This week’s article was written by a great peer of mine Helen Hayes. Helen works in Human and Organisational Performance (HOP), helping organisations redesign systems to put people at the centre of culture and performance. With a background in clinical practice, wellbeing consultancy and communications, she helps create cultures that enable people and their wellbeing to thrive. Her mission is to make a lasting impact by building workplaces that actively nurture people and their wellbeing, rather than undermine it.
Where Are We
Creating lasting impact in workplace wellbeing has never been easy. In recent years, there’s been real progress, more organisations have wellbeing strategies, Employee Assistance Programs and even senior roles dedicated to culture and mental health. These are positive developments and every effort to care for people at work deserves recognition.
There’s even still room for free fruit and mindfulness sessions, but true workplace wellbeing isn’t built through wellness campaigns, it’s built in the daily experience of work. If we want genuine, lasting change, we need to look beyond individual health and resilience and examine how our systems, processes, and leadership practices enable, or undermine, people’s ability to thrive and contribute.
Enter Human and Organisational Performance (HOP)
Originating in high-risk industries, HOP explores how human behaviour interacts with complex systems. Yet its principles apply just as powerfully to leadership, culture and wellbeing.
At its heart, HOP is both a philosophy and a framework for building resilient systems and blame-free cultures. It shifts the conversation from “Who’s at fault?” to “What conditions shaped that behaviour?”
It recognises that people are not the problem to control but rather, the experts in how work truly happens.
Why Leaders Should Care
Leaders at every level sit at the intersection of culture, performance, and people systems, exactly where HOP has the greatest impact.
Traditional wellbeing initiatives often focus on helping individuals cope. HOP, by contrast, focuses on how the organisation itself supports performance, safety and wellbeing. It encourages leaders to ask:
- How does our system enable or constrain good work?
- Where are people forced to adapt or “drift” just to get things done?
- What do those adaptations reveal about hidden pressures or barriers?
When leaders start to see wellbeing as a system outcome rather than a personal responsibility, meaningful and sustainable change begins.
From Blaming to Learning
A central principle of HOP is moving from blame to learning.
When something goes wrong, a missed target, an error, an accident, the default reaction is often to find fault. But blame doesn’t fix the system. Learning does.
Leaders play a crucial role in this shift. By modelling curiosity rather than judgement, they create conditions where people feel safe to speak up, share concerns, and report issues without fear.
This underpins psychological safety, which, as Harvard’s Amy Edmondson explains, is one of the strongest predictors of team learning, engagement, and wellbeing.
Learning cultures replace defensiveness with discovery.
Designing Systems That Really Support People
HOP thinking invites leaders to take a systems view – designing environments that anticipate human variability (and fallibility) and make it easier to do the right thing.
When leaders integrate the 5* HOP principles, wellbeing stops being a side initiative and becomes a natural outcome of good organisational design and leadership.
Drift, Insight and Innovation
HOP introduces the concept of drift – the small adaptations people make over time to navigate real-world challenges, inefficiencies, or conflicting priorities.
To the untrained eye, drift can look like deviation or noncompliance. But often, it’s the organisation’s most honest feedback loop.
For leaders, noticing drift means paying attention to how work is really done, not just how it’s meant to be done. Are people bending rules to make processes work? Are they finding more efficient ways that aren’t yet recognised?
Seeing drift as insight rather than disobedience unlocks valuable learning. It reveals where systems may be creating friction and stress and where innovation is already happening organically.
Cultures evolve not through control, but through curiosity.
Practical Steps for Leaders
1. Start with listening. Use focus groups, learning teams, or informal conversations to understand how work really happens.
2. Foster learning over blame. Build a just culture where people feel safe to speak up and leaders are rewarded for curiosity and empathy.
3. Design for flexibility and resilience. Review systems, policies, and workloads through a HOP lens: do they support people, or strain them?
4. Measure, adapt, repeat. Regularly evaluate progress, learn from what emerges and continuously improve rather than simply report success.
ReThinkin Leadership for a Healthier and More Effective Workplace
Adopting a HOP mindset and some basic HOP tools, allows leaders to address the deeper, systemic conditions that shape how people feel, behave, and perform.
When we see people as experts rather than errors, when we build systems that flex instead of fracture, and when we prioritise learning over blame, we unlock the full potential of both our people and our organisations.
The future of workplace wellbeing isn’t about teaching people to cope better. It’s about designing work that cares better.
*The 5 HOP Principles can be explored here: https://www.getthegrit.com/human-organisational-performance/
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WellWise helps organisations identify and manage psychosocial risks so people and performance can thrive together. Its evidence-based diagnostic aligns with ISO 45003 and global wellbeing standards, providing leaders with clear insights into what’s helping, what’s hurting, and where to focus next. Trusted worldwide, WellWise turns workplace data into human-centred action.