Designing Anti-Inflammatory Workplaces with Specialist Jaqueline Oliveira-Cella

Welcome to the Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, change makers and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work and lead with more joy, health, love and meaning. Hi Jacqueline, it is so lovely to have you on our Flourishing Edge podcast.

Happy to be here. Long overdue but timely.

So listen, I think you will have a very unique perspective. Jacqueline, you've been an actuary for over 25 plus years and you really studied the topic of health and wellness from many different angles. And you know, one of the topic that has really come to the front, especially in the last five years, is this notion of flourishing. Flourishing way beyond just illnesses and what's keeping people sick. But how do we help people flourish? And I'm curious, from your perspective, why does flourishing matter? If you were talking to a CEO, how would you actually help them? Think about flourishing as a key strategy for them to invest in.

Okay, as a like leveraging the actuarial background. The first thing that comes to mind is how we measure risk. And nowadays you look into risk per body parts or per let's say health, disability, death, longevity and whatnot. There is a risk that sometimes is overlooked, which is the culture, the container, the organization that someone is working with, whether or not that organization enables people. And I will get to the flourishing enables people to actually be at their best self. So considering company A, company B similar demographics, let's just for simplicity sake, same people, but now that same group of people in one company, they are enabled. They have the space to create, to flow. They have managers that act as a coach, as uplifters, that are able to close learning apps, for example, and help them feel they matter. Company B you have high stakes like it's a high pressure same in both case, high pressure leadership is used with do as I say, stay on your lane and not the time to create anything new. And I expect you to perform as a that's your your obligation, that's the starting point. And then if you do a good job, maybe I'll tap you on the back and I say that you matter. So for me, the organizational the organization A enables flourishing, enables someone to be at their best self producing and connecting with others meaningfully. The company B likely is driving people towards illness, towards physical illness, if not out of the company together, does it

make sense we are a very interesting point in the US right? Healthcare costs are going up. Many CFOs look at the healthcare costs and they want to go up and they want to think about their employee basis. And I think your research and your invitation is to say don't just look at your healthcare cost as something to do with people and what resources can we do them and who are we hiring. But really think about the systems in which we are putting them because those systems will be a big driver for our people. Flourishing, being at their best driving higher performance, lowering healthcare costs or are they burning out or at higher risk of many of these other ailments that they would fall into if they are fundamentally operating in these environments that constrained, that put people in survival mode rather than in a thriving mode?

Absolutely. And it's like employee benefits, health wealth and well being offerings, they are relevant. Like when well designed they are relevant, but they are in some cases or in a lot of cases they are protection. They serve as protection, they serve as remedy. If you can combine that with an environment where people can flourish, with an anti inflammatory environment, you have the opportunity to actually leverage your offerings, your employee benefits offerings. Medical inflation is going to like I don't know if you are following the medical inflation expected in 2026 for 2026 is hitting double digit digits and employers are now trying to pull the same levers which is cost shifting in some cases. Others are aiming for something more long term preventive. But I will pause right here before digging into deeper into the numbers when you answering one more point of your initial question on flourishing. When I think about the data background, I look at health risks like cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, musculoskeletal pain management and gastrointestinal issues. Those are like across the globe, give or take and cancer, give or take. They are either increasing in utilization, like in, in, in utilization or in severity. When you look at the ways you are, the ways you are living, the ways you are working, that on itself could be a lever to alleviate some of those health risks. And there is plenty of evidence based that correlates a life well lived. Like you feeling present, you feeling like you are flourishing, that you are capable of being present with like also symptoms, being relieved in terms of chronic, particularly when we think about chronic stress and chronicle other chronic illnesses.

Yeah, it's so true. So this notion of if your costs are going up, look at your culture and see if moves that you can make in how things get done can actually be an untapped lever that you're not pulling. So that you can go more into preventative. Right. Rather than kind of after the fact giving people the resources that they need to protect them when they're sick.

Yes. And it's not. I will make a big caveat here because it's sometimes when you hear the. Unfortunately when you hear the word preventive care, some may say well, but in three years this employee will no longer be with me. So why invest all this money on prevention? When I think about shifting containers, creating this anti inflammatory workplace, the results are likely that you will be able to see on the next, on the next meeting on how you're going to leave that meeting, encourage it and feeling that you matter enough and now you want to like you are with a slightly more engaged self to perform. You know, if you need help, you know who to reach out to for that help. Because it's more immediate than for example, very valid but long term care.

