That thought will help as we forge upwards from the economic downturn of the past two years, which for many of us, has been an exercise in perseverance . We’re discovering how this experience has changed us and how it changes the way we do business. It is times like this that force us to transform how we work and remind us of the importance of focusing even more on building healthy environments to work in.

Healthier companies will no doubt have found it easier to weather the events of the past couple of years.

Persevering through tough times requires good thinking. Lynda Curtin, this year’s opening keynote speaker at the Health Work & Wellness™ Conference 2010, is a recognized expert in helping organizations develop the kind of thinking power that can be the difference between ‘making or breaking’ the success of your organization.

Persevering also requires tough teams, which is the message of our closing keynote Stan Slap. As Stan says, “The bad times won’t last forever, but the story of how you stood up to them will. It’s time to write that story.”

In between Lynda and Stan is a fast-paced program that I hope you will join us for. It is aimed at helping you understand what thinking really means to your organization and how you can use it to bring about the change you are looking for.

And as Margaret Wheatley notes, changing things is quite straightforward. It doesn’t require grand plans, official support or the involvement of all leaders; it simply needs us to step forward and act instead of remaining silent or withdrawing.

The genesis of good, critical thinking is knowledge sharing, which is what the Health Work & Wellness™ Conference is all about – a forum for bringing people together to share ideas, energy and thinking.

Hope to see you in Vancouver in a few weeks! Let the thinking begin!

Deborah Connors
President
Health Work & WellnessTM Conference 2010

My Partner Ken and I started Nurse Next Door out of a Starbucks coffee shop in 2001 with 2 cell phones and a couple of caregivers. Within 4 years we had a company with a 1000 strong workforce and were one of the fastest growing (if not fastest) companies in the country.

But there was a problem. Neither of us actually enjoyed going to work. Yes, we owned the company. Yes, we were doing well. Yes, we were being recognized for our success. But we weren’t happy. And we weren’t happy for one reason: our culture was terrible.

It turns out that having the desire to be great to your people and build a special workplace is far different from actually doing it. As you grow, and time goes on, your culture starts to form a life of its own, and before you know it, it can become a life that you don’t like!

It turns out that there are only two ways to build culture: You build culture either by 1) Design; or by 2) Default.

By design, I mean that you architect it from the ground up. You blueprint it, you envision every little detail of what it needs to look like over the next 5 years and the plan to execute on this strategy.

By default, I mean you just let it form naturally. And this can work for a while. Until you walk into the office one day and you realize that you don’t like working there any longer. Just like Ken and I did in 2005.

Since we started our rebuild of Nurse Next Door, one where we had a fully architected culture, we have grown into the # 1 place to work in British Columbia (ranked by B.C Business) and one of the Best Companies to Work for in Canada (ranked by the Globe and Mail). And I LOVE where I work. In fact, I would consider myself to be one of the happier entrepreneurs on this planet!

In my workshop at the Health Work and Wellness Conference, I will walk you through our story on how we built our company from a place we didn’t want to be to the # 1 place to work in BC. And within this workshop, I will lay out a step by step plan for you to architect your own culture around.

Finally, In the words of Herb Keller (Founder of Southwest Airlines) ”culture is the most precious thing a company has. So you better work harder at it then anything else.”

John DeHart
Co founder Nurse Next Door www.nursenextdoor.com

Visit my blog on building culture at: www.johndehart.com

Humans are by nature idea machines. At the upcoming conference in Vancouver you are guaranteed to generate enough great ideas to keep you going for years. The Take Action series we’ve put together for the conference is designed to help you turn those ideas into concrete products, services and processes that will make the biggest difference for your organization and the people it serves.

Having a system for implementation will set you up to succeed. The system provides the structure for you to choose the idea you’ll focus on, get VERY clear about what the end result looks like, and stay in motion no matter what.

Although we don’t always enjoy the lifting and placing of each stone, the cathedral we are building is magnificent. We stay motivated by imagining the cathedral, getting inspired, and bringing that inspiration to the action of laying the stone. Our attitude is the one thing we actually DO have some control over, and there are tricks and methods for building our capacity to self-inspire and self-energize no matter what our external circumstances. We’ll be sharing those in the Take Action series and post-conference workshop.

