Close the Gap refers to our aboriginal friends who suffer from a health perspective to deal with day-to-day life in the 21st Century in the same way that non aboriginals do.

The gap that I’d like to refer to is the one between being “healthy” and being “not sick”. Let me explain more fully.

Just because we are not sick does not mean that we are healthy. In fact, more often than not we are merely in a holding pattern waiting to become sick again.

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of dynamic harmony between the body mind and spirit of a person, and the social and cultural influences that make up his or her environment”.

So what are you doing to move from a state of “not being sick” to one of being “healthy”?

For many years now, I have been facilitating Strategic Planning retreats for a variety of companies in a variety of industries in a variety of locations. On more than half of these occasions there has been a mention that organizations would like to be an “Employer of Choice”. Where the struggle has come from is determining how this is going to be achieved.

Irrespective of the statistics (which support the following five points by the way), the feedback from executives and staff I have surveyed has been overwhelming.

How would you like to be more successful at work?  How would you like to be better paid? 

What about being more engaged and energised – does that grab you?  And what would it be like if Monday mornings were something you looked forward too? 

If you already do then congratulations, you’re probably happy at work.  If you’re not, then the good news is that you’re going to reap a whole pile of benefits as we show you how to be happier at work.

Jessica Pryce-Jones (author of Happiness at Work) conducted a large-scale study of more than 3,000 respondents in 79 countries and she found that the happiest employees are:

180% more energised

155% happier with their jobs

150% happier with life

108% more engaged

50% more motivated and

50% more productive!

The happiest employees took 2/3 less sick leave and spent 80% of their time doing what they were there to do compared with 40% by the least happiest.

It’s not just employers that are better off. According to Dr Sonja Lyubomirski (Ph.DS Psychology, University of California) people that are happy at the office have higher incomes, better outcomes and enjoy more success. In research published in 2005, Lyubomirski found that there was a much stronger causal link between happiness and success than between success and happiness – i.e. happy people become successful – not the other way around (though there is a bit of that). Or put it another way – if you’re miserable before you became successful you’ll be miserable afterwards (so don’t put it off your happiness :-> !).

Why then do employers (and let’s face it many employees) resist the notion of happiness at work?  Why do they have a separate (and smaller) budget for wellbeing then they do for professional development?  It’s because we think to be productive you also have to be serious and stressed.  I call it the “George Costanza Myth” (see my earlier post for more).   It’s the notion that successful people are harried, highly-strung and much too busy to have fun or to share a kind word with their colleagues.

In reality, maintaining a positive, uplifted, outward-looking and humourful state is much better for your work, concentration, memory and decision-making than a serious, stressed and/or narrow focus.  It’s also better for your health, wellbeing, wallet, and success.  So enjoy your life and your work – it’s good for you and it’s good for your organisation. 

Follow me on LinkedIn to learn more about how to build your happiness and productivity, save time and stop stress.

Give yourself a top day.

Most wellbeing programs start off as an idea. The CEO or HR manager decides that it’s time to implement a wellbeing program. They give the task to you (or one of your colleagues). It’s usually well intended but even so, it’s important that you understand WHY your organisation wants to implement a wellbeing program.

Once that is clear, you sit down and start planning – but what should you include? You might start doing some research on what is available e.g.: massage, fruit, walking clubs, laughter yoga (we provide all of these), stress-management, resilience – but which do you choose?

You can also have a staff survey you can refer to. But both still leave you largely in the dark – what is it that people really want, need and will improve their wellbeing.

Experience will help you choose the right ingredients, but all of these methods still don’t guarantee the commitment of the most important person for your wellbeing program – the end users.

More importantly, the program you devise is all the responsibility of the organisation – ultimately that’s you. Wellbeing is affected by our workplaces, but it’s also affected by our personal lives, habits, and make-up. It’s the responsibility of both the individual and workplace. How do you make that happen?

Staff turnover is inevitable and increasing so there are two approaches that employers can take. The first is to reduce it and the second is to get early warning and be prepared for it. In this blog, I’ll focus on the latter as just about everything has been written on the first. The main objective is to understand why staff could leave even if they’re (allegedly) happy.

Essentially staff will leave if they have been at the same place for too long, have friends tell them how much better their job is, they get bored, they feel unloved, or they have personal issues not related to work.

As an employer, you need to get “inside their heads” to get the early warning signals and get ready for their exit.

One of the first things that suffer when we are under stress is sleep. We have one of the three things happen. Firstly, we can’t get to sleep. Secondly, we can’t stay asleep. Or finally we wake up tired…as if we’d never been asleep in the first place.

So why do these things happen?

In the first place it’s because we have personal issues. These arise when we get home and overtake anything that may have happened during the day. The reason we have trouble staying asleep is because we have so much happening at work that we wake up in the middle of the night with solutions that we don’t have time during the day to deal with. And finally, we wake up tired because of a combination of the above, along with the inability to take time out to regularly calm our mind.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “The dynamic harmony of the body, mind, and spirit of a person, and the social and cultural influences that make up his or her environment”. This is truly what we call holistic health. When we’re looking at our options, we must therefore consider all the elements of our health.

Another very important thing to consider when assessing what activities we need to undertake, should be to select those that integrate several, or all, of the following elements. Once again why work or play hard, instead of smart. When you get smarter you get what’s known as “flow”. This is when all the elements of your work, life, and health combine to enable you to achieve holistic health.