Absolutely. So look, you've run global benefits and well being for some really amazing companies, right? Colgate, Pamela Aon, you were at IBM. I want to dig into a little bit of the space of many companies go down the path of offering benefits. What are some of the core things they get wrong or things that they don't think about when it comes to employee health and benefits and the way these programs are designed, the way they are administered. What are some things that you would recommend they consider from all of your rich experience in this space?

Well, I recommend them to look into one of my. I could talk for hours. I love this topic. But I would say you want to dig more. Take a look at the collaboration, the HealthAtWork collaboration that was published a few months ago on how to design benefits for equity, how to design benefits that are sustainable. But when I think about opportunities within employee benefits, generically speaking, when you think about timely access, relevant. Right. So right now the way benefits work and I believe AI can help a little bit with that is I have an umbrella of benefits. If I'm sick, I go seek care. If I need, like if I need time off, I would check whether or not the flexibility. So it's way more passive than proactive. And I think there is an opportunity and this is like very common. Like people don't even know that certain benefits exist. So the way you communicate, when you think about twisting instead of communicating benefits, communicate on people needs. Design thinking 101. Start with what's the problem you are trying to solve for who is impacted by that problem and maybe your communication. And this is a good segue to for example storytelling During COVID we did create this, we had a mental health task force and we are able to look per different groups of employees what was the problems to be solved at the time. And we interviewed, we talked with those employees. So we are able to understand what are the different issues that we could solve for them. Published had not just communications, but we had to tweak benefits again to solve for a key people problem. And the result of that, even on the middle of COVID there was a 4 basis point increase in engagement and some of the comments related to the caring values of the company. This is huge for everything that we all passed through during COVID So that's a good example. It's communication. The other one is how are you designing your benefits? I will publish this very soon, but I just learned it was an event to talk about consumerism, empowering beneficiaries to be good consumers. And here is what the payer shared as best practice. This particular employer with a self insured plan added for ER visits added a tiered approach. The more times an employee would visit the ER the highest they shifted the cost towards the for the employee to pay more. And you're like, who would be going to an emergency room for care? What is the question that needs to be asked? Why are they going to the emergency room? What are the gaps in care, in timely care that are preventing them to get to a doctor? And then I looked into the data

when you just what did they find? Why was that happening, Jack?

No, this was, this is, this is an actual, this is happening now. This was placed as best practices in a conference by one of the large payers that we have in this country. And then I took a look at. Okay, this is so off. So when I answering your question, the design is we are still using the same tools to thinking that will fix individual behavior. When the issue is a systemic issue, takes over a month for people to have access to a PCP specialty care even longer. So you are using the stick on a design, shifting the cost. Maybe short term you're going to get some gain. But can you imagine the long term impact of not getting access?

So you talked about these levers. One you talked about was communicating and communicating in a way that we can connect the benefit to the real need and even think about targeted communications to certain, you know, groups that might be, you know, more in need of that. Right. That we have actually resources available. We see you.

Yeah.

I think there's a second piece that you highlighted which is to design care and benefits in an equitable Way to make sure that, you know, we are really keeping that into consideration, which might have to do with, again, demographics, might have to do with where people live, how they're, you know, what, what level of compensation do they have to make sure that these are actually met?

Affordable, sustainable.

They're affordable and sustainable. Right. There are many companies offering benefits that most of the frontline can't access because they can't even pay their part in it. And I think most and many executives are unaware of that. Well, we have a plan. What do you mean everybody doesn't use it? Well, because what they're required to pay, they even can't pay that.

