Lessons in Wellness-Crafting & Environment-Shaping with Duncan Young

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group. And I've got a fellow Australian joining me today, Duncan Young from Sydney. Welcome, Duncan.

Duncan Young: Hey, Dane. Great to be here with you.

Dane Groeneveld: We were just talking about how to introduce you and you said, " Hey, just say it's Duncan from Sydney, and let him tell the story". I'll hand it off.

Duncan Young: Great. Yeah, it's one of the things we talk about in wellbeing, is the ability just to ask open questions. Tell me about yourself. My name's Duncan Young, I live in Sydney. I'm a motivational speaker, habit change and executive coach. Previous to moving into the wellbeing space, had a long career with international property and infrastructure, business cord lend lease, which over time we moved from being an engineer, through to being the head of workplace health and wellbeing.

Dane Groeneveld: Great. That's an interesting journey. You don't normally put engineering and wellbeing in the same bucket. Maybe tell us a little bit about how that evolution came about.

Duncan Young: Okay. The concept that I've now learned is called job crafting. I've always been a curious cat. 30 years ago, I started in the property sector. And I've always had what you probably call a side hustle, so traditional property site engineer, site manager, project manager, development manager. And in my spare time, I built a house. It won an environmental award. That started me thinking about different ways that you could look at your role, and sustainability was something that was starting to emerge. This is in the early 2000s. It was interesting that when the tsunami happened, I got an opportunity to be seconded into a UN team in Sri Lanka. And I was able to see firsthand the impact of climate change on these vulnerable nations. From there, I moved into a head of health and wellbeing... Sorry, head of sustainability role based in the UK. It's six years in the UK, which is amazing. And then I was looking at a thing called sustainable human capital. We call that health and wellbeing today, but much of sustainability is based on energy, water waste, environmental issues, and now we're looking more deeply into what make people tick and how do we help people thrive? That's what we call wellbeing.

Dane Groeneveld: Neat. And so that sustainable human capital concept, that was from a internal viewpoint, how to make sure we've got optimal teams, workforce available to our projects or what was the genesis of that movement?

Duncan Young: Look, in my 28 years at Lendlease, I literally was a team at one. I was always doing something a bit different. I always think that I'm looking at what we call weak signals. And we know that when you watch a weak signal, it takes a lot of time to be adopted by a mainstream business. Large businesses per se, have always cared about their people. Most companies will say people are our number one assets, but I think at the time, people were focusing more on health and safety. Health and wellbeing is a prevention of chronic disease, whereas I'm looking at the promotion of wellbeing. How do you coach people to flourish, be the best version of themselves? That's the opportunity that we're trying to provide people, not just being okay, but being the best version of themselves every day.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. And you're right. I think it is easy to focus on the statistics that businesses get managed by on safety incidents et cetera, but promoting wellbeing, particularly through Covid but even before that, it's becoming very evident which companies do a good job of it, which companies don't, and how that plays out not only in the workplace but in their community brands and license to operate everything that goes with that.

Duncan Young: Yeah, I suppose the thing that I found, which was interesting is that I spent most of my time working externally. I would be outside of the Lendlease, essentially selling wellbeing products into large corporates. The clear link between good wellbeing and engagement... And again, the main game is really to increase engagement of your fellow employees. And of course, as we live longer, so you and I are probably going to live six to nine years longer than our parents, we're going to live probably into our late 80s, early 90s, and that means we're going to be working longer. The ability to be healthy, be able to transition between roles, re- skill, learn new things, we call that broadly wellbeing, it's going to be more important because we're living longer but we need our healthy lifespan to increase with our lifespan.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that. And so tell me a little bit about what that looks like. In those early days, what type of initiatives, activities were you bringing forward to people?

