A full-time employee may work over 2,000 hours a year. Considering the known impact of environment and peers on individual behavior, creating a health-promoting workspace and supportive company culture may be the keys to improving productivity while preventing burnout. For more on transforming workplace cultures, I am joined by Dr. Richard Safeer.
In our conversation, Rich provides suggestions to encourage physical health at work. These include small actions, like placing a bowl of fruit instead of doughnuts on a meeting table, and structural changes, like offering low sodium cafeteria options. He advocates for leadership at all levels to find creative ways to support their teams’ wellbeing.
“An organization has a culture across the entire workforce, but then each team has a subculture… they can be part of the solution where they can have a better experience at work, and we [as leadership] have to help empower them to do that.”
Similarly, fostering positive interpersonal relationships among a company’s workforce can improve mental health and overall wellbeing. Rich explains the phenomenon of “social contagion,” in which one interaction between individuals can influence how those individuals go on to interact with others – for better or worse.
“Those could be our friends, our coworkers, namely our manager… What happens is that a bad mood can spread to others and inadvertently cause other people to have a bad day.”
With this framework, Rich discusses how workplaces can implement wellness plans most effectively, how we can measure a plan’s success, and how employees can seek support for their health.
Here are the details of our conversation:
[00:01:45] Connecting healthcare and patients’ workplace
[00:02:45] The rise of “workplace wellness”
[00:05:22] Wellness vs. wellbeing
[00:08:28] Defining “culture”
[00:10:30] How the workplace shapes our behavior
[00:12:14] Behavior economics
[00:13:18] Social contagion and the Three Degrees of Influence
[00:15:08] Implementing wellness plans
[00:17:14] Working towards wellbeing at all levels of a company
[00:18:58] Rich’s initiatives at Johns Hopkins
[00:21:36] Magnifying wellness at the institutional level
[00:23:43] Measuring success in culture and programs
[00:25:45] Optimizing individual potential and the CDC Worksite Health Scorecard
[00:27:58] Asking your workplace to support you
