GMU’s Center for the Advancement of Well-being: Interview with Nance Lucas, Executive Director

A few months ago I was listening to National Public Radio and heard a story that mentioned George Mason’s Center for the Advancement of Well-being.  It caught my attention – wait, something like this exists?  Several months later, I reached out to the center’s Executive Director, Nance Lucas, to find out more.  She discusses the center, the stresses of being a college student today, and where individuals and companies can go to learn more about mindfulness, well-being and the latest research.

LS:  Tell me about the Center for the Advancement of Well-being.  What prompted the creation of it at George Mason?

NL:  Before it was named the Center for the Advancement of Well-being, it was called the Center for Consciousness and Transformation.  In 2008, individuals who had a relationship with George Mason University, Don and Nancy de Laski, both patrons of the arts, were at a place in their lives where they wanted to significantly contribute to students finding greater meaning and purpose in their lives.  To make a long story short, they focused their contributions on Mason because of the university’s ability to be nimble and innovative in thinking, and to break through interdisciplinary boundaries.  We had some existing course work that they thought would provide a good foundation for the start of this new center as well.  In 2013, we formally changed our name to the Center for the Advancement of Well-being to more fully align with our focus, our vision and the expertise at the center.

LS:  What were some of those “foundational” courses?

NL:  These were courses that were taught across the university on spirituality, meaning and life and purpose, psychology, religious studies, philosophy, conflict resolution, consciousness and meaning-making in the arts, etc.  There was interest from a wide range of faculty and staff from different programs around consciousness and transformation that morphed into a coherent agenda around well-being.

LS:  In my firm’s higher education design work, we have seen well-being emerge as an important factor for students.  We’ve heard there is increased stress, increased suicide rates, and other indicators that show students are suffering from a variety of mental health issues.  Are you all seeing any particular issues emerging at GMU or were there other drivers?

NL:  What we are noticing as an institution – and this is a higher education trend – is that there is a significant increase of students today who have mental health challenges, and the number is the highest it has ever been historically.  This has resulted in a need for a more systemic approach to well-being as an institution, and every university and college is facing that same phenomenon around student mental health.  The traditional model is to increase the number of counselors and psychologists to meet the demand of counseling services.  We’re aware of this at Mason, but we also believe there is a need for the entire institution to create pathways for students so that they have tools to respond in more resilient ways to life’s challenges, to understand and explore what it means to have a life well lived and to have greater meaning and purpose in their lives and their academic and career paths.

LS:  Why is stress so high for students today?

NL:  I think it’s for three reasons:

Firstly, the pressure we put on young people today is phenomenal.  We put pressure on students to meet certain academic high bars, to get into the best schools, and to have a number of AP credits completed before they go on to college.  We used to see students who might have 1 AP course. Now, some students are cutting off an entire year of college before they come here with AP credits.  That is a lot of pressure to perform!  It’s just the nature of how secondary education has changed dramatically in our country.  Students today are under such extreme pressure and they’re coming to our institutions already showing stress, anxiety, and the inability to cope with multiple demands.

Secondly, students today have as sort of Teflon protection that surrounds them.  The whole time they are in high school and even prior to high school, their parents or family members keep them in a bubble, which protects them from experiencing failure and responding to challenges (i.e. everyone gets a trophy even if the team loses massively throughout the season).  When they come to a university, they are expected to be more independent, yet they lack the skills and resources to do so.  We have parents who call us and ask professors to change their son or daughter’s grades.  Why?  Perhaps it’s because our society puts so much pressure on young people to get into the best school or to excel in everything they’re involved in.   Somehow we have lost our way with what it means to raise children to be more interdependent and to pursue their own passions and interests.

Thirdly, there has been a change in the sheer amount of time students devote devices such as iPads, iPhones, and all of the social media where they’re constantly plugged into something.  You want to say to students, “Stop Googling and start talking to people!”  That is another aspect of our society that did not exist 10-15 years ago.  It robs young people of the ability to develop high quality relationships with their peers, their teachers, and with adults because they spent a large majority of their time on these devices and less time on inter-personal connections and cultivating quality social support mechanisms.

LS:  I have two small girls and way too many devices in our house!  You are really making me think hard about what that means to their future.

NL:  Just walk into a restaurant and look around.  You might see a family sitting at a table and typically one of the parental units is on a device, and so are the kids.  If the parents can’t model what it means to have a conversation and take a break from emails, Facebook or social media, why should their children change their behavior?

LS:  How does the center support faculty and staff vs. supporting students?

