By Chad Pearson and Cal Beyer
An AWCI member since 2014, Plexxis is a custom software firm that was founded in 1999 in Toronto. The company is intentional about addressing mental health and well-being preventively for all 92 associates.
Chad Pearson is a designated member contact from Plexxis and a senior start team leader responsible for starting the right conversations with the right people for mission success. He has been with the company for 17 years and is one of three owners. Pearson is a former law enforcement officer with significant training in behavioral health and critical incident stress debriefing. He is also a mixed martial arts fighter and coach.
Pearson shared the following highlights of the company’s intentionality on well-being. Mental health was an undercurrent in our executive team’s lives through family and friends who died by suicide and/or battled anxiety and depression, including post-partum depression. Pearson highlighted how the two co-founders (who are cousins) specifically made extreme sacrifices that came at a high cost to their health and well-being. While those efforts saved Plexxis in the early years, the Executive team allowed their lived experiences to lead their lives and the company differently.
Most entrepreneurs and construction leaders and managers understand this level of commitment. The stress and strain of hard work and constant pressure from tight schedules, manpower shortages, and unexpected contingencies is real. What is different is how they intentionally shape its policies and procedures, design company workplaces and manage their workforce to recognize sources and signs of stress and make adaptations to heighten performance of all contributors.
Pearson summarized six key strategies they deployed to assess, manage, coach and improve well-being and mental fitness among individual contributors and collectively among all teammates.
Fitness Focus: We build a work-life aimed at improving performance, positivity and physical and mental fitness, which we call “3PM.” Key to achieving this is focusing on mental fitness, rather than mental health. We view health as a condition or state best served by medical professionals, while fitness includes actions and practices we can practice without medical credentials.
Path to P&R (Professionals and Resources): Bridges the gap between our mental fitness tactics and a teammate’s mental health needs. We help people become their best through practices we are qualified and capable of managing while becoming the path to P&R in scenarios where we’re not qualified or capable. Our mantra is: “You might not always be able to help. But you can always be helpful.”
Positive Proximity: Groups who invest consistent and repetitive time together pursuing a shared purpose naturally develop the bonds and level of behavioral awareness needed to have each other’s backs. There are four key best practices in this area.
- Serve AND Protect: Serve by prioritizing human interaction over digital transaction while protecting the team from bad actors who turn positive proximity toxic.
- Maximum Social Collisions: Carefully designed work space that ensures teammates ‘bump’ into each other often throughout the day, eat together, enjoy amenities together and no one is isolated except for when completing tasks in areas dedicated to privacy.
- Behavioral Awareness: Knowing each other’s behaviors well enough that teammates become predictable and signs of struggle become clearer.
- Commute Over Vanity Address: Regardless of the cost to build and break lease agreements, we invested in real estate located within a maximum 40-minute commute for at least 80% of the team, placing zero value on prestigious vanity addresses that often-required excessive commutes.
Indirect Checks: Sometimes asking “Are you okay?” is not enough. Indirect checks help leaders to detect harmful undercurrents that may be building. Examples of questions (often hypothetical) include:
- Do you think there is anything at risk today we can review?
- Do you think any of your tasks are at risk?
- What type of resources do you think we can add to help?
We monitor when help is needed and if there is a ‘pattern developing’ of reduced capacity and/or increasing risk, there is likely an underlying current that needs to be identified.
Frontloading Intensity: As overtime is common in the industry, we mandate earlier work and only allow a maximum of two hours per week at END of days (evenings).
We do this for three main reasons:
- Working earlier is healthier. Humans evolved by doing harder work earlier.
- This helps preserve high-value personal time (HVPT) for friends, family and self to reduce burnout.
- When unavoidable scenarios arise where HVPT has to be sacrificed for the mission, it is rare enough that the sacrifice can be made safely.
Positive Effort (journaling): We have an internal personal planning and journaling tool designed to help set priorities, milestones and identify barriers and personal challenges that can interfere with a teammates sense of fulfillment and achievement. This tool helps teammates take control over their day in ways that maximize the impact of the dopaminergic system. When used properly, teammates get a daily sense of achievement while the body’s dopaminergic system suppresses the systems that make us feel bad.
The practice of positive effort also helps teammates slowly escape reliance on external validation and external recognition. This may sound counterintuitive at first, but we found the building skills of self-recognition and the ability to pat yourself on your back has had absolutely incredible impact on mental health.
Chad Pearson is a partner at Plexxis Software, where he helps deliver software to the trades while coaching teammates on crisis resolution and performance under pressure. Outside of Plexxis, Chad is a mixed martial arts and wrestling coach. Prior to ConTech, Chad worked in law enforcement in emergency response, at the Criminal Investigation Bureau, and as an outlaw motorcycle gang liaison officer. His formal training includes a bachelor of arts from University of Guelph, crisis resolution and tactical communication (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear response), police defensive tactics and use of force.
Cal Beyer, CWP, is senior director for SAFE Workplaces for national nonprofit SAFE Project. SAFE stands for Stop the Addiction Fatality Epidemic. Beyer has more than 30 years of construction risk management, safety and well-being consulting experience. Beyer serves on the Executive Committee for the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention and helped launch the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention in 2016. He also serves on Advisory Groups for MindWise Innovations, Goldfinch Health, and the Lived Experience Advisory Committee of the Suicide Prevention Resource Center. Contact Beyer at [email protected] or via cell at 651-307-7883. www.safeproject.us