Duncan Young: Yeah, okay. I'm telling a tale in hindsight, if I joined the dots of all the things that I did along the way, there's no way I could visualize where I would've got to today. But when you look in hindsight, you can see all the things I've done has add up to the rich experience. I think the permaculture course that I did in the early 2000s probably hasn't accelerated my career, but it's given me a broader awareness. There are lots of things that I have done. I could see that the ability to influence people and to understand more deeply about how people operate, led me to doing my certification as an executive coach, for example. What did it used to look like in the early days? We would essentially have... We will build awareness. You'd stand in front of a room and you'd say, " You don't stop what you're doing today, you're not going to live a long and healthy life." They're large format discussions, their luncheon learns, they're those things. This is about giving information to people, but you and I both know that information doesn't equal change. We work with a finished company called Firstbeat. They have heart rate variability monitors, they measure your sympathetic and parasympathetic dominance. And for viewers out there, that's just your recovery, that's your parasympathetic, and your sympathetic is your stress system. We put these devices on people, they wear them for 48 hours and we'd say, " Why don't you try a few things about your day?" We could see over the course of a day how stressed they were, how they slept. The things they did during the day really impacted their sleep 12 hours later. Once you have that curiosity, when you give people the actual data and they see their resting heart rate, respiration rates et cetera, they start listening. Then we coach them into how to change. And of course change, is difficult but we know that if you work on your strengths, you're far more likely to succeed in the long term than working on your weakness. Our program is called Build Your Ideal Day, and it uses appreciative inquiry, which is strength- based approach to change. That's what we use. And we've used it through thousands of people globally. We've done it in Japanese, Italian, English, US English, English English, Australian English. It works really well. Small steps to change is a big thing.

Dane Groeneveld: That's really neat. I was recently doing some work with Daniel Pink. He came and spoke to a number of us and he talked about chronotypes and how some people operate better early in the day, other people later in the day. Is it that type of thing that starts to get picked up as you look at the data and you play to people's strengths?

Duncan Young: Well, it's interesting. Daniel Pink will talk about the importance of timing and that your chronotyping is interesting but it can be shifted over time. What we largely see, the big surprise for people, is even though you sleep, that doesn't mean you're recovering. Everyone knows you need seven to nine hours sleep a night, but you need seven to nine hours of recovery. And what we do is with our heart rate monitoring, we can show that if you were watching Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, arguing with the missus, drinking booze, having coffee after three o'clock, your recovery when you're asleep, you'll still get your stress system activated. We will coach people to say, " How do you quiet your mind before bed?" That could be reading a book, that could be having booze free days because alcohol's a sedative, but it doesn't mimic a natural sleep cycle. And of course we know sleep's super important because physical recovery is the first four hours, but mental recovery, how you lay down new memories, how you do all that is the second half. And many people are missing out on this second half. We know of course, that that shift work has been put on as a potential cast inaudible just because it's so disruptive to your sleep. Sleep's really important, but showing people during the day how stressed they are and giving them a simple tool, if you can slow your respiration rate to six breaths per minute, automatically your stress system turns into a recovery system. It's pretty simple. You've just got to remember to do it during your time.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's actually encouraging me to start breathing a little more slowly.

Duncan Young: Exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: That Finnish device, what was the name of that company?

Duncan Young: The device is called Firstbeat, and they are a wellness... Essentially they're a wellness device company and these are called biofeedback devices. And we're measuring heart rate variability. It's not your heartbeat, it's the distance between beats of your heart. And as that changes, we can measure what's going on. If I was to send to you work for three days, I could tell you VO2 max, tell you walking speed, it would tell you how much recovery you got at night. Obviously, there's daytime recovery. You could sit down at lunch and read a book and it mimics in some respects, a natural sleep cycle. It can show the impact of napping, all those things. If you're a stressed executive or an executive under low pressure, understanding how to recover, because recovery is the secret sauce to success. It's not extra workload, it's the recovery where you make your gains. Teaching people how to do that and giving them their results is pretty important.