NL:  We are exposing faculty and staff to the emerging science around well-being, the evidence-based practices that are emerging from the science, and how this whole body of scholarship is centered around more optimal human functioning.  We have created faculty learning communities which look at how we might redesign of existing courses to create modules around well-being.  We have come to understand that just about every single field or discipline has something to contribute to the science and application of well-being.  Well-being is becoming a unifying connector across the university.  We’ve used it as a tool to revitalize the curriculum in many ways.  We’re making the tent as large as possible so that everyone can shape and advance our agenda around well-being.  This is important for long term sustainability.

LS:  It sounds like you are really changing the culture at George Mason.

NL: It’s like running a social movement.  We are fortunate at Mason that this movement started at the grassroots level, and now it also has top down support.

LS:  Are there examples of how faculty incorporated concepts of well-being into their courses or research?

NL:  Yes. For example, one of my colleagues at the center is working with our provost’s office to create a well-being pathway in our general education program (where students have to complete 18-24 credits in areas such as Western Civilization and Social Behavioral Sciences. My colleague met with each general education instructors and he asked if they could integrate well-being into their existing courses.  He received enthusiastic responses from every faculty member he met with. For example, one history professor selected well-being related readings for his course.  Other global education faculty member is planning to show students how well-being is measured in different countries and how those countries compare with one another.  For example, typically the Scandinavian countries score higher on well-being in these global indexes because of higher income levels per capita GDP, better national policies related to health care and unemployment, and greater civil liberties.

In student affairs, the Office of Student Involvement created a new initiative that provides training for students to become well-being peer educators.  A group of 8 students is going through training now and will eventually facilitate peer-to-peer education with students around mindfulness practices, how to create and sustain positive relationships, and how to become more resilient. Peer influence is so strong with students, which is why this new initiative is so important.

LS:  Talk about the mindful living residential community at George Mason.  My firm has been researching and designing live-learn communities for a while, and have seen incredibly positive results from this model with the combination of living and academic space in one.  How does the mindful living community work?

NL:  This is a place where students can engage in common learning and feel safe in doing so with their peers.  They are with a group of like-minded students who are interested in and passionate about exploring deeper meaning and purpose in life, exploring what it means to be flexible, nimble, and vulnerable while being supported in their learning journey by faculty and their peers.  Students start in the mindful living community their freshman year and can continue through their sophomore or junior year.  Students form support systems with each other and the faculty, while being exposed to knowledge that we didn’t have 15 years ago.

LS:  Is there a perfect size for a residential community like this?

NL:  We cap our enrollment at 48, which is about as large as we want it to go.  That includes some upper class students in there who are in it for the second or third year, but the majority are freshmen. If it gets too big, it is difficult to develop community where meaningful relationships can develop.

LS:  What is the “Leading to Well-being” conference?

NL:  The conference was co-created by MasonLeads (a university-wide leadership collaborative) and the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being.  We thought it was important to intentionally make the connections between leadership and well-being. Nothing existed like this we when sponsored the first conference in 2010.  We used a combination of internal expertise at Mason and external scholars and practitioner’s from around the world to help shape this program over time.  We have experts in positive psychology and leadership studies, practitioners who are “good consumers” of the scholarly work and successful in applying these concepts in organizational settings.  The idea was to share our knowledge and ground breaking interventions to help organizations transform their organizations as we were doing this at Mason.  Every year, we bring in experts in leadership and well-being as well as participants who want to explore what this looks like on the ground.

Take a look at our speakers for the Leading to Well-being: Cultivating Resilience Conference in 2016.  We have a great line up of renowned authors and experienced industry leaders: Dr. David Cooperrider talking about appreciative inquiry, Dr. Dan Siegel talking about resilience, leadership and neuroscience and Dr. Annie McKee discussing resonant leadership and resiliency.  It’s all day on April 15 in Falls Church, Virginia with a pre-day conference on Thursday, April 14^th for those who want a more extensive learning experience on four workshop topics

LS:  Are you starting to see your students taking new career paths because this program is in place?

NL: Yes and I believe our students in general want to apply what they are learning about well-being in their jobs so that they can be the ripple effect of facilitating others’ well-being.  I also just had a conversation with a student today who is pursuing a master’s degree with a concentration in well-being and leadership.  His career goal is  to work in an HR firm or be the HR person in an organization focusing on employee well-being.

