Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

  • 3 Ways to Meet Survival Needs in the Workplace

    3 Ways to Meet Survival Needs in the Workplace

    I will never forget reading Arianna Huffington’s account of her personal experience that forced her to focus on wellness and wellbeing, namely sleep.  In one of her books, Arianna talks about how she woke up on the floor after hitting her head on the way down. She had collapsed due to utter exhaustion. 

    Arianna went on to found Thrive Global and wrote another book, The Sleep Revolution. The mission at Thrive Global is to “end the burnout epidemic with sustainable, science-based solutions that unlock employee performance and enhance well-being.”  They are tackling wellbeing through employers, helping us see that these issues are not an “employee benefit” but a business “strategy”. 

    At Horizon Point, we couldn’t agree more. Much of what Thrive helps people focus on is small behavioral changes that end up creating habits at the individual level.  If the majority of employees adopt these strategies and change habits, then it ends up impacting workplace outcomes at the organizational level. Doing this successfully demands that organizations understand and adopt ways of working that support these behavioral changes. We can’t demand people change their habits when we don’t support organizational structures and cultures that allow the habits to take place.  

    We need to help people meet their “survival” needs. When we do so, that allows them to “thrive” by being able to meet higher-order needs and impact business results. 

    So what do we need to support to meet survival needs? 

    1. First, as Huffington points to, SLEEP is foundational and critical. According to the CDC,  “Insufficient sleep is associated with a number of chronic diseases and conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression.”  In order to consider sleep, we also must consider people’s natural circadian rhythms.   This necessitates that we look at how our bodies function naturally as Daniel Pink says in his book, When.  Taylor focused on this book in a recent blog post.   Here are a few concrete steps for workplace implementation: 

    a. Get rid of anything that requires people to go against their circadian rhythms.  Hello rotating shifts – and to a lesser extent, night shifts. Get rid of them if you can. If you have to operate on a 24/7 structure, then at least keep people on a consistent shift that does not change. There is study after study about how detrimental this practice is to people’s health.  Here’s one: Shift work impairs brain functioning.

    b. Get people to do a time audit. (Here’s a good time tracking spreadsheet download to do so.) I particularly like this one because the notes column helps people to jot down how they are feeling, not just what they are doing. I would encourage using the notes section to also note when attention seems to be waning. In other words, how long have you been focused on a task when you notice it is harder to stay focused? Research suggests that this point is usually about 50 minutes to an hour for most people. Helping people track their natural peaks and troughs of energy, attention, and productivity helps them to understand their natural rhythms. It also can help them discern what is getting in the way of a consistent time to go to sleep and to wake, which research has shown is critical to performance. You can then take this and apply some general parameters around meeting times and workday structure for your team.   For example, our team at HPC did this and we found that mid-morning was almost everyone’s peak productivity time. Because of this, we try to reserve this time for individual work on important tasks as opposed to meetings. We also seek to eliminate other distractions and time-wasters during this peak performance time block. 

    2. Next, know that you have to aid people in completing the stress cycle. Stress is a natural part of life. It is adaptive and helpful in many cases, but we need to monitor the fine line between boredom and anxiety, as we’ve noted before in a blog post. Like dealing with a chronic lack of sleep, dealing with consistent high levels of stress leads to the same type of health risks and reduces cognitive functioning, thus negatively impacting workplace outcomes. We’ve compiled 7 Ways to Help Employees Complete the Stress Cycle. Check out some of the concrete steps to actually do this in the workplace in this blog post. 

    3. Finally, paying a living wage and/or helping employees maintain financial wellbeing is critical. We’ve written about examining wage practices (how to do it) and why what you pay does matter. You can check those posts out for practical tips and advice on addressing this survival need. But I think the podcast from Adam Grant titled Why It Pays to Raise Pay  (listen about 4 minutes into the podcast to hear the MIT professor talk about this) drives the point as to why we have to focus on this survival need because when we don’t, we are actually “making people dumber”.  We reduce people’s cognitive functioning when they are constantly worried about how to make ends meet, whether it is because their paycheck does not support their ability to survive, or because they have made financial decisions that trap them into not having enough to pay their debts. So first, examine if you are paying living wages (check out MIT’s living wage calculator). If you are, great. Then second, coordinate with your banker or financial advisors to offer classes to employees about how to maintain financial wellbeing.  Most of them will do this for free for you, just make sure you’re reviewing the curriculum that will be used and selecting something that has been research-backed. 

