The COVID-19 pandemic has generated extraordinary stress, anxiety, and suffering, but in many ways it is simply a crescendo on a much longer refrain. Put simply, the way we are working and the environments in which we do our work have become increasingly unbearable to a large proportion of human beings.

This fact shows up in numerous statistics: frustrated workers imparting poor service and experience to customers and patients, low employee engagement, high turnover rates in “essential jobs”, levels of burnout that range from 20-80%, the inability to “find enough talent,” and leaders regularly stepping down from their roles to “spend time with family”. These outcomes have a distinctly personal impact on what we sometimes refer to as morale. They also tie directly to organizational and business metrics, and make it much more difficult for workplaces to accomplish the goals they set and remain financially competitive.

For several decades, our efforts to address stress, burnout, and morale in the workplace have largely focused on interventions to rescue or rejuvenate individuals through confidential counseling, employee assistance programs, gyms at work, meditation and nap rooms at the office, etc. These efforts have two things in common. First, they shift the burden of stress reduction and wellbeing to individuals by asking them to take care of themselves so they can deal in a hardier fashion with the demands of their work. Second, they have not substantially impacted stress, burnout, and wellbeing at work.

We need a new and different paradigm, one that fundamentally alters our mindset about work being a source of wellness rather than a source of depletion, and one that provides a holistic set of avenues to generate wellbeing at and through work. One way to do this is to conceive of work as a healing ecosystem.

What would a healing ecosystem look like, at work? Defined, an ecosystem is a a community of organisms and agents that interact with and within their physical environment. Breaking a workplace ecosystem into its component parts might look like this: 1) physical, digital, and political structures in which we do our work; 2) climate, or the way things feel (“emotional temperature”) in any given part of the workplace; 3) people, who come with individual traits, preferences, and experiences; and 4) the interactions between people and their leaders.

When we look at work this way, several insights emerge. First, relying on wellbeing interventions that primarily focus on individual people is too narrow a focus to hope for any progress. A person might exercise, eat right, sleep well, meditate, and regularly access therapy, and yet may remain unable to overcome the combined impact of structures, communal climate, interpersonal interactions, and leadership on day-to-day experience. Second, why have we focused so much on individuals, assuming that structures, climate, and leadership are not also sources of wellbeing? Third, if our places of work conceived of the ecosystem and all of its elements as viable avenues for producing less suffering and more thriving, we wouldn’t be so stymied in our efforts to address stress, anxiety, and burnout.

The good news is that a healing ecosystem is possible. Indeed, the Care Collaboratory and others are working to discover how to shape and nurture healing ecosystems, and robust scientific research illustrates that interventions focused on each of the ecosystem domains above measurably reduce stress, mitigate burnout, and promote wellbeing. In subsequent blog posts, we’ll explore each part of the healing ecosystem in more depth and provide examples of activities that enhance wellness. In the meantime, it’s worth pondering: what could a healing ecosystem look like in your work?

Shifting Our Response to Stress and Burnout Through a Healing Ecosystem