Correct. And there is like it. It's so true. And it's. There are plenty of data to show that even employee people employed with health care plans sponsored by their employers cannot afford medicine, cannot afford certain treatments. The cost is too high for them. The point on health equity, usually you may ask how. How do you do it? I created the big ads. My. When I was on my prior role, I received the challenge of we are changing culture. We want to be employer of choice. And within that framework we created. Let's capture the different voices. And it's not about voices in our heads. It's like the voice of the market, the voice of the employee, the voice of the company, the voice of the market. And I will switch things around. The voice of the employee captured on surveys, but even more on interviews with different groups to understand unmet needs and preference. The voice of the markets to understand what the competitors are doing. Is there anything that I'm missing in terms of trend, medical trends and whatnot? And the third pillar, which is the company, I would say the voice of the company, which is a voice of the business, which aligns with strategy, values and sustainability. So that's the. How you bring the health like it's one of the building blocks to create health equity. Once you have that, you create, let's say you have a hundred different designs that you could be adjusting to make it more equitable to which ones can you prioritize, Prioritize, measure cost, measure implementation and test and monitor impact. That's like in a nutshell, how I would address health equity.

So one of the. One of that makes a lot of sense to me is really listen. Right? Starts with listening with curiosity rather than kind of one size fits all.

Now,

one of the things that you're really been leading the thinking on, Jacqueline, I'm really quite plugged into the network. People who are working on, well, being flourishing. There's a lot of rise of brain health and brain capital, et cetera. But nobody's actually leading and talking about designing anti inflammatory systems and organizations. So talk to me a little bit about that framing of anti inflammatory systems. How did you come up with that? And talk to us a little bit about what all of that means right now.

Okay. And I will try to be Brazilian short. Okay. So where it came from, I was recently at the Women's Health International Summit. I was leading a panel that was focused on food is medicine. I invited two medical doctors. One is an endocrinologist, the second one is a gut expert and the third was the biomolecular doctor specialized in food. I'm not going to the details, but her focus was on lactoferrin. As I was looking into the physiology, the individual, I needed to find a hook that connected the hormonal fluctuation with like how it impacts your mental health and then how gut right. Is a key part of it. And what you eat is what you are now. It's like exaggerating a little bit. And from a workplace standpoint, I needed to ev this out. And with people at work, what does it mean for employers the connection was inflammation. It's when our bodies as an individual, as individuals, our bodies are overworking to fight a threat. When you think about organizations that are inflammatory, we as individuals are fighting or wasting our energy to fight what? To fight systems that are threatening us, that are creating fear or stress. Stress. But not everybody has manages stress. But overwhelming stress, stress that would paralyze you. That's what I'm talking about. And that's how let's build anti inflammatory workplaces came through.

Yeah, I think it's very, I think it's a lot of people don't make that direct connection. And I think I love how you made the connection. Look, 60% of people today experience stress daily. 22% are burnt out. Right. And it's not just a mental, you know, issue. It's actually a physiological, it's a physical issue. Because when you're operating in environments of high stress where you constantly feel threatened, you know, you feel you don't feel psychologically safe, you know, the conflicts at work leave you drained. Fundamentally what you're putting yourself into, because you spend so much of your time at work, you are putting yourself and your body into a constant fight, flight freeze, which causes inflammation, which then brings all of these onset of other metabolic disorder, you know, diseases which then you indirectly as a company end up paying for because you end up becoming a more Sicker population. Forget about the impact on performance and creativity and innovation. But I really like how that you know, by framing it as is your workplace inflammatory or anti inflammatory. I think you're really kind of bringing to light this core issue of that the workplaces that we are creating are actually amplifying human suffering rather than human flourishing.

Yes, yes and yes. And I know you love the data so trust one of the. When I was looking at the Gallup flourishing result like the. I think it's a multi year now, right. The flourishing survey and report and they have stats showing the trend down on engagement and the correlation to I think it's over 430 billion in lost productivity. But then if you dig a little deeper you will see that that disengagement is even higher with managers. Right. Which are. I see like managers and I have, I'm copying this sentence because I have heard from so many different people that I admire and it's true. They are the Speak spokesperson. Like they're the keynote speaker for the cultural norms. Like for culture. They are representing ways of working the way they are operating and uplifting people or not or coaching people or not. They are disseminating how the cultural norms like and when I was looking into trust, a key element for you to feel like, okay, this is a safe space for me to create and to innovate for my company with my peers and I think the trust in direct managers, you keep me honest here. Over the last two years decreased from 46% to 29%.