Life happens. The enthusiasm and energy of the Big Idea can wane when we’re not doing the little action steps that make it happen. Your implementation system should include structure to keep your energy high. Habits of self-care (nutrition, exercise, creative time) are critical. Coaching, buddy systems, mastermind groups….anything that helps to keep you accountable for doing what you say you want to do is a CRITICAL piece of the implementation process.

Here’s a tip to get your started before the conference. Think about a project that you’ve wanted to do but feel overwhelmed about, like cleaning your desk. Set up at least one 10 minute action every day, so that when you go to bed you are congratulating yourself for taking a step forward instead of berating yourself for what you didn’t do. Prepare to be amazed at how quickly you will move forward, and let us know how it worked when we see you in Vancouver.

© Copyright 2010 Entelekey, Inc. All rights reserved.
Rory Cohen is known for her expertise in the psychology of success, particularly in the implementation of Big Ideas. She leads mastermind groups for business and marketing event producers nationwide. She co-developed the Take 10! System, a powerful and uniquely simple system for achieving extraordinary results, available in the book and CD Take 10! How to Achieve Your Someday Dreams in 10 Minutes a Day. Rory has been a featured guest on various television, web and radio shows, including The View, CNN, and Public Radio. National print media appearances include the cover story, “Start a Business in 10 Minutes a Day”, for Entrepreneur Magazine and a spread in People Magazine. To download a free 10 minute timer to keep you focused on YOUR Big Idea visit www.take10now.com/timer .

Becoming a healthy organization is both a journey and a destination. Goals and action plans help, but what’s also needed is careful attention to how you go about change. Here are 5 tips for ensuring that the change process itself is a healthy experience for all involved and, equally important, that intended change goals are actually achieved.

1. Understand change readiness

A basic insight from the field of health promotion is the importance of a person’s readiness to make changes in their health-related attitudes and behaviours. Organizations also can be assessed for their readiness to change in a healthy direction. Develop a checklist of the basic features of the organization and assess each as a source of resistance, readiness, or momentum.
2. Align structure and culture

Organizational change initiatives often fail because structural change is given priority over cultural change. So if you want your organization to get on or stay on a healthy change trajectory, changes in structures or operational processes must be balanced with the values and other elements of culture.

3. Link people initiatives to the business strategy

Many organizations have too many separate “people” policies and initiatives. If HR champions of these initiatives can’t see how all the strands tie together, line managers surely won’t. Needed is a strategy-focused approach to healthy change that makes it easy for all to see how actions to improve the work environment and employee wellbeing also contribute to business goals.

4. Widen the circle of involvement

Successful change requires collaboration. Healthy change processes move organizations forward because they provide ever-expanding opportunities for others to become involved. While leadership from the top of the organization is a big plus, employees throughout the organization can become change agents, contributing to making their own work environments healthier.

5. Learn and innovate

Successful implementation of change requires time for ongoing reflection and learning. Furthermore, think of your healthy organization strategy as an innovation – it introduces something new, institutionalizes its use, and diffuses the healthy practices and their supporting values more widely.

Managing Chaos

If you are a human today chances are great that you have a very full plate. If you have a job and a family, you are likely desperately trying to keep all your plates on a tray without dropping any. In my opinion, this is why so many start-up businesses employees feel stressed to the point of non functionality. There’s no way to manage that kind of chaos in the way most of us try to manage.

Let me repeat that last sentence. There is NO WAY to manage that kind of chaos, especially not alone. You cannot do it all, certainly not if you expect to grow a successful business. If you find yourself working night and day and still feel that you are accomplishing nothing, you know you are in the ‘doing too much’ trap, and it’s time to stop, take stock, and try a new approach.

Start with taking honest stock of everything you are doing in your day. If you are like most of the entrepreneurs I work with, those projects were not chosen consciously. Take 10 minutes right now and make the following lists:

• The projects I’m currently working on
• The roles I’m handling in my life and business (parent, spouse, manager, thought leader, accountant, mail clerk…be honest and list them all)
• All the things that are on your mind that you AREN’T getting to (unfinished business, creative pursuits, new product ideas)

Now, looking through the filter of your long term goals, evaluate the roles and projects and see which ones emerge as priorities. Which are the ones that if you paid full and consistent attention would make the biggest difference in your feelings of vitality, your relationships, your financial success?

