any decision we make about our employees, part of that decision making process is… how does this support the whole person workplace, how do we value employees?

It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to add big extra workplace programs and benefits, it could be smaller or more informal, like how you design work. For instance, one place I profiled used to have a 9:00 am all-hands meeting which was stressful for parents who were trying to get multiple kids out the door in the morning. Finally, someone just said, “you know, it’s really hard for me to get here without really stressing out, is there anything we can do about it?” So they did. Simply shifting the meeting to 10:00 am cost zero dollars, and think about the collective weight that was taken off for dozens of employees.

What are some alternatives to WFH for those workers who cannot do so?

There is going to be some level of hybridization showing up whether that’s a set schedule (MWF office, TR home) or the type that involves real choice, which is working with your team and manager to figure out when set times should be, what to do when we are all together, etc., but other than that it is up to you. So there are two hybrid models, hybrid set and hybrid choice.

Even for workplaces that really do want to get most people back, and I think now, most organizations have the capacity and the understanding to at least do ad-hoc and informal flexibility. This could be people needing to be home early for a school event, scheduling a work from home day for home service calls, scheduling health appointments, perhaps someone who has to drive to the next state to take care of their mom who just had a fall, but can bring their laptop and still work….that type of flexibility is here to stay even in organizations that profess to be fully back at the workplace. And I think that type of flexibility is great, because that was literally going to be the big takeaway from the first version of my book, before the pandemic, was to let people do that….it’s nice that the world actually got beyond my ambitions.

What are the top needs and wants of employees moving forward and how can organizations respond?

Fundamentally, the best way to support everybody, because I think this is a universal want, is more autonomy and control over one’s time. That unlocks many things, and if there is one intervention, that this is probably it, because it gives people the opportunity to construct a custom fit solution to their challenges. If we allow more flexibility on how, where, when, work gets done, that solves a lot of problems for  people. The fact is however, it’s not as simple as “what do employees want?” Different employees want and need different things. What we need to do is first listen really well to our employees. Then based on listening, build a variety of programming that people can plug into. Listen, be flexible, and creative.

What does all this mean for Higher Education?

I think there will be a little bit of back and forth. For example, this semester I’m teaching in person, which is great, but most of my meetings are now on zoom, which, for me, is also great—that’s fewer days a week that I have to be on campus which saves me a fair amount of driving time. Now, leadership really wanted all our professional staff, like advisors, leadership back in the office because we needed to ‘show our students we’re here for them’. But, we found that they work pretty well remotely, and now with the students back, the best way for them to work in the end was hybrid. Some of the students are commuters, or may not have classes on particular days, or whatever reason, it was better for them to zoom to their appointments.

By next year, I’m guessing my University will figure it all out, and maybe have specific in-person and zoom days. We’ll continue to oscillate and course correct  to a point that embraces the lessons we learned because it would be a shame to live through everything the past 22 months and go back to 2018.

Universities are deceptively complex organizations, you have unions, different roles, different considerations, colleges, schools, departments, units etc. The way you value employees as whole people, in such an environment, with such a diversity of organizational structure, mission, etc. means that no one size solution is going to fit all these groups. Consider pushing some decisions down the organization so you can get customized solutions around certain things depending on the type of work. Don’t just look to the Board, President, and Provost for direction, consider more local input, decisions and management.

As a professor, I have about 15-20 hours a week where I have to be somewhere. Otherwise, I just need to get my work done, whether on campus, at home or on the road. This autonomy has helped me have a wonderful life, to be a present parent, and to really partner with my wife. I’ve been able to make this work thanks to my job and my flexibility and I just think that if we think a little more flexibly about lots of people’s jobs, they can experience this too. Maybe this means giving people some choice over their time, maybe in a hybrid solution.

What about the inherent hierarchical environment in academia?

I think academics lends itself a little more to a political environment than others. So this means we need to redouble our efforts to make sure we are valuing and supporting everybody, the frontline employees, people without offices, people who don’t get to work from home, because ultimately this translates to benefitting our students.

Personally, I have been thinking more about how this applies to my students…I’m a little more mindful about what’s going on in their lives….a lot of our students are first generation, are working 20, 30, 40 hours a week, and a lot of students have had a really hard time this past year and a half. I used to be more strict about deadlines and stuff and now, it’s not that I’m lowering standards, I’m just a little more considerate of the fact that students have a lot to manage. Writing a book that is values-based has changed my perspective and challenged me to try live these values in my life too.

This interview took place, November 2021, before some of the changes Omicron brought. Thank you Scott, we appreciate you sharing your time and knowledge with CUWFA!

“It’s a set of values first, but the decisions that flow from those values are very specific to your situation, your employees and your organization”

The Whole Person Workplace by Scott Behson, Read an excerpt at https://www.youtube.com/c/scottbehson. View the Whole Person Workplace Videos: two minutes of advice from the book to help build a better workplace that works for everyone. Scott is also the author of the Working Dad’s Survival Guide.

The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It. Jennifer Moss argues our current strategies are getting it all wrong – that self-care won’t cure burnout and organizations need to entirely rethink their approach to wellness. Leveraging her latest research and evidence-based solutions, this book will help leaders and individuals prevent burnout for healthier, happier, and more productive workplaces. https://www.jennifer-moss.com/books