24 Jul #234 – Integrity Idea 057: Waken Wellness
Integrity Ideas are practical actions toward implementing a bigger WHY for the organization. We believe some are critical (and necessary) steps in the RENEW/RE-ALIGN/RE-IMAGINE/RESTORE process. Others are just ideas to be considered if they feel like a good fit based on what leaders prayerfully discern is best for stewarding the organization toward its WHY.
“Waken Wellness” is about employee benefits, and we believe employee benefits usually fall into the “if it’s a good fit” category.
Integrity Ideas are specific actions a leader can consider during the Re-Align step of Integriosity®–actions that will begin to Re-Align the organization with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities. You can find more Integrity Ideas at Integrous | Integrity Ideas (integriosity.com)
INTEGRITY IDEA: Waken Wellness
To complete the wellness theme from our last two posts on “Fortify Fitness” and “Nurture Nutrition“, “Waken Wellness” is about adopting practices and benefits that are specifically designed to encourage and support the total wellness of employees, including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness.
Wellness encompasses and goes beyond the nutritional health and physical fitness covered in our last two posts. Wellness is about the health and well-being of the “whole person”–mind, body, heart, soul, and spirit.
It recognizes that an organization pursuing faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing should care about the overall wellness of its employees, because wellness is critical to, and actually aligned with, human flourishing. “Waken Wellness” also recognizes that God wants people to be “well”, and the desire to be well may need to be wakened in them.
Wellness and Flourishing.
In his article “On the Promotion of Human Flourishing“, Tyler VanderWeele, Director of The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, writes about the relationship between wellness and flourishing:
Flourishing itself might be understood as a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good. We might also refer to such a state as complete human well-being.
From a scientific standpoint, we believe wellness implicates all six of the key domains identified and measured by the Harvard Program on Human Flourishing in their human flourishing index.
Like nutritional health and physical fitness covered in our recent posts, wellness certainly includes domain 2–“Physical and Mental Health”. It also captures domain 1–“Happiness and Life Satisfaction”, domain 3–“Meaning and Purpose” and domain 6–“Financial and Material Stability”. We think it even captures domains 4–“Character and Virtue” and 5–“Close Social Relationships”.
That’s all six! Wellness is about flourishing–caring for the whole person.
From a Biblical perspective, we know that God cares about more than just our physical health.
Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thessalonians 5:23)
Dr. Skip Moen observes that “Hebrew uses the word nephesh for the whole person; what we call body, mind and soul in the Greek world.” (So, we probably could have called this post “Nurture Nephesh”.)
As we did in the last post, let’s look at how Coach Don Nava describes the “abundant life” Jesus talked about in John 10:10 (“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly”). In his book Fit After 40: 3 Keys to Looking Good & Feeling Great, Nava describes what he believes is captured by “abundance”:
Abundance refers to an overflowing amount of everything that is beneficial to life—health, vitality, energy, strength, purpose, ministry effectiveness, career success, fulfillment, finances, friendships, loving family relationships, intellectual growth, and emotional well-being. Not only does abundance refer to an overflowing quantity of these good things—and many other good things—but also to having these things in balance. The Jewish understanding of wholeness was that all aspects of life are both present and balanced.
Like “wellness”, the abundant life is also about flourishing. In other words, “Waken Wellness” is about encouraging and supporting employees in claiming the flourishing that God desires, and Jesus came to make possible, for their lives.
Wellness and Work.
Dr. Amy Sherman makes the important tie between a faithful leader’s stewardship of an organization and the need to pursue what we are calling Biblical flourishing. She writes that “Vocational stewardship starts by asking: What are the hallmarks of human flourishing from a biblical perspective?” Sherman goes on to say that those hallmarks “include justice, beauty, peace, wholeness, economic flourishing, joy, community, dignity and intimacy with God.”
As we noted in our post on “Fortify Fitness”, encouraging and supporting employee wellness is not only caring stewardship–it is also wise stewardship. A wellness white paper by Storehouse Wellness says that studies of corporate wellness programs “consistently show positive ROI ranging from $1.50 to $3.00, driven by reduced medical costs, absenteeism rates, and improved productivity.”