How Will I Know When Enough is Enough?

As the bible says, the lillies of the field neither toil nor spin. “Enough” is a decision, not a thing. If you are clear on your vision, have balanced your priorities to include health, relationships, inner work in addition to your business, and you are taking small, consistent actions each day, you are doing the best you can. Act AS IF you’ve done enough, acknowledge yourself, give yourself time to rest and rejuvenate, and watch your results expand.

Stan:
A manager’s emotional commitment is worth more than their financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. It’s what solves problems that are unsolvable, creates energy when all the energy has been expended and ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees, teams and customers. If you’ve ever witnessed a human being emotionally committed to a cause – working like they’re being paid a million and they’re not being paid a dime – you know there’s a difference and you know it’s big.

It’s big but it’s not easy. Companies don’t get emotional commitment from their managers because the company believes it needs to be the dominant organism in the relationship; it must get managers to do what it wants them to do, how it wants them to do it. This causes managers to have to repress their own values—and so causes them to detach emotionally from their jobs.

The key neurobiological source of emotional commitment is the ability to live one’s values in a relationship or environment. For managers this means the relationship with their company and the environment at work. In order to really get emotional commitment, a company would have to reattach managers to their own deep drivers—allow them to live their own values and act according to their own personal codes.

This is the great fear of the corporate organism: If I set you free to pursue your own priorities, you’ll leave me and I’ll die. The problem is, managers are already free. They’re free to detach, which is about as free as one can get. What every manager in every company has in common is that they are human. When that humanity is denied by an anxious corporate organism managers detach emotionally to protect themselves.

New truth: The cause cannot always be the company; instead, it must also be managers’ pursuit of their own values within the company. This isn’t licensing chaos; it is ensuring control. There is no more reliable way for the company to become the cause than by not always insisting on being the cause.

Can companies trust their managers to remain committed to the enterprise if they’re free to live their own values at work? Human behavior is only unpredictable and dangerous if you don’t start from humanity in the first place. To safely trust managers a company must allow itself to be the best possible place for managers to practice true fulfillment, to live their values, and to realize deep connectivity and purpose.

This is the system managers will protect. This is the system managers dream about.

Excerpted from BURY MY HEART IN CONFERENCE ROOM B: THE UNBEATABLE IMPACT
OF TRULY COMMITTED MANAGERS by Stan Slap by arrangement with Portfolio,
a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) Stan Slap, 2010.

Stan Slap, President
slap
stan@slapworld.com

Typically when it comes to Workplace Wellness, two issues are being discussed: wellness and productivity. However, both are treated as separate entities – wellness as a human resources issue and productivity as strictly an economic one.  The key is for thinking organizations to realize that the two are related and how it affects their bottom line.  Through our research we have established the relationship between wellness and productivity. Only when employers can begin thinking about, and acting upon, the link between wellness and productivity can the trend of unhealthy organizations and employees be reversed.

Comprehensive Workplace Wellness not only pays for itself, but results in a large return on investment (ROI).   The American Heart Association position statement reports ROI’s of as much as $15 for every $1 invested in workplace wellness programs within the first 12-18 months after implementation.

Over the past 10-15 years research into wellness and its economic consequences has become more adept at measuring such qualities.  In Canada, a review of 13 studies demonstrated that implementing comprehensive workplace wellness programs result in:

• Cost savings of $3.45-$5.82 for every dollar invested in wellness programs.
• As much as $3.48 in savings of reduced health care costs.
• As much as $5.82 savings in absenteeism.
• As much as 12.2% decreases in illness days.
• Reducing one health risk factor decreases absenteeism by 2%.
• Reducing one health risk factor increases productivity by 9%.

These are just some of the ROI’s that organizations can reap from a workplace wellness program that is integrated into their core business strategy.

