Unlocking sustainable success

Descriptive transcript

Good morning, everyone. Just watching as participants are joining our webinar. I'll just give it one minute. We've got an action-packed agenda, so welcome.

Okay, I think we might get started, given the agenda. So again, welcome everybody. Welcome to our fourth annual POSCOP, which is the Australian Positive Organisational Scholarship Positive Psychology Community of Practice.

And your hosts are myself, Dr Rosemary Sainty, formerly the Australian representative to the UN Global Compact and now at UTS Business School, and my colleague, Dr Susie Green, clinical and coaching psychologist and founder and CEO of the Positivity Institute. So welcome, everybody.

First, a timely acknowledgement of Country. UTS Business School respectfully acknowledges that we're located on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The Gadigal people have cared for their community, land and waters for thousands of generations, based on their deep knowledge of their country. We pay our respects to their ancestors, their elders, and acknowledge their ongoing status as the First Peoples of this land, particularly at this very important time. And just a little word that in my own teaching practice here at uni, I use yindiyamarra. It's a Wiradjuri word, and it's really about mutual respect, giving honour and taking responsibility.

What is our POSCOP? This is really about where theory meets practice. So we've got over 200 people that have RSVP'd. Some of you are from academia, some of you are practitioners, researchers, teachers, and it's really about fostering a conversation and learning together as a community of practice. So welcome again.

A bit of webinar housekeeping. We're keen to have a lively chat and we give this a long tail, if you like. So we are recording the webinar. We'll post all of that on a webpage, including the slides, and you'll all get a link to that information. Whilst we're talking today, the chat is open for your comments, and we're keen to get those, including the land that you're meeting us on. And then when it comes to questions and answers, that's saved over till towards the end of the speakers talking, and we have the Q&A function for you to post your questions to the panel, which we will address.

I just want to say briefly about today. Given the enormity of the transition that we're all having to go through, largely driven by climate change, today really is about a collective effort. So it's a multidisciplinary piece, essentially, so that we can all play a role in building a more sustainable world.

From the sciences, engineering, design, law, and in particular today from the humanities, we really want to explore and extend the role that positive psychology, positive organisational scholarship can play in this space. Today, I really want to acknowledge the founders of Positive Organisational Scholarship, a number of whom have been supporting our POSCOP, including Jane Dutton, Monica Warline, Kim Cameron, and of course Robert Quinn, all originally based at the Michigan Centre for Positive Organisational Scholarship.

Just going through the agenda very briefly, it's very action-packed. So we'll begin with a brief history of sustainability, CSR, ESG. That's from me, five minutes I've given myself, and Susie has five minutes to cover a brief history of positive psych and positive organisational scholarship.

We'll then hear from Jason van Schie, the Managing Director and Psychologist at Flourish DX. Jason is going to be looking at the S in ESG, followed by Dr Austin Chia, a Fellow from the Centre for Wellbeing Science at the University of Melbourne and Associate Director with the Consulting Division at KPMG. And Austin's going to be looking at the integration of positive psych and positive CSR.

Following that, back to Susie and myself, I'm going to be looking at the role of purpose in building positive organisations and the shifting or transitioning purpose of the corporation. And Susie's going to be differentiating purpose and meaning, and looking into the linkages here between meaning and our agenda today. And finally, Lisa Skovron, who's the Director of Global Culture and Engagement at Cochlear, is going to be providing, having heard all of us speaking, a corporate leadership perspective. And we'll be looking at threading some of the pieces of our conversation together. So it should be an interesting morning. So once again, we're keen for an active chat. So please jump in, tell us where you're meeting us from, tell us your disciplinary background, and we'll get the conversation going.

So, five minutes on the history of CSR, ESG, etc. I've worked in this space for, I guess it's about 20 years. And probably the biggest point to say is just the rapid, rapid development that we are seeing now. So a number of us have been kind of working away over the years, but really in the last two years, one year, even last six months, so much has been happening.