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That's not just about the manager himself. He is representing a systemic issue, but he himself like we come from this, we come from this behavior like I'd say pattern where people become manager just as a promotion, right?

Yep.

Like you are good at your job, you are evolving on a vertical ladder. You become a manager. No training. I have asked this so many times that the training comes after you become a manager or when there is an issue. So there you go. There is an opportunity for training and it's like going back to the creating this anti inflammatory workplace is I think of rewarding teams for collaboration, not comparison, not creating cannibalistic type of competition. I think about training managers to be coach not task managers. I think about building reflection and that leads into something that I want to chat about as well. Reflection on how decisions are made.

Yeah. Just space to reflect itself is a big deal. What you reflect on is up to you. But rather than constantly be in, react, create space for reflection and choiceful response can be a massive lift.

Absolutely. Moving from pressure to presence. Yeah, that's. That's pretty. For me it's, it's quite powerful. And when we're looking to. I think it's the Daniel Goldemar. Goldemer. Yes. It starts where they associate emotional intelligence with top performers. I think it's like 92% of what separates top performers star performance versus their peers is related to emotional intelligence.

Yeah.

It's related to having that we call resilient. Like I, I don't want to get into the nitty gritty, but it's. The system needs to be adjusted. There are levers to use to adjust the system. Benefits, employee benefits is part of it. It shows care. It shows protection. When it's. In the end, it needs to start with the individual.

Well, yeah. And I think, and that's what I love. I think I wanted to get you covered. Many of the levers. Right. For designing anti inflammatory workplaces. Right. Really invest in trust, make sure your managers are upskilled. To be able to lead. Right. Create safety, lead with curiosity. To be able to support people. Right. To be able to empower. What are some other levers? Right. Cultivate presence. What are some other levers that if a middle level manager or like a senior leader is listening right now? Jacqueline, what are three to four things that they should consider as a core attribute of building an anti inflammatory workplace?

I will pull that instead of going to the top three. I think it's a good time to talk about the growth, the individual growth that we all need to accomplish to create the anti inflammatory growth. Yeah.

So that you're saying the journey starts with the individual. So let's talk a little bit about that.

And when I think about that, this is actually the reason why I created a protocol as part of my capstone. It was years of research, collaboration with field experts leading to how to build emotional intelligence and clarity of thought in a way that's simple, in a way that can help others connect in a way meaningfully connect. I think that's a good way to put before going to leadership traits and whatnot. But how to build that moment of pause when you are at a high stakes meeting and emotions may cloud your judgment. Emotions are great. It's what makes us human. It's signal. It's all good things. What we want to do is to create that moment of pause. So it doesn't. Emotions are not paralyzing us or making us say things that are not really showing our expertise our what we really what we stand for. And that's like the protocol that I created focusing on you said three. So I will put three plus the execution. Okay, so four.

Safe. You're talking about safe?

Yes, I'm talking about safe. So and the reason why is we talked about system, we talk about managers, but the one thing we can control right now is ourselves. So that hence the reason why I'm shifting us to talk about the individual and we can talk more about impact. So out of this necessity of creating the moment of pause, the moment that I get like the voices on our heads that can paralyze as rumination to pause and create positive change. You start with the same way if you're going to the gym, you're going to exercise, what do you do first? You may want to warm up your body, right? So if you are going to a reflection mode and I Talked with over 50 different exact like 50 executives that use different ways to journal to reflect. They always start with okay, I have the situation happening, what we want to get out of it. So that's you are priming your mind to understand what your goals and your intentions. So s for set your intentions and goals. And sometimes to be honest, you may need to start with like regulating your body physiologically, getting like doing breathing, exercise and whatever that is going for a walk outside, go pet your dog so you can regulate yourself, whatever that is for you. Then you move into from S to A. Okay, I set my intentions. I want clarity. I want now I'm moving into what happened in that particular situation, what's real and what I'm feeling, what are the emotions. And then from that realization, you can start to unpack things that may be on your head and not really on your happening or thing or curiosity. Things that you need to clarify with someone else. Then you move into what I call fame, reframe or focus or you can say effort or hands off the cake, whatever that is. But basically is what I'm telling what I'm telling myself here, is it really the truth? What else might be happening in this particular circumstance? And then the E which is execute on micro steps. So the protocol was built. I didn't reinvent the wheel. I used heavy data centric insights from different research papers and collaborations with healthcare experts field experts and one thing was missing which is how I could now I have the protocol but okay, this all makes common sense but when it's real, who is going to help me to deep think to build the right questions to build the right prompts. So recently I was able to actually convert my vision into action. So I created safe now empowered by OpenAI and I created in a way that's more private than ChatGPT and talk about equity. It's anyone with a ChatGPT account can use Safe