Dane Groeneveld: It's funny on that recovery piece that we really don't talk enough about it, but I even think in simple terms, back to when I played rugby at university, we would take creatine drinks to try and improve our recovery so we could go and do more rest. The creatine didn't give us bigger muscles, it helped us recover more quickly. Bit of a hack. Probably had some downstream impacts on the kidneys but it worked.

Duncan Young: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. These devices come from the Finnish winter Olympic team. If you happened to be in that team, if you didn't get enough parasympathetic recovery the night before training, they don't let you train. Literally, you're measured on your recovery. Then you take that into the mainstream. We've probably had 1500 executive wear devices. And it's interesting, some people have life sorted because stress is something we shouldn't be worried about but chronic stress is, burnout's a big thing these days but stress is a natural response to stimuli. And once you wear it, as long as you're recovering well, it's okay.

Dane Groeneveld: Good, good. You touched on shift work as a carcinogen. That captures my attention because we do a lot of work with our customers putting people into operating environments. And we've obviously talked about the executives recovery but have you seen any examples of being able to put this data into play to drive better health outcomes, better recovery outcomes for shift workers?

Duncan Young: I don't work with shift workers per se. I'm more the office based executives but it's not my view that shift work is a carcinogen, that's a WHO. That's what they're saying. This isn't a view of Duncan Young, this is a view of the World Health Organization. Shift work and giving people adequate breaks to recover, and then helping people understand that we've given you an adequate break to recover, that's actually for recovery. It's not for...

Dane Groeneveld: Don't go party in Bali.

Duncan Young: Don't go party in Bali, that's right. Again, if you give people the right information, largely people get it right. And information is king. It's funny, I've looked at essentially construction workers, if you like, foreman on site. We see interesting things that if people... One example is people were living on the central coast from Sydney, train trip was about an hour and a half each morning but they need to be on site around six o'clock. They were getting up at four o'clock in the morning, so interrupting a normal sleep cycle. But once they got on the train, they actually had 90 minutes of sleep, and it mimicked the natural response of their sleep cycle. Once they could see that their body was recovering on the train, they stopped scrolling through their Instagram on their devices. They would actually try and get extra recovery. It's about using your time better, could be reading on the train to slow your mind down, we all need a break between when we finish work, we need an end of work routine, which is Cal Newport's description, transitioning from work to the rest of life, which is called home.

Dane Groeneveld: That's a big one. I worked with an executive coach recently that talked about book ending the day. Start with something for yourself, end with something for yourself. Unfortunately or fortunately, it depends which way you look at it, with Covid, with a lot of people moving to remote work, they're walking from their kitchen, their dining room, spare bedroom, straight into the family environment, sometimes multiple times in the day. That becomes a challenge, whether you're an executive or not. Are there any key practices, routines, rhythms that you've seen with your executives that you work with that help with that end of work routine?

Duncan Young: Look, broadly, we crave routine. And routine helps us set up habits as well. 40% of all your daily actions are related to your habits, an unconscious action but just goes on the background. With Covid, obviously changed a lot of things but changed a lot of things for the better. Why I was able to do more, I didn't have to commute into the city every day, allow me more quiet time, so the ability to research books, write the blogs and record the podcast. I think mimicking either a work cycle if you're working from home... Let's say a walk from here down to the Manly Ferry, and then that was my start of the day. Well, you can still mimic that even if you're working from home, you could walk to the ferry and walk home. And so it's just about not doing extra work, it's about mimicking a natural cycle. And of course, we know productivity is based around having good breaks. The desk time study we know is quite a famous study, and it was more based around numbers and things but the most productive workers worked a 52 minute work cycle and then they had a 15 minute break. That's where we saw the most productivity coming. If you think about breaking up your day into 90 minute cycles et cetera, with morning, have a morning tea, a lunch and afternoon tea, and then you do an end of work routine, that's really important to maintain because the routines are something that really do underpin your day.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And actually, maybe like you said with Covid, it's way healthier to take that walk down to the ferry terminal than to be in a car for 60 minutes in traffic. You can probably mimic healthier routines than maybe you were stuck in before Covid.

