Rupture between professional and personal life is a myth: employee well-being should be a whole.

In industrialized countries, we spend most of our time indoors. According to the National Human Activity Pattern Survey in the United States, we spend about 90% of our lives in indoor environments, meaning that by the age of 40, we will have spent 36 years within four walls. With Portugal ranking 10th among European Union countries for the longest working hours, I question how much time we spend immersed in the business context. Environmental psychology and neuroscience have been studying how spaces affect our physical and emotional well-being. It is true that buildings shape our health, as does the context and connection to our companies.

Increasingly, studies are promoting the happiness economy, which posits that the happier employees are in a company, the more productive they become. Recent results from the Harvard Business Review indicate that we are 31% more productive when we are happier.

Our role is to provide tools to our talents to make them more resilient during vulnerable moments, which will retain them in times of uncertainty. Companies must be attentive to diversity and acknowledge that within our office, there is as much diversity as exists in the world (or at least I hope so).

Long-term well-being cannot be achieved unless we can be ourselves and express ourselves freely in our workplace.

If there is one positive aspect the pandemic has brought us, it is the demystification that our professional and personal lives are like oil and water. Our life is one, with various dimensions, but if we cannot be whole at our workplace, we will struggle to achieve the desired levels of well-being. This dissatisfaction will reflect on our commitment to the company and productivity. In other words, psychological safety—the ability to express our ideas and opinions that foster and encourage us to "share ourselves"—is crucial. We must educate employees for a campaign of interdependence where I am responsible for the well-being of my team members and vice versa.

There is still a lot of shame in admitting vulnerabilities, especially at work, and so it is common to ignore symptoms related to this context, which we often do not know or cannot identify. Thus, external identification by colleagues is very important.

Closely related to these issues is 360-degree well-being, which includes the well-being of our families and our post-work context.

We know that investing in employees has the potential to help companies not only retain the best talent in an urgent time but ultimately because it is much more enjoyable to work in a company where we are all happy.

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