I have to admit that in my long HR career I made one mistake repeatedly and I was forced to confront it only when a major ailment hit me. This is the story of how being diagnosed with hypertension at a very young age drove home a painful message about the way most companies treat their employees – and of how they should!
It is imperative for organizations to understand and work towards creating an environment that promotes and boosts employee health and wellbeing
For those joining me here, let me clarify that this blog is about me. It’s about an event that occurred and a realization that hit me in its wake. This happened to me, and I worry that it could happen to all of us driven, ambitious, hard-working professionals out there. But, there is something that we can do about it -more about that later.
No arguments, I hope that the most important resource an organization has are its people. These employees are the ones that put in hours of relentless work to make the organization achieve its goals. If this is the case, then there should no argument that it is imperative for the employers to ensure their employees’ health and well-being. But honestly, this seems to be less of a priority than it should be for my peers in the HR community. It’s nobody’s fault I guess, after all, it took a serious ailment for me to understand this too!
I have been in HR for over two decades and for much of that time I was the stereotypical driven professional. It took me a personal setback in form of a diagnosis of hypertension, to bring the focus back on my own health and wellbeing. Over a decade later, now when I reflect back at those years; I can see clearly where I and the system went wrong. Despite being the HR head of a major international corporation, I never realized or helped my fellow workers to focus on their health. I’m willing to accept that I failed myself and I failed them too.
The corporate lifestyle is not child’s play. The entire system is geared towards keeping the employees motivated to put in their best and to overachieve every day. In this race to be better every day, the employer and the employees themselves lose touch with what is most important i.e. their personal space and wellbeing. Nobody teaches us in the business schools or in the corporate world about the importance of having a healthy body and mind, even while striving to achieve work goals. In the quest to scale new heights each day, the young and driven work-force ends up overlooking their health. This hard-driving lifestyle has fashioned a man into a machine with little to no sleep, poor eating habits, and no downtime.
No organization ever puts a focused effort into providing a healthy work culture for their employees
In 1998 at the age of 27, I was detected with hypertension. It was too early to fall prey to such a health issue, but looking back, it was inevitable. I was running flat out at home as well as at my workplace and was managing both roles with, what I thought was, a degree of flair. Looking back now, I recall there were entire days when I went by without a sip of water or a morsel of food. But, I never felt it because I was excelling at my work. Everywhere people appreciated my management skills. Both my family and my organization were proud of me and so was I. My mind was in overdrive all the time but I was overweight and often physically tired. Even with all that I was always asking for more responsibility -read more work. As an individual, as a member of a high-performing organization, and even as a productive member of a typical Indian middle-class family, I was conditioned to believe that this was the definition of success. This is what I “must do”. No one told me otherwise.
Little did anyone, including myself, realize that in all this, it was my health that was burning out hidden away on the back burner where I had forgotten it. By the time it was 2006 and I was 35 I had chronic hypertension, cholesterol, cervical spondylitis and getting better meant more and more medicines. It looked like I had reached a point of no return and this hit me hard. It made me re-evaluate my entire outlook to my lifestyle and my beliefs about life and work. I took a sabbatical and, as luck would have it, got the opportunity to move to London for further education. It is that stint in London where I rejuvenated my mind and body. I pursued a course in Counselling and took lots of time out for myself. Two years I had recovered some part of my health and more importantly developed a perspective not only as a ‘person’ but also as an “HR professional”
The honest fact is that no organization ever puts a focused effort into providing a healthy work culture for their employees. These efforts are usually little more than good intentions. But I now realise that this must become part of the psychological contract between the employer and the employee. I now realise that it is imperative for organizations to understand and work towards creating an environment that promotes and boosts employee health and wellbeing. Everything around the employee is designed to motivate them to put in their 200% to receive appreciation and success often at the cost of their health & well-being. While the HR Community is super-effective at putting into place programs that synch with organizational objectives – these objectives need to include employee health & well-being too.
This means that these initiatives must be well-considered (driven by chosen metrics), comprehensive (not activity based or mere events), individually tailored, and measurable -just like every other HR initiative. At plugH, this is the mission we have committed ourselves to.
And all this would not have happened had I not got diagnosed with hypertension at the age of 27.
