Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hey everyone. Today I want to talk about public health and the role public health plays in the workplace. We're introducing a new program called Workplace Public Health in the Josh Person Academy. And as we developed it and learned about it and talked to many of you about it, I realize there's a lot of really important topics here that I wanna raise to your attention. The first is, let's talk about the pandemic in general. We've been in this situation for 10 months, and most of us have been pretty fed up with it all. We've watched the political system struggle, the economic system struggle. Our companies have struggled, our businesses have struggled, our employees have struggled, our HR departments have struggled. And if you read Apollo's Arrow and really get to know the history of pandemics, you come to the conclusion that actually this is still gonna go on for a while.
Speaker 0 00:00:51 Because what happens in pandemics, and this is certainly not the first one, is there's a lot of cultural, social, economic science and technological issues at play. And as people suffer and the pandemic continues and the virus is continued to be diagnosed, people react in different ways. It's very likely, for example, that we're going to continue to have arguments about the vaccine just as we've had arguments about masks. And the reason for that, I'll talk about it in a minute, but we as employers and HR people have to look at this professionally and do what's best for our organizations. And I would suggest to you that rather than think about this as a temporary problem that's gonna go away in January or February, or maybe in q2, it may go on through the year next year and maybe change your company and perhaps society for many, many years to come.
Speaker 0 00:01:43 In fact, as Nick Christakis talks about in his book, the 1918 Flu Virus Second Wave was four times as deadly as the first wave. And many, many things in our lives changed permanently as a result. The elimination of Spittoons, for example, which it's hard to believe they actually existed, but these were things we didn't understand. And so we may end up not having crowded restaurants or crowded buses or crowded offices the way we did in the past. In fact, I always used to laugh about the way San Francisco seemed to pride itself on cramming people right next to each other to make them feel like they were being collaborative, only to result in everybody putting on headphones, <laugh> so they wouldn't have to listen to the person next to them talking on the phone. Well, anyway, let's talk a little bit about public health just for a minute. Public health of course, is not something many of you have been trained on. I certainly haven't been, but it is a very deep domain pioneered by quite a few scientists. But Charles Winslow, who is one of the early pioneers, defines it as the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private communities and individuals. And what people in public health do is they understand epidemiology and and
Speaker 1 00:02:58 The science of disease, but even more so, they look at all of the interconnected factors that result in a population maybe not being healthy. And that's everything from education to culture to infrastructure to policies to financial health, mental health, all of which of course fit into the category of employee experience. And so as we've been thinking about public health and learning about it and building the program in the jba, uh, I've more and more realized that what we're doing in HR is reinventing in some sense a domain that already exists. And so we can really inform our safe workplace and employee experience programs by boning up and sharing what public health professionals know. And in fact, many of you work in companies that now have public health officers or chief health officers who have backgrounds in this domain because the public health community is very experienced in dealing with all of these complex issues.
Speaker 1 00:03:57 They just don't think about it from the standpoint of one company at a time. So let me raise a couple of issues that we discuss in our course. The first is the virus itself, as most of you know, is particularly sneaky because it's infectious before the symptoms occur. So people will walk around infecting others without knowing it. This means a contractor, a consultant, a friend, an acquaintance who comes in the office or meets with you at home or takes you out to lunch who may claim to be completely healthy, could infect you. And of course, as most of you know from a lot of the discussions that have been having in the public is your circle of contacts is connected to the circle of contacts of everybody that they know. So even though you may meet only one person outside of your family on a given day, that person may have met somebody the day before who may have met somebody the day before.
Speaker 1 00:04:51 And very quickly you could be exposed to the virus without ever knowing about it. And that's the reason Lockdowns curfews and other forms of social isolation have continued because clearly in some of the states in the United States that didn't practice these rules, the epidemic returned and they're now realizing that this is the only solution. The second thing that you think about when you think about the pandemic is not only do we need safe protocols, p p e, social distancing, masks, et cetera, and lots of other practices to keep people separated from each other. And we also need a lot of discussion about culture. If you feel sick and you're paid by the hour, will you stay home? Well, in the past you wouldn't. In fact, there was a big culture for many, many years to come to work sick. It was kind of a badge of honor, and it certainly isn't now.
Speaker 1 00:05:41 So that's a big culture that has to change. Will you report to your boss that your child or your parents or your friends that you know are sick and that you may be infectious? Will you challenge somebody who works for you or with you who happens to violate one of the policies that your companies have to both accept the policy and obey? And for a lot of you that work in retail and customer facing roles, you've had to face customers that don't want to abide by the various rules of public health too. And those are policies that have to be established and you need to be trained to deescalate those problems. In fact, I was just on the phone on Friday with a very large company, a large retailer who you all know who has been going through deescalation training on that issue itself. So that's part of our publish health journey too.
