Healthy Place to Work? - The Work Healthy Newsletter | Issue 8 | November 2024
Healthy Place To Work?
Health is the key to delivering sustainable high performance.
2024 has been an exciting year for everyone at Healthy Place to Work?. We continue to experience rapid client growth, to expand our global partner network, with 12 experienced partners across the globe and our core services are now available in 15 languages, a phenomenal achievement. A personal highlight was the successful launch of ‘Make Work Healthy’, our why-to/how-to book that charts the course for leaders who want to create resilient, sustainable, and high performing workplaces. I was delighted to have the opportunity to travel to South Korea and Brazil to support our partners there to launch our book, followed by a successful launch in Ireland, firstly in Dublin and then in Belfast and it was great to have several of our global partners join us. My next stop will be Mexico, and I am really looking forward to going back there very soon.?
And because we are global, we can give you access to the latest approaches that are working for organisations, through the ‘Work Healthy’ podcast series where we interview some of the best brains in the world on topics that really matter, giving you access to the world of healthy workplaces.
But global research remains overwhelming, that the majority of the world’s employees continue to struggle, where a staggering 41% of employees report feeling “a lot of stress” and undoubtedly this is having direct consequences for organisational productivity*. So, as we get closer to 2025 there remains so much more to do, and the critical role of leaders cannot be exaggerated. Leaders need to authentically care about the health of their people and be passionate about creating a healthy business and organisation. And that is why we need a new fresh approach to people's performance, the global workplace urgently needs something different.
So, enjoy the read but also join us in 2025 and together let’s make the global workplace a healthy place to work.
*Gallup 'State of the Global Workplace 2024'
Get Certified in 2025: The Power of Certification
Getting certified as a Healthy Place to Work? is a powerful way for any organisation to reinforce their on-going commitment to creating a workplace where all employees can flourish. Any organisation can take the simple steps to become certified and recognised as an employer of choice. But don’t just take our word for it
?BT Ireland has utilised the Healthy Place To Work? framework and process to its business advantage. BT have been certified for six consecutive years, a world first and an incredible achievement. This has coincided with year-on-year revenue increases and as Managing Director, Shay Walsh, said “the data that comes out of the process, when acted upon, will improve your business, 100%. It has improved our business, by any measure, whether that's customer satisfaction or profit of the organisation”.
?Boyum IT Solutions is another great example of a vibrant organisation that benefits from the power of certification. An IT solutions company, based in Denmark and who have experienced significant growth since its formation in 1997, with operations in Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, and Spain have been certified three years in a row which is an incredible testament to their commitment to their people. As CEO, Mikael Boyum, said “The certification emphasises the positive results of working strategically with our culture and with employee satisfaction”
Hughes Insurance, part of the Markerstudy Group and based in Northern Ireland, has also been certified for 3 consecutive years. As Sarah Balmforth, HRD at Hughes explains, they made the strategic decision to move to a remote working model, using the Healthy Place to Work? framework and process to assist them with this significant change, identifying 3 important areas of development, allowing Hughes to improve the employee experience overall.
From Brazil to Singapore:
Our exciting ‘Work Healthy’ podcast series gives you access to the world of healthy workplaces, digging deep to uncover the practices and approaches used by organisations worldwide in their attempts to rewrite the rules of the workplace as we know it. We access the brilliant brains of global thought leaders in the fields of health, performance, psychology, neuroscience, organisational design, culture and much more. Up next in our From Brazil to Singapore series is Dr Alan Watkins, Marcel Chiavone Pontes and Michael Jenkins.
If you are passionate about creating healthier workplaces that deliver better results and hungry for knowledge, insights and ideas to transform old ways of working and replace them with new approaches that make work actually work!
Then have a listen…
Toxic Humans - Michael Jenkins
?If you’re saying to young men and boys that this is the kind of masculine prototype, archetype or icon that you should be following, and being compassionate and empathetic is not manly, for example, it’s not how men should behave. I think this is doing a tremendous disservice to humanity, and we really need to fight back against that. To not have this notion that being empathetic or being compassionate is in any way compromising to one’s own masculinity”
A Healthy Rhythm! - Marcelo Chiavone Pontes
But organisationally, when you join an organisation, there is a rhythm that you get that sense of rhythm straight away the minute you walk in. It can be a mad, chaotic rhythm or it can be a calm, high performance rhythm. And there's mood music. And that mood music is oftentimes the CEO or the leadership team.
Coherence The Biology of Performance - Dr. Alan Watkins
The superhighway to disease is unregulated emotion. So if we are stressed to the eyeballs, or we're depressed, or we're overwhelmed or we're anxious, that has biological consequences. We pump out cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, which impairs your immune system, increases your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, senile dementia
You can find links to all three of the episodes below:?
The Toxic Human:
We are now in a post-pandemic workplace where employees have a greater sense of empowerment than ever before with regard to how they are treated by their employers. In spite of this shift, however, toxic individuals, and even more so, toxic workplaces, are still very much prevalent and an issue that has not gone away despite the shift towards a more empowered employee.
Toxic workplaces can be something as simple as “longstanding indifference towards new ideas and innovation”, or even a working culture where micromanaging out of an “absolute fixation with wanting to control everything”? can turn the workplace into a stressful one, demotivating staff and leading to high levels of turnover when the cause of these toxic practises are not properly addressed. It is simple on paper to point out, yet in practise it can prove increasingly difficult to get rid of…
Are employees sick and tired of health initiatives?:
We are now in a working world where employees expect more from their employers than ever before. The ‘health initiatives’, such as desk massages and saunas, that employers once believed would satisfy staff are now being ignored as a benefit, and viewed as surface-level placating to appear like your care, when in reality this does nothing to satisfy the self-actualisation needs of employees. Employee standards have risen, control and autonomy are the real goals for talent now, and poorly behaving managers dictating the rules are no longer tolerated.?
We have been getting the workplace wrong, and have been for years according to our research. For this new generation of employees, pay and perks have been overtaken by purpose and passion, flexibility, and freedom. These are the new parameters that employees value from their employers. The Silicon valley inspired bean bags and free food can be fun initially for workers and will definitely be posted on their social media that day, however, the novelty of these benefits wears thin in the long run and needs to be replaced by something substantial that proves that they are valued...
'Make Work Healthy' Launches in Ireland: