The Healthy Workplace Nudge

How Healthy People, Culture, and Buildings Lead to High Performance

Rex Miller, Phillip Williams, Michael O'Neill, Phillip Williams

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781119480129
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119480167
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Discover how healthy buildings, culture, and people lead to high profits

Organizations and employees now spend an average of $18,000 per year per employee for health costs, a 61% increase in 10 years. Every indicator projects these costs will double before 2030. This is an unsustainable path. These costs are the tip to an even bigger iceberg, the hidden costs of time out of the office, distraction, disengagement, and turnover. The Healthy Workplace Nudge explains the findings of research on 100 large organizations that have tackled the problems of employee health costs and disengagement in five fresh ways:

1. Well-being leads to health and high performance
2. Wake up to the fact that 95% of traditional wellness programs fail to improve health or lower costs
3. Behavioral economics has become a new powerful tool to nudge healthy behavior
4. Healthy buildings are now cost effective and produce your strongest ROI to improving health
5. Leaders who develop healthy cultures achieve sustainable high performance and employee wellbeing

In addition to proving highly effective, these approaches represent a fraction of the cost sunk into traditional wellness and engagement programs. The book explains how to create a workplace that is good for people, releases them to what they do best and enjoy most, and produces great and profitable work.

•    Find actionable strategies and tactics you can put into use today

•    Retain happy, productive talent

•    Cut unnecessary spending and boost your bottom line

•    Benefit from real-world research and proven practice

If you're a leader who cares about the health and happiness of your employees, a human resource professional, or a professional who develops, designs, builds, or outfits workplace environments to improve employee health and wellbeing, this is one book you'll want to have on hand.

Part I
Slow-Moving Storm: A History of Warnings and Apathy

Chapter 1
A Slow-Moving Storm: The Existential Threat to Business and the Economy

Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.

—Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma

In the beginning, I thought our team came together to write a book. But, in fact, we were like those once described in a Cormac McCarthy novel: “They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke.”¹

Like that band of cowboys, our troupe stopped in the road when we saw the distant storm. We knew what it meant; our original purpose and destination no longer mattered. I saw the first flashes of lightning and heard the faraway muffled thunder when I met Dr. Michael Roizen at the Cleveland Clinic. Although it was distant, I could tell the storm carried deadly ferocity. For the first time in my life, I saw a true existential crisis. Before I give you a peek into that slow-moving storm, let me explain why and how we came to write this book.

A writer friend of mine was once embedded with a gaggle of reporters for a seven-day papal visit to a Middle Eastern country. In his first experience of being one of “the boys on the bus,” my friend's biggest surprise was what seemed like a total absence of press curiosity. He told me, “I expected to meet people who assumed nothing and probed everything. Surely, they would listen and ask questions thoughtfully and carefully. Instead, I saw journalists ignoring the subject of their coverage. They conducted loud cell phone calls, talked, ate, spilled drinks, swore, and stepped on people to get better positions, often as the pope was speaking!”

Let me assure you, that does not describe our approach. Curiosity drives MindShift.

We distrust the scripts and official announcements. We prefer to excavate the who, what, when, where, why, and how without the help of the authorities and their jackhammers. We agree with Steve Jobs: “It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.”²

That approach took us through three books; you hold the fourth. Our battle plan gathers 50 to 100 dissimilar, knowledgeable, strong, and gifted thought leaders. Then we move around the United States together, visiting innovative and sometimes radical outliers. We call those gatherings “summits,” but they're more like scavenger hunts. We grab relics, stories, honest research, and other artifacts and rush back to the cave for further analysis. Then we do it all over again a few weeks later.

We lead with our weakness.

Inexperience is our strongest asset. Because we know nothing, we have to be curious. So, we wear camo, distract the gatekeepers, build illusions, slip cash to the night security people, “borrow” reports, and hang out with insiders as well as outsiders. Think of us as the guys in Oceans 11. We embrace audacious goals, build daring plans, have a grand time, and knock over the Bellagio. Or something like that.