The CDC publication on controlling health care costs is relevant here as it was for “Fortify Fitness”:
A systematic review of 56 published studies of worksite health programs showed that well-implemented workplace health programs can lead to 25% savings each on absenteeism, health care costs, and workers’ compensation and disability management claims costs.
“Waken Wellness” is one way to lead faithfully by curating and reinforcing a caring and compassionate organizational culture that aligns with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities, prioritizing the flourishing of people as an “end” and putting profit in its proper place as a necessary means to that end.
CONTINUUM: Practices
The Integriosity model organizes “heart change” along six Covert-Overt Continuums. There is nothing magic about these categories, but we believe they are helpful in thinking about practical execution of a Re-Imagined Purpose, Re-Imagined Values and a Re-Imagined Culture. The Continuums are Prayer, Proclamation, Policies, Practices, Products, People.
Each Continuum represents an area in which leaders can begin to think about, plan and institute Re-Alignment changes to the heart of the organization.
“Waken Wellness” is on the Practices Continuum. It involves practices the organization can adopt to affirm its commitment to Biblical flourishing and the Biblical principles of Imago Dei and love your neighbor, to reflect and reinforce its purpose and values, to care for its employees, to prioritize relationships and community, and to be wise stewards of the organization.
COVERT-OVERT RATING: Highly Covert
The Integriosity model breaks the Covert-Overt Continuums into six gradations–from Highly Covert to Highly Overt–that we believe are helpful in beginning to pray and think about what is most appropriate for an organization at a particular moment in time.
Most Integrity Ideas will have one place on the scale. Some can vary depending on how they are implemented. In one sense, “Waken Wellness” can be Highly Covert (an action that would be taken by a secular company). Even secular businesses should care about the wellness of their employees, if only from the Profit as Purpose “bottom-line” perspective of lower healthcare costs, less sick-time and higher productivity as detailed in the wellness white paper by Storehouse Wellness.
While we suggested “Nurture Nutrition” and “Fortify Fitness” CAN also be Overt (An overtly faith-based action known generally within the organization), we believe “Waken Wellness” SHOULD be Overt, because caring for the spiritual health of employees is critical to real “wellness”–real “flourishing”–real “abundance”.
Overtness in “Waken Wellness” is more than just explaining its importance in terms of the Biblical significance of treating people with dignity as creations in the image of God, loving your neighbor, and caring for your body as a temple of the Holy Spirit. It is about adopting practices and benefits specifically aimed at spiritual wellness, and those practices are hard to keep covert.
STAKEHOLDERS SERVED: Employees
When we categorize faith-based actions, we also consider the stakeholders principally impacted by the action: Employees, Customers/Clients, Owners, Suppliers/Vendors, Community and Kingdom.
“Waken Wellness” principally serves Employees by caring for their well-being. It also benefits Owners through wise stewardship and the Community through healthier members.
Flourishing itself might be understood as a state . . . `{`of`}` complete human well-being. (Tyler VanderWeele)
IMPLEMENTATION
“Waken Wellness” is harder to get one’s arms around than “Nurture Nutrition” or “Fortify Fitness” because it captures all aspects of the “humanness” of employees. In one sense, it is just about employees, but in another sense, it is about the entire RENEW, RE-IMAGINE, RE-ALIGN and RESTORE process, because it is about the bigger WHY of business a better way–maximizing Biblical flourishing by Humanizing People, Beautifying the World and Glorifying God.
As we discussed in post #200 (Prioritize Biblical Flourishing), Biblical flourishing is broader than human flourishing, because it captures the flourishing of all creation. “Waken Wellness” is focused on the human flourishing aspect of Biblical flourishing.
We think it is helpful to explore options for implementing “Waken Wellness” by looking at the Harvard program’s six domains of human flourishing. What is the right fit for an organization will depend on many factors, such as the number of employees, the nature of the work, the realistic budget for “Waken Wellness”, and where the faithful leaders of the organization determine is the best place for the organization on the Covert-Overt Continuums.