Duncan Young: Yeah. And I suppose what we've mentioned just then, is really about physical wellbeing, but wellbeing's a really broad church. You've got physical wellbeing, you've got mental wellbeing, you've got career wellbeing, financial wellbeing. We've spoken previously about a strength- based approach to change, if we know... For me, curiosity is what drives me. Allowing a time in my day to read something, listen to something or to write something is really important when I feel I've had a good day and I reflect, they're the thing. You don't necessarily need to... I swim every morning, as we mentioned, the bold and beautiful down in Manley. But if you just took time for yourself to listen to one podcast or read one section of a book or whatever, they're the important things. Carving things out so you can grow and learn because again, our elongated careers, we're going to need to be flexible and to keep on learning.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's interesting. I was working with a health coach a couple of years ago, Dan Miller, and one of his big things is anti- fragility. And he talks about getting in the sauna. I've just recently purchased a sauna, and it's brilliant because my wife and I sometimes together, sometimes apart, it's a three person sauna, we'll just get this time in there. And to your point on curiosity, it might give me a chance to read, it may give me a chance to listen to a podcast, but I'm in this enclosed quiet space. I feel like I'm looking after myself, and it just gives me a huge energy left.

Duncan Young: Yeah. I suppose you've raised an interesting point there in terms of environmental shaping is probably the key to your health and wellbeing. But we've spoken then about the physical sauna or sauna. If you're in Finland, it'll be the sauna obviously. And then the things you can do physically to set yourself up, that might be the food you've got in the fridge or all those things. But you've also got your digital environment. When you turn your phone on, is it Instagram, is it Facebook? Largely, if you want to get on and have a good day, it shouldn't be that. And then you've got your social environment. Who you surround yourself with makes a big difference to how you progress in life as well. Thinking about those three things of physical, the social and the digital, is really important.

Dane Groeneveld: The social one's a very interesting one. Scott Galloway's just recently released his new book, Adrift, and he's brilliant at providing these charts that create this profound statement. And one of those charts said that today compared to 20 years ago, we've all got far less close friends, which is sad but I think it's probably a direct correlation with the digital environment becoming so unhealthy, because if everyone's spending so much time in their digital environments, they're not making the time to really routinely and regularly catch up with good friends.

Duncan Young: We just live in a different world. I think it's hard to compare what we had to what we have now because you could argue that we have greater access to more people than we have ever before. If you look at studies like the Harvard grant study they've been running for 80 years, they pretty much show that the strength of your social connections determines your subjective wellbeing, what we call that happiness in life. The world's happiness report, again, if you look at the six or seven questions they ask of the 3000 people across 151 countries around the world, one of them is, " Do you feel someone has your back?" That's a question about, " Do you have a close friend?" And obviously, Robin Dunbar talks about the size of the units, the 5, the 10, the really close friends. You might only really have one or two close friends and then it inaudible out. But we have an extraordinary opportunity to build our weak connections. And if you think about Julian Sandstrom, she's probably inaudible university, she studies the value of talking to strangers. Did you know that if you just rock up in the morning saying you're going to try this tomorrow, when you rock up to get your latte in the morning, you're not going to look at your phone, and you're going to say to the barista, " Paulo, how are you today? How are things with you?" You're going to personalize your transaction. It turns out that personalizing the transaction versus just looking at your phone and ordering, gives you up to a 15% lift in your subjective wellbeing or happiness. Think during the day you've got between 8 and 12 opportunities to speak to people, dog walks, school drop off, ordering your latte, checkout person, you could be increasing your happiness and your connections through weak connections even though you haven't got this really strong depth as a close connection. I think you can curate your social biome, which are all the little things you do during the day that might be the best brand, it could be the weak connections, talking with strangers, to actually improve your overall feeling of belonging in your community.