With such a high ROI, the health and economic benefits are indisputable.  Businesses are hard-pressed to ignore an investment that results in such a positive impact on their bottom line. One thing is clear: employers pay more for unhealthy employees.  The cost of doing nothing is unsustainable and businesses have much to gain by investing in wellness as a core business strategy.

Lydia Makrides, PhD
President, Creative Wellness Solutions Inc.
Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Workplace Health Management
www.creativewellnesssolutions.ca

Recently, I spoke with a professor who is teaching a class of MBA students. He expressed his frustration with the general level of poor quality thinking applied in their assignments. He went on to talk about how students are very good at reading case studies that benchmark best practices. They can recite information provided no problem. How helpful is that?

He would rather see his students equipped to think up the next best practices in the businesses they enter. That is very forward thinking! The piece missing, in his view, is the thinking tool piece. What thinking tools are we teaching our students so that they are equipped to think independently–thoroughly, broadly, creatively, critically?

This discussion got me thinking about this conference. If we want to create THINKING ORGANIZATIONS we really need to be thinking about thinking. How did we learn to think? What thinking tools are in our thinking tool kits? What thinking tools are missing from our thinking tool kits? How are we going to build our thinking tool kits? What problems are we having because we lack robust thinking tools? Think about all the media attention during the last 50 days focused on BP–an excellent example.

I believe the quality of our thinking plays a huge role in determining the quality of our futures. This conference is a great venue to start the conversation if it isn’t already a conversation at your workplace. There is nothing more basic than thinking ability. The good news–it can be strengthened

Good thinking to you.

Lynda Curtin
Phone: 818-507-6055
info@LyndaCurtin.com

Now, take a moment to think about the environment they are working in. Is it the kind of environment that effectively uses that ability to think? One of the biggest complaints we hear from employees today is “I don’t have time to think anymore!”

With thinking performance being a key driver of organizational health and productivity, this is a big problem! How do we create the kind of healthy environment that gives people the time and space to do their best thinking, and hence, tap into our organization’s best thinking?

Here are a few suggestions….I’d love to hear some of yours!

• Encourage (and model) breaks at work – wellness (a.k.a. coffee) breaks, and eating lunch somewhere other than at your desk. Encouraging the act of taking a break will go a long way in increasing creative thinking and productivity.
• Take steps to reduce email clutter, which can save your employees an hour or more a day. Setting corporate guidelines about email use has helped many organizations “take back the hour”. (For more ideas see “Managing Your E-Mail: Thinking Outside the Inbox by Christina Cavanagh.)
• Create a learning organization culture – at the Health Work & Wellness™ Group, we’ve been working on this for years – learning from all of our experiences – good and bad — and applying those learnings to how we do business.
• Creating time and space for brainstorming, innovation and creativity – this might mean making some big changes to how your meetings are run. I’m so looking forward to Lynda Curtin’s post-conference workshop this year on leading “high-performance thinking during meetings!”

O.K. – these are just a few ideas that came to mind. What ideas can you share with us? How do you create time and space for thinking in your organization?

Why healthy business?

Because despite the talk about people being a company’s biggest asset, in reality very few organizations could be considered truly healthy. Most employers would agree that workplace health makes sense. It’s more a question of ‘how do you make it happen?’ How do you shift your organization from a focus on tertiary programs (treating issues once they have occurred) to primary strategies (getting to the root of the issues)?

If you’re in a large organization, compare how much funding goes into return-to-work, disability management, attendance management and employee assistance programs versus health promotion initiatives and you’re most likely to find that the scales are very unbalanced. I think this creates a vicious cycle. If little is being done to create work environments that reduce work intensification and support employees to be at their best mentally, physically and emotionally, the costs of the tertiary programs will continue to rise.

Employers often spend substantial resources on preventive maintenance of many corporate assets, yet choose to wait until employees become ill or incapacitated before spending vast funds on repairs.

- Whitmer et al. 2003. Editorial: A Wake-Up Call for Corporate America. JOEM, Vol. 45, No. 9, Sept. 2003.

This is why the conversation on building healthy businesses continues to be so imperative. What are your thoughts?

Take this opportunity to be a part of the conversation – we welcome your comments!