Learning Center

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 ...

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 most irritating, and unfortunately too common,   injustices of the contemporary workplace is seeing an individual with less competence and an inferior work ethic advance ahead of a more skilled and hard-working person simply because they are more adept at office politics. When the wrong people are getting promoted for the wrong reasons organizational productivity and morale eventually ...

We spend a high percentage of our waking hours interacting with our work colleagues. Conventional wisdom has it that coworkers don’t have to like each other; they just need to do their jobs. According to some very interesting research coming out of Carnegie-Mellon and M.I.T. (not exactly epicenters of the “touchy-feely” school of business management) conventional wisdom, once again, turns ...

Many organizations try to boost employee productivity by using traditional analytic approaches which focus on strategic planning, goal setting and process efficiency measures. These methods reflect the belief that better systems, planning and processes lead to better employee performance. Other organizations emphasize improving employee benefits, perks, compensation, and schedules as a means to increase productivity. This approach reflects the belief ...

Next time you start feeling the unwelcome onset of stress and all of it’s debilitating symptoms, take a couple of deep cleansing breaths and apply some of the life saving techniques that astronauts have developed for staying calm in crisis situations. Astronauts have the most stressful, and dangerous, of occupations and their training is the gold standard for successfully managing ...

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. ...

In our culture, which extols the merits of authenticity and transparency in everything from TED talks about leadership to advertisements for our food, it may seem a bit contrarian to make a case for the virtues of faking it. But I’d like to try.   Suppose you are the manager of a busy gift store at the height of the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“Anger impedes our ability to be happy, because anger and happiness are incompatible” -Unknown Anger is a combustible emotion which leaves a trail of regret in its wake. The inappropriate expression of anger can destroy a marriage or a career. Unexpressed anger, on the other hand, leads to a different, but equally toxic, set of problems. It can fester and ...

I met Steve Mellor in the mid-1980’s when he was a young HR professional and I was a green EAP consultant. We bonded immediately as allies and comrades learning to make a place for ourselves in the corporate world. Along the way, we also took time to compare notes on the joys and challenges of being husbands and dads. Later ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Of the 21.5 million veterans in the United States, 9.1 million are currently in the workforce. According to government estimates, one million service members will be leaving active duty over the next five years. Last year on Veterans Day I posted a piece on the special value and skills veterans bring to civilian work. I would like to observe this ...

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 ...

In my role as an EAP consultant I have a front row seat for observing the damaging effects of workplace conflict on individuals and organizations. Destructive conflicts should not be confused with the constructive process of conflict that often propels creativity and innovation. Constructive conflict is based on a spirited competition of ideas and strategies and aims to improve the ...

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 ...

When conflict becomes mean spirited and starts including personal attacks, group morale can quickly move to the dark side, the bane of every manager.  Recently I was asked to help two employees resolve a conflict that was having a negative impact on everyone around them.  Routine tasks were still getting done but the tension in the group cast a long ...

One of the best things about social media is that it gives us daily access to the wonderful world of serendipity. Here I am scrolling through my Facebook feed of baby pictures, spam, political and social appeals, and miscellaneous artifacts of friends and family when I see a post from a friend linking to a Ted Talk by Dr. Brene ...

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% ...

Last month, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) added to its list of honors by moving into the number one spot on the 2012-13 U.S. News & World Report “America’s Best Hospitals” list.  MGH is a complex institution with more than 23,000 employees that handles some of the world’s most difficult and complicated cases. Hospital staff arrive at work every day knowing ...