Could prioritizing mental health at work strengthen your team’s connections, engagement, and productivity?
That’s exactly what Tony Jamous, CEO and co-founder of Oyster, has achieved. With 550 employees across 70 countries, Tony has built a culture where trust, psychological safety, and meaningful work serve as the foundation of his team’s success.
Senior Executive Coach Lauren Weggeman leads our discussion with the CEO of Oyster – a global employment platform that empowers companies to streamline the hiring and management of remote workers worldwide.
Tony’s insights are a powerful reminder that when leaders prioritize mental health at work, the results can be extraordinary – for both their people and their businesses.
If you’ve ever wondered how to lead with empathy and truly champion mental health at work, you’re in the right place. Here’s the interview!
How To Be a Human First Leader
Lauren: Tony, when we first spoke, you shared a little bit about your definition of Human First Leadership. Your definition included this idea of being connected to the real needs of humans.
I’d love for you to talk about what some of those needs are that you’re thinking about and looking out for and how you accomplish that at Oyster.
Tony: Yeah. So, first, is what does it mean to connect with the real needs of humans, and what are these needs, right?
These needs are below the surface. They are things like need to be seen, need to be validated, need to be recognized. And there are other needs, like needs of working on something meaningful, something impactful.
I believe that human centripetal ship starts by focusing on these core needs. From there, you can build up on other needs, but you start with these basic human needs.
How we do that at Oyster – first, we create a culture of psychological safety, so people are not afraid to be themselves and bring their full self to work.
So how do we do that? We create a non-reactive culture. Bad news happens, things slip – the way leaders react to this has to be a non-reactive approach.
I have to say, asynchronous work and distributed work helps, because the way we work is we get information ahead of the meetings all the time.
So we have the opportunity to process any negative reaction on our own, and then when we show up to our team, we are fully present for them.
How To Build Trust and Positive Mental Health at Work
Tony: There’s also a question of building trust in an organization. You want to create an environment where people feel trusted and make sure they can trust their leaders – and that starts by being transparent.
It also starts with developing a practice of assuming best intent.
I know many leaders and managers as we transition more into distributed work, they struggle with this, because they’re used to having their employees in seats, seeing them in person.
When they couldn’t see them anymore in person, that trust relationship has shifted.
So it’s important for any organization, and specifically distributed and remote organizations, to practice this intentionally, this assumption of best intent so that people feel that they are trusted.
How Can Leaders Create Psychological Safety at Work
Lauren: I think several things that we could dive a little bit deeper into, Tony, is specifically this idea of psychological safety.
I think going even a little bit further into how leaders can show up in that non-reactive way…and what it takes to build those strong foundations of trust in a distributed environment.
Tony: There’s a number of tools that you can do, from meditation to sounds and music to therapy. It’s really about being connected to your own needs, being in touch with your own emotions, and be there for yourself first.
So this kind of difficult emotion that arises in leadership roles are not spilling over into the organization and spreading.
That’s more important the higher you are in the organization because your emotions at the top will impact everybody else in the organization.
The more you are higher in the organization, the more you need to be disciplined in how you manage yourself and how you manage your experience.
From there, you bring that to the workplace. You bring this positive energy of showing up with presence, with listening skills and being in touch with what people are trying to say behind the words and how they’re feeling about this.
Framework: Where Are You Spending Most of Your Time?
Tony: This is a framework I got from my business school, the IMD Business School in Switzerland. You see here, on the bottom is the negative versus positive energy, and on the left here is low versus high energy.
Let’s say you’re feeling burned out, defeated, exhausted, depressed, you’re in the burnout zone. If you’re feeling fearful, angry, irritable, you’re in the survival zone. We want you to be aware of that, and it’s okay to be there.
The key is when you create awareness, people start thinking, “Okay, how can I move to the right? How can I feel more confident, more hopeful, more joyful?”
“If I’m in burnout, maybe I should go and hang out in the recovery zone for a few days.”
I don’t ask people how to get there. My job is to just see them and increase their level of awareness.
Gardener Analogy: Helping Your Team Flourish
Tony: I look at organizations like a natural environment. Think about a garden, and your role as a leader is to take care of that garden, so people can grow infinitely and indefinitely.