Dane Groeneveld: I really like that approach. That's a really positive way to frame where we're at today. And I love the biome construct too because it is a lot of little parts, it's not just one central unit or movement.

Duncan Young: Yeah. The gut biome piece is if you think... I had run a podcast show also called Build Your Ideal Day, and we had micro microbiota the other day, they're a Queensland based organization and they look at gut biomes. When we talk about gut biomes, it's the small foods you put in every day that increase your gut flora. Why won't we look at our social biomes as well? It's the small social snacks we take every day to increase our mental and our feeling of belonging in society.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Actually it reminds me, we brought all of our teams together in Florida at the beginning of the month in November, and I was speaking to one of our younger entry level team members, and I'm sitting there with Colton saying, " What's new?" And he said, " I'm really pushing myself to step out and just introduce myself to new people in the business that I don't get to work with every day." It's a little bit of that weak connections play, and he was buzzing off it. That was perfect evidence of that approach.

Duncan Young: Yeah. It's funny, if you listen to people like Adam Grant, talking to people, you can be on your extrovert/ introvert radar thing and talking to people or strangers is not a natural thing. But surprisingly, we find that people enjoy the interaction. I think there's an experiment in Chicago where they said, " Are you going to jump on a train in Chicago? We're going to give you a small reward for that. Would you talk to the person next to you and see how you go?" Most people are going, " No way in the world am I talking to anyone on the train." They get off their stop and they interview them again. They say, " How is that experience?" And the majority of people said, " Wow, it really made my day. I met someone today who I never thought I would've spoken to." We've all got to push ourselves to make these stronger bonds in our society because we're seeing lots of people getting their information feeds from different sources and we're slowly splitting apart. We need to be able to talk to people and hear their views and be active listeners, obviously listening's a really key skill that we all need to get better at.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it is. It's probably one we should be doing more work on in schools when you think about it. No, I think that's a huge one.

Duncan Young: We're living long lives. School never ends, so we've got to keep on learning these skills. Lynda Gratton's work on the future of the skills that we need, really important over time. And one of those is interpersonal relationships can become more important as we progress.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, I believe it. Yeah. No, I think that's going to be a huge part of the future of work. The other thing I liked about Adam Grant, I'm glad you mentioned him, he had a post out on Twitter the other day that talked about data showing that people that go and do their side hustle, and you gave evidence of this at the beginning of this conversation, people that go and do their side hustle on a Tuesday night turn up to work on a Wednesday far more enthused and energetic. Whether that's because they connected with people in a different sphere to their daily job, daily social routine, or whether the work really sparked some excitement, in your case, building a really cool house. I think there's value in pushing ourselves out of the daily routine as well, having a good daily routine but also just constantly exploring at the fringes.

Duncan Young: Yeah. Look, I think everyone should have a side hustle. It not only ignites people's curiosity about the world, it helps them follow things they're interested in. But I think if everyone could think like a business person within a business, you're going to get more value out of people. It's interesting that if we think about job crafting, this is a theory that's been around for about 30 years, if you just think about your job in a different way, it could be cognitive crafting, it could be time crafting, environmental crafting, just think differently about your job and then do something to adjust that. It makes people far more engaged at work. I think increasingly, this idea of job crafting, changing your role to suit your strengths, is what it really is, is going to be really important. And it ties in with the side hustle concept as well. I've essentially built two six year chunks of my career out of things that I was interested in. I've been able to make them a business and stay within a larger business. People would often say, " You seem to know more about this than anyone I know. Maybe you should be the head of health and wellbeing or whatever."

Dane Groeneveld: I think we're actually just... One of our values here at HUDDL3 Group is be pioneering. We've started this Pioneers Club, we're working with Dr. Ernesto Seroli, who has done some really cool work in economic development. And his whole view is if you harness the beauty in people, the passion in people so that they can come and do what they want to do, then that's where you start to see innovation in a community or in an organization, particularly with entrepreneurship becoming more and more real I think, for a lot of people. And what's been interesting, we're only just kicking off that initiative but to your point on job crafting, people are starting to become excited about having the opportunity to explore what they are passionate about, what they do like, what they want to be the expert in, and not being told, " Well, in this company, if you want to get to this role, you have to do X, Y, Z." It can't be that rigid anymore.

