Last week I was talking with an HRBP who is grappling with finding the best way to support leaders who are asking for help with staff wellbeing.
To give some context, the HRBP's organisation has a lot of interventions in place, from an active group of Mental Health First Aiders through to wellbeing days for all. But stress levels remain high.
This isn't an unusual story; an organisation may have lots of wellbeing initiatives, but for some reason the environment doesn't enable those initiatives to have their intended impact.
There can be lots of reasons for that, a number of which we've written about previously.
I've been reflecting on this podcast this week and how some of the themes here around habit and routine might provide us with some insight.
One of the questions that Prof Ben Gardner and Paul Davies discuss is:
'What is a habit?'
Prof Gardner is clear: In his view the habit is not the behaviour. Rather the habit is the thing that triggers the behaviour. You can think of it as an association or a process.
For example, perhaps you have a habit of going for a walk after you've eaten your lunch every day.
Then your team introduces a lunchtime meeting and you realise after a few weeks that your daily walks have stopped.
That's because the situation has changed, breaking the association between the trigger and the behaviour.
If you want to reintroduce walking into your routine you'll need to look at that process and rebuild it.
This is a fascinating area to explore for any of us looking at how we can change our own behaviour, either to introduce more healthy behaviours or to reduce unhealthy ones. But it's also a really interesting area when we're thinking about team environments.
The workplace typically has lots of situations that can trigger set behaviours or habits.
For example, perhaps in your team everyone makes a cup of coffee and grabs a biscuit before the start of a meeting. Or maybe everyone stays late when the senior manager visits. Or perhaps every Monday morning huddle starts with the question 'What problems do we need to overcome this week?'
As Ben and Paul make clear in the podcast, creating good habits is not a solution to all ills, but they are a useful part of the picture.
For those of us working around wellbeing and organisational culture, I think there is a lot of value in us helping leaders to look at the situations and associations that exist in their teams, and the behaviours they trigger.
What I like about this approach is that it clearly signposts that our environment influences our behaviour - we don't operate independently of the world around us. It allows us to have broader conversations where we consider the environmental cues that might need to change if behaviour change is to be successful.
It's a good opportunity for all of us that work in personal, team or leadership development to encourage those we work with to look at the whole context, rather than just focusing on the individual.