SHRM26 Debrief · Health & Wellness · #2693

Organizational Health & Wellbeing: Unlocking Root Causes with the SCP GROWTH Index™

with Monica Gould

▶ Watch on the SHRM portal ~67 min, distilled

organizational healthroot cause analysissystems thinking

"We're just giving people a Tylenol rather than getting an MRI to find out you have a brain tumor."

What it was about

Most organizations treat only the visible symptoms of poor culture (burnout, turnover, low engagement) with surface-level fixes like team-building events, when they should be diagnosing the interconnected root causes across strategy, culture, leadership, and operations using a holistic systems-thinking framework like the GROWTH Index.

By the numbers

48.5% engagement

same nonprofit's true engagement rate once broken down further

80% overall sentiment score

case example nonprofit organization's overall engagement/health score

70% response rate with leaders vs. 30% response rate with rest of staff

participation gap revealing psychological safety issues at the nonprofit

Key notes

Survey your entire workforce, not a self-selected subset, or you will only hear from the people already willing to talk.
Track participation rates by division/level, not just overall sentiment — a low response rate from frontline staff versus leadership is itself a signal of psychological safety problems.
Use a six-point (even-numbered) Likert scale instead of five- or seven-point scales to prevent people from defaulting to a neutral middle answer.

The contrarian takeEngagement surveys, even done well, may not be enough to assess organizational health. Rolling out organization-wide mandates based on ranked survey scores, as the federal government's FEVS did, happens 'in a vacuum' and doesn't actually support real improvement.

Take this back Monday

Do this for your team

Send your engagement survey to the entire staff, then compare leadership vs. frontline response rates for a hidden participation gap.

Say this in your next leadership meeting

An 80% engagement score can hide a 48.5% reality — we need to break down survey data by division before trusting it.

Watch out for

Treating symptoms (burnout, turnover, disengagement) with quick, surface-level interventions instead of digging into root causes.
Running engagement or culture surveys but never implementing action plans from the results, which breeds cynicism and lowers future participation.
Surveying only a subset of the organization (e.g., 'the happy departments') rather than the entire workforce.

Fun fact · Monica Gould

Monica Gould has personally equipped more than 100,000 leaders, and she's the daughter of immigrants who built her firm over 31 years.

If this landed, see these

↳ Go deeperHR Service Delivery and Culture Transformation: A Lean Six Sigma Diagnostic and RoadmapSupplies the actual redesign framework for the root causes a GROWTH Index-style audit would surface.⇄ The counterpointUnwell at Work: Addressing the Health Challenges No One Talks AboutSome of what looks like a culture root cause is really an undiagnosed personal health issue.✦ The unexpected oneGrappling with Gremlins: Three Steps to Managing Imposter SyndromeSame root-cause-not-symptom logic, just aimed at the inner critic instead of the org chart.