Do you have a health and wellness program in your organization? What about an employee engagement initiative? If you have both, do you look for correlation between the two? How about causation?
Causation, of course, is harder to prove than correlation, but Gallup recently released interesting research on the effects of employee engagement on employee health.
Obviously, the recession and its effects on the workforce has caused employees to react in a variety of ways, including with physical and mental symptoms of illness. How they will choose to handle that reaction is an even more important question.
The Chief Happiness Officer blogger, Alexander Kjerulf, recently posted the story of a reader of his book, Happy Hour is 9 to 5. The reader tells of his decision to change careers into one that paid much better but required him to leave the field he loved. After gaining 100 lbs. and suffering several other physical ailments, the reader completed an exercise in Kjerulf’s book. The main lesson he learned:
The main take away – you may not be able to alleviate the stress of layoffs, pay reductions or other challenges faced by your team. But you can help them see how their personal values are reflected by your company values. You can give them a greater sense of personal meaning and purpose in their work.