A really important milestone is the 1987 Brundtland Report, and most of you would be familiar with that quote, that sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. And that was beautifully crafted, and it's actually really sort of stayed with us as the definitive way of considering sustainability and sustainable development.

If you're looking at the timeline now, we're probably mostly familiar with the IPCC scientific reports that have been providing us globally with updates on what's happening in terms of climate change. Unfortunately, things have, again, been moving more quickly than even scientists had thought would happen.

A really important development was back before the turn of the century, the creation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And so that's instigated approximately yearly communication of the parties or COPs sessions. And so you may have noticed, we had a COP session in Glasgow, we have one coming up in Doha later this year. And this is where governments come together to negotiate around climate change, sometimes more successfully than other times.

Also really important in this space, around the turn of the century, a lot of unrest around globalisation and particularly with multinational corporations, quite a violent demonstration in Seattle, you may or may not remember. And this really helped push along a recognition by the UN and by the private sector that they needed each other. In other words, in order to have flourishing economies, business needs peace and stability, and in order for the UN to meet its aims of peace and prosperity for people, they also need flourishing economies.

So this actually led to the development of the world's largest corporate citizenship initiative, the UN Global Compact. So this is about really bringing business on board together with the UN under the banner of sustainable development and including things like human rights, anti-corruption, labour law, and also of course the environment.

So that was around the turn of the century. We had the UN Millennium Development Goals, really trying to address global poverty, infant mortality, maternal education, etc. And then we see the involvement of the investors. They've become very important now.

Really, I think around 2015, very important time, the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals. People probably know about those. That's really coming together of private sector, governments, not-for-profits. Very colourful, 17 goals, something for everyone, and really pushing the sustainable development agenda ahead across sectors. Also that year, the Paris Climate Agreement as part of that UNFCCC framework. Although not everything was agreed to, it still was a line in the sand for particularly investors to build off.

Right now we're seeing a convergence of sustainability reporting standards, looks very much like alphabet soup, and in particular from the investor community, particularly institutional investors, via the G20 and Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg, we have this taskforce on climate-related financial disclosures. So now it's the markets pushing for change.

With all this push for change, really want to point out, as Mark Carney has said, we need hope, resilience, compassion, humanity to tackle these huge and interconnected challenges before us.

So today, we really want to make a point that although things have moved more into a regulatory, coercive space, we need to hang on to what an academic would call the normative piece about the humanity. And we know that it's not just about surviving, it's also about thriving. So we do really see a role here to move from a kind of risk position to something more than risk. With that, I'll hand over to Susie.

Thanks so much, Rosemary. You did a brilliant job, actually. Well done. And welcome to everyone. Thanks for joining us again for our fourth POSCOP. And I have to say, this is a relatively new area to me. And I've been madly researching, and Austin very kindly shared some papers with me. So I feel like I'm on a steep learning curve, but very keen, very interesting area.

So for those of you that are new to the field, and even though Positive Psych's been going, I think, around 24 years now, there are still people that haven't heard of it. So just very briefly, there are many definitions, but the one that is my preference is the scientific study of the conditions and processes that lead to optimal human functioning. And what we have seen, and I just want to make a quick point for those that still think that positive psychology may be about being happy all the time, we certainly moved on. We're up to Positive Psychology 2.0, which is the recognition of the full range of human emotions, and the contribution that positive psych can make. And we've moved on to 3.0, which is looking at systems informed positive psychology. So this is where I believe we can start to see how this can affect not just us at the individual level, but at the group, the systemic, and the planetary.

So POS scholarship is a complementary science to Positive Psych. Positive Psych really emerged out of psychology, and for those that know a bit of history, Marty Seligman, and before him, the humanistic psychologists like Maslow and Rogers. And then POS scholarship really grew out of business and management. And you can see some of the key questions. If you go to the website, you could spend days on there, Rosemary, couldn't you? There's so much wonderful research and practice. And over the years, there's really been a strong focus to practice.