Students who are graduating who have taken our courses around mindfulness and well-being are committed to integrating what they have learned into their jobs.  For example, one of our graduates who is a physical trainer has taken what he learned around mindfulness and applied it to his work as a trainer.  He claims that the people he works with do better because he has combined what they are doing with their physical regimen, while exposing them to concepts of how their body is connected to their mind.  Another one of our graduates got a job at an architectural firm and was asked to create a company mindfulness program for their employees based on the coursework she completed through our center.

LS:  For people like me who are interested in getting involved with your program from industry, how can they do that?

NL:  We do offer courses, certificate programs as well as executive education programs that we can also customize for whole organizations.  The Leading to Well-being: Cultivating Resilience Conference is also a great place where people can participate.  Our website is a great resource and we also have a Facebook page that provides resources and a network of like-minded people committed to advancing well-being.

The Importance of Choice on Worker Health

Robert Karasek, an industrial engineer and sociologist, and Tores Theorell, a specialist in industrial medicine, have been studying stress and jobs for a long time. Their epidemiological studies over decades have carefully measured the stress level of hundreds of jobs and the impact of those jobs on the health of workers (particularly heart disease). They created a model that describes each job they have studied into two factors: 1) the levels of “psychological demands” of the job and 2) the “decision latitude” or control of the worker to manage how he or she could deal with psychological demands. The results of their work show that those workers with the greatest risk for illness are those with high psychological demands and low decision latitude. In other words, if you have a stressful job that does not provide much choice in how you are able to manage stress, you were more likely to suffer mentally and physically. Theorell describes how workers who have control over their work and work environment typically have more positive health outcomes, even if they have stressful jobs:

“The combination of high psychological demand and high decision latitude is defined as the active situation. In this situation, the worker has been given more resources to cope with high psychological demands because he/she can make relevant decisions, such as planning working hours according to his/her own biological rhythm. In addition he/she has greater possibilities to improve coping strategies – facilitating feeling of mastery and control in unforeseen situations. This situation corresponds to psychological growth.” (Berkman, Social Epidemiology, 2000)

Karasek and Theorell’s work emphasizes the importance of having choice on the job, and having some choice as to where, when and/or how you work can impact more than health, it can also impact engagement and the bottom line. My colleagues and I recently did a study for a global financial services firm including a survey of over 9,000 respondents from 18 locations across the globe. On average, and consistenly, 68% of the respondents across locations and service lines believed the company’s flexible work policies (allowing them to work where, when and how they need to) made them more effective.

• 70% of respondents said they were more effective serving their clients.
• 68% of respondents said flexiblity helped them to work more effectively on individual tasks.
• 67% of respondents were better able to manage their professional/personal life.
• 66% of respondents believe flexibility helped them to be more effective when collaborating with others.

Sally Augustin, a noted environmental psychologist claims, “When we don’t feel in control of what happens to us in a place, we are stressed, discouraged and frustrated. Feeling in control is the key here; we don’t have to actually exercise control to reap psychological benefits.” Just knowing that we can adjust our environment to better suit our needs makes a huge difference in how we feel about work and our ability to be productive.

The good news is that now, more than ever, we have choices about where, when and how we work. Technology is small and mobile, our need for paper is reducing significantly and managers everywhere are learning how to handle virtual teams. Most companies have adopted some form of “alternative work” policy for those functions that can be performed out of the office or in a non-traditional way. Even when employees are in the office, they are given choices beyond just “one office” to work.

This “choice” idea in the workplace is taking hold. In a recent survey a few colleagues and I conducted for the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) of 538 companies across services, manufacturing and a variety of other industries, respondents claim they are already using or about to roll out the use of touchdown spaces (69%), activity-based settings (52%), shared address (51%), hoteling (50%), group address (46%) and free address (38%) in their workspaces.

In many workplaces, culturally, there is still a stigma for working in a more “mobile” fashion, but the tides are turning as work flexibility helps companies recruit and retain the best and the brightest.  In this same IFMA survey, respondents were asked why they are exploring new ways of provisioning employees, both in their “primary workplace” and offsite. The responses were overwhelming: companies are adopting these new policies to support work / life balance for employees, flexibility, aligning with organizational goals, aligning with advances in technology, and the perceived benefit to workers. Cost savings and reducing real estate are also important drivers (and an important part of the business case to try these new ways of workgin), but they were chosen less often than many of the organizational or employee-driven goals.

So what can your organization to do promote choice in your workplace?

