Achieving Well-Being Through Strengths
Whenever I talk about the importance of well-being, people think I mean making more time for candlelit baths and spa sessions. But when I say well-being, I’m not only talking about self-care or swapping out your morning pancakes for green smoothies. Well-being is a more full-picture, wholistic approach based on a set of factors that are important to how we think about and experience our lives.
A high sense of well-being is the difference between surviving and thriving. It’s about experiencing satisfaction in your job, nurturing strong interpersonal relationships, feeling financially secure, being connected to your community, and enjoying good physical health.
Gallup has devoted years of study to better understand the complexities behind well-being. Through their extensive research they’ve identified five critical components called “The Five Essential Elements.”
1. Career
2. Social
3. Financial
4. Community
5. Physical
There are two things I want to point out about this list. Firstly, the ordering isn’t accidental. It’s sorted by order of importance. Secondly, and crucially, all of these elements are interconnected. If you’re lagging in one, odds are good it’s dragging on your sense of well-being in the others. The dream scenario, when we look at the Five Elements, is to score high marks across not just a few, but all five. Most people have nailed one or two, but all five can be a bit of a challenge. Gallup research has found that 66% of people are doing well in at least one of these areas but only 7% are thriving in all elements.
A big reason for this is the challenging nature of the first essential element: career. When we look at the career element, the sad fact is that most people are dissatisfied, unhappy, and disengaged at work. When asked the question “Do you like what you do each day?” only one in five can answer with an emphatic, “yes!”
Career dissatisfaction is all too common, and here’s the thing: if your shine is dulled at work, and you’re not given the opportunity to do something that engages you and makes the most of your strengths, then it’s going to have a domino effect on your well-being in all the other categories.
I learned this first-hand. For a while I held a job that was totally unfulfilling and left me just trying to make it to the end of my day. At home, I brushed aside those feelings of frustration and annoyance and tried to be fully present. But when I quit that job, I found out that this was far from the truth. A few weeks after I left my daughter said, “Mom, you seem so happy now that you’re not complaining about your job so much.” Ouch! I thought I was doing a good job compartmentalizing and keeping my work life struggles separate from my home life. Guess not!
When you feel unmotivated at work, Sunday nights are the worst (again, I can very much relate). There’s a sense of dread that builds as the clock ticks closer to Monday, definitely-not-fun day. We spend so much time at work, sometimes more than we do at home. Our jobs can even feel like a part of our identity, and if our identity is one characterized by being unappreciated and underutilized, then it’s no wonder that it has a negative impact in all other areas of our lives.
The detrimental effects of scoring low in career well-being isn’t just theoretical or based on my observations. The research bears it out, sometimes in kind of scary ways:
* Disengaged workers are a leading indicator of the diagnosis of clinical depression.
* Most heart attacks happen on Mondays.
* Low career well-being increases the risk of anxiety and stress.
On the flip side, people with high career well-being are more than twice as likely to be thriving in their lives overall. And it’s not just about the effect it can have on the individual — increased sick days, general malaise, active disengagement, doing just enough to get by — a low sense of well-being can translate to very really, very steep costs for employers. The Bureau of Labor statistics reports that the average sick day costs a business about $348 in lost productivity. There’s a direct correlation between employee well-being and organizational well-being.
What can you do about it? I think you might guess where this is going… yup, CliftonStrengths. When people understand their strengths, when their employers and managers understand their potential, it unlocks an incredible wealth of positive change. It allows the person to feel like they can authentically be themselves. It gives them the tools to articulate their value more clearly. It provides managers with the information they need to fully utilize their direct reports’ top talents instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to well-being.
Higher engagement, higher satisfaction, higher self-esteem, and, yes, a higher well-being score are all noteworthy byproducts. And that high well-being score in the career element has positive spillover effects into the four other Essential Elements. Investing in strengths training is investing in helping your employees thrive. And when they thrive, so do you.