    As the previously mentioned podcast says, we really need to think about these survival issues because when we don’t, we literally make people “dumber.”  Not meeting survival needs reduces cognitive functioning. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the ERG Theory, we know survival needs as “existence needs”. We can’t talk about helping people thrive until we create workplace conditions that are conducive to people existing or surviving. 

    Interested in learning more about how to help people survive and then thrive in the workplace? Check out and sign up for our Illuminate Workshop. 

  • The Point’s Top 5 Posts of 2021

    The Point’s Top 5 Posts of 2021

    2021 has been another interesting year. Despite the challenges experienced this year, we have strived to continue to provide insight on a wide variety of topics on The Point. We try to bring real-life scenarios and personal experiences into our writing. We’re always glad to help you on your quest for knowledge to better your career, your work environment, or your organization!

    Here is a look back at The Point’s Top 5 Posts of 2021:

    5. Hiring Incentives in 2021

    4. 6 Steps for Planning and Implementing Effective Extended Leave

    3. World Mental Health Day- October 10th, 2021

    2. To Offer or Not to Offer: Pros and Cons of Sign-on Bonuses Post Covid

    1. Taking a Walkabout

    Thank you for a great year. Please visit us in 2022. We promise to keep you informed and entertained in the new year!

    If you’d like to subscribe to The Point, you can do so here.

  • 2021 Book of the Year

    2021 Book of the Year

    It might seem odd that a company with a core value of “productivity” would choose a book of the year titled Do Nothing. But in a year of seeing people’s mental and physical health deteriorate due not just to issues a global pandemic continues to cause, but also because of the phenomenon of overworking and under living, we found the book captured the essence of putting productivity, and work, in perspective.   

    As the author, Celeste Headlee states, “The question is not about whether you are productive but what you are producing.” And we would go on to say that the question also expands to examine the method in which you structure your production and whether or not it leads to healthier, more joyful lives and more meaningful output. 

    Over the course of the year, we watched ourselves and our clients attempt to be on two to three virtual meetings at a time, catch up on work emails over the weekend because the work week demanded forty hours of meetings alone, and watched as story after story was brought up about people’s mental health crashing and therefore causing a complete meltdown of physical health.  Emergency surgeries were needed, trips to the ER for chest pains took place, and people cried at lunch with us because they were so exhausted and did not see a way out of their current state of life revolving around the need to meet “productivity” demands at work and at home. 

    But as our core value of productivity intertwines with the value to put people first and to foster passion with an end goal of innovating the workplace, we found that many of us don’t have the bandwidth or the energy to innovate anything as we constantly chase the next goal or metric, all while trying to multitask as we are chained to our phones and computers. 

    We’ve lost sight of the goal of work with purpose and replaced it with work towards some endless pursuit that creates exhaustion and insanity. This narrative may not be something you’ve personally experienced, but we’d venture to guess you know and love at least one person that has been impacted by this conundrum. 

    So, we all took or are taking sabbaticals in 2021 and 2022 to think deeply about what this means and to develop training and insights to shift the paradigm for ourselves and our clients on what it means to work, to be productive, and to think deeply about just how we got to this point where enough is never enough. 

    Do Nothing provides a history and research lesson about how, over the past 200 years since the industrial revolution, we’ve gotten here and gives us six “life-back strategies” on “how to break away from overworking, overdoing, and under living.”  

    And although we as a team may not agree with everything Headlee postulates in her narrative which may be more based on how she defines work (something for pay) versus how we do (something for pursuing purpose), we agree with its method of the scientific practitioner approach by taking sound research and applying the learnings of that research in our own lives and workplaces to experiment and learn.  Then, we can follow the information and data our learning provides to make better decisions. 

    And as Headlee suggests, in our metric obsessed world, sometimes the information provided doesn’t come in the form of numbers but in the way we feel.  We need to be paying more attention to how we feel and what that means for us to be productive in a way that leads to creativity and innovation. This book provides us with the opportunity to think about how to do that.   