I wanted to just reiterate again that despite, I have another slide that's going to be focusing on what's been happening in terms of POS Psych and the climate and climate change. Through COVID, it really gave us an opportunity to showcase in many ways that there's so many different constructs that sit under the umbrella of positive psychology that can be used through adversity. And so again, I think it takes us out of this happyology space into a much broader conceptualisation of wellbeing, and as Rosemary said, moving from surviving to thriving.

Next slide, thanks, Max. And I did a brief search in the last few days. There's not a lot that I can see. I didn't do a very rigorous lit review, but from what I could see, there's not a lot of publications that are looking at the combinations of positive psychology, wellbeing, and sustainability. There was one other paper, I will try and put that, I think it's an open access one, Rosemary, on when we do make all of this information available. And it was calling it, I think the term was posistainability, or some word combining. I can't actually express it now. But this focus again on promoting sustainable wellbeing. And it's really wonderful to see that there's such a strong movement within education. I just listened to the Dean's Lecture from University of Melbourne. I'm not sure, Austin, if you've had a chance to listen to that one yet. And it was a wonderful presentation on the role of schools and what's happening in schools in terms of climate change. And I'm also presenting at the PISA Conference, the POSED Schools Association on Saturday at Knox Grammar, and I'll certainly be making reference to that.

So the carrot and the stick, and I'm not going to steal Jason's thunder, because I know he's going to talk quite a bit about this. I've spent most of my career, despite coming from a clinical background where I was very reactive, and the whole field is largely reactive in terms of treatment, I moved pretty quickly into coaching. And so I've been more focused on the proactive, and in terms of promotion, rather than prevention. And you can see, certainly Peter Drucker, as a thought leader, was onto it. And Gretchen Spreitzer, who's also part of the Centre for Positive Organisations, has been doing some great work on thriving, has recently worked with Microsoft, and they've moved their metrics from traditional engagement to a broader conceptualisation of thriving.

Next slide, thank you. And again, Jason's going to talk to this, but I know this is one of Jason's and my own pet hates, is the continued confusion between the terms psychological health and safety, which you can see the definition there. It's a much broader understanding of the workplace and how it promotes psychological health and safety. This is not psychological safety, which is primarily based on the work of Amy Edmondson, primarily based at the team level, puts a lot of emphasis on the role of the leader.

Love this quote by Monica and Jane. And if you're on the call, or if you're listening to the recording, we love your work. To bring about flourishing, we must pay attention to the seed as well as the soil. So the people as well as the organisational context. And I can say, coming from a clinical psych background, we didn't have much time, and this is quite a while ago, but I believe it hasn't changed much. It was very individually focused. We didn't get the full understanding of the social or the organisational context. And it's only been through my work with organisational psychologists over the last 20 years that I've really come to fully understand that.

This is one of the best papers I've ever come across, and again, it's a favourite of Jason's, and he'll speak to that. Anthony LaMontagne published this article, it's a must read, 2014, where he spoke about the integrated approach to workplace mental health. So we certainly need to prevent harm, and there's a big focus on that, clearly, in what we're speaking about today from climate change and also ESG. We need to manage illness once it occurs. But I loved it, and you can imagine, as the CEO of the Positivity Institute, how happy I was when I saw 'Promote the Positive'. Now that's been turned a little bit more into 'Promote Flourishing' now, and again Jason will speak to that.

So a lot of this does rely on leadership, and often one of my close colleagues talks about leaders as believers. I do know right now, leaders really are the meat in the sandwich in many ways. There's a lot of pressure on them, on their own wellbeing and managing those around them. I just want to reference Kim Cameron's wonderful work on positive leadership, particularly his model that focuses on the four key components of positive leadership: fostering a positive climate, relationships, communication and meaning.

And Kim says that there are three factors that enable a positive climate: fostering compassion. And I'm going to really stretch this here because there's a lot of research around self-compassion, certainly compassion for others, but I would say in terms of our topic today, compassion for the planet.