Speaker 1 00:06:29 The second thing I wanna talk about is the issue of individual versus society, or what I call the citizenship issue at work. When you study public health, what you understand and really appreciate from this domain is that everything that public health professionals think about is on behalf of a population. Of course, we don't want any individuals to get sick, and individual is is a bad thing, but we need to do things that affect the whole group. In companies, we often call this collaboration, we call it culture, we call it teamwork, we call it collective thinking. And if you're sort of a real left wing person, you might call it socialism, we won't get into that, but many, many studies have shown that companies that have collective thinking outperform those that don't. In fact, as I was reading up and really thinking about public health, I was reminded of one of the most valuable culture frameworks I've ever read is called the Competing Values Framework, which I've posted on my website today that looks at corporate cultures and the authors of this framework who are two professors from Michigan, Cameron, and Quinn, or maybe it's from Minnesota, I forget which one determined that if you look at many, many companies, they tend to have one of four cultures.
Speaker 1 00:07:47 There's command and control cultures like the military where you do what you're told. And that's that. There are highly collaborative cultures, which are called clans, where people group together in groups, and the groups play together and have fun together all the time. There are highly creative cultures which are focused on action, where people don't necessarily work in teams, but the person who gets the work done is the hero. And then there are competition cultures or market cultures where different business units or groups compete with each other. And competition is considered to be good. Now, every company has all four of these cultures at a time, but you do tend to find a general culture theme. In the case of public health and where we are today, you're going to have to practice a certain amount of command and control, and you're going to have to deal with the fact that if you are what is called an ad hypocrisy or a clan, these heterogeneous groups have to be brought into the fold.
Speaker 1 00:08:42 And what is really come back to me many, many times, as I've talked to lots of companies about the response to the virus is companies that have a safety culture, Dao Chemical for example, or Exxon or Chevron, these are companies that are built around a culture of safety. In fact, many of them have safety as their number one value. Shell Oil is another example. BP learn this example the hard way. And the reason these companies have these cultures is they know that they're dealing in highly dangerous situations because of their chemistry or because of their, uh, industrial operations. And if they have an accident, it could be a massive disruption to their business, to their people, to their brand. And so they really want people to think about safety first. How do they do that? They focus not just on training and education and signs on the wall, but culture.
Speaker 1 00:09:36 I remember very, very distinctly when I worked at Exxon in the late seventies, there used to be a rule at Exxon that you don't skip stairs when you go up and down the stairway. If you do, you gotta go back and step on every stair, which sounds completely ridiculous. But the point that we're trying to make is it's a safety issue. If you skip stairs, you could trip. If you trip, you could hurt somebody else, you could hurt yourself, et cetera. It was almost as important as not lighting a match in the oil refinery, which was obviously against the rules too. So what these companies do and what we can learn from them is by reinforcing the message and the mission of safety, they create a culture of safety. And so the behaviors of safety take place without formal education and rules. And I think most of us get this in the pandemic because we're all personally threatened.
Speaker 1 00:10:25 But this issue of culture and collectiveness thinking is critical, which gets me to number three, which is this idea of citizenship. When you read about public policy and you talk to public policy professionals, you realize that these are people that have very societal or population views of the world. One of my best friends from high school who was the public policy head for the city of Berkeley here where I live, and now she's in charge of, no, excuse me, public health. Now she's in charge of public health for the whole county of Kauai, the island of Kauai. And she deals with everything from floods to roads that have too many bumps on them to education, to healthcare, to right now covid. And she said, right now it's Covid, COVID. Covid is pretty much all she's doing. But what you realize when you talk to her is her work is not really about, you know, individual safety and health.
Speaker 1 00:11:13 She's always thinking about the whole. And in companies, that's something we have to consider. You know, I just had a long conversation with our senior faculty last week about the role of citizenship. And this is a group of people that's working on what we call human-centric leadership. And what I was pointing out to them is that if you look at human happiness and what creates human happiness, according to the World Happiness Report, which is a very, very big longitudinal study of happiness that's gone on for many years, there's basically four things that create human happiness. One is physical health, you know, mental health, your body. The second is financial health. You have enough money to live your life. The third is relationships, human relationships with your community, your family, and others. And the fourth is trust. And what you find is that if you look at this at a countrywide level, the happiest countries in the world are the Nordic countries, the unhappiness countries, or those going through terrorism.
Speaker 1 00:12:09 And the United States falls down in, you know, the second half of happy countries. Why is that? It's not because we don't make a lot of money here. It isn't because we're not unhealthy. We are reasonably healthy, not super healthy compared to the other countries in the world. But we don't have a good culture of social connections the way we used to. And we have a real problem with trust. In fact, if you analyze the data in the world happiness study, if the United States were to be as happy as say Finland, we would have to have four times the GDP to make up for the lack of trust we have in the United States. My point is that these issues of social relationship and trust and caring for each other are very, very important psychological issues at work. And relative to the pandemic and public health, it gets to the issue of collective thinking.
