PjWe at Wellness Leadership, LLC believe that today’s best-led organizations focus on the wellness of their employees first! Gone are the days when you had to decide between mission and people. The best way to accomplish the corporate mission is to enable your people to fulfill their purpose!
Our well-led guidelines operate within the risk management domain. Every Project Management Professional knows that there are three critical constraints of project management, also known as the Iron Triangle of Project Management: scope, schedule, and budget. They also are aware of the significant risks that impact these components. For example, we all know that disagreement among stakeholders over requirements or vision can lead to scope creep and, in turn, impact budget and time. Likewise, a delay in an external dependency, such as a related project, can impact the schedule and cost.
Yes, the average PMP can rattle off the key risks from the PMI manual and may even be able to come up with a mitigation plan for that risk. However, in my thirty years of experience running projects and teams, I have seen more projects and organizations go off the rails by inadequately accounting for employee wellness. Here are just three examples.
- A project scheduled its critical initial deployment one week after Diwali. Consequently, when a problem arose just before the release, the vital resources from the India delivery center needed to be on hand to correct the problem. The US-based leadership team had addressed the timing for Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks but needed to remember the critical holiday time for most of the resources for their global team.
- A key developer and informal project leader needed to trust the underlying architecture and voice his opinion to management. Instead of discussing and addressing the concern, the project lead indicated that the architecture was used on thousands of projects. The developer only wanted to make a minor recommendation, but due to the lack of attention, they left the project, taking some critical resources with him.
- A project was pushing toward a tight deadline and shifted to a mandatory work schedule. The new schedule impacted the employee’s non-work appointments, such as school and daycare pick-up, causing anxiety and resentment. As a result, absenteeism increased, and productivity decreased, impacting the schedule even more.
I could name many more examples, but it would fill an entire book. Instead, I have categorized the top fifteen wellness considerations for projects, programs, and organizations, along with approaches to address these considerations
