Learning Center

I have been journaling for a few years now and it has turned out to be one of the best methods I have ever come across for reducing stress and achieving increased clarity and about goals, relationships and problems. I write longhand in a notebook trying to get onto the page whatever is on my mind at the moment but ...

The project may be entirely ordinary like cleaning out the garage, or it may be critically significant like preparing a major presentation for work. The goal may be to start eating more healthy foods or to advance your career. Whatever the circumstances, one of the major obstacles facing any project or goal is the phenomenon of procrastination. And the digital ...

Our digital devices, the screens connecting us to an infinitely wide world of information, pose a significant challenge because they are so compelling and distracting. They pull our focus away from being in the moment and compromise our ability to concentrate on the essential tasks of daily life: paying attention to our loved ones, solving our work challenges, and practicing ...

Organizations implement rigorous strategic planning processes because they know they can’t pursue every possible goal. They have to make critical choices in order to focus their business on those objectives which provide the best opportunities for success. Similarly, if you want to be healthier and perform better at work, you should consider developing a strategic plan for improving your personal ...

In January 2018, Stress.Health.Business published a post which anthologized ten of our most popular blogs on the effects of stress on employee health, engagement and productivity. That anthology turned out to be our most widely read post of 2018. We are continuing this successful tradition in 2019 by assembling the following selection of our most popular blogs documenting the multi-faceted ...

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 ...

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 ...

One of the more common misconceptions about counseling is that the primary purpose is to rehash troubling events from the past. This is a particularly harmful misconception because, if you believe it, you are likely to conceive of counseling as a painful and futile exercise since, obviously, no amount of conversation can ever change the past. Of course, counselors do ...

For the past several years we have seen growing awareness in the business community about the high cost of sleep disorders. There is an abundance of research which validates the impact of sleep problems on productivity: An international human resource company has declared that “insufficient sleep” is the number one condition damaging corporate productivity. This finding followed a thorough examination ...

The United States won 121 medals out of a possible 306 at the 2016 Rio Olympics which just concluded in Brazil. You probably are not aware that Denmark defeated the United States 2-0 in Women’s Badminton (doubles) at the Rio Olympics. More importantly, you may not know how we compare to Denmark in the area of workplace happiness. Let’s start ...

Many companies are beginning to change the way they operate in order to reduce employee stress. In doing so they are recognizing that excessive stress is not only bad for employee health and happiness but it’s also a drag on productivity and the bottom line. Some of the most promising initiatives in this area are focused on creating a workplace ...

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 ...

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. ...

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, ...

Work environments have an abundance of stressors, but having a boss who behaves badly may be the worst. The experience of being treated unfairly or rudely is always unpleasant, but when it comes at the hands of someone who has significant power over your income and career it can be devastating. The problem is often compounded by the well-meaning, but ...

You know the feeling. A dark cloud of procrastination sweeps in blocking the light of your enthusiasm, inspiration and creativity. Your project stalls. Momentum fizzles. Distraction and guilt follow. According to Dr. Joseph Ferrari, a leading researcher in the study of procrastination: “Everyone procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator.” He estimates that 20% of adults in the United States ...

Last week the Boston Globe published a chart which details the current costs, in dollars and in time, of providing care for an older family member (It is worth noting that the chart appears in the business section because the astounding numbers illustrate just how significant this issue is for many employees and for the organizations that employ them)   ...

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. ...

Some days it feels that way. You’re a manager with an ever lengthening task list and rapidly approaching deadlines and you worry that your blood pressure and stress level may be reaching new heights. Then one of your employees, let’s call him Ted, walks in the office and asks: “Have you got a minute to talk?” Freeze frame. You are ...

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 ...

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 ...

Are you getting enough sleep? The National Sleep Foundation survey reports that 60% of us struggle with our sleep every night. Sleep problems, which are being linked to an ever expanding array of health and psychological problems, were recently described as “the new health frontier.” Employers, who are waking up to the mounting evidence documenting the impact of insufficient sleep ...