    In fact, one method of feeling should be tied to our ability to have time to think, not just do.  Our ability to think, apply, and learn is what separates us as human beings.  It’s what makes us human and it’s what produces great work.  It’s what produces innovation. 

    Given the thinking and learning we’ve done over the course of 2021 and into 2022 on the topic of workplace wellness and wellbeing and in an effort to innovate the workplace through people practices, we are excited to be offering workshops- one on a cruise ship, yes on a cruise ship!- to help you come to understand the research, design experiments at your workplace, and help follow the data and the feelings to help not only yourself but also to help your workplace build a culture where people thrive.  To not just create change at the individual level, but to create it through organizational systems and structures.  These workshops will also provide an opportunity for relationship building and fun.

    The premise of our book of the year and our workshops is not to literally “do nothing” but to realize we’ve gone so far to the opposite extreme that we need to find a way to focus on doing nothing so that we can center ourselves so that we can find balance and pleasure not only in leisure but also in work, and to realize that sometimes they are both so integrated that you cannot have one without the other. 

    We are so appreciative of the opportunity to pursue purpose with you this year.  Thank you for your business and your friendship.  Blessings to you and your organization as we all strive to build workplaces where people thrive and enjoy doing work worth producing and have the health and mindset and permission to enjoy leisure.  Both are noble goals, and both require one another to happen.

    If you are interested in learning more about how to create organizations where people thrive, please visit our Illuminate website at: https://horizonpointconsulting.com/illuminate/

  • 7 Ways to Complete the Stress Cycle

    7 Ways to Complete the Stress Cycle

    We’ve been looking at all things workplace wellness throughout the fall, seeking to provide insight to ourselves and our clients about how to create workplaces where people can thrive.  A lot of the impetus is put on individuals to manage their wellness and stress.  This has its place but is also up to organizational leaders to help create systems and structures that give people the ability to survive and thrive at work.  This will impact how they also thrive in all aspects of life given that people do not live and operate in silos. 

    A thought-provoking book that is geared towards the individual management of stress is a book called Burnout: The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle.  Although it focuses on how individuals can “complete the cycle” the book provides insights to organizational leaders on the difference between stress and stressors and how to complete the stress cycle in ways that can be incorporated into workplaces. 

    First, what the book describes as stressors: 

    Stressors are what activate the stress response in your body. They can be anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine could do you harm. There are external stressors: work, money, family, time, cultural norms and expectations, experiences of discrimination, and so on. And there are less tangible, internal stressors: self-criticism, body image, identity, memories, and The Future.  In different ways and to different degrees, all of these things may be interpreted by your body as potential threats. 

    It’s worth noting that as another book, What Happened to You? points out that we may be cognizant of these stressors happening to us, but more often than not, we aren’t.  As this book describes, our lower order brain- the brain stem then the diencephalon then the limbic system- takes in input from the inside world of our body and the outside world through our senses and processes stressors and reacts to stressors often before our high order brain, the cortex, ever receives it and is able to THINK about it.  That’s why you sweat when you’re nervous when you don’t even realize it, or you flee or “attack” someone when they smell in a way that is associated with a bad memory. 

    Likewise, we often don’t even realize what we are doing or why we are doing it in reaction to a stressor. We often do not connect the dots to the linkages between our stressors and our stress. 

    As Burnout describes, stress is: 

    …the neurological and physiological SHIFT that happens in your body when you encounter one of these threats.  It’s an evolutionary adaptive response that helps us cope with things like, say, being chased by a lion or charged by a hippo…. It initiates a response to help you survive…. Your entire body and mind change in response to the perceived threat.

    As the book goes on to state, what we’ve been conditioned to do when we experience the lion is run! The book quotes Robert Sapolsky as saying “ …the core of the stress-response is built around the fact that your muscles are going to work like crazy.” 

    But we aren’t doing very much running these days in modern workplaces. We aren’t involving our muscles to help alleviate and eliminate the stress we feel.  We are, however, experiencing a lot of modern-day “lions.”

    So what do we do? 

    1. So first and foremost, one thing workplaces need to incorporate into practice to help their employees complete the stress response is to initiate movement into the workday.  Especially when a situation is anticipated to be stressful or a stressor has occurred. 