• Provide choice for where employees can work. Technology has greatly increased the ability of workers to get things done outside of the traditional office. For example, many people can work effectively and efficiently at home, in a satellite office, a plane, train, hotel room, park or coffee shop. The key is determining what activities are best suited for more “flexible work” and providing employees the right tools to be mobile, like a laptop, cell or soft phone, VPN connection, security controls in place, etc. More portable tasks might include making personal or business calls, reading and responding to email, reading industry magazines or work materials or just doing some deep thinking, which might be hard to do at the office.
• Provide choice as to when employees can work. Flexible work schedules are an alternative to the traditional 9 to 5, 40-hour work week. They allow employees to vary their arrival and/or departure times. Under some policies, employees must work a prescribed number of hours per pay period and be present during a daily “core time.” Other arrangements include job sharing, where a full-time position is split between two co-workers by mutual agreement, and benefits are given in proportion to the number of hours each person works. A third example is a compressed work week where employees complete their weekly work hour requirements in fewer than five days. Whatever the arrangement, employee choice is at the center of these policies and something that could work well for you if your employer allows.
• Allow employees to choose how they work. It may be too difficult for your company to allow certain employees to choose where and when they work, but helping them change the way they carry out their workday might be a strategy to help them cope with stress and the daily grind. Here are some ways companies are helping employees take control of their health and increase “control” of their workday through the work setting.
  • Standing up. Even if the company does not provide adjustable desks, it may be possible for employees to change position or location in their workplace so that they can work while standing, like working a table in the break room or attending a “stand up” meeting.
  • Walking. Walking meetings are all the rage today and have gotten glowing endorsements from people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and President Barack Obama. Walking meetings help you burn calories but also the dynamics of these meetings are different. People who walk and meet claim that they are more creative, productive and positive than “sitting meetings.”
  • Taking the stairs. Taking the stairs is a built-in cardio workout with no gym fee! If you or your employees need incentives to avoid the elevator, consider this: U.S. adults, on average, gain about a pound a year and just two additional minutes of stair climbing per day should prevent that gain.

The key with trying any of these flexible workplace strategies, is to study which ones might work best for your organization’s culture and the needs of the job before they are rolled out. They also, often, require change management and training. Managers and employees cannot change their behavior overnight and everyone needs help learning how to work differently as individuals and as teams.

Flexible workplace strategies also need to be measured by how “productive” the workforce is before and after adopting them. IFMA survey respondents suggested a number of ways organizations have measured this internally – which varies greatly by the industry and culture of the organization, and includes employee engagement and morale, individual performance, team performance, sales goals, new business relationships, data output and production metrics.

Roses, Buds and Thorns

Every night my husband, girls and I sit around the dinner table and share our “roses, buds and thorns.”  Roses are things that made us really happy, thorns are things that made us sad or disappointed us, and buds are things we are looking forward to.  It’s a good temperature check.  One day, I was asking my 4 year old about her day. She said she was really sad because one of her friends told her that she did not like her picture of a vampire.  Her friend insisted the teeth should be red, and Ali felt strongly they should be white.  “She didn’t put anything into my bucket,” she said with a quiet, sad voice.  “What do you mean,” I asked.  “Well, you know how we have roses, buds and thorns mom?”  Um, yeah.  “Well when you have a rose, that goes in your bucket, and when you have a thorn, nothing goes into your bucket.”  My little Yoda.  I’m starting to believe Robert Fulghum who wrote, All I Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.  I smothered her in kisses and added some roses.  All was better.

My wish for you this holiday season?  Fewer thorns, more roses in your bucket.

How “Gamification” Can Improve Your Health

I’m always looking for “nudges” or ways to encourage more healthy behavior.  Sometimes knowing the healthy way to behave is not enough to make us actually follow up.   Not surprisingly (especially if you are the 1 in 10 Americans regularly using a fitness wearable), a powerful motivator to encourage us to move more and or to engage in healthy behaviors is the use of “gamification.” Gamification is the concept of applying video game thinking and game dynamics in a non-game context in order to engage people and change their behavior in some way. Commercial video games have been popular for years and the gaming industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world – proof that their products are desirable and highly addictive.

Mike Tinney, a “gamer” in a previous life, has been studying aspects of social and behavioral engineering for online video games for years and now applying them to games that encourage people to adopt more healthy behavior. His company, Fitness Interactive Experience and his games: UtiliFIT and A Step Ahead: Zombies integrates techniques like competition and “progressive reinforcement,” where a player gets a challenge, they meet that challenge and then receive an immediate reward for their accomplishment (also referred to as the Nintendo effect).  Tinney reports that his top clients are seeing retained engagement as high as 90% from start to finish on their challenges.