Just quoting Monica Warline and Jane Dutton briefly, a new science of compassion based on extensive research helps us to see that suffering and the compassion that helps us address suffering directly is one of the most important ideas for business today. So we're really trying to bring these strands together, these multifaceted approaches today.

Jason, I'm going to introduce Jason. I've made reference to Jason already. Jason and I have known each other, I think possibly nearly two or so years, Jason, and I hope you will acknowledge that I was certainly one of the earlier adopters in reaching out to you and trying to learn as much as I could from you, given that that wasn't my background historically. And I really appreciate the support that you've given me and the ongoing collaboration. So over to you.

He's jumped out, he'll probably jump back in in two seconds.

So we're just whizzing through to Austin.

Okay, Austin. Austin is a Fellow of the Centre for Wellbeing Science, where I'm also a Fellow. So as I said, I've been reading Austin's papers, loving them, hadn't come across them, so very, very keen to make them more visible, Austin, and very keen to hear what you have to say today.

Great. Thank you very much, Susie. And thank you everyone for jumping on the call today. Really excited to be presenting this work on positive CSR with all of you today.

As Susie mentioned, the research that brings together positive psychology with concepts related to corporate social responsibility, sustainability, SDGs, is actually quite limited. But before I go into the detail about the proposition of what positive CSR is, I just want to give a bit of background around what's led to this stream of research.

And really it stems from the acknowledgement that over the last 15 to 20 years, there's been an increasing focus on policy right across the world, with governments and intergovernmental agencies. So what we've really seen is real advancements in the way we look at national and global measures of wellbeing. There's greater attention in public policy discourse on wellbeing, and resulting from that has been some real pivots in the way we've looked at the impact of public policy on the wellbeing of society.

So against this backdrop of what we're seeing in public policy, really what's led to the stream of research around positive CSR has been the acknowledgement that while governments and policymakers have the potential to impact on societal wellbeing, the missing piece of the discussion has been what has been the role of business and corporations.

And this was quite an important gap in my view, given that increasingly we're seeing that the power and influence of businesses and corporations across many economies is increasing. A lot of services that have historically been provided by governments are increasingly being privatised and provided by business. And what comes with that is an evolving sense of responsibility that must be taken up by organisations.

So really, the motivation for positive CSR is this push to shine a light more on the impacts that businesses and corporations have on wellbeing, on the wellbeing of society. The second part of this question is around what can positive psychology add to extant literature that we have on corporate social responsibility? And this was a burning question in my mind while I was doing my studies in positive psychology.

I'm a management scholar by training and then did further study in positive psychology. And the big question mark for me is that there's a huge body of knowledge and advancements in theorising and empirical work around social responsibility. But the question is, what can positive psych or positive organisational scholarship add over and above what we already know in the existing literature?

So this is really then sort of frames up what the contribution of positive CSR is. And this is a bit of a cheeky term to say we did a paper along with my co-author Peggy Kern. We wrote a paper a couple of years ago that coined this term of positive CSR. And the reason we use this term is more of a provocation to try and bring the two fields closer together. But really the focus of positive CSR is to give primacy to the understanding of wellbeing outcomes, and those wellbeing outcomes may be subjective, objective and interactions between the two as a result of the consequence of business.

Something to call out as well, sorry, just previous slide, is the graph below, as Susie sort of alluded to before. The intersections of the two fields is actually quite limited. So what you can see from the graph below is we did a literature search to see what the influence of positive psychology has been on CSR, business ethics, sustainability literature, and is actually quite limited.

And what we actually found from our review is that much of the literature in CSR and sustainability is self-referential. So researchers in this field tend to only refer to research within the discipline rather than looking widely beyond the management literature.

There's another paper in 2020 that we wrote, which was around corporate social responsibility for happiness. And again, using the term happiness was another provocation. It's something that really sort of catches people's attention. But really when we talk about happiness, it is conceptualised as subjective and objective wellbeing, which is consistent with what positive psychology understands wellbeing to be.

