Imagine your perfect day.
If I think about my perfect day, I will wake up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee knowing that I would be getting up stress free and well rested. My feet would hit the floor and I would happily grab my exercise gear and go for a run in the fresh air. My mind might wander to the few important tasks I had to complete that day, but my energy would be high, and I would be happy to tackle any task with enthusiasm. I would get back, shower, eat a nourishing breakfast. The kids would be organised, lunches made and happy to see me. Once everyone had left for work, I would enthusiastically head off to work knowing that whatever I did that day would have a positive impact on people. When I arrive at work, I would be greeted at work by cheerful faces of people who would genuinely care about me being part of the team. Someone might even ask if I wanted a coffee or pop by to see how my family was. I would work for two uninterrupted hours with no emails, no meetings, just productive work time. Then I would stop, have a snack, maybe go for a quick energising walk and then get back to my tasks. My work would enthusiastically boost my optimism about how good life is and at the end of the day I could reflect on how my work had contributed to the greater good. I would come home and be welcomed by a loving family. Eat a well thought through meal and engage in delightful banter across the table, welcoming the stories of everyone’s day. After dinner we would all clean the kitchen together and once that was done, I could shower, sit down, read a book and relax knowing that I could do it all again tomorrow.
How many of you get to have your perfect day?
Or does the day sometimes go like this – You get up feeling frazzled with a poor night sleep because you had to keep getting up with kids crying or the noises of traffic or sirens in the distance keeping you awake. Maybe the stress of work from the day before rendered sleep an unnecessary burden for your already tattered mind. The alarm goes off and you hit snooze, it goes again, and you snooze it again all the while hoping the alarm would just stop working all together so you could at least get more than 9 min uninterrupted sleep. You get up and the kitchen’s a mess, the bread has run out and there is nothing for lunches ready to go. You grab a 2 min shower, throw some makeup on, tie your hair back and run out the door. The trains are late, or the traffic is bad. You race into work but each step closer fills you with more dread. You hate the place; you hate the people, and your work feels like it’s sucking your soul out. When you get in people don’t make eye contact, no one says hello and so you sit in your allocated desk space which by now has become a hot desk making it even less hospitable than it was before that crazy cost saving fad started. You make your way through another day where few people speak to you other than in meetings. No one has asked you how you are. No one has checked to see if your child has recovered from the broken leg, they had that’s kept you up at night. No one has checked how you are getting on with your mum having recently moved into a nursing home and how you are managing the tenuous balance between being a parent, working and looking after your parents. You are exhausted. You’re tired and no one you work with seems to care. You head home at the end of a long day, making your way home with the throngs of traffic and grumpy people. You have to grab shopping on the way home, so you have something to cook dinner with. The family get home and grab food and sit and eat in front of the tv. Once they have finished they get up and leave and you are faced with cleaning the mess. You’re beyond tired so you grab a chocolate hoping that it will make you feel better. You want to sleep but you have just one load of washing to do. Then you realise that your child has a school project due in the morning and you need to stay up work with them on their project or sit there and complete it alone. You make yourself a cup of coffee, suck it up and get on with it.
What about that day? If you had to choose between each day, which one is the one that you relate to more?
While we strive for a perfect day, more often than not we find ourselves entangled in days that drain us. It’s the culmination of the days that drain us that create the most risk.
The human need to “belong” is more than a fanciful new vogue term being bandied about by clever marketing agencies jumping on the next wave of sales. Our research has shown us over the past few years that feeling like you belong, feeling that someone cares about you, knowing that you have someone at work or someone at home that genuinely “has your back”, is one of the most important protective factors for poor health, risk of lost time injury and poor productivity at work. Humans are social creatures that have an innate desire to be part of the “pack”.
We are surrounded by “packs”. If you think about it, you have your home “pack”, your “work” pack and your “community” pack. These are three critical “packs” that we need to feel like we belong to for us to feel cared for, loved, valued and safe. When we don’t feel like we belong to a “pack” or even a person we start to feel disconnected and lonely. We start to feel like we have no solid anchors around us. We know from research more and more that feeling like we belong creates social safety and we also know that social safety is still the least focused on area in workplaces.
So how connected are you to your pack? How can you create a better sense of belonging for yourself? How well do you know if your teams or staff feel like they belong? How much risk is your business under just because your staff don’t feel like they belong? How socially safe is your business?
For more information on social safety contact us at www.howesafe.com