Jane McGonigal, a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of The New York Times best seller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, has done a tremendous amount of research on what she calls “being gameful,” using computer games of all kinds to minimize the negative impacts of post traumatic stress disorder and depression, to improve happiness and resilience, even to promote weight loss.  In a trial with the University of Pennsylvania, study participants tested the benefits of using a game called SuperBetter, a web-based and smartphone based application that provides users with engaging, interactive content designed to help them achieve wellness goals.  A version of the game was based on cognitive-behavioral therapy and positive psychotherapy and used with subjects suffering from depression.  After just a month of daily use, the SuperBetter users’ depression symptoms and anxiety decreased and life satisfaction and social support scores increased (based on survey data).  Here is her TED talk on SuperBetter:

Games like Candy Crush Saga, Bejewelled and Tetris have been shown to reduce cravings for food, drugs, cigarettes and other addictive habits by occupying the visual processing center of the brain, thereby reducing the vividness of naturally occurring cravings.  According to McGonigal, “A game like Candy Crush Saga can reduce cravings for things like food or cigarettes by 25 percent, which sounds like not a lot but it’s actually been shown to be enough of a reduction of the craving that you can make a better choice and gives your willpower a fighting chance.”  It may be that video games, during a break time, can do more than relax employees, it can help them curb addictions too!

 

The Conflict between Work and the Workforce

This disconcerting image (above) is a drawing from Lennart Levi, who has given 4,000 lectures and seminars around the world dealing with problems and solutions in Occupational, Public and Mental Health. He uses this analogy to describe how we sometimes force ourselves to fit into jobs that restrict or confine us, and it causes a great deal of stress.  Levi is no stranger to this issue, he really knows what he’s talking about.

Lennart Levi, MD, PhD, became Sweden’s first Professor of Psychosocial Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1978. In 1959 he founded and chaired the Karolinska’s Department of Stress Research, which in 1973 was designated the first World Health Organization Centre in this field. In 1980, he also founded and directed the National Swedish Institute for Psychosocial Factors and Health (IPM). From 1982-2005 he was Chair of the Section on Occupational Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association and was President of the International Stress Management Association. Before and after his retirement in 1995, he has been an advisor to WHO, ILO and the European Commission in his field.

Karolinska Institute Research Center Stockholm, design competition: C. F. Møller Architects | Berg Arkitektkontor

His research has been out there for a while, but his colleagues have expanded and evolved his ideas exponentially.  It’s worth checking out some of their recent articles if occupational stress is of interest to you.  Interestingly, I posted the foot/shoe image on my Facebook book page on October 3 of this year along with a little description.  I post a variety of articles there, and some of them get lots of spreading, but this post was spread the most.  It now has been “liked” by 1,500 people and “shared” by roughly 600, an indication that it resonates with people and with people they know.  I think possibly this is because women’s shoes are truly terrible ergonomically, but also that many people connect with Levi’s point as it relates to job stress.  Here are a few of their comments:

• “Yes we do try to squeeze ourselves into jobs that just aren’t comfortable causing stress on various points (home, family, spiritual life, and every aspect of life). I know I am trying so hard to wear that shoe and yet I know I can’t anymore.”
• “When u hate your job, it takes over your life.”
• “My job is profit oriented and unwittingly hurts employees with whacky schedules and lack of Sunday time to worship. Looking!”

You want to know the second most popular “liked” post?  It was a Time magazine article about how some retailers are giving their people the day off (paid) on Black Friday.  Interesting.  I think there are many times when we are just happy to have a job, but there comes a time, when our job starts to control our lives in a very destructive way.  I feel like for short periods of time this is OK, but over the long term, a job that “takes over life” can’t be good for anyone.

I was going for a run with a friend recently, and I mentioned all of these great health-conscious companies I have been interviewing, and how, when they have truly invested in the health and well-being of their employees, they have seen their investments pay off in spades.  “The trouble with this concept in general,” my friend pointed out, “is that most businesses don’t think like that.  Most businesses are set up to use and abuse their people until they wear them out, and then backfill their positions with people cheaper and younger.”  Of course she’s right.  There are some shining examples of companies out there who are trying to engage people and improve their well-being to benefit the bottom line, but they still seem to be the exception.

It’s not that I blame companies, or even the individual managers who are driving their people to work so hard – heck, I’ve been one of them!  I guess I blame our U.S. corporate culture and a business model that hasn’t evolved much over the least 250 years.  It’s like we’re still thinking about people as we did in the Industrial Revolution, as brute force workers in a factory, mindlessly producing stuff.  But this model is so outdated, even in actual factories!

