If you’re a regular listener to my podcast, you may know I have been interested in the Zappos culture since I read “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Heish a few years ago. I had the pleasure of talking to Kelly Maher, the wellness coordinator at Zappos.
Kelly was such a fun guy to talk to and I really could have asked him a million more questions but spared him (and you) from a really long interview. Kelly and I talk about what it’s like to work at Zappos, his wellness efforts, incentives and the Holacracy deal that happened less than a year ago. And of course I ask him if he ever sees Tony, the CEO.
If you’re ever in Las Vegas, they do offer guided tours of the campus. Something I’ll check out the next time I’m in Vegas!
For full show notes visit: http://bit.ly/ZapposWellness
For more info on Mindful Eating workshops visit: https://redesigningwellness.com/mindful-eating-trainings-individuals/
Dr. Jessica Grossmeier is the vice president of research at HERO (Health Enhancement Research Organization), where she oversees the direction and execution of the HERO research agenda.
Jessica loves research and has a lot of publications to her name to prove it. In this conversation, Jessica and I talk about what drew her into research, the evolution of the wellness field, and a bit more about HERO.
With all the talk about throwing ROI out of the wellness conversation, Jessica makes some great points about it and what to consider when measuring ROI successfully. We talk VOI and something she said really stands out to me – identify your stakeholders and identify what they care about. What they want to see as a result of your wellness efforts.
Jessica also tells us what ½ of the companies who fill out the HERO scorecard are missing (and her advice for fixing it).
For full show notes, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/.
To learn more about Mindful Eating, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/.
The Motley Fool, a financial services company, is known for a non-traditional culture and that carries over to wellness. Sam Whiteside, their Chief Wellness Fool, has been there for over 3 years and in that time has expanded the approach outside of just the physical dimension of wellness.
In this conversation, Sam and I talk about the Motley Fool culture, her wellness approach, how she connects with employees and her advice to other wellness pros for engaging employees.
Here’s a few cool things about the Motley Fool – they call their employees fools, they give 1-week leave if you adopt a pet, they start their new hires on Fridays (Sam’s first day included a shopping cart and beer) and they have a sledgehammer workout weekly.
For full show notes, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/.
As I was thinking about people to interview on this podcast, I wanted to get the perspective of wellness professionals in the trenches who are challenging the status quo with their companies and clients. The ones who can positively impact the wellness industry from their everyday practices.
I had the pleasure of meeting today’s guest, Rachel Druckenmiller, at last year’s Wellness Underground Workshop.
In February 2015, Rachel was recognized by the Wellness Council of America (WELCOA) as the #1 Health Promotion Professional in the U.S. which is quite the testament to her dedication to the field of wellness. In today’s conversation, she tells us what that award meant to her, her approach to wellness, lessons learned as she’s grown professionally and a bit about her blog, Rachel’s Nourishing Kitchen.
A few things that impressed me about Rachel – even at an early age she reached out to people she admired, she aims to learn and grow from her interactions with employers and employees and she actively seeks to learn (reading books outside the profession).
We start out the conversation with Rachel telling us what it meant for her to win the WELCOA #1 wellness professional award in 2015. She tells us about the application process and how she was notified she was the winner.
Rachel talks about her approach to wellness and how it’s changed over the years. She started her career presenting the business case of wellness but found it didn’t work. Rachel learned to listen and be open…seeking first to understand. She now believes in getting curious instead of making assumptions.
Here’s a question her dad asks when working with companies:
“If it were just right (for you), what would it look like?”
I ask Rachel what happens now when someone pushes back on wellness. She feels it gives an opportunity to ask some questions and have them explain their viewpoint.
Rachel tells us about the wellness program at SIG (for internal employees) and how she busted her budget in year one. Three years later, she started doing more around wellness with her clients.
Rachel walks us through the challenges she faces with clients. She believes employees want more than just a paycheck, especially with the millennials. She has started approaching how wellbeing efforts can help a company become an employer of choice.
Rachel tells her story about chronic health issues with allergies and acid reflux. She started making changes to her diet but ended up being underweight. After she started aligning with functional medicine doctors, she got healthy and gained some weight back. As the wellness person, she felt judged after gaining the weight back.
She offers her thoughts on the divide in the wellness industry and how it’s brought negativity, especially to those looking from the outside of our profession. It seems we can’t disagree without being disagreeable. We need to recognize people have a different view of the world and that’s ok. There’s no room for dogma in wellness.
Rachel feels the future of worksite wellness involves optimizing the employee experience. Wellness professionals have a lot of opportunities to expand their role.
Wellness is not just about yoga mats and apples.
