Ready Living Podcast Ep. 42: What Every Employee and Leader Needs to Know About Creating a Healthy Workplace
People are feeling a lot of stress and insecurity around work these days, says award-winning workplace mental health expert Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio, and it’s fundamentally because too often they’re treated not as valued members of an organization in their own right, but merely as something from which to extract productivity.
With 30 years of experience, including nearly two decades overseeing behavioral health at a Fortune 500 company, he has seen workplace culture at both its best and worst. The worst includes employees who feel undervalued and disposable, supervisors who are promoted without being adequately prepared to lead, and senior leaders quietly planning the next round of layoffs while publicly claiming people are their greatest asset. The best, he argues, starts with something simpler than most organizations realize, namely a good immediate supervisor who understands that workplace health spans physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and financial wellbeing.
He takes a clear-eyed look at why somewhere between 50% and 85% of Americans report being unhappy at work, and warns against tying one’s identity too closely to a particular job or title.
He’s sharply critical of layoffs as a standard corporate response to financial pressure, referencing Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of Dying for a Paycheck, whose research shows that mass layoffs generally don’t improve stock prices, hurt productivity, destroy institutional knowledge, and damage those who remain.
Drawing on his own experience of being laid off from a position he loved, he shares the importance of focusing equally on three things: the job you’re contracted for, the ongoing work of stewarding your own career, and the managing of your personal finances. The last of the three, he notes, is especially critical in the United States, where the absence of a strong social safety net can quickly escalate financial vulnerability.
How power is viewed is also fundamental to workplace health. Ken draws a distinction between “power over,” namely domination, ranking, and punishment, and “power with,” which rests on shared responsibility, collaboration, and the belief that different perspectives make organizations stronger rather than harder to control. Leaders and organizations that operate from the second model tend to grow their collective strength, he argues.
Ken earned his bachelor’s degree in bio-psychology at Cornell University and his master’s degree in social work at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He completed a three year intensive post-graduate program in family therapy at The Multicultural Family Institute in Highland Park, New Jersey.
The interview is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
