Workplace Well-being: PERMA

Hello, everyone. Welcome in. As people start trickling in here. Happy midday Monday morning, 1130. Almost lunchtime, hopefully for you, or maybe you just starting lunch right now. I want to talk about today is I came across some information about workplace stress, and of course, we all know about how stressed out we all are in the workplace with just everything going on. The data from OSHA, occupational Safety and Health Administration showed that 80% of us workers right now are experiencing some sort of workplace stress, and about 50% are saying that their stress at work is affecting them at home.

Some things are like the concerns about their job security, the lack of access to adequate tools that they need to perform their job safely or effectively. If you have some stressors that you would like to share, let me know. There's a lot out there. Some more data from the same study. Oh, this one's from actually from the American Psychological association saying that 85% of employers now are actually helping their employees with their mental health. And the trend now is to not just help employees cope with the stress.

That was a long term fix for employers. The cheap option would just be, here's some resilience training, here's some opportunities for you to build the emotional intelligence. While those do help, a big trend is to what can we do to change the culture? How can we give the people the adequate tools to do their jobs safely and effectively? How can we build that security in people's jobs? It's that idea of how can we go to the source of the stress and alleviate that before it even becomes stress for these employees.

And one way that we can do this is similar to what I was talking about last week, is with the idea of culture. How can we build a culture that is centered around de stress? And one way to do that is through workplace well being. Workplace well being is when a person realizes his or own abilities can cope with the normal stresses of life and that they can work productively, fruitfully, and contribute to his or her organization. So how can we do this? And how many people out there feel that they have well being in their workplace?

If you want to comment and share, maybe comment ideas on how your company can help with this, or maybe they do help with this, what are ways that that happens? So how can a company build a culture centered around workplace well being? Well, it's taken straight from the well being source. Martin Seligman is kind of the father of positive psychology. I don't think he calls himself that, but he kind of started this trend of where psychology in the nineties was looking a lot towards what are the diagnoses of mental health?

What are the negative things that are happening in psychology? Well, he kind of flipped it on his head and started looking at what are the positive things that we can look at? How can we look at things in a positive light? And he first talked a lot about optimism with learned optimism, a way that we can learn skills to be optimistic even if we're naturally pessimistic. But another tool and model that he created was what's called the perma model. The perma, p e R M. A model for well being stands for positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

This has been taken into the workplace as well, these positive emotions, looking at. Looking at the experience of happiness, joy, love, gratitude, and being in the present moment with that engagement, being highly absorbed, immersed, experiencing what is called flow while engaging in activities. Flow is kind of like the zone, really being focused at your work. The other is relationships, having the ability to establish and maintain positive relationships that are mutually beneficial and characterized through love and appreciation.

You may not think about that in the workplace as much, but relationships are important, even if you're just virtual. If you do virtual work, you can build relationships through group chats, through meetings on Zoom. And while you might be focused on your work, on those Zoom meetings, taking time to get to know the other person can be important as well. There's also meaning. This is the experience of being connected to something larger than oneself. It's often that we get lost in our work and we kind of lose the focus of the company's mission.

Or maybe the company's mission doesn't get passed down all the way to everybody in the organization. So one way is we have to find meaning in our work, and how can we contribute to the greater good of the organization and the communities? And lastly is accomplishment. This is experiencing a sense of mastery over a particular domain of interest. While these are great starting points, Seligman says that this is not really the formal theory. This is not the end all, be all for creating a culture of well being, but it's mainly just a stepping stone.

This is how we can start the conversation. This is how we can build a culture based on this. We can look at this and say, well, this is well being. How can we build our culture off of this? It's really this, the gold standard, seligman called it. It's the gold standard of well being. Now, when this was brought into the workplace, a lot of the practitioners and psychologists behind this said that, well, this can't just be it in the workplace, there needs to be more so. Donaldson in 2019 added four more criteria to the Pruma model.

It doesn't fit with the name Puma, but the idea is still there. So adding on the prima model is physical health. This is the combination of, like, high levels of biological, functional and psychological health assets. So this is just being healthy physically and healthy mentally. The mindset, having a growth mindset, being optimistic, future minded in a positive light, thinking of the future positively. We often get lost while thinking about the future. Thinking about it negatively, but thinking about the future in a positive way, that's coming down to goals and other things.

And then work environment is another aspect, the quality of the work environment. So like natural light, fresh air, the physical safety, and then also what goes into the culture and the climate of psychological safety. And lastly, is economic security. At the end of the day, do they feel economically secure in their life, or are they always worrying about paying bills that can contribute to your overall well being, too? So that's the perm model. We'll be going deeper into it later on next week. We'll start with positive emotions, and every single week we'll focus on the next letter.

So I hope you join me as we go through the entire perma model and help create an organization built on workplace well being.