The Great American Burnout is just getting started

The Great American Burnout is just getting started

Ariane Ollier-Malaterre answered my call from Canada. “It’s a holiday here today,” she told me: The National Holiday of Quebec. She had the day off from teaching at the University of Quebec in Montreal’s School of Management. Source Never mind that Ollier-Malaterre studies the future of work, focusing specifically on how people set boundaries between their personal and professional lives. She was excited to share some of her research findings, and getting on a 30-minute call from home seemed easy enough. This blurring of boundaries is a trap Ollier-Malaterre knows that others will fall into as well. She is especially worried now that many people are returning to the office […]

Never Have an Unproductive Day Again With This Simple Hack

Never Have an Unproductive Day Again With This Simple Hack

James Clear is an author and productivity expert who uses behavioral science to help nearly half a million newsletter subscribers optimize their habits. Nir Eyal is a tech entrepreneur, Stanford University educator and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. The two recently sat down to discuss how to put technology in its place, build a better work culture and supercharge your daily productivity.   Source Nir: You’ve done a lot of work on how to change behaviors within a workplace environment. How do we prioritize properly, and how do you change productivity by developing good habits? James: So there’s a story. It’s 1918 or so, and the CEO of Bethlehem Steel, one of […]

Remote Employees Face a Greater Risk of Burnout?

Remote Employees Face a Greater Risk of Burnout?

Zillow founder Rich Barton offers advice for helping work-from-home teams maintain work-life balance. Employees working from home are likelier to suffer burnout than they were when they worked in the office. This is why you should watch for burnout signs in your remote team, and take action to help them avoid burning out before it happens. Source: Inc. That advice comes from Rich Barton, founder of Zillow, Expedia, and Glassdoor. Barton took part in a recent GeekWire virtual event where he talked about the burnout dangers Zillow’s more than 5,000 employees face while working remotely. Barton tweeted in late April, My personal opinions about WFH have been turned upside down over the past two months. In the same tweet, he […]

9 Tips for Eating Healthy When You’re Working From Home

9 Tips for Eating Healthy When You’re Working From Home

You’re on a conference call and somehow wandered into the kitchen. Next thing you know you’re eating crackers and dry cereal out of the box. Or maybe you got so caught up in a project that you suddenly realize you haven’t eaten a thing all day. Or perhaps the “I’ll just have a handful of chips as I work” mentality turned into accidently eating the entire bag. Source Keeping your nutrition in check can be tough when your home is your office. You feel comfortable and there’s plenty of food available. And unlike in the office, you’re free to graze all day and the fridge is all yours. But this […]

Three Ways To Improve Immunity, From An Infectious Disease Specialist

Three Ways To Improve Immunity, From An Infectious Disease Specialist

In the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, it might be easier to overlook the severity of the flu, but in reality, the two aren’t that different. This article will remind us just how important it is to keep our immune systems healthy. Here are top three tips, which emphasize both the mind and the body, to help improve immunity naturally. Source 1. Reduce stress. Stress can affect everything from brain health to body weight, and of course, immunity. Kesh said when her patients are otherwise doing everything right but continue to get sick, “It’s almost always because of stress.” This is because when cortisol levels aren’t kept within their normal range, whether in […]

5 Tips For Reducing Your Work Stress in 2020 (by yourself)

5 Tips For Reducing Your Work Stress in 2020 (by yourself)

You feel the need to commit that 2020 is the year you stress less about work? That the demanding deadlines, long hours, and email notifications will not get you down? It’s a great goal, and one you likely have in common with a lot of people; a survey by the American Psychological Association revealed that 61 percent of respondents found work to be a source of stress. Source But resolutions are best kept with a plan of action in your inbox, so we reached out to experts for tips on tackling work-related tension this year. A) Use Breaks Strategically If stress is getting the best of you during your daily 09:00 to 17:00, Kaplan suggested […]

5 Employee Wellness Trends for 2020

5 Employee Wellness Trends for 2020

Organisations are beginning to understand the direct connection between employee health and wellness and business performance. But the definition of employee wellness, or wellbeing, has evolved dramatically over the past few years, and corporate wellness programs must adapt to changes in society. Source Here are 5 new trends in employee wellbeing and corporate wellness programs:   1) Employee wellness programs are about more than just physical health.  What began as a focus on counting steps, tracking sleep, and logging water intake has expanded to include social and emotional—or mental—health. This means taking a more holistic view of employee wellbeing. Rather than just considering physical fitness, best-in-class corporate wellbeing programs now prioritise […]

These are the signs that you’re suffering from Burnout at Work

These are the signs that you’re suffering from Burnout at Work

It’s normal to feel stressed at work from time to time. But for some people, the stress becomes all-consuming, leading to exhaustion, cynicism and hatred towards your job. This is known as burnout. Burnout used to be classified as a problem related to life management, but last week the World Health Organisation re-labelled the syndrome as an “occupational phenomenon” to better reflect that burnout is a work-based syndrome caused by chronic stress. Source: World Economic Forum The newly listed dimensions of burnout are: Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job Reduced professional efficacy (work performance). In the era […]

How Toxic Is Your Workplace Exactly? Quite Toxic If These 6 Things Keep Showing Up – Inc.

How Toxic Is Your Workplace Exactly? Quite Toxic If These 6 Things Keep Showing Up – Inc.

How toxic is the workplace-maybe even yours? In Dying for a Paycheck, Stanford professor of organizational behaviour Jeffrey Pfeffer documents loads of evidence suggesting that the workplace is literally killing people. Sixty one % of employees said that workplace stress had made them sick and 7% said they had actually been hospitalized. Job stress, according to Pfeffer, may cause 120,000 excess deaths each year.  Source: Inc. I’ve documented toxicity in the workplace as well, with head-shaking statistics. To raise awareness of the profundity of the problem in hopes of safeguarding our children’s future when they enter the workplace, I offer you six commonly found toxic behaviours. 1. Passive aggressiveness. Research has discovered that most toxic […]

Employers Need to Recognize That Our Wellness Starts at Work – HBR

Employers Need to Recognize That Our Wellness Starts at Work – HBR

The current debate about workplace wellness has called into question virtually every aspect of wellness programs. Commentators have railed against them, with some asserting that they are not only worthless but are also a morale disaster and a stealthy way to shift more coverage costs onto employees. Source: Harvard Business Review Despite all this, most corporate leaders continue to fund such programs. Collectively, employers spend upward of $8 billion a year on wellness programs — yet the programs underperform by most measures, and barely 25% of employers even try to understand how well their programs do. This disconnect between the near unanimous adoption of workplace wellness programs and their demonstrably apathetic results leads to some fundamental questions. Is the workplace […]