    For example, one day I knew I was going to have to have a conversation that was going to induce a stress response with someone I worked with.  Instead of sitting down across the desk from her, I said, “Let’s take a walk.”  We walked and talked instead of sitting and staring.  I know it helped to reduce my stress about the situation and I think it did hers too. 

    We need to be encouraging people to move and allowing time for movement during the workday. The book suggests that most people need twenty to sixty minutes a day to walk, run, swim, dance, or anything that involves physical activity. 

    2. In addition, in the modern-day workplace we live in, we may think that dealing with the stressor deals with the stress.  We need to realize dealing with the stressor doesn’t necessarily allow us to complete the stress cycle.  Take for example a “jerk” you’re dealing with at work.  Maybe he or she is not a lion, but they’ve been elevating your stress level at work, so much so that your natural response is either to literally fight the lion, I mean jerk, or to flee from him/her.  But, you can’t come across the table at the person literally like your body might be telling you to do, so you play nice. (As the book states, social appropriateness- or being taught to be “nice” at all costs- really impedes the natural stress cycle- it makes us get stuck). Or maybe you even act and go talk to your supervisor and/or theirs about it, or you go home and vent to your spouse about it.  But, dealing with the stressor, aka the jerk/lion, doesn’t mean you’ve completed your body’s natural response to the person and situation(s) he or she creates. 

    So we need to help people, again, move to help complete the stress cycle. But we can also create workplaces where other things happen regularly- all that involve engagement with our bodies and minds-  to help deal with the stress, not just the stressor.  These are: 

    3. Breathing.  “Deep, slow breaths help regulate the stress response.”  Encouraging people to breathe is a very simple thing that can help change the tone of a conversation, meeting, or a person’s outlook on a situation.  Asking people to inhale deeply for a count of three to five and exhale at the same or longer cadence is simple, and sometimes seems silly, but it may be the small thing needed to get people to a point where they can access their higher-order brain to be able to think clearly and respond appropriately. 

    4. Positive social interaction.  Things to include in positive social interaction are opportunities for laughter, affection (hugging and kissing- encourage this at home, not at the office-!), and also can include interaction with animals, like petting a dog or a cat. 

    5. Allow time for creative expression. Incorporating sports, arts, music, theater, and storytelling in all forms can help with this. Some of the work your organization does may naturally incorporate creative outlets.  We incorporate coloring sheets, fidgets, and role play at times into training to help initiate this.  Asking people to start a meeting by sharing something- in other words, something that is going to allow for storytelling can be a good way to start things off on the right foot.  Like, “Tell us about a time when you…” where the question and response is tied to the meeting’s purpose. 

    6. Allow crying.  Crying is one critical way for the body to release stress, yet we label people who cry, especially at work. At the very least, keep a stigma around crying that is neutral and do not punish people at work when crying happens. 

    7. Help people pay attention to their body’s response to things.  This is necessary to know when stress is taking place and also to know when the stress cycle has been completed due to one or more of the interventions above.  It’s like knowing you’re full after you’ve eaten. Some people are more in tune with it than others and we need to equip people with the mindfulness to pay attention when we are “hungry” or “full” when it comes to stress as well.  Some questions or actions you may help people engage with this is to encourage people to check their heart rate, monitor their body for tension, sweating and other responses that show us we have not completed the stress cycle and need to “eat” to initiate an action to help our bodies do so.  

    How do you deal with stress at work and how does your organization incorporate systems and actions to help people complete the stress cycle? 

    If you are interested in learning more about how to create organizations where people thrive, please visit our Illuminate website at: https://horizonpointconsulting.com/illuminate/

  • 6 Steps for Planning and Implementing Effective Extended Leave

    6 Steps for Planning and Implementing Effective Extended Leave

    Earlier in the week, our post was a reflection on why I will be taking a walkabout, or an extended amount of time away from work this fall.  Each person on our team will be taking four to six weeks off at some point within the next six months.  

    Whether it is taking time for intentional rest, reflection, and/or deep work or going out on maternity or extended sick leave, stepping away from anything at work requires preparation beforehand in order for the time away and the people providing support during the time away to be a success. Here is a roadmap for doing so: 

    1. Plan/proactively discuss with your team the timing of your absence and the roles and responsibilities they will have while you are away.  You can read more about my team’s discussion on the timing of my absence in the last post, but the next step in this for me has been thinking through and communicating with them about who will do what while I’m out. We will do the same as each person takes leave. Some things are natural, given that many of the projects I work on and the people I work with have at least two of our team members providing support.  There are some things where you may be the only person with a knowledge base for execution, so planning proactively gives you the time to provide cross-training, introductions, information, and or tools needed for success. 