Like with all Integrity Ideas, implementation should only be done after prayerful discernment by faithful leaders. For an organization seeking to address wellness holistically, one option to explore is Storehouse Wellness. They have developed a Christ-Centered comprehensive wellness solution for organizations that encompasses nourishment, physical fitness, mental awareness, and financial health.
Domain 1–Happiness and Life Satisfaction.
Because work in the image of our creator is an essential element of our humanity, an organizational culture that turns God’s intended blessing of work into a burden is de-humanizing. By treating workers as a means–a tool–toward the end of Profit as Purpose, we believe business as usual leads to disengaged workers, which leads to less happiness and life satisfaction.
The toxicity of business as usual (and its consequence, work as usual) has led to the idolization in our culture of “Work-Life Balance” in which work is viewed as an oppositional force to life. Rather than work being the blessing God intended, happiness and life satisfaction are perceived to come by reducing and eventually eliminating work, which itself is de-humanizing!
People are more “fully human” when engaged in meaningful work that unleashes their God-given productivity and creativity and creates economic prosperity in a culture of Shalom built on Biblical principles of relationships, community and human dignity.
We believe returning work to the blessing God intended by aligning the vision, values and culture of an organization with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities is the best way for faithful leaders to encourage and support “happiness and life satisfaction” through work.
Consider these Integrity Ideas in particular:
Domain 2–Mental and Physical Health.
Our last two posts on “Nurture Nutrition” and “Fortify Fitness” include many ideas for encouraging and supporting physical health.
Covert implementation of “Waken Wellness” in the area of mental health can be providing employee assistance programs (EAP) with counseling for employees going through life challenges. It can also include education in areas such as depression and loneliness, which have reached epidemic levels.
But the mental health of employees is also cared for by cultivating a business a better way organizational culture that prioritizes relationships, community and human dignity. In his book Connecting, Larry Crabb wrote:
We have made a terrible mistake! For most of this century we have wrongly defined soul wounds as psychological disorders and delegated their treatment to trained specialists. Damaged psyches aren’t the problem. The problem is disconnected souls. What we need is connection. What we need is a healing community.
Creating a kind, caring and compassionate culture is at the root of many of our Integrity Ideas. For example:
Integrity Idea 001: Hire a Chaplain
Integrity Idea 005: Fund an Employee Fund
Integrity Idea 006: Provide Humanity Resources
Integrity Idea 008: Group Prayer
Integrity Idea 017: Listen to a Life
Integrity Idea 030: Encourage Biblical EQ
Integrity Idea 031: Catalyze Kindness
Integrity Idea 032: Adopt a “77” Policy
Hiring a Chaplain is a particularly effective way to care for the mental health of employees. Although many organizations have EAP programs, a corporate chaplain provides a very different resource:
• A chaplain is typically on-premises on a regular basis, whether daily or weekly. This creates visibility, accessibility and a sense of familiarity, which leads to trust.
• A chaplain is typically “on-call” for life emergencies 24/7/365. EAP programs generally require calling a service and booking an appointment with a counselor (possibly with delays of days or even weeks).
• A chaplain can be perceived as more independent from management and more likely to maintain confidentiality.
• There is often less “stigma” associated with visiting a chaplain than visiting a mental health professional.
• A chaplain is available to provide care in situations that are outside the scope of traditionally counseling, such as hospital visits for employees and family members, marriage support, and support for employees in caring for children or aging parents.
Although corporate chaplains provide voluntary, permission-based support focused on compassionate care, unlike most therapists, they are available and equipped to help with “spiritual wellness” if an employee chooses to pursue that path. Corporate Chaplains of America and Marketplace Chaplains are two leaders in corporate chaplaincy.
Domain 3–Meaning and Purpose.
Articulating and reinforcing a bigger “WHY” for an organization is the first step toward helping the employees of that organization see greater meaning and purpose for their work. Several Integrity Ideas are focused on reinforcing the “meaning and purpose” aspect of “Waken Wellness”:
Integrity Idea 002: Proclaim a Faithful Purpose
Integrity Idea 011: Celebrate Impact
Integrity Idea 038: Recall Your Faithful Purpose
Domain 4–Character and Virtue.
