When your boss and colleagues care enough to invest in your health, it is good for you and the business.
Don't worry about breaks every 20 minutes ruining your focus on a task. Contrary to what I might have guessed, taking regular breaks from mental tasks actually improves your creativity and productivity. Skipping breaks, on the other hand, leads to stress and fatigue.
Making better choices takes work. There is a daily give and take, but it is worth the effort.
What works for one person's needs is almost always very different from the next.
If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year's insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. Instead, they treat healthcare like any other expense.
Employees who report receiving recognition and praise within the last seven days show increased productivity, get higher scores from customers, and have better safety records. They're just more engaged at work.
When you ask people what affects their wellbeing most, they think of health and wealth.
There is certainly some predisposition to wellbeing, based on the research I've looked at. There are people who have a lot more natural discipline. But for most of us, it takes a lot more in terms of social expectations, where, say, we tell people we're going to run a 5K.
Our relationships with people are formed by small moments - and relationships are crucial in business.
Executives must place a priority on wellbeing if they want to attract the right people, keep their best people, and drive their company's financial performance.
When I speak with people who love their jobs and have vital friendships at work, they always talk about how their workgroup is like a family.
What we've learned is that if you can make the right decision in the supermarket aisle, it's a heck of a lot easier to make a good decision when you reach in your cupboard when you're craving a snack at eight o'clock at night.
When you ask people about what they enjoy doing, time spent with the boss is even worse than time spent cleaning the house. So this suggests that there are a lot of leaders out there who are not doing an adequate job.
On average, spending time with your boss is consistently rated as the least pleasurable activity in a given day.
I think the term 'friend' itself has lost almost all of its exclusivity. Even the term 'good friend' is overused. Adding the word 'vital' provides a clear definition of what we mean.
I always thought there were some people who were just destined to be disengaged in their jobs because that was their personality, and no matter how hard managers tried, there wasn't much they could do with some of those people.
Positive defaults protect you from yourself - and that helps you to make decisions in the moment that are better for your long-term interests.
There's a conventional wisdom that says that strategic thinking is much more important than relationship building, which doesn't seem to be nearly as highly valued as it should be, based on what some of the leaders that I've spoken with have said to me.
The right choices over time greatly improve your odds of a long and healthy life.
While the things that motivate us differ greatly from one person to the next, the outcomes do not.
