Why Workplace Values Fail and How to Fix It

Why Workplace Values Fail and How to Fix It

Read Time: 4 Minutes

A big thanks to the People and well-being leaders in this community for their amazing focus on supporting their organizations that have brought this work to life.

It’s a collective effort to realize well-being in the workplace, promote mental and emotional health for performance, and end the culture of chronic stress and burnout. #Wellbeing is the new performance 

Join us on Mar 1, 2023 at 12PM PT / 3PM ET for our next Workplace Wellbeing, Performance, and Recovery Support for People Leaders on LinkedIn.


Key Highlights:

  • Aligning personal and organizational values
  • Navigating Trauma and grief
  • Coaching support and exit interviews

The theme for this week’s community support is aligning values.


Have you ever wondered why finishing or updating your company’s core values and actively promoting them doesn’t lead to higher engagement, performance, and belonging?

When it comes to organizational values, it’s no more than a projection; a hallucination.

Most optimally, you can use it as a guideline on the type of behaviors you’d like to see in culture. Fake it to you make it.

Worse case, it’s fancy words you have on your website.

I know that’s a little hard to hear after investing all that energy and effort into labeling the desires and observations of your leaders.

Intrinsic motivation does stem from values, but only our personal values.

The missing link most workplaces miss is spending the time to help your employees learn their own values hierarchy in their career and map them onto the collective values of the organization.

There’s no need to throw the baby with the bathwater, the good news is that the values mapping exercise can be integrated into your workplace performance management process.

It helps people leaders connect deeply to their teams and acts as a great trust-building exercise, not to mention one of the most effective burnout prevention exercises.

All are covered in Part 5 of the Burnout Recovery VIP Experience.


Navigating Trauma and Grief

An important question that was raised this week was about handling grief and trauma in the workplace.

With ongoing layoffs, increasing political tensions, and growing civic unrest, not to mention personal challenges like:

  • relationship breakdowns
  • health issues
  • loss of family

Dealing with loss can be challenging, especially with today's rampant chronic stress and burnout.  It can be a tipping point for many that can easily turn another stressful event into a traumatic trigger.

When it comes to trauma, we think trauma is only the big rapid escalation to a high-intensity stress event like dealing with death or a catastrophe.

However, micro-stresses can also be a source of trauma as many of us don’t regularly process our emotions.

Regularly coping with suppressing and distracting ourselves can turn the workplace into a stressful furnace with a high potential to trigger unwarranted emotional events.

So regarding workplace well-being, recovery, and performance, being trauma-informed and responsive is very relevant in our modern work landscape.

Let’s break the silence and bust the mental health stigma and make it okay that as a population, we’re not as mentally healthy as we believe to be.

We just survived a global pandemic.

We are amidst a global recession.

Let’s make healing and recovery a mantra.

Remember, when performing at our best, we have to be at our best, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

Ensure your teams learn the skills to process emotions, and have professional support on standby to help with processing trauma.


Coaching Support with Exit Interviews 

I draw a clear line in the sand when it comes to burnout-related turnover - that’s not an option.

It’s 100% preventable.

While it’ll take time, consistency, patience and focus to deliver on burnout recovery and prevention in the workplace, quite often we lose out on our best talent when they quit because of burnout.

Remember, someone quitting a job from burnout doesn’t mean they won’t ever enter into another one to eventually burn out again.

While burnout has systemic and environmental components, burnout-related habits are conditioned into us at the individual level.

That means, if we don’t know how to clear burnout during the sabbatical process, we can unconsciously carry it into the next organization.

That’s why a combination of coaching and therapy support as a channel when catching someone leaving the workplace during an exit interview from burnout, can be an effective last line of defense.

It gives great insight into unhealthy organizational behaviors and cultural elements and helps to foster well-being champions, mentors, and advocates for the workplace out of the lived experience.

It’s a mental health stigma buster.

When it comes to addressing leadership for workplace burnout, I believe it’s not a top-down or bottom-up approach, but an inside-out approach.

Burnout can happen to anyone, given our modern-day life-work climate.

Supporting someone through their recovery not just signals trust and restores talent, and it can be foundational to developing and amplifying an engaging workplace well-being program.


Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. If you're still looking for personal recovery and support for your well-being, I'd recommend starting with this affordable course that's helped hundreds of people and their organizations, here.

2. If you’re struggling with a crisis of burnout and looking for an effective way to recover quickly, consider a life-transforming Burnout Retreat for your next vacation, here.

3. Build out Workplace Burnout Responsiveness and Recovery in your organization by booking a strategy call with me, here.

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