Joan Venocchi wrote an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe last week about the curious case of Kelly Greenberg, the embattled head coach of the Boston University woman’s basketball team. It seems that her players just can’t agree on the question of whether she is a bully. Ms. Greenberg has been accused of driving four players to quit this year’s ...

“A skilled [feedback] giver is great, but mostly our lives are populated by everyone else, folks who aren’t so skilled, have their own issues, or are too busy to really give us the time we need. If you’re going to take charge of your own learning you’ve got to get good at learning from these people too. A skillful and ...

You know that jittery feeling you get before you have to make a presentation? Most people believe that trying to “calm down” is the best way to handle this kind of pre-performance anxiety. It turns out that most people have it wrong. A recent study, by Alison Wood Brooks at the Harvard Business School, investigated this problem and her findings ...

Of all the complicated personal problems that employees bring to the workplace, none is more difficult for organizations to manage than drug and alcohol issues. Employee drug and alcohol problems pose uniquely troublesome challenges because the risks they pose to safety, health and quality are often obscured by employee deception and denial. Employees who are missing work or making errors ...

Sleep has become one of the hottest topics in medical and corporate circles. In the past 10 years there has been a mounting volume of studies, surveys and discoveries validating the fundamental importance of sleep. The National Institute of Health states it plainly: “sleep plays a vital role in your health and wellbeing throughout your life.” Insufficient sleep has been ...

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 ...

I am concerned about the escalating lack of civility that surrounds us in our everyday life. Incivility at work has many different forms. We see everything from the gossiping coworker to the intimidating bully. Then there are the supervisors who take credit for your work but never give credit and the managers who are dismissive and rude and will not ...

“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 ...

Organizations face daunting challenges when it comes to effectively managing employees whose personal problems begin to interfere with their work performance. Just ask the city of Toronto. The headlines concerning Rob Ford, Toronto’s embattled mayor, have progressed from sensational to almost unprintable in just a matter of days. We have been deluged by a steady media stream of Mr. Ford’s ...

“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 recent analysis from an international human resource company revealed that of the top 15 drivers of poor employee productivity the number one culprit is insufficient sleep. The remaining top 14 drivers of lost productivity were: depression; fatigue; back/neck pain; anxiety; hypertension; other emotional disorders; arthritis; obesity; chronic pain; headache; irritable bowel; high cholesterol; heart disease; and allergies.  Amazingly, eight ...

Mindfulness 2.0? In case you haven’t noticed the meditation practice of mindfulness has rapidly been gaining popularity. Once the purview of meditation halls and Eastern religious practice, mindfulness training is now a component in many successful corporate environments. This renaissance of mindfulness, informed by research in neurophysiology, organizational leadership, education and technology, has created an exciting intersection which can be ...

Did you hear the story about the fellow who was walking through the Broadway theater district in New York and was accosted by a frantic stage manager? The stage manager told him that he needed to find a replacement for an actor that had suddenly come down with a case of laryngitis. The curtain was going up in 10 minutes ...

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 it comes to balancing work and personal life managers have a double challenge. They not only have to figure out how to make work and home trade offs for their own well-being, they are also charged with the responsibility to be fair and responsive to their employees who are trying to manage the same challenges. Employees routinely talk their ...

1.  EAPs improve early identification and intervention for employees with mental health and substance abuse disorders. 30-40% of your employees will experience mental health and/or substance abuse disorders at some point in their lives. Depression accounts for as much medical and disability cost as hypertension, diabetes, back problems and heart disease. The positive impacts of early intervention for an organization include: savings ...

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 ...

“Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting” Christopher Morley Thomas Edison failed to invent the light bulb 6000 times before he finally figured out that he could make a filament for the electric light out of carbonized cotton thread. Edison is the presumed author of the phrase: “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” While it’s an appealing ...

What if I told you that there was an empirically validated tool which gives managers the capacity to improve employee performance and discretionary effort while simultaneously reducing their stress and improving their creativity? Let me sweeten the deal by telling you that this tool does not require a budget and you don’t need permission to adopt it. The “silver bullet” ...

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 ...