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Since its inception in 2012 stress.health.business has showcased numerous examples of companies making strategic choices which benefit both employees and profits. These companies do not view the workplace as a zero sum game where the needs of employers are competing with the needs of employees. Rather, they seek to achieve a competitive edge by identifying and promoting those factors that ...

I have just reviewed a very compelling new research report which concludes that companies who “embrace best practices for employing and supporting more persons with disabilities in their workforce have outperformed their peers.” The study, presented in a report from Accenture in partnership with Disability : In and the American Association of People with Disabilities, found that companies that championed ...

Bad bosses are an unwelcome, but all too common, feature of the American workplace. Work environments have an abundance of stressors, but having a bad boss may be the worst. Consider the fact that approximately 50% of American workers have left their jobs in order to get away from a bad boss. Furthermore, according to Gallup’s 2017 State of the ...

During a February presentation at the Harvard School of Public Health Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist spoke about the rise in preventable deaths by suicide, alcoholism and addiction calling them “deaths of despair.” Public Health researchers around the world have started to recognize that loneliness plays a significant role in these deaths of despair and, as a result, loneliness ...

The most successful employers are always looking for a fully balanced “win-win” when it comes to achieving both higher productivity and healthier, happier, and more engaged employees. These organizations do not view the workplace as a zero sum game where the needs of employers are competing with the needs of employees. Rather, they seek to achieve a competitive edge by ...

It’s not a shocker to learn that a blog with a name like stress.health.business. (inaugurated in 2012) has featured more posts about stress than any other topic. However, you may be surprised to see how many different dimensions there are to the stress/productivity/health relationship. So, as we commence our 6th year of the blog, I have anthologized a diverse sampling ...

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Stephen King Some companies like Zappos spare no expense when it comes to trying to keep their employees happy. They provide snacks, ping pong, nap rooms, video games, free lunch and a wide assortment of other perks designed to improve morale and productivity. ...

I can’t cite a source for the widely circulated statistic that “ten percent of conflicts are caused by a difference of opinion and 90% are caused by tone of voice” but my EAP consulting work supplies a steady stream of examples demonstrating the primacy of emotional tone in business communications. Whether a difference of opinion ends up leading to a ...

A recent article in the New York Times detailing the arduous demands Amazon places on its employees has put a spotlight on the subject of working long hours. The authors contend that Amazon, an amazingly successful company well on its way to become the world’s first trillion dollar retailer, is conducting a Darwinian experiment in “how far it can push ...

What happens when you have a winning product and/or business strategy but your managers have poor people skills? Lost opportunity is what happens. Failure to capitalize is what happens. Your business loses is what happens. Even the best business strategies do not implement themselves. They require communication, coordination, alignment, and efficiency. In other words, they require leaders with strong people ...

A new research study from Stanford University and the Harvard Business School has named workplace stress as a contributor to at least 120,000 deaths a year and up to $190 billion in health care costs. 120,000 mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and coworkers who die prematurely, in part, due to work environments that are allowed to remain toxic. ...

We are forgetful creatures. I’m not referring to the “senior moment” variety of forgetfulness. I’m talking about the habitual forgetting that takes place in the midst of everyday life challenges and stresses, when we “forget” to make those choices that we know will keep our bodies, spirits and relationships healthy. We forget that change can only happen today and not ...

Meetings are important. For better or worse, most organizational decisions are still made in groups. Meetings are a ubiquitous element of organizational life even as teams are now often geographically dispersed and collaborating online as well as in person. A productive meeting energizes, coordinates and galvanizes a team. Dysfunctional meetings, on the other hand, lead not only to bad decisions, ...

Our hyper-connected, 24/7, ultra-competitive and globalized work environment is putting extraordinary stress on employees and their families. The health consequences to individuals and the financial costs to businesses add up to a problem of staggering proportions: Depression has become the leading cause of disability worldwide. Behavioral disability costs have increased more than 300% in the past decade and account for ...

Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) provide organizations and their employees an array of  counseling and supportive services to address the negative effects of workplace stress. This is an extremely important mission, and EAPs are uniquely positioned to deliver on it, but I think we should be doing even more. We should be going beyond simply repairing the damage caused by organizational ...

Advances in brain imaging technologies are extending the reach of scientific comprehension into the complex and fascinating recesses of human motivation. By studying detailed pictures of the brain’s responses to different situations neuroscientists are changing our understanding of why people act the way they do. Business leaders have an opportunity to translate these discoveries about human motivation into organizational cultures ...

If you take the pleasure of getting things done at work and multiply that by the pleasure of getting better at what you do, the result is improved job satisfaction, higher motivation and diminished levels of stress. It’s a simple formula: we come to work to get something done and when we do our level of well-being and engagement increase. ...

According to a recent survey of senior executives the success rate for major change initiatives is only 54%. Why do so many organizational change initiatives fail? Organizations are certainly aware that their success depends on the ability to change and adapt to rapidly evolving conditions effecting markets, customers, suppliers and competitors. They assign their top management talent, often reinforced with ...

It was about an hour before I was supposed to “run” my first therapy group. The clients, ranging in age from 20 to 60, were in various stages of recovery from heroin addiction. I was 26 years old, had never run a group by myself, and was suddenly feeling a little panicky about the assignment. Among them, the group members ...

Ward Cleaver was an exemplary Dad, calm and wise and always available to talk with his kids and guide them. His wife June was an iconic nurturing at-home Mom. The Cleavers made a great team and their children adored and respected them. The men of Ward’s era were not expected to be present for their children’s births and did not ...

There is nothing better than an impending disaster to clarify the distinction between the essential and the trivial. When total annihilation is on the horizon no one is wasting any time worrying about whether it’s going to rain this weekend. The standard formula for disaster movies builds upon the stark choices offered by the threat of total calamity. In response ...