Rachel has an active blog she started in January 2014 as an outlet to offer a refreshing approach to food. She focuses on whole body nourishment instead of just healthy eating.
She leaves us with her tips for wellness pros wanting to change the status quo:
Links Mentioned:
Anytime I work with employees or employers, there are often complaints or requests about the physical environment. Whether it’s the air temp, air quality or noise level, the buildings where we work can either enhance or detract from our well-being. It isn’t until recently that there has been some attention to the impact of the built environment on employee health and wellness.
One of the people to credit for this spotlight on the built environment is Leigh Stringer. Leigh is a workplace strategy expert and author of the Healthy Workplace. Leigh and I talk about the impact of physical space on employee health, easy ways to create a healthy workplace and the inspiration for her most recent book, the Healthy Workplace.
I also want to thank Leigh for opening up about her experience when she was seriously drained at her job. She talks about what caused the burn out and what she did about it.
Links Mentioned:
Center for the Advancement of Well-Being
The Healthy Workplace (Leigh's book)
Have you ever thought about your approach to challenges? I’m not talking about those 8 week health challenges we love to run. But the challenge of trying to engage employees in their health at work, where they have a million other things to do. Not to mention, the many things we should consider…location, demographics, remote work, job function, etc.
Today’s guest has such a great approach to challenges and life in general. Today I talk with Patty Purpur de Vries. Here’s a quick bio on Patty. She went to the Olympic trials, started and sold a company, started a strong network of Health Promotion professionals, and found ways to engage a hospital staff of 10,000. She now has a new challenge of engaging physicians in their health and professional fulfillment.
I learned so much from Patty. In this episode, we talk about the company she created from $40 in business cards and how she’s engaged employees in her different wellness roles. Patty tells an impactful story about how she approached union nurses and got them to buy in to her wellness efforts. She also tells us about how she plans to tackle physician health and wellness in her new role as Director of Strategic Project for the Stanford Medicine WellMD Center.
Today, I talk with Mim Senft, co-founder of Global Women 4 Wellbeing and President and CEO of Motivity Partnerships, Inc. Mim is a positive force in our wellness industry, calling for collaboration to move our profession forward and often looking to bring in perspectives outside of our industry.
She's also a “get it doner” and you’ll hear how after a conversation at a conference, she co-founded Global Women 4 Wellbeing.
In this conversation, Mim and I discuss:
We start off with Mim telling us about how Global Women 4 Wellbeing (GW4W) started. Younger women were asking seasoned professionals why men were all at the front of the room leading the conversations. Then, a dinner at the SHINE conference sealed the deal.
It's important to focus on women's health because most research on health issues has been done on men, although women may have different symptoms (as in the case of a heart attack). GW4W also aims to support the next generation of women.
Mim believes none of us know everything and we need to strategically collaborate. She sincerely hopes that the forward thinking group gets louder and louder.
Mim tells us when she first realized the common approach to wellness was broken. She often sees the absence of a wellness strategy despite the importance of having one. I loved Mim's comparison of how a company treats wellness to how a company treats an IT security issue. Wellness is typically given to a lower level person and that would never happen with a security issue.
We discuss ROI and how spend in wellness is 1-2% of healthcare costs (if that much). Mim addresses two areas where companies can see an ROI. Putting in a bare bones wellness program won't give you a return. I like how Mim called that "magical thinking".
Mim and I talk about participation numbers and why participation doesn't equal change. She gives us a great example from a CEO and how his well intentioned perspective wasn't hitting the target with his population.
She tells us why a sense of delight is important and her thoughts on incentives in wellness. Mim believes they can be a strategic tool as part of a bigger strategy. They can be good for one time thing if they are culture specific. Again, Mim gives a great example that shows how important culturally relevancy is for incentives.
Those blasted emails! We get 140 emails a day every day (work only, not personal) and on average we check our email on average 36 times an hour. It takes your brain 20-30 seconds to refocus after checking email. Mim tells us what you can do instead.
Mim wants more of us in the wellness world to join together. We need to get louder if we want to address the problems. She believes the future of worksite wellness will bring more of a collaboration with other industries like the built environment. Also, a growing voice of people leadership that wants better answers.
Mim leaves us with a tip for the wellness professional who wants to challenge the status quo and for the employer who wants to build a thriving workplace culture.
Links mentioned:
Book Mention: Delivering Happiness byTony Hsieh.
I regularly ask my guests their thoughts on wellness incentives. I decided to focus today’s episode on incentives and what works to engage employees. Today's guest is Dr. Paul Marciano.
Dr. Paul is a leading authority on employee engagement and retention and author of “Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work: Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles of RESPECT”.