How long are we going to continue to create jobs and companies using a model that disengages, overwhelms and generally stresses us out?  Businesses can’t keep leaning on the fact that “we’re still in a recession” to excuse the fact that their people are working 2 or 3 jobs.  It’s time we took a hard look at what makes us uniquely human, creative, inspired and awesome, and build work and companies around that.  I’m not just saying this because I care about people, of course I do, but I also am really worried about how our outdated view of “how to run a business” is inhibiting long term economic growth.

Most companies are just generally inefficient and there is a lot of human energy lost just keeping them running – they can be more paperwork than progress.  And companies are not exactly long-lived or resilient either.  Geoffrey West, who has studied 30,000 publicly traded companies in the U.S. over the last 60 years, found that the average lifespan of a company already on the stock exchange is about 10 years and the larger the company, the more inefficient they become (see The Long Now Foundation and an article on Percolate).

I wonder, what will be our wake-up call?  Will it be crippling health care costs, bankrupt companies, or is it possible that U.S. corporations will start to see health, well-being, engagement and human performance as the ultimate competitive advantage?  And how long will it take us…  another 250 years?  In the mean time, I’m pleased to see that workers are voting with their feet.  Their shoes don’t fit, and they are finding ones that do.

The Business Case for Health: Interview with Ron Goetzel, Johns Hopkins University

I first met with Ron Goetzel doing research for my book The Healthy Workplace, and soon after meeting him realized that I had landed on a gold mine.  Ron is a Senior Scientist and Director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and Vice President of Consulting and Applied Research for Truven Health Analytics.  Ron is the author or co-author of many influential studies that measure the ROI of health and wellness programs.  He has interviewed and written about countless companies that have successfully rolled out wellness programs, and he is an authoritative source when it comes to measuring their benefit.

I’ve included some of his current research in my book, but he’s always got more research underway.  He’s worth following!

LS:  Ron, we have talked before about some of the work that you have done in terms of looking at the ROI of health and wellness programs.  Where can people go to find some of your studies and the companies you’ve interviewed?

RG:  The Health Project  is the repository of the companies, about 60, that have won the C. Everett Koop National Health Award, and have been able to document that their programs improve health and save money.  This year O’Neal industries, a building materials manufacturer in Alabama, won the award along with McKesson Corporation, a health care software company. Other companies that have won include USAA, Dell, J&J, Prudential, Dow Chemical, the list goes on.  If you go to the website, you can find each organization’s individual application for the award – how they presented their program, and all the data that show they did, in fact improve health and save money.  These are concrete case studies.

The other place you can go is to Promoting Healthy Workplaces on the Johns Hopkins website that takes some of these Koop Award winners like J&J, LL Bean, Citibank, and a few others, and looks at these companies through a qualitative lens.  We spent a day with each organization to figure out their “secret sauce” — what they do and how they do it, so that we can understand exactly how their program works. We put our findings into journalistic format, rather than a strict scientific research study format.

LS:  Did you find, when you did your research on health and wellness programs, that there were consistent ways that organizations set up their program (internally) that made them successful?  Did this vary based on size of company or industry?

RG:  The answer is that each organization needs a champion, and that champion needs to be an important person in a position of making a difference that can leverage resources (like time and attention) within the organization.  There is a small company called Next Jump in NYC and a company called Turck in Minneapolis, where the CEO is the champion.  In other cases, it’s the Medical Director who is passionate about health promotion, who works with the other senior level people in the company.  Sometimes you have champions who come out of nowhere, but they have a huge amount of influence in the organization.  The common theme here is that unless you have senior level support, it’s not going to work.  For example, you may have someone in the fitness center who thinks it’s a good idea to be healthy, but everybody else is working on projects and deadlines and making revenue, so nothing is going to happen.

You need senior level support and that level needs to influence middle managers/supervisors. In a large company like J&J with 120,000 employees around the world, the fact that the CEO says this is something important is not enough to change behavior.  You also need to have the company presidents, senior executives in HR, and people managers to send this message to supervisors.  Health then becomes part of personal accountability and employee evaluations.  The message must be consistent across tiers of leadership that heath is critical for the company’s success, otherwise it will not get a foothold.

On the grassroots side, unless the employees want to adopt these healthy programs, they will not work.  A senior manager may be a fitness nut, but if no one in the company is interested trying something new, it won’t work.  You’ve got to create a culture of health for the line worker, the person working at the machine, or at the front desk.  Each person needs to believe that health is important for his or her personal improvement and it aligns with what the company is all about.

LS:  Did you find that any of these organizations you met with had to change their culture to be healthier, and how did they do that?