We have said many times that Integriosity® is about creating an organizational culture in which people learn to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons without even thinking.
For a faithful leader leading with faithful integrity through business a better way, helping employees experience flourishing in the domain of character and virtue starts with aligning Biblical values with a faithful purpose.
Values in an organization are critical because they serve to translate the purpose into an aligned culture. Purpose and values define the culture of an organization; the culture shapes the behavior of the people in the organization; and the behavior of the people drives the results of the organization.
We believe this domain is also a place where “spiritual” wellness can be found. Psalm 23:3 teaches us that God restores our soul by leading us on paths of righteousness.
He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Skip Moen tells us that this reference to “soul” is our nephesh–our whole self. An organizational culture built on a purpose and values aligned with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities helps its people stay on God’s path of righteousness so that He can restore their wellness.
The following Integrity Ideas particularly explore this in more detail:
Integrity Idea 013: Set a Values “Plumb-Line”
Integrity Idea 019: Banish Bribery
Integrity Idea 021: Cancel Cursing
Integrity Idea 023: Segregate Sacred Space
Integrity Idea 025: Reward Rest
Integrity Idea 026: Keep Your Word
Integrity Idea 040: Set Integrity Boundaries
Integrity Idea 043: Create a Cue Card
Integrity Idea 046: Clean Your Chain
Integrity Idea 047: Be Trustworthy
Integrity Idea 050: Discourage Winning
Domain 5–Close Social Relationships.
Relationships and community are at the core of an organization pursuing faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing. To repeat one of our favorite quotes from James Hunter:
To manage a business in a way that grows out of a Biblical view of relationships, community and human dignity before God has divine significance, irrespective of what else might be done from this platform.
A faithful leader leading with faithful integrity should care about removing barriers to healthy relationships at work, strengthening relationships at work, and strengthening the family relationships of their employees. Several Integrity Idea posts aim at these topics. For example:
Integrity Idea 004: Promote an ERG
Integrity Idea 005: Fund an Employee Fund
Integrity Idea 015: Remember the Fourth
Integrity Idea 016: Pick the Right “Peter Principle”
Integrity Idea 017: Listen to a Life
Integrity Idea 020: Buy Tickets
Integrity Idea 021: Cancel Cursing
Integrity Idea 022: Adopt Adoption
Integrity Idea 030: Encourage “Biblical EQ”
Integrity Idea 031: Catalyze “Kindness”
Domain 6–Financial and Material Stability.
For most people, work and an organization are the vehicles through which God provides for their material needs and the material needs of their family. Unfortunately, business as usual can use that provision to manipulate people through the fear of financial and material “instability”.
Business as usual optimizes compensation to achieve its purpose–Profit as Purpose in the context of a culture built on assumptions of Scarcity, Self-Interest and “Can We” Ethics. As we explained in post #169 (The “Way” of the World), this often results in senior executives being overcompensated and lower-level employees being paid “just enough” to keep them.
Leaders of an organization operating in alignment with the principles of the world–business as usual–will feel pressure to utilize job security, promotions and compensation to manipulate behavior in line with the maximization of profit. Creating the fear of financial and material “instability” becomes an effective tool to pursue Profit as Purpose.
As a consequence of this purpose and these assumptions, business as usual works against Shalom, devalues human dignity, is devoid of trust in God, and does not prioritize community.
As described in post #171 (How the World’s “Way” Wrecks “Work”), because the key attributes of business as usual do not align with a culture of Shalom built on Biblical principles of relationships, community and human dignity, the “way” of the world often brings the inherent “beauty-potential” of business (solutions, prosperity and jobs) with an ugly cost of “wrecking” work.
Leading with faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing leads to a very different approach. It reorients profit to its proper place as a necessary “means” and the maximization of flourishing of all creation touched by the organization, particularly people, as the “end” toward which the organization is managed.
Business a better way requires recognition of what we have described as four key principles of stewarding capital–Respect, Sustainability, Mutuality and Generosity.
• Respect. Respect for all humans because God created them, which means treating all stakeholders of an organization (owners, employees, vendors, customers, communities) with dignity and caring about how the organization is impacting their flourishing.