Dr. Paul and I discuss:
Paul talks about when incentives programs are really helpful and when they're not. He gives a great example of an employee of the month story and how it was a demotivator for an employee.
Paul walks us through his RESPECT model, both the definition and examples, and tells us about the impact pf praise on employees.
Dr. Paul leaves us with his book recommendation and a tangible tip.
We know how hard it is to change health behavior. Yet we spend our lives educating employees on the long term benefits of rational solutions, like eating healthier and exercising.
Today's guest, Dr. Shahram Heshmat studies how people make decisions over time and how we ignore future consequences. Shahram specializes in the behavioral economics of Addiction & Self Control.
In this episode we talk about:
I ask Shahram what can we do as wellness professionals to apply these learnings and he leaves us with great parting thoughts with some clear examples.
It’s the start of the year, which means a few people may still be hanging on to their New Year’s resolutions. You may know that the top resolution for Americans is to lose weight. But as we know most people aren’t successful with this one (or any others really). That’s why I brought on today’s guest, Byron Morrison.
Byron Morrison is the Author of the book 'Become a Better You', and the founder of Tailored Lifestyles Coaching. His work is all about helping as many people as possible live healthier and happier lives, by taking a holistic approach to losing weight, becoming more active, managing stress, and improving their wellbeing.
He was a hardworking professional in the Marketing/business field who was 50 pounds overweight, out of shape and unhappy. A life event caused him to completely turn around his lifestyle and start a career in health coaching.
Byron’s story is impactful because it’s from someone who was at the beginner level and can talk about the challenges he faced. His story can help us have more empathy for the struggles people face when overcoming barriers to lifestyle changes. It’s not as easy as telling them to exercise more and eat less!
As I was reflecting on 2016, it’s been full of self-imposed changes. Starting this podcast has enabled me to connect with amazing wellness experts that helped me expand my thinking around wellness.
With this podcast, I set out to talk with both wellness experts and those that are experts in different areas that complement the field of health promotion. This podcast is my small way of challenging the status quo wellness programming and trying to move the wellness field forward. I have learned a ton and been inspired by many.
Although this is a year end, wrap up episode, I thought it was a good way to kick off 2017. This episode will be clips from 10 episodes that impacted either my listeners or me. Hopefully you can get inspired by some of these messages to challenge the status quo in 2017.
You may have heard the word “corporate social responsibility” being thrown around but not really connected it to employee wellness. Corporate social responsibility, often abbreviated "CSR," is a corporation's initiatives to assess and take responsibility for the company's effects on environmental and social wellbeing.
So you may be thinking “what does corporate social responsibility have to do with wellness”? Hopefully you are looking at wellness or well-being as moving beyond just the physical, and are thinking or have thought about ways to weave volunteering into your wellness strategy.
If you need more evidence than that, I’m a big fan of the Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing model that includes community as one of their 5 dimensions.
That's why I brought on today's guest, Isa Watson, founder and CEO of Envested, the next generation giving platform that makes it easy to inspire and engage employees.
In this episode we talk about:
- how she got from chemistry degree to a company founder
- what is Envested and what are the capabilities for both employers and employees
- how corporate social responsibility and wellness are connected
- common challenges employers face when it comes to corporate social responsibility
Finally, she leave us with not one but two tangible tips on how companies can increase their corporate social responsibility.
Have you ever thought about how to sneak health and well-being to your employees? What about how to get your Managers to create engaged teams?
Today's guest, Laura Putnam offers guidance on both of these topics along with her thoughts on incentives, all the infighting within the wellness industry and her advice to wellness professionals.
Not to mention, we get a sample of what it's like to live in San Fransisco and we meet Laura's cat Minky.
Laura Putnam is author of Workplace Wellness That Works and CEO and founder of Motion Infusion. A leading authority on how organizations can promote well-being at work and how leaders and managers can inspire employees to adopt healthier behaviors, Laura is a sought-after speaker and consultant.
Laura is leading a pre-conference intensive workshop at the 2017 Art & Science of Health Promotion called Workplace Wellness that Works: A Smarter Framework for Designing More Effective Workplace Wellness Programs. For more information, visit this site.
Wellness initiatives are commonly known as "programs" which implies a start and an end, exactly what we don't want wellness to be. So, how can we pull away from pushing programs to influencing organizational culture?
Today's guest, Dr. Rosie Ward, is a thought leader who challenges the status quo, pushes boundaries, and engages people and organizations to find success through shifting old, ineffective thinking habits.
In this episode we discuss, how she got into organization management from fitness and public health, her advice for wellness pros to stay relevant, how there’s a missed opportunity in leadership development and we discuss those damn incentives!