Organizations are on a quest to identify the essential elements of employee engagement. They dream of building cultures and work environments that will capture every last ounce of employee discretionary effort. They want employees who arrive at work every day with all the optimism, ambition and enthusiasm that they brought on their first day believing that happy people create more ...

For the past 25 years the Families & Work Institute has been tracking the benefits practices, policies and programs of U.S. employers. Their findings have documented the many ways that employers and employees benefit from flexible and family friendly workplaces. The data demonstrates that in return for providing a more supportive workplace to employees, employers benefit by having “more engaged employees, ...

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” Abraham Joshua Heschel   Harold Ramis died last week. He cowrote and directed Groundhog Day, a ...

Last October, I had an opportunity to ask 25,000 strangers five questions concerning their attitudes and feelings about work. Today’s post reviews some of the responses I received to one of those questions: “What are your strategies for balancing the demands of work with those of your personal life?” As you might expect, there is great variability in how people ...

One of my best management experiences was coaching my son’s Little League baseball team. I may not be able to remember the name of the movie with what’s-his-name in it that I saw last week but I can tell you the name of each kid on the team and what position they played. That group played hard and had a ...

“Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same.” Franz Peter Schubert Today’s post is the third in a series. Part 1 explained how I won the Listserve lottery and earned the prize of polling 25,000 strangers about their feelings about work. Part 2 looked at some of the answers I received ...

“If management stopped demotivating their employees then they wouldn’t have to worry so much about motivating them.” W. Edwards Deming If you read my blog post last week you know that I was the winner of The Listserve email lottery and as a result had the opportunity to ask 5 questions to a diverse group of 25,000 strangers. This week ...

What would you want to say if you had the chance to send an email to 25,000 strangers dispersed across planet earth? That’s the question that faced me last week and I had 48 hours to decide what to do with this opportunity. The Listserve is an email lottery. One person every day has a chance to broadcast a message ...

Workplaces with high levels of employee stress and anger are increasing their risk for many negative business outcomes including: Employee fatigue, concentration difficulties and diminished problem-solving abilities Diminished quality, productivity and customer service Under reporting of critical business issues (in order to avoid blame) Poor teamwork and coordination among individuals who are resentful and feel that they have been treated ...

Meetings are the place where an organization can access the collective knowledge of its members to make the best possible tactical and strategic decisions. Meetings are the place where organizations can work out conflicts, coordinate individual efforts and get everyone on the same page.   Meetings are an inevitable, necessary and ubiquitous element of organizational life. To my knowledge, no ...

A few years ago one of our client companies merged with their biggest competitor and they asked us to facilitate some preliminary meetings with the other management group which, until the merger, had been their rivals. There was much anxiety in both management groups about how to merge the two very different, adversarial and extremely competitive cultures. Andrew, a senior ...

The idea of employee burnout been in circulation since the 1970s and continues to be relevant in contemporary discussions of job stress and the employee experience of work. The original burnout metaphor refers to the smothering of a fire or the extinguishing of a candle by depriving it of the resources (oxygen) it needs to burn brightly. By extension, the ...

You know them. They are the management equivalent of helicopter parents (without the personal commitment and attachment). They hover over the work of their employees and they insist on inspecting and controlling the smallest details of a project. They are irritated by employee initiative and insist on being consulted on all decisions, even those well within the scope of the ...

When an employee reports being sickened at work by toxic fumes leaking into their work area, most organizations will carefully and expeditiously investigate the matter. We expect them to seek out the origin of the fumes and engineer a solution that protects employees from illness and the organization from liability. It would be short sighted and foolish, not to mention ...

EAP professionals don’t need a Gallup pollster to tell them that many Americans are feeling distressed about their jobs and work environments. We see the evidence every day in our offices: employees who are discouraged, running on empty and preoccupied by thoughts of “getting out.” The good news is that managers don’t need a big budget or anyone else’s permission ...

In 1982, Zingerman’s Deli served their first magnificent overstuffed sandwich in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The founders, Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw, were united by their dream of the perfect corn beef on rye. That year was my (lucky) 13th year in Ann Arbor and I just couldn’t get enough of their insanely addictive food. I left Ann Arbor in 1983, ...

Work-life balance is complicated. It’s an intricate consideration – much more than just assessing personal priorities and learning how to manage our time. It’s an Ideal, a goal and a pursuit that will probably be a little bit different tomorrow than it is today. When we used to talk about balance, it was a conversation rooted in location. Are we ...

Three years ago this month Microsoft shut down its Encarta website and acknowledged the obvious – that its encyclopedia had absolutely no chance of competing with Wikipedia. In 2009, Wikipedia – a free collaborative project – was getting 97% of the online encyclopedia visits in the United States. Encarta, after 16 years of trying, was a distant second with 1.27% ...

Every morning I wake up and, after having a cup of coffee and reading The Boston Globe, I go to work on the Sudoku puzzle. Like millions of other people I look forward to testing myself against the day’s 9×9 grid. We puzzle people (let’s not forget the crossword folks) happily engage with this task even though we are never ...

While we do not have access to the performance appraisals Snow White might have completed for Happy and Grumpy , the business research consistently demonstrates that happy employees produce more, miss less work, are less likely to quit and make a greater commitment to their jobs than grumpy employees. In their recent review of this research in the Harvard Business ...

When it comes to stress, if the soup’s too hot you can strain your heart, increase your risk of chronic disease, weaken your immune system, be distracted by worry, become irritable and pessimistic and find yourself making poor decisions. And if the soups too cold you risk boredom, lethargy and lack of motivation and engagement. But if the soup is ...