Personal Sustainability
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Exceptional Performance

Exceptional Performance

Small interventions generate big returns in employee wellness.
In this study, managers received less than two hours training each: a combination of computer tutorials and face-to-face discussions. The training focused on actions like providing emotional support and modeling healthy behavior. Positive effects for these managers included health, satisfaction, and safety improvements among their employees. As the researchers report: "Teaching managers to be more supportive of their direct reports' work/life issues can be a simple and effective route to improving employee health and satisfaction, according to our multiyear study of hundreds of frontline workers and dozens of supervisors in middle-America supermarkets." [source: Harvard Business Review¹]

Workplace well-being boosts profits.
This report's researchers conclude that: "Desirable outcomes, even economic ones, are often caused by well-being rather than the other way around... Happy workers are better organizational citizens, meaning that they help other people at work in various ways... Job satisfaction and positive mood at work both contribute to the productivity of organizations. When the workplace is properly structured to increased well-being, profits will likely rise." [source: Psychological Science in the Public Interest²]

Health problems have serious economic implications.
The incidence of clinically defined obesity in the U.S. adult population has reached 34%, more than double the incidence in 1980. McKinsey estimates that the medical costs associated with clinically obese patients represent about 10% of the sum spent on health care premiums. Reducing the incidence of obesity back to 1980's level would generate $60 billion a year in net savings. [source: The McKinsey Quarterly³]

Footnotes:

¹ "Supervisor Work/Life Training Gets Results" by Ellen Ernst Kossek and Leslie B. Hammer, Harvard Business Review. Nov 2008, Vol. 86, Issue 11.

² "Beyond Money, Toward an Economy of Well-Being" by Ed Diener and Martin E.P. Seligman. Psychological Science in the Public Interest [PDF], American Psychological Society. 2004, Vol 5, No 1.

³ "Three Imperatives for Improving U.S. Health Care" The McKinsey Quarterly, December, 2008.

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