Could you infuse more positivity into your workplace? I would venture a guess that we could amp up the positivity and optimism not only in our organization but also in our health and wellness programs. That's why I wanted to bring on MJ Shaar.
MJ Shaar was one of the first 50 people to graduate with a Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology from University of Pennsylvania. She has spent over 15 years studying, researching, coaching, and designing Applied Positive Psychology-based workshops for wellness professionals and organizations of all kinds.
MJ is a fun person to talk to and has a lot of great advice for integrating positive psychology into health and wellness promotions within organizations. In this episode, MJ walks us through the 5 pillars of positive psych, how we can apply it to health and wellness, gives us advice on moving the wellness industry past the traditional biomedical model and leaves us with a tangible tip.
Dr. Michelle Segar is a motivational scientist who has been studying what motivates people to choose and maintain healthy behaviors, particularly around exercise.
We start with Michelle explaining what she does as a motivational scientist. Research suggests we tend to make daily health decisions based on emotions and in the moment instead of according to logic. We'll make the choice based on how we feel.
Wellness has come out of a medical model that's logical and makes sense but long term benefits of exercise don't influence people. The "feel good" benefits of exercise do drive long term exercise.
We need to look to marketers as we are trying to change health behaviors. Michelle compares this to Apple and how they guide us to feel in the moment. We can help people see that if they move for 10 minutes they do have more energy. We also need to decrease the standards we give to people using a Kindergarten mindset. Let's shrink the goals we're asking people to achieve (at least at the beginning).
How can we move exercise from a chore to a gift? When you frame exercise as fun instead of physical activity, we get them to see it differently. Hook people to re-frame exercise by the quicker benefits like feeling happy, better sleep, stronger sex drive, connecting with your love ones, etc.
We need to shift people's perception that healthy behaviors from logic health reasons but instead as a vehicle to feel better immediately. Encourage people to notice how they feel differently when they make healthy choices. Ultimately, increase their self-awareness. The most challenging aspect is sustaining the health change because of the ongoing self management around the behavior.
Michelle gives her thoughts on external motivators like gift cards and financial incentives. She leaves us with a tangible tip to assess the reasons we give employees to participate....are they based on logic?
When it comes to the Corporate world, we tend to shy away from practices like meditation, deep breathing and using our intuition to make decisions. Today's guest, Jonathan Winn, gives us good reasons to incorporate these practices into our everyday lives.
As a warning, we start out talking about the U.S. election. Regardless of how you feel about the outcome of the election, I encourage you to listen to Jonathan's reaction and encouragement for us all to not feed the divisiveness. He urges us to seek the grounds where we have common space and warns us that whatever we focus on, we welcome it to continue.
Jonathan tells us about the benefits of incorporating focused breathing into your day and how your feeling is directly related to how you're breathing.
The steps to using your breath are to observe without worrying about changing it, to slow down your breath and finally to deepen your breath.
Jonathan talks about how to incorporate breathing into your wellness program (first, don't describe it as a breathing program because that's the how) but rather on increasing focus, productivity and well-being. For example, it's what can you do to maintain your calm when you're on the phone with a difficult client.
He talks about the imbalance in the corporate world between creativity, intuition (going with your gut) and using logic/analytics (data driven pieces). Jonathan teaches clients how to listen to their own inner guidance and body intelligence. He also tells us how employers can help tap into employee creativity and innovation.
Finally, Jonathan tells the story of how he came into this world and why it influenced his company focus (and name).
As a wellness or HR professional, how often do you think about, research or identify organizational trends? It's easy to get caught up in our day to day and ignore how the world of work is changing.
That's why I brought Jacob Morgan on today's episode. Jacob’s one of the world’s leading authorities on the future of work, employee experience, and how the workplace is changing. Jacob also hosts the weekly podcast titled ”The Future of Work”.
In this episode we discuss:
Jacob walks us through his Future of Work Forum and Community and fills us in on his new book, due out March 2017.
Finally, he leaves us with great advice for what health and wellness pros can do to move their organization forward.
Workplace wellness programs tend to focus on obesity and ways to get employees to lose weight. Unfortunately, many organizations rely on weight loss methods that don't work and may reinforce restrictive eating, yo-yo dieting and ultimately, more weight gain.
Today I talk with Rebecca Johnson, Director of Workplace Wellness for Am I Hungry? Mindful Eating Programs and Training.
In this conversation, Rebecca and I talk about how she got her start into the health and wellness industry, how we can help push the wellness profession forward and the tenets of the Am I Hungry training. Rebecca also leaves us with tangible tips for employers who want to address weight at the workplace.