Speaker 1 00:12:59 Why do you wear a mask? Is it to keep you safe? I think Donald Trump believes that's it, actually, that's not it. It's to keep other people safe. Public health isn't about you taking care of yourself. It's about all of us taking care of our population, our community, our company, our shareholders, our customers. You know, when you go into a doctor's office, and I've been to quite a few this year, you get this feeling that they really care about the P P E and the cleanliness for you, not just for them. Obviously they're exposed to anything that you bring into the office, but they're thinking about your health too. And that's what has to happen at work. Do we have to take a citizenship view that our company, a sense a little society, and when we take care of each other, we become a better organization, we become a better society, we can better develop products and services for our customers.
Speaker 1 00:13:55 And in fact, our customers are part of that too. So if you're in the retail industry and you have customers coming and going in and out of your stores where you're shipping things to people, of course you care about their safety. That's part of your mission as well. And if you go back to some of the research that's done by various industry groups that have looked at this, companies that have high degrees of internal and external citizenship absolutely outperform their peers. All the problems we talk about in hr, diversity, inclusion, skills, capabilities, alignment, performance, resilience can be solved when people are willing to help each other. And public health requires this thinking and understanding that the organization as a collective whole is greater than any one of us. You know, one of the things, I've told this story many times, but one of the things I had the opportunity to do in my career is three or four years ago, I met Edgar Shine, who's one of the really famous authors of culture when I was doing a lot of work on culture.
Speaker 1 00:14:53 And I was sitting next to him waiting for his speech and he was speaking and I was speaking, and I kind of elbowed him and said, Hey, you know, with all these books you've written, is there anything that comes to mind as the single most important issue in corporate culture that you've learned over the years? And he leaned over to me and he said, yeah, it's pretty simple. He said, it's people helping each other. And he pointed out the fact that he had written an entire book on helping and how to help others and how to encourage others to help you. And what he was basically saying is that helping means you're thinking about the organization as a whole and not just yourself. And that we have incentives and reward systems and communications and cultural attributes that encourage people to help each other. So if I'm sick, I'm not gonna come to work cuz I don't wanna get somebody else sick that somebody else isn't wearing a mask.
Speaker 1 00:15:41 I'm gonna ask them to wear a mask because it'll be good for me and them. And it goes on and on into every single thing we worry about in the pandemic. The last thing I want to talk about is where we're going in 2021. And I am really spending a lot of time thinking about my predictions for next year, which I will write up sometime before the end of the year. And I would suggest that of all the things that have happened in 2020, and there have been a lot, believe me, perhaps the biggest of all is that we have all become more interconnected. You know, this little virus, which isn't even a living thing, it's just a little, little package of proteins is affecting every single one of us in an interconnected way. You can't get it by yourself, you have to get it from another person.
Speaker 1 00:16:25 So everything that we're worried about and working on has to do with interdependence between individuals. And going into 2021, the theme of CEO as Chief Empathy Officer, the theme of resilient hr, the theme of working at home or work coming to you instead of you going to work. The theme of people needing resilience and endurance and fatigue in their time, in their zoom meetings and being more flexible and empathetic and patient and forgiving to others. The theme of being humble, which by the way is one of the words that comes up a lot when you talk to public health professionals because these viruses are unpredictable in their early stages. And so they teach themselves in public health to be humble, to be curious, to pay attention to things that you may not understand so you can learn about them. And of course, the theme of working in cross-functional groups on urgent projects and supporting and helping each other as we complete them, all of that has been going on during 2020.
Speaker 1 00:17:31 None of it was predicted in 2019. In fact, if there was anything that was going on before this pandemic, it was the opposite. It was competition, it was growth, it was hard to hiring. It was stealing people from other companies. It was cranking up the tension and the pressure at work. Well, we've learned a big, big lesson this year that we have to deal with these societal, citizenship, human issues in order to survive. Now, our public health program in the academy is just a small piece of the domain of public health. You have to respect the fact that their entire masters in PhD degrees in this domain. But I do believe, and I'm not just throwing this out there, that every HR person in the world should become familiar with the disciplines and practices of public health. You don't have to become an epidemiologist or learn the details of contact tracing, but there are many, many ideas and principles in this particular profession that have direct impact on what we're gonna do this year and next year.
Speaker 1 00:18:31 And by the way, remember that even though there is a working vaccine that seems to work, we have to get people to take it. We have to distribute it fairly. We have to figure out what to do when people don't take it. We have a lot of issues to deal with in the safe workplace for the year ahead. So I really want to honor the public health professionals that are here to help us. And I want to encourage you in the next few months and certainly into next year, to learn a little bit about public health and bring it into your employee experience strategy, your safe workplace strategy, your back to work strategy, your leadership strategy, and everything else you're doing in hr. We are going to be here to help you. We are going to focus on this topic now that we've introduced the program. And the big greet set groups will be adjusted to accommodate this enormous topic. And as always, I appreciate your input and feedback and any questions you have, please send them to me and we would love to talk to you. Thank you very much.