    2. Communicate proactively with the external contacts you interact with regularly that you will be out with.  For the past two weeks, I’ve emailed or called every client and/or potential client that I interact with to let them know that I’m going to be out, for how long, what this means in terms of what they should or shouldn’t expect from me (for example, I will not be checking email during this time), and who their new point of contact will be on our team.  I will say that in doing this, EVERYONE I’ve talked to has been supportive and encouraging in taking the time away.  They are appreciative of the heads-up and connection(s) with our team for the project to continue in my absence. 

    3. Start saying “no” based on your scheduled time away.  In the past two weeks, I’ve said “no” to more things than I have in a long time.  Both personal and professional.  It really helps you realize how much stuff you say “yes” to without even thinking about it.  “Yes, my calendar is clear on the date you asked to meet with me, so yes, I’ll meet with you” happens a lot without a thought about whether or not the meeting is necessary or if you even want to meet with that person.  We commit to things without thinking about them and then wonder why we can’t find the time to do the most important things. It’s pretty liberating and reflective to take back your time. 

    4. Set guardrails and systems around being able to maintain your no and the margins the time away should provide.  I know my email will be a problem for me. It is the mechanism in which I say yes to most things because most things come in the form of calendar invites via email or requests for this or that via email.  So, for me, I will not be checking and responding to emails while I’m out.  To ensure I do this, someone on my staff will be changing my email password for me on the day I go out.  She will also check the box once a week to make sure there are no emergencies she and the team need to tend to (this will help me maintain my sanity of not checking it) and I will set up an out of office reply explaining that I’m out, points of contact for specific needs, and when I will return.  You may not need to go to the extreme of getting someone to change your password (if you do, you have a lot more self-control than I do, because checking email is such a habit for me), but know yourself well enough to deploy the guardrails needed for maintaining the integrity of your leave. This may mean deleting social apps on your phone, disconnecting your wifi (or getting someone to change your wifi password), or setting standard times around the do not disturb feature on your phone.  Figure out what you need and solicit any help needed to do so. 

    5. Reflect on what these planning exercises are telling you. As mentioned earlier, delegating responsibilities to others may help you realize they need to be cross-trained on a certain task or function to be successful.  Saying no because you’re going to be out may help you realize you need to say no indefinitely to certain things.  It may be telling you that you have a problem with your social media or email usage and need to get a healthy grip on it.  All these planning items can help you succeed in an absence and the reflection on them can help ensure long-term success upon your return. 

    6. Reflect on the purpose of your time away and what you hope to accomplish in taking it.   Before you go out, write down two or three things you want to focus your time on while out and post them for yourself in the form of yes or no questions you will see every day. Mine are: 1) Did you rest and restore today? 2) Did you read/research and write/create content today based on your purpose? 3) Did you play with your kids today?  Don’t overload yourself with more than three to four questions.

    Framing the questions in the second person as “you” has been shown to be helpful in training the brain to eliminate “chatter”. It gives your brain a word that naturally offers more grace than using the first person “I”.  Like the book, Chatter states, “Doing so (using ‘you’ to refer to yourself) is linked with less activation in the brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, and less negative emotion.” Some questions you may have if you’re recovering from surgery or bringing a newborn home may be: Did you rest today?  Did you do something to help your body recover today? Did you refrain from checking work email today?  You know what you need, so customize the questions for you. As you begin to heal and or accomplish what you want while you’re out, your questions may change. 

    Finally, you may not be at liberty to decide if and when you get to take an extended time away from work.  But if you are a person in a role where you can impact policy at your workplace, consider how you might drive the conversation around the need for people to take more than a standard week or less of vacation annually and what business results it might achieve.  At the very least facilitating dialogue around how you can provide autonomy by structuring work differently (four day work weeks, hybrid work arrangements, mental health days, etc.) in order to impact workplace wellbeing and productivity could lead to substantial gains in recruitment and retention.  If you’d like more information on the research related to this, see our previous post on readings for reflection.