RG:   Most of these organizations I met with were almost “born” caring about health, but they are continually aligning their health program in a direction that supports best practices.  Sometimes people are brought in – a new medical director, for example – to change culture.  They are almost like the Donald Trump of wellness (in a nice way).  They are there to push an agenda and make it happen.  Most of the organizations already have a good foundation of health – they are good organization, they care about people – but this person lights the fire under them.  Sometimes these “disrupters” are charged with creating a business case, build relationships with the right people and establishing a support/advocacy group.  When they go in front of the executive committee and say, “I want to invest $15 million dollars in this,” they won’t be booed out of the room.

LS:  Yeah, I can see some parallels between that need for a “disrupter” and a business case for health, and the need for a business case to create a new workplace strategy.  For example, in when we are designing a new space for companies, we often get a lot of resistance from employees.  Even if the workplace is better than what people might have occupied before, it’s still different.  People viscerally react to that (negatively) and change management has been a big part of our practice for a while now.  When it comes to changing healthy behaviors, I would think that we’re getting into even stickier territory.  It’s one thing to ask someone to move his or her desk; it’s another thing to criticize someone’s lifestyle behaviors.  “You should stop eating fried food, that’s bad!”  I can see health and wellness getting into our personal space even more.  It must be an even harder job to create change in this case.

RG:  First, you don’t want to “tell” people to change their behavior or blame them for a health condition.  That’s wrong on so many levels.  You do have to establish the right culture that accepts disrupters.  If your organization is one where people just sit at their desk all day for 12 hours, no one is going to encourage workers to be more physically active or go to the gym during the day.

LS:  Do you find companies are focused on the right outcomes when it comes to health?  Does it vary based on company, culture, what they do, etc.?

RG:  Measuring health and wellness is actually a pretty specialized skill, and most people don’t know how to approach it or what it means.  When I am asked to evaluate a program, often I am inundated with data that don’t mean anything – people are just throwing data at you.  In general, companies do a really lousy job measuring health promotion program impacts.  It’s not that they don’t want to measure better, but it’s not always easy.  A lot depends on what they want to get out of the initiative.

For example, if I go to a senior executive and say, “You have a wellness program, what’s important to you?” The executive might say, I want employees to be aware of their health, to know there are programs available to them, or the rate of participation and engagement in these programs.  This is pretty easy to measure, because all you have to do is administer a survey and ask those questions.  But when executives want to know how the program impacts worker performance, and you ask them, “How you measure performance today,” often their answer is that they don’t measure performance.  So if that is the case, measuring program impact becomes difficult!

In terms of reducing health care costs, most of the ROI studies are well designed, but complicated to do.  You can’t just on a whim say, I used to pay $10,000 per year and now I pay $9,000 a year.  This might be because you reduced benefits for employees, so now they are paying more out of their pockets for healthcare.  Things like absenteeism, disability and workers’ compensation are also difficult to measure.  And then you get into things like how these health programs help attract talent or increase the value of the company’s stock market.  Interestingly, we’re going to be publishing a paper in January that shows that companies that won the C. Everett Koop Award outperform the S&P 500 in the stock market, and have done so for the last 15 years.  Dr. Ray Fabius is also an author in this study (which compared the performance of companies that won the Corporate Health Achievement Award (CHAA) with the S&P 500).

LS:  What is the difference between the CHAA and the Koop award and why would you choose different award winners to compare to S&P 500?

RG:  The Koop award is focused on health promotion and disease prevention programs, while the CHAA is more occupational health and safety oriented.  When you apply for the CHAA award, there is a cost because ACOEM sends a team of people to inspect your worksite.  For the Koop award, there is no cost to apply, but you do need to provide statistically significant data to prove to 10-15 reviewers that your program has the hard data to show that heath has improved and dollars were saved.  Some companies have pursued and won both awards.

LS:  Some companies claim that they are too small to afford to compete for these awards.  Have you found smaller organizations apply for these?

RG:  Well, there are some awards that are targeted at small companies.  The Wellness Council of America (WELCOA) has an award based on surveys and self-reports and the National Business Group on Health also has a self-report application format.  But even for the Koop award, we’ve had some small organizations submit applications and win.  If their insurance costs have remained flat, or if they have good safety records, that is evidence of health improvements.  They just need good data to prove it.

LS:  It has been bugging me that none of these awards and measures talk to each other.  See previous post on health metrics.  It seems like the building design, products and workplace programs are all evaluated in a vacuum.  Is there a movement out there to connect some of these things?