Duncan Young: Yeah, yeah. I think having a really strong vision... When I look at companies that do health and wellbeing really well, one of the things they have is alignment to the vision of the business. And so pioneering is a great one. It'd be interesting to unpack that and see what that looks like on a day- to- day basis. If you were to be pioneering, what does it actually look like? Or have you seen examples in the past when you've been pioneering and it's worked well for you? I want to also unpick another thing, we've mentioned Covid a few times. We're in a post Covid environment, and you mentioned the word antifragility. We have an expert here in Australia called Dr. Paige Williams. She's an expert on antifragility, Tal Ben- Shahar also talks... He's from New York University, talks about antifragility a bit about if you crush this ball in your hand, if it returns back to the normal size, that's called being robust. But if you drop this ball from this height and it bounces higher or bounces back, then that's really anti fragilian. We had some Australian researchers, this in the positive psychology space, look at the impact of the SARS pandemic and also the Covid 19 pandemic. And they found that the stress of the pandemic in some cases actually allowed post traumatic growth, that they were actually start a new path to their career or they looked at things in a different way. I think anti- fragility is really important and it's next logical step on from being robust, which is just about to take more and more pressure without crumbling, but antifragility is that really bouncing back. And I love that idea.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And I hadn't heard of post- traumatic growth but I think it's true. We've seen good examples of it out there where people grow. And in fact, we've had a few people on the podcast when we talk about what their definition of good teamwork is, particularly people from the military world, and they look back fondly on coming through the trauma of bootcamp or royal Marine training, commando training in Lympstone or wherever it might be. Very cool. Maybe moving into that team direction, a lot of your work Duncan, is with executives and professionals. How have you seen that translate into the team environment that they're in? If a leader is really truly setting these good habits, how does that trickle down?

Duncan Young: Yeah. Firstly, wellbeing is what's called a continuum. There's a thing called a Cantrell Hope Ladder, " Out of scale of 1 to 10 today, how is your life going from a wellbeing point of view? And in the future, how would you like it to be?" After asking that question thousands of times, I'm yet to find someone that says, " No, I want my health and wellbeing to be worse than it is today." That suggests on the continuum that you never get there. Wellbeing's a skill of small, daily, intentional actions we make every day. Once we understand what good wellbeing looks like, and again, that could be the physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, career, financial, all that stuff, then we start to think about the role in which we play. Many of the wellbeing work that we've done the past is about me, it's about Duncan being the best version of himself, using the heart rate mantra and that stuff. But then we need to think about the next thing, which is we, " As a leader, how can I set up the environment to help Duncan thrive?" It could be healthy food at work, it could be managing meetings so that Duncan can go for a swim each morning. Or if he's been traveling or speaking overseas, there's an additional day off before he goes back to the office. And then there's us, this is almost at the government level of stuff. How do we shape our environments so communities thrive? When you're surrounded by people who are thriving, you're more likely to thrive yourself. I think viewing it in those three things, it's the individual, that's the me, the we and the us is really important. And leaders can make a really big impact. High performing teams you often see it. If you go into a room, you're about to start a presentation, and I literally do hundreds of presentations, you watch the high, the deeply engaged team, they're not on their phones waiting for you to start. They're chatting to each other, they've got dialogue, there's a buzz in the room. You go to others who are disengaged, and they're just waiting for the show to start and they're going to speak for 15 minutes and not much going to happen after that. That's because the leaders probably said, " We've got a really special guest coming in today, this is going to help you." They're framing why wellbeing is important. They've probably given enough time off for them to think to maybe their job crafting themselves. Everything a leader does is really important. We join organizations because we like the rolled up goal. Everyone joins your organization because it says be pioneering, but they leave organizations because the manager who they're aligned to doesn't share the same value. And it's interesting, I do this a dirty trick, but I say, " How many of you are looking forward to the weekend, really looking forward to it, can't wait for the week to end, had enough for the working week." And I say, " But just before you put your hand up, I want you to tell you that people who have a manager who they see as a partner, don't experience what's called the weekend effect, because they're a partner in a business, versus those that see their managers as... The supervisor can't wait for the weekend because they don't have their own autonomy and their own competence. It's a really interesting thing, the leader plays an amazing'.. Well, your direct inline supervisor plays an enormous role in your overall health and wellbeing.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's actually a big one. I was listening, and I can't remember the name of it now, but it was a book on blinkers, short summaries. And it said there was this coach talking to an employer and he said, " If you call your staff and say you're sick for the day, how do you think they feel?" And he was like, " Oh, I think they feel okay. I think they feel like they'll get on with the job and they don't need me there. And the coaches, actually the data suggests that when you call your staff and say that you're not going to be there, they rejoice, they're relieved, they feel like they have the autonomy and the freedom to get their work done. That's a default position in a lot of teams. Having a manager that's partnering, as you said, and giving people room, giving people autonomy, setting good health and wellness examples, it's clearly a way to drive performance.