So the way we approach this idea of corporate social responsibility for happiness is we apply the contractarian lens of CSR. And just a quick background on this, when we talk about contractarian lens, it is a belief that social responsibilities arise because a social contract exists between society and businesses, that businesses exist because society and their constituents allow them to exist. A similar term that's been used widely, perhaps more so in practice, is this idea of a social licence to operate.

So the question around corporate social responsibility for happiness then becomes, what is this contract that exists between society and business when it comes to wellbeing outcomes? And this was a theoretical lens that we applied to the research.

So then the critical question here is that suppose that we believe that businesses have a responsibility for wellbeing and happiness, to whom do they have this responsibility and for what? So if we're going to go to organisations and talk about this idea or this notion of a responsibility for wellbeing, are we clear in terms of what aspects of wellbeing are we talking about? Is it only about things to do with the objective conditions of a workplace? Are we talking about how people feel and function in their role? Are we talking about specific stakeholder groups like employees versus other stakeholder groups like suppliers? So there needs to be a lot more nuance and precision around what exactly we're asking organisations to do or what they should be giving attention to.

So then, this led to the research question around what are the boundaries of this responsibility? So really, what are the terms of the social contract?

So just quickly to touch, we've done some empirical work around this, and this is based on a large-scale survey of over 1,300 respondents trying to shine a light on the specificity around the terms of this social contract. So what we found is that some degree of responsibility does exist for corporations and businesses for wellbeing, but the responsibility seems to be a lot greater for those from less privileged segments of society.

And the responsibility is greater for those that are high proximity stakeholders. So stakeholders like employees and consumers are probably perceived as having, corporations have a greater responsibility for wellbeing.

In terms of the specific boundaries of that social contract, what the public perceive as being the terms of this social contract is that at a minimum, organisations should not harm or impede happiness or wellbeing. That organisations have a responsibility to enable conditions for happiness or wellbeing to occur, but not necessarily for wellbeing and happiness as an outcome. That there is an expectation that organisations exercise awareness of happiness in decision making. So there's an element of governance and the role that wellbeing has in governance processes within organisations. And then that the scope of responsibility then is limited by what is the declared strategic purpose and the resource availability of the organisation or entity.

Some other quick insights that I won't labour on, but just quickly touch on. What we found in the existing literature in this space, as well as in our empirical work, is that there is actually quite low emphasis on other stakeholder groups like suppliers and shareholders. So the impacts that businesses have on their wellbeing, there's been negligible research in this space.

That the perceived responsibility varied depending on whether we're talking about subjective or objective wellbeing. And that the final point is that wellbeing literacy is patchy. So what we mean by this is when we look at public respondents, the understanding of what wellbeing is, is patchy. So they can recognise what subjective wellbeing is and objective wellbeing is, but they don't really see the interconnections and the flow-ons between those two different dimensions.

So a huge body of work, or emerging body of work, that's taking place in this space. But hopefully this gives you a bit of an overview as to what the emerging research agenda is around the intersections of these two fields.

So I might wrap up there. Over to you, Susie.

Thanks so much, Austin. And very interesting. But I think we'll quickly jump back to Jason. And if we can take the slides back, Max, that'd be great. Thank you. Jason, you're all good?

Yes, I just think my video will.

Alive and well.

Yeah, apologies about that. It's always fun doing things live and your computer decides to do a restart just as I'm being introduced. Couldn't have been any better timing, really.

Not a problem. Thank you.

But Susie, it allowed me to do some research. And in fact, we actually met in 2018 at the PISA conference at Geelong Grammar School. So it's been more than a couple of years, it's been more like five or six by now. But time flies.

But I can introduce myself. So Jason van Schie. I'm Managing Director and Psychologist at Flourish DX. My background is in organisational psychology. I've definitely dabbled in positive psychology and I really enjoy working in the area. But I guess where most of my work these days is in psychological health and safety.

So it's really about applying a risk-based framework to understanding and addressing the causes of mental health or mental ill health in the workplace. So what I want to really talk about is the S in ESG and it's the part that is largely overlooked. There's a lot of focus when we're talking about sustainability around environmental sustainability. There's a lot around governance. But we're not really looking so much at social sustainability. And it's definitely an area that we need to.