In a garden, if you have to plan that one close to the other, they might be in competition.
You have to create space in that area. That’s one example.
And you have to keep taking care of it. You have to water it.
Especially the more you go on the top, you need to be taking a back seat and you’re not in the spotlight. You want to put other people in the spotlight and you do it without the need to for external form of recognition.
You have to develop your ability to self recognize yourself because you’re at the very top, so nobody’s going to come and recognize you.
How To Improve Employee Engagement and Mental Health at Work
Lauren: You also shared that your team has a daily check-in to understand how people are feeling. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that process.
Tony: We use an app called, called Kona that is an add-on to Slack that just sends a message every day to people how they’re feeling, and they aggregate that data into charts.
We look at that in my leadership team to see how people are feeling and we see like when the world go through stressors.
But we have other forms of data that we gather. In my executive team, before our meeting we do ask asynchronously to share how they’re feeling and what they’re excited about in their work and in their life.
We also have a mental health channel in the business where people can come anonymously or not share their struggles in the community of pearls, we call them, at the employees of Oyster.
They come and support that person in whatever they’re going through. Again, feeling seen and validated. We also offer the possibility to have therapists for each employee in the company.
I think that probably very much instills that feeling of trust and strong relationships even in a distributed team.
3 Steps To Empower Your Team and Champion Mental Health at Work
Lauren: What are some of the things that you would recommend to leaders who are struggling with giving their team that space to grow and space to breathe, or maybe struggling with that trust in general?
Tony:
#1 Nobody wins anything by reducing the level of trust, whether consciously or unconsciously. Practice defaulting to best intent all the time.
And when you get these thoughts, put them on the side, park them, come back to them in two weeks if you need to. But don’t get obsessed with them because people feel that.
So, number one is practice assuming best intent and default to trust.
#2 Develop your non-reactivity. When you are in the heat of the moment, and things are happening, you’re in a meeting, and somebody said something, and you don’t agree with them, or you’re reactive, you’re anxious. This is not the time to make opinions about people.
You have to manage your reactivity so that you don’t bring that into the workplace and start being in the way of your own success. You have to manage yourself.
You have to lead yourself first before trusting and leading others
#3 Default to transparency. It was hard for me to learn what is the level of transparency I need to go with in this business.
Over time, I refined this approach, and now I have a process inside of me asking me, “Hey, is that something I should share with the team or not?”
So you have to practice wise transparency in the business, and you have to have a process inside of you that pings you on a regular basis asking you, “Is this something that will add value to the transparency in the business?”
How To Build Meaningful Relationships and Work in Remote Businesses
Lauren: I’d be curious to hear your perspective on what it takes to build deep, meaningful relationships, especially in fully distributed environments.
Tony: We want to make people successful and productive no matter what they are, no matter what time they’re in.
So we default a lot to documentation and asynchronous work. When we come and join into synchronous communication, meetings are well-defined and people are engaged in the content in advance.
So not only makes meetings more productive, but more pleasant. And people are not reactive in these meetings, right? So suddenly you’re creating an environment where people are coming to work together in a positive environment.
Secondly, is in a distributed setting you’re not seeing people in person. So how do you fill up your connection needs as a human?
At Oyster, we have the various Slack channels. We have our monthly all-hands. We have yearly virtual events that we come together.
Developing Self-Awareness and Personal Growth as a Leader
Tony: As leaders, one of our philosophy is do no harm, and I’ve been increasingly more sensitive to that question.
In many ways, unintentionally as leaders, we can create a negative impact in the organization. It’s really, how do you become more aware of this, and continue to manage yourself and continue to be compassionate to yourself as well.
You have to be grateful to yourself to have done everything you can align with your value.
Lauren: Yeah, I love that. I love so much of what you’ve shared does just bring us back to this idea of the importance of self-awareness as a leader.
I know that that’s something that you’ve spent years developing in yourself, but just love that concept of doing no harm and how you’re able to demonstrate that as a leader.
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Tony’s story is a testament to the power of leaders championing mental health at work by building trust, non-reactivity, and transparency.
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