• Sustainability. Sustainability applies across all aspects of an organization, including its utilization of all forms of capital that drive the business and its relationships with the stakeholders related to those forms of capital. This requires leaders to assess the usage and the availability and health of all the capital it requires to keep operating–natural, human, social and financial.
• Mutuality. Mutuality is about an organization extending its culture of Shalom to all people it touches by managing all capital from a Biblical view of relationships, community, human dignity, flourishing and the common good. Mutuality is about ensuring that transactions are “fair” to both parties, regardless of bargaining leverage. It embodies the Golden Rule (Luke 6:31) and helps ensure sustainability of the organization, its relationships and its capital.
• Generosity. As explained in post #189 (First Things–Righteousness), faithful integrity requires more than “giving generously”–it requires the “vertical integration” of generosity by “living generously”. Living generously is about operating the organization (and, in the process, generating wealth) in a way that generously loves others and stewards creation. Living generously is living sacrificially–choosing to give something up or to forego a benefit because it benefits the common good–because it represents faithful integrity and increases the Biblical flourishing of others.
Several Integrity Ideas discuss these concepts:
Integrity Idea 024: Optimize Compensation
Integrity Idea 036: Thank Your Temps
Integrity Idea 037: Take Steps to “PPP”
For the organization, “Waken Wellness” is part of pursuing faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing. It is: recognizing Imago Dei; living out the commandment to love your neighbor; reinforcing an organizational culture that prioritizes relationships, community, and the flourishing of its people; and wise stewardship of the organization and its people.
PERSONAL NOTE (from PM): It may seem like “Financial and Material Stability” is out-of-place in a discussion of wellness and flourishing. My experience is that it is a necessary domain. Twenty years ago, a dear friend (B.J. Weber) gave me a book called Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions by Gerald May. He kindly told me he was giving it to me for the “grace” part. Because I was not struggling with anything I thought of as an addiction (e.g., substances, pornography, etc.), I almost stuck it on a back shelf. Thankfully, I read it and recognized an addiction that I would have never identified as an addiction–financial security. I recognized it as a primary driver in my pursuit of worldly “success”. I was not primarily driven to “succeed” by aspirations of power, prestige or material comfort–I was driven by the fear of “financial and material instability” even though by any rational standard I had “financial and material stability”. Was I flourishing? Was I as “well” as I could have been? My fear was devoid of trust in God’s promise of provision.
Only five short years later, Lisa and I felt God call me out of my position of “financial and material stability” as a partner in a Wall Street law firm for an undisclosed destination. We trusted. Fifteen years have gone by–God has provided (but the fear has not been completely eradicated). “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24)
ESSENCE: Integrity Ideas are specific practical actions a faithful leader can consider in leading faithfully through business a better way.
INTEGRITY IDEA: Waken Wellness
COVERT-OVERT CONTINUUM (six Continuums for action): Practices
COVERT-OVERT RATING (several levels from Highly Covert to Highly Overt): Highly Covert
STAKEHOLDERS SERVED: Employees
“Waken Wellness” is about adopting practices and benefits that are specifically designed to encourage and support the total wellness of employees, including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness. It recognizes that an organization pursuing faithful integrity through business a better way toward Biblical flourishing should care about the overall wellness of its employees, because wellness is critical to human flourishing. It also recognizes that God wants people to be “well”, and the desire to be well may need to be wakened in them. Wellness encompasses and goes beyond the nutritional health and physical fitness covered in our last two posts. Wellness is about the health and well-being of the “whole person”–mind, body, heart, soul, and spirit. Whether through education, prayer, or support services, “Waken Wellness” is also wise stewardship and one way to lead faithfully by curating and reinforcing a caring and compassionate organizational culture that aligns with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities, wanting employees to flourish because you want to love them as “neighbors” and not just because having “well” employees is good for the bottom-line.
Copyright © 2024 Integrous LLC. Integriosity is a registered Service Mark of Integrous LLC.
Photo credit: Original image by Esperanza Doronila on Unsplash
(photo cropped)
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