And we can look at social sustainability in a number of different ways, right? If you look at the fundamental worker rights that the International Labour Organisation focuses on, things like abolition of child labour and modern slavery, and all the rest. Those are all worthy pursuits. Interestingly, last year, they also introduced a fifth fundamental worker right, which is occupational health and safety. And so that actually gives us an opportunity to position mental health through a health and safety lens as a fundamental worker right.

But I would say we are not performing well at all when it comes to creating workplaces that are mentally healthy. Probably the best and most damning evidence is looking at workers' compensation statistics here in Australia. So the latest statistics have just been released by Safe Work Australia just in the last couple of weeks. So it's quite timely given this webinar. But the number of claims is down overall. So it went from just over 12,000 claims last year to 11,700. But the complexity of these claims, so how long people are taking off and the cost of these claims is continuing to escalate.

And it's a trend that we've seen over the last seven years where, you know, there's 69% increase in total claims, but the working weeks lost continues to escalate quite a bit. So you can see here, for example, the median claim for a mental health condition when someone has something that is work-related and leads to time off work is 34.2 weeks. Huge. It's well over half a year now and about seven times greater than the median amount of time lost due to all other claims. The cost also is far greater given that complexity, almost five times higher than all other claims.

But I guess when you take into account both the complexity of these claims and the number of claims, the best way to look at the true impact of mental injuries on the health and safety of working Australians is looking at the weeks lost due to mental injuries versus all other claims.

So whilst all mental injury claims account for less than 10% of all claims, if you looked at the weeks lost, which remember again is about six to seven times greater than all other claims, we're actually talking about almost 40% of the time lost due to any illness or injury being due to mental injuries. So just let that sink in. It's a huge amount. So we can look at musculoskeletal disorder, we can look at slips, trips and falls, all the rest. Our mental injuries account for a huge amount. And the trend is over the last seven years, the amount of time that we're losing due to mental injuries is up 304%.

So, despite all we know about the benefits of having flourishing organisations and teaching people to be more resilient or using positive psychology type tools, knowing what we know about job demands and resources and applying these sorts of theories as well, there's lots of carrots. But unfortunately, we've not seen enough organisations really thinking about what they're doing in order to protect people from these mental injuries in the first place by creating safe systems of work.

So that's where regulations come in. And we've been in a period of regulation reform here in Australia since 2018, when Marie Boland did a review of the Workplace Health and Safety Act. And out of 34 recommendations, the second recommendation was, hey, we need regulations dealing specifically with psychosocial risk.

Because under the 2011 Act, which all of Australia except for Victoria subscribe to, Victoria have their own similar legislation in place. But under the 2011 Act, there is a duty of care that employers must ensure that the work they get people to do and the working environment doesn't cause them harm. And that was always supposed to be both physical and mental harm, but employers didn't read that into it and regulators didn't feel it was strong enough to enforce.

So now, as you can see, most of Australia now have these regulations enforced. South Australia and ACT will be joining in November and December. And Victoria, this is still unknown, but we believe it's likely in the next three to six months. And that will mean that all of Australia has specific regulations in place.

And what does that mean? Well, there's three high-level obligations that all PCBUs or persons conducting business or undertakings need to abide by. One is they actually need to identify psychosocial hazards. They need to consult with staff to determine what are the things that potentially might cause you harm. And psychosocial hazard is anything in the design, management or social aspects of work that have that potential to cause harm, be that psychological or physical.

So things like work overload or lack of role clarity or lack of autonomy, bullying, harassment, these sorts of things all have the potential to cause harm.

We must consider the duration, frequency and severity of that hazard exposure because we are talking about an exposure issue here. And then make sure that we're putting in controls that either eliminate those hazards at the source rather than just trying to make people better able to manage the stress associated with being exposed to these hazards. So actually addressing the design and management of work.