RG:  That’s true for every industry out there and even within organizations.  My group is trying to connect health measures in a number of ways.  We’ll be looking at physical space and how can influence health as part of a large project for the CDC focused on updating the CDC Worksite Health ScoreCard.  The Samueli Institute in Alexandria, Virginia looks at optimal healthy environments (OHE) as one of the many aspects important for health.  Delos is also getting their name out there as a wellness organization as it relates to the environment.

LS:  Yes, I’ve noticed there are small pockets where there is cross talk across industries and disciplines, like at Harvard’s SHINE center, UC Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and a few other places.  But it seems like we are missing the big picture by not measuring some of these health measures more holistically.  Something to aim for!  To wrap, I have to ask…Where do you think all this is going?  What can we expect over the next five years – what will happen in the world of wellness?

RG:  I think what you are doing is pretty exciting.  There is a lot more money in designing healthy workplaces than in providing tobacco cessation programs, as an example.  To the extent that employers design the physical space so that is health promoting, that is a good thing.  The opposite is happening in many workplaces now, where we are focused on saving space and pushing people closer together, which gives them more natural light, but makes them grumpier and less healthy. The overall industry is moving away from saying, “we are going to lower your cholesterol level,” and now saying, “We are going to improve your health and well-being, which includes improving the physical and social environment of your job — where you go to work every day.”

The Healthy Workplace Book – Available for Pre-order!

The Healthy Workplace: How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees—and Boost Your Company’s Bottom Line is now available for pre-order and just in time for Black Friday!  Buy your copy today (or multiple copies for you, your boss, and your 500 best friends).  The book hits bookshelves July 1, 2016.

Click here and buy now!

Book Description

Is your workplace working for you and your employees? Studies show that unhealthy work habits, like staring at computer screens and rushing through fastfood lunches are taking their toll in the form of increased absenteeism, lost productivity, and higher insurance costs—but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Companies such as Google, Apple, Aetna, and Johnson & Johnson have used innovative techniques to incorporate healthy habits and practices into the workday and into their culture—with impressive ROI. Packed with real-life examples and the latest research, The Healthy Workplace proves that it pays to invest in your people’s well-being and reveals how to:

• Create a healthier, more energizing environment • Reduce stress to enhance concentration • Inspire movement at work • Use choice architecture to encourage beneficial behaviors • Support better sleep • Heighten productivity without adding hours to the workday

Filled with tips for immediate improvement and guidelines for building a long-term plan, The Healthy Workplace will boost both employee well-being and the bottom line.

Work, Love and Play: An Interview with Brigid Schulte

Brigid Schulte is the author of the New York Times bestselling book on time pressure, Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play when No One Has the Time, which named one of the notable books of the year by the Washington Post and NPR, and won the Virginia Library Association’s literary nonfiction award.  I first met Brigid when she spoke at my daughter’s school, to a bunch of very busy, overwhelmed, Type A parents.  Her message about finding the balance between work, love and play really resonated with me (and lots of people I know).  She also has been going through some life / career changes that are pretty inspiring.  She is no longer with the Washington Post, but now serves as the founding director of The Good Life Initiative at the nonpartisan think tank, New America, and director of the Future of Work-Life program.  Her insights below are worth reading – no matter how busy you are!

Designing a “Free-Range” Workplace

I can’t stop talking about the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.  I reference it like I used to talk about Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.  It’s just so comprehensive, and so juicy that it can fit into any conversation.  I won’t give too much away, but there is a part in the book where Harari talks about the Agriculture Revolution (ca. 10,000 years ago) that struck me.  He isn’t all that crazy about it.  Most historians emphasize that this point in time was a really good thing for humans.  We didn’t have to roam around hunting, gathering and foraging, thinking about “what’s for dinner”  all the time.  With domesticated plants and animals, our ancient cities were born, along with increased crop yields, drought tolerance, and easier harvests.  The human population exploded globally, so at least from a “perpetuation of our species” perspective, times were really good.  But Harari points out that from an individual worker perspective, the move from forest to field was overall pretty miserable.  According to him,

Interview with Jennifer Stevens, PhD: Neuroscience and Space

When I first met Jennifer Stevens, PhD, about a year ago, she was giving a presentation on neuroscience and some of her latest research. I was impressed with the fact that every thing out of her mouth was so… understandable!  Usually when I talk with neuroscientists, I walk away feeling like a deer in headlights.  When Stevens talks, she uses simple language to explain some of the most complex concepts of our time. She makes it all so simple, so practical.  She describes the structure of the human brain using by using words like “real estate” and “utilization” and she’s studying how our behavior is impacted by space.  Which is makes her super cool in my book.