socially responsible organizations

(4 minute read)

Hi! Welcome to week four of Our Best Work Weekly, a newsletter from Healthy Pour where you'll get weekly tips on creating a healthy workplace, becoming a more compassionate leader, and cultivating a regenerative relationship with work. 

It’s been a weird week for leadership and business accountability. While this medium lacks the capacity for nuance necessary to weigh in on current events responsibly, this is an excellent opportunity to discuss the connection between businesses behaving ethically, toxic workplaces, and occupational burnout. 

Burnout is complex and never really caused by just one thing. In their book The Burnout Challenge, Maslach and Leiter detail the slurry of factors they call mismatches: workload, control, rewards, community, fairness, and values. When businesses behave in undesirable ways (unethical, nefarious, cruel, criminal, villainous, consumptive) that are out of alignment with an employee’s values, sense of fairness, and justice, it ultimately harms their well-being and can result in burnout. Misalignment of values and a lost sense of fairness are the more insidious and poisonous mismatches of the bunch. Additionally, father and son duo Charles and Donald Sull identified unethical behavior as one of the five pillars of toxic workplaces. Add this to the mountain of evidence of how corporate greed harms public health.

I mention all of this to say that cultivating workplace well-being goes far beyond giving everyone a Fitbit, offering rooftop yoga, or directing teams to the company’s EAP—it’s embedded in the organization's overall social and environmental behavior and impact. 

The good news is that organizations that behave in socially responsible ways see remarkable and lasting benefits, with increased well-being, lower HR costs, higher productivity, more innovative teams, stronger communities…

Examining the benefits of focusing on well-being shows that exploiting workers, the environment, and our communities is not the only way for a business to make money within a capitalist system. I’m not convinced there is such a thing as ethical capitalism, but mounting evidence within organizational and social sciences points to robust long-term benefits (including species survival) of organizations behaving socially and environmentally responsibly. 

Zooming back in: this happens at a cultural level, meaning individuals within organizations have the power to influence the direction of the organization’s behavior. Some have more influence than others, but we all play a role. It’s up to us to decide whether we will continue to be complicit in harmful and unethical business practices or if we course correct. It’s easier said than done since we know obedience and conformity are powerful behavioral motivators, but not impossible. It’s up to us to be aware and brave. 

See you next Monday,