Amazing. So four part framework which I left which is set intentions A which is acknowledge facts, emotions and needs. So you have to really start with accept acknowledging how am I seeing things, what do I need emotions F which was frame and reframe and focus and E which is evaluate next steps right as a powerful way for individuals to start to take agency right this notion of don't wait for the team or the manager or organization but you can start to take agency to shift from judgment to observation, from blame to curiosity and really through this powerful self reflection method first starting to see and then trying to fix and take actions that you need to take.

Beautiful. That's it.

I love it. And you can access it. Jacqueline, how can people access it? You said you built it as an Open it's on OpenAI as a custom GPT. How can people find it?

You log well you can go straight to my LinkedIn and click on a link in bio but you can also log into your GPT then search under the GPT phone logging into your ChatGPT account. Search under GPTs for SAF SO S A F dash E leadership and daily reflections and you can just start journaling. As I said, they created in a way that's more private than chatgpt so the user data is not shared to train the tool so far I have had 300 conversations. I just I made it public six weeks ago. 300 conversations, 30 deep dive interviews with chief medical officers with different healthcare professionals and coaches and executives, leaders in AI for ethics and governance because that's something that's always top of mind for me one of them so I'm capturing very very powerful insights and one of the I think it was Dr. Ering I she is a surgeon and she described it safe as an emotional intelligence. I had written here for me emotional intelligence layer to my decision making process. So it's helped her to act with a little more clarity or at least ask the right questions before moving into let's say a dialogue with one of her direct reports. People have used it with client trust building when there is a conflict. Others some I think the more too unusual ways of that safe has been used was one with domestic violence and I'll tell more about this and the second one with talent acquisition. I was like oh, interesting. I never thought domestic violence was the one that surprised me. And the feedback was extremely positive. This was a situation where HR was dealing with one of their employees being impacted by domestic violence violence and other than the legal aspects. This particular HR leader wanted to prepare herself because it was something that impacted her personally. And the responses that Saif was producing were adhering with what the what they had trained their psychologists, their healthcare experts to answer. And the second one was managing management consulting like an executive coach who was interviewing for a C suite and wanted to identify any potential bias that he had. So those are like very unique. And in both cases it was it act as it should. And with that I will make a caveat. No tool, no resource, no AI replaces the human connection, replaces a conversation with your close friend or like with like your doctor, with your therapist, your coach, whatever that is. That's to your point. It's a resource. It's something that you, you may not have access to a human being or you want to reflect within yourself and maybe that's a resource for you.

Yeah. Amazing. Jacqueline, thank you for creating that resource. You know, from the time that I've gotten to know you over the last year and a half, two years, the amount of content that you produce for mass consumption for people to be able to use, whether it is on a topic. You were one of the early writers on menopause and how that's affecting women. You know, you've written so much around this topic, around burnout, stress, and you continue to pick topics. What I really love is you're able to kind of really convene and have a broad set of conversations with people who are experts. You know, I've had a chance to contribute to some of your content. You leverage research, right? Academic research, and you're able to really bring it together into really simple frameworks with a big drive to make this available to as many people. So I really appreciated that about you. Thank you for joining us on this podcast, sharing about your SafeGPT that now is available to everyone. I'm just grateful for our friendship and I'm grateful for the powerful work in the space of flourishing that you are creating in the world. And I will keep you in mind as I think about anti inflammation. Inflammation as kind of really an overarching, overarching measure to talk to my clients about.

As a medicine, you can be. As a manager, you can be the medicine for someone. Right? And my goal is leave this the world we are in, better or not worse than what I have found. So that's. Thank you. Thank you for your kindness. This is beautiful.

My pleasure. Take care, my friend. I wish you well.

Yes.

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