Going Postal

Stress management, lunch-and-learns,
and smoking cessation programs:
Is workplace wellness a frivolous benefit
or a matter of life and death?

By Caroline Nolan

Imagine: There I was in a Vancouver hotel, eyes closed, listening to New Age music with other delegates attending the first annual Health Work & Wellness conference.

The session was called "Vision quest: transforming the way we live and work," and our guide was Linda Naiman, a creativity consultant in Vancouver. She asked us to pretend we were as small as light particles, find our DNAs, and ask our genetic coding about the true meaning of life. She ended our journey in the future, where we were to imagine ourselves bringing wellness into our work lives. My eyes jolted open. Hello?

I looked for further clues as to what this was all about at another session,"Spirit in work: a wellness inspiration," conducted by Carol MacKinnon, who until recently, headed up a human resources consulting unit for Towers Perrin in Vancouver. Her last gig was helping a company orchestrate a major downsizing. Her head was sore. Her body ached.

"All I knew," she said, "was that I couldn't get dressed to go to work."
MacKinnon quit to start her own business in an effort to have more balance, working with spirit. In other words: "Finding meaning and purpose, and making a contribution [at work]. Making a living, not dying on the job," she explained.

Then there was Donald Ardell, who walked out dressed as Captain Vancouver, complete with ruffles. "It's time for a revolution in healthcare," roared the Orlando-based author. We must attend to the work and quality of life issues employees are facing, he asserted, before they "go postal." In short, to practice "existential wellness."

Vision quests. Meaning and purpose. Spirit. Existential wellness! What are these people talking about?

We all have bad workdays and I don't remember being given any guarantees that work would be fun. Parties are fun. Playing pool is fun. But work is work. So why should benefits managers give two hoots about dispirited employees?
Because it affects their health and productivity, said Dr. John Frank. The director of research for the Institute of Health and Work, Toronto, presented startling evidence that a lack of control on the job is as damaging to an employee's health as smoking.

I won't get into the details here (you can read the full story in the News section at www.benefitscanada.com), but to summarize: "People in high psychologically demanding jobs with low control [over their work] are those with the highest incidences of chest pains."

Bad work design "takes it out on people's arteries," he concluded. Good work design, on the other hand, empowers employees, fostering participation.
Still not convinced? Ask yourself why stress-related claims are sky high. Why Prozac teeters on tops of drug reports. Why employees go berserk.
The benefits industry has done so much: we have employee assistance programs, lunch-and-learns, and stress-management seminars. Aren't these efforts enough?

Apparently not.
Work can have such a positive impact on our lives when we feel we are contributing in a meaningful way. In fact, as Dr. Frank aptly puts it, "work is the cod liver oil of life."

But people are human. We all have limits--and my feeling walking away from this unique conference is that more of us are reaching them every day.
Health promotion is a worthwhile endeavor, but maybe things are getting to the point where offering a stressed-to-the-max employee another smoking-cessation program may not be the cure for what ails: a sense of spiritual poverty.

We need to reconsider the traditional definition of wellness beyond the physical (you don't look sick, so everything must be great) and include a person's psychological, spiritual well-being too.

After all, healthy, happy people who want to be at work are bound to have a positive impact on the bottom line.
As John Lennon once imagined--"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."
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© Copyright 1997 Maclean Hunter Publishing Ltd.
Reprinted with permission from Benefits Canada. For subscription information please call 416.596.5248.