For more information visit www.amihungry.com.
As wellness and HR professionals, we tend to get focused in our bubble of where we work and how we can make an impact on our employees. There are many forces outside of the worksite that impact individual's total health. That's why I wanted to expand our worksite lens and talk to Dr. Kelly Brownell.
Dr. Brownell tells us about the work he oversees as the Dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.
He drops some interesting facts about how the world population is expected to double in the next 50 years and that will put a tremendous strain on agriculture. China is now having a problem with obesity...more than with malnutrition.
We talk a bit about the agriculture subsidies for corn and soybeans and how they are complicated issues. He gives me a history lesson on why they were put into place in the first place.
We discuss how Philadelphia recently passed the soda tax and Dr. Brownell gives his input into the effect on other cities. He compares these soda taxes to tobacco taxes.
I ask him what he thinks of the angle Philly used to pass the soda tax (using bringing in more revenue vs. health implications) and what he thinks of the personal responsibility story when it comes to junk food?
Finally, I ask him if the soda tax replicate for the worksite, if obesity in adults can be solved or if we need to focus on prevention and how can cities/communities/employers can start a movement around health and wellness?
Today we talk a lot about the criticism that Jon and others have faced when challenging the status quo. Jon walks us through how he gained a newfound respect for WELCOA, the wellness organization that has previously been stuck in the past.
Jon tells us how him, Al and Rosie wrote up Employee Health Code of Conduct to prevent harmful practices done to employees. They want brokers, consultants, wellness vendors and companies sign the Code of Conduct.
Jon has a lot of respect for people will admit they were wrong. In fact, Jon used to run an Optifast program.
I jab Jon about his Linked In commenting and he talks about the continuum of snarkiness. He's received negative comments on Linked In as well but admits he's occasionally stepped over the line.
When you are speaking out about strong paradigms and challenging the status quo, you may need to be more direct.
Jon gives advice to his younger self/wellness pros getting out of school today and tell us about The Fusion, an upcoming conference in 2018 that includes Wellness, HR, safety and Organizational Development.
Jon leaves us with his advice for a company who wants to start a wellness program and tells us about their Thriving Workplace Culture certificate.
Jon Robison has been stirring the wellness pot for the past 30 years. He's co-founder of Salveo Partners, an expert consulting and professional development firm that guides organizations to create thriving workplace cultures, enhance organizational performance, and cultivate employee wellbeing.
We start off discussing Jon's philosophy around wellness/well-being. I ask Jon what got him thinking outside the traditional wellness program model. He answers the questions what's right and wrong with the wellness industry.
Jon then talks about the Safeway Amendment and how the average incentive is $693 per employee per year. He feels incentives promote cheating, lying and taking short cuts.
Finally, we talk about weight loss programs in the workplace. The majority of people lose weight and 90-95% gain the weight back, most gaining back more weight than they lost.
Because we end up going well past an hour, I ended up making my conversation with Jon two parts. Next week, I continue my conversation with Jon.
Financial wellness is all the rage in these days but what does it really mean? It seems like it can be pretty squishy and unclear just how to help employees with their finances. That's why I brought on Dave Jacobson, financial coach and national speaker.
Dave describes financial wellness as having peace and security around your finances.
In this episode we talk about:
You’ve probably heard the staggering numbers around diabetes. In the U.S. there are almost 30 million people with diabetes and 89 million with prediabetes. As many as one in three by 2030 will have diabetes.
People with diagnosed diabetes, on average, have medical expenditures approximately 2.3 times higher than what expenditures would be in the absence of diabetes.
It’s a bit of a problem in the U.S. but how can an employer address the disease?
Today I talk to Dr. David Marrero, who’s an expert in the field of clinical trials in diabetes and translation research. His career in diabetes research got started when he was diagnosed with diabetes 40 years ago and couldn’t find any research on the subject.
David and I discuss: the risk factors for diabetes, the Diabetes Prevention Program, treating the whole patient and what employers need to understand about their employees with diabetes.
As always, thanks for listening!
Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Redesigning Wellness podcast! If you’re a regular listener, you know myself and past guests have mentioned the Wellness Underground. This organization was created by Brian Passon and Evin Cole (along with 2 other members who are still underground). They also started an “unwellness” workshop in 2015
Today, I talk to Evin and Brian about the 2017 workshop. I also go into a speed round that asks them questions from the organizers perspectives.
I went to the workshop this past January and found it to be a refreshing approach to the standard conference. In particular, I liked the small atmosphere, speakers and time and ability to connect with almost all workshop participants.
For more info on the 2017 Wellness Underground workshop, you can visit http://www.wellnessunderground.com/.