In the beginning, we called this project “Wellness.” That word meant something then; it means something totally different now. At its core, this book is really about a set of problems: the systems, ideas, habits, and walls that prevent people from attaining what they do best and enjoy most in America's workplaces.

Others saw that problem long before we did. Since they carried credentials and presented official authorizations at the guard shacks, they entered America's offices and factories and built an industry around their solutions. They issued lots of scripts, press releases, programs, and marketing plans. The problem was, their bold brilliance made the problem worse.

Then we arrived with nothing. Except curiosity and another great (my second and final) quote from Steve Jobs:

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.³

That's where our story began.

Looking back, my unfamiliarity with workplace wellness was a benefit. Because I was a novice about the subject, I had to get educated quickly. That meant digging deep. So, I immersed myself in the relevant areas of architecture, design, medicine, psychology, human resources, and health. It seemed like I read every book, watched every video, scoured every website, and interviewed every authority within the various realms of applicable knowledge.

I knew that Delos had started new collaborations, connecting building science with medical science, with the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic. So, I thought a few conversations on the medical side of the wellness topic would help connect some dots and clarify how buildings influence the mind and body. I reached out to Paul Scialla, founder and chief executive officer of Delos. And he built a bridge to Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer for the Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Roizen, the first chief wellness officer for any medical institution, holds numerous patents, has written several best-selling books, appeared multiple times on Oprah and is a partner, colleague, and co-columnist with Dr. Mehmet Oz. Roizen is a very young 71. In fact, his “RealAge”⁴ score is 51.2 years old. His dark hair, impeccable dress, and commanding voice help him to fill any room. He moves and talks quickly, drawing from his encyclopedic knowledge in conversation, interviews, and speeches. He doesn't stand before audiences; he prowls like a cat. Roizen is the pragmatic fanatic of wellness.

Figure 1.1 Meeting Dr. Roizen.

He and the Cleveland Clinic have many critics. That is true of every outlier we met. They attract sharpshooters from the ridges. But our MindShift approach likes projects that provoke critics. We like them for the same reason that musicians create tension with chord progressions that feel incomplete or chords that clash. That dynamic stimulates interest, engagement, and a sense of motion.

When I first entered Dr. Roizen's office, he was walking on a treadmill, talking on his cell phone, and shuffling papers on his standing desk. He waved me to a chair at a table piled with reports. My quick glance around the office took in stacks of paper, boxes of reports, awards, photos, and books. His corner office gave a sweeping view of the grounds of the Cleveland Clinic's Wellness Institute.

Figure 1.2 Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer for the Cleveland Clinic.

The interview started with his brief history of the deadly perils encountered on the road to career prosperity and convenience. It seemed that he too was once a cowboy, stopped dead in the road by a gathering storm.

“We know exactly when this rise of chronic disease started, 1983. We (adults) ate 2,340 calories, plus or minus 60 calories, per day from 1858 to 1983. Then we started increasing 2% per year. We reached 400 extra calories per person per day by 2000. The problem now is compounded by a concurrent drop in physical activity. Fifty percent of Americans—woman, man, employed, unemployed, Hispanic, Asian, whatever—do less than 10 minutes of physical activity any day of the week. The average 65-year-old person is five-foot-seven and weighs 33 pounds more than the same average 65-year-old did in 1991. Ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Praise for The Healthy Workplace Nudge
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Introduction: The Elephant Whisperer
• Part I: Slow-Moving Storm: A History of Warnings and Apathy
• Part II: Is There Shelter from the Storm? A Search for Wellness
• Part III: Magical Nudges: The Road to Health and Well-Being
• Part IV: Haven in a Heartless World: The Need for Safe Places
• Appendix A: The Well MindShift Core Team
• Appendix B: Well MindShift Participants
• Appendix C: Personal Story Template
• Index
• End User License Agreement