Duncan Young: Yeah but we started the beginning of the interview talking about the difference between health and wellbeing, and an example of health would be is when you're sick, you get sick leave. In Australia, that's about 10 days. I'm not sure what it is in the US but companies that are thinking ahead of the game are giving wellbeing leave, which is if you feel you need to take a day off to look after your health and wellbeing, whether that's medical, physical, social, or whatever, we'll give you three or four days a year to do that. And some companies are doing it and they're finding that not everyone takes their wellbeing leave because just knowing that they're trusted to manage their own wellbeing not only reduces sick leave, but people don't even take their wellbeing days because just the knowledge that if they need to, they could take it, is enough. And so that's pretty special when we're starting to deal with giving people autonomy to live their best work and normal lives.

Dane Groeneveld: I think you're right. In fact, I was talking to Eric the other day who's the CEO of SmartSearch, our software business. And he was saying that he's noticed an interesting phenomenon recently bringing some team members in, and they're not asking questions about PTO the way that most new employees will here in the US, paid time off, which is a catchall bucket for sick leave and vacation holiday. And he was saying it's a really interesting phenomenon, which he puts down to the fact that these people are excited about the autonomy they're being provided and the mission that they're coming to join, the cause that they're here to deliver on. There is absolutely some hard science behind that.

Duncan Young: Yes. One caveat I think, if we're to extrapolate that even more, is that when we're working from home or we're working remotely, that we haven't got the guardrails that we used to have, come in inaudible, you'd leave at 5: 30, everyone would come together for lunch. If you work for a European business, they come at nine, they're left at five, and everyone sits together for lunch for an hour, and they're actually phenomenally productive. You go, " How can I be that productive with that less time?" I think as we move to greater passion in our work, we need to make sure as leaders, we're looking at our employees and saying, " Actually, I know you love your work, but make sure that you've got the balance right because we'll get the best out of you as an employee and you'll be the best example for others if you can maintain this over the long term and not go into a really deep dive and then explode."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, I think that's a big one. We had a guest on the show, Suzanne Conrad, who'd worked with Lululemon, and she was instrumental in driving a lot of their culture and people initiatives. And one of her big things in her new business is about remembering your future self, which requires you to think about not just what you're performing this year at work or this year at home, it's how do you want to look back and remember yourself in 10 years what you've achieved? You start to think about health and wellbeing, you start to think about relationships, you start to think about growth and how you've explored your curiosities. And I think it's good to take a more holistic approach to that personal planning. Maybe that ties nicely into that job crafting opportunity that people have if they really think about where they want to get to in life, how they want to be existing as a 60 year old, a 70 year old, an 80 year old, maybe that starts to pull them forwards into some new avenues to explore.

Duncan Young: Yeah. James Clear sums his... He's the author of Atomic Habits. He has a great example of that. He talks about identity- based change as a habit change theory. He says, " Every action you take is a vote for the person you want to be." With your rolled up goal to be the best version of yourself, to be the healthiest, expand your health span, every action you're taking is a vote for the person you want to be in the future. I think if people can remember that, and obviously, you don't need to be goodie two shoes every day of the week but if you do more good than bad, then you're going to get there in the end.

Dane Groeneveld: I really like that, it's a great framing statement. Very cool. There's so much we've covered. If you think about teamwork in the future, and you said it earlier, it's hard to join the dots sometimes but in retrospect it helps, but if you were to be taking a shot at joining the dots for the future Duncan, what do you think would be a good outcome for teams in 10 years and 15 years time with the emerging knowledge base that we're developing and the emerging technologies and social change?

Duncan Young: If I was to look into the future, I think the future is human. We know that machines are going to help us with a whole bunch of stuff, with the really smart stuff, like being able to just capture things on the internet, it's always going to be done by humans. How can we be the best version of ourselves? Well, we're the best version of ourselves when we feel supported, we're given the right autonomy. And it's essentially self- determination theories, so competence, autonomy, et cetera. If we think of how that plays out in the future, it's giving people the freedom to explore the stuff they're good at, build on their strengths over time, setting it up as leaders, so creating the right environment for people that do that. And then because we don't know the future, then we're more likely to thrive and succeed if we're all emotionally and physically well. Focusing on the whole human's really important. And of course, work is such a key thing to humans in terms of our identity, we find a lot of our purpose in life from work, you meet a lot of your colleagues at work. Work's going to be really important, we just need to remember that it's a really important part of our society and helping shape that for others is really key.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, I think that's a great outlook. If I summarize some of the big things that I heard today, I love the fact that you created the curiosity used data to drive people into the habits and really build on strengths, I think that's a great approach to bringing wellbeing into the workplace. I thought it was fascinating the way that you talked a little bit about end of work routine and the way that we work, the 52 minutes and the 15 minutes to give ourselves recovery time. I think recovery is something that we just don't talk about enough in teams or in the professional world, maybe quite separate from what's on the sports field. That's a great catch. And the social biome, that one just stood out to me in a big way. I love the concept of going out and talking to strangers and getting that lift. I think that's something that we can all do, building on those weak connections. It's a great hack and a great habit. Lots of good stuff there. And I think the final one that we ended on as far as how we take wellbeing into teams and into communities, that movement from me to we to us, that's huge. I think it's a great way to be building teams, it's a great way to be exploring different teams in your communities. And there's a lot there, a lot there to unpack from today's conversation for our listeners. A big thank you. And if anyone was to want to reach out and learn a bit more about having you out as a speaker or as a coach or a strategist, how do they best find you, Duncan?

Duncan Young: Okay. The best way to find me is duncanyoung.com, it's my website. I've got a podcast series, which you can find on Apple, called BuildYourIdealDay, all one word. And so you can just reach out and get in contact. But the key things that I want everyone to remember today is that if you want a successful wellbeing program inaudible, you got to build awareness, foster curiosity, and you've got to embed lasting change. Do that and what's called a learning loop. You just keep on adjusting it and doing it again, you're going to be successful. And of course, thank you to you, Dane. At a high level, you probably think, " Oh. Well, I want to record 50 podcasts this year." But really, what you're doing is helping other people gain access to speakers and information they might not come across. Good on you for taking the time to not only think of all the speakers, but obviously put on your own podcast. Well done.

Dane Groeneveld: No, thanks, Duncan. It's been a pleasure. We'll talk again soon.

Duncan Young: Great.