wellbeing
l a n o i t a p u c c O ards Haz
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black president in the White House, a global depression not known for the best part of a century and the Japanese are going to the moon – the times they are changin’ and business had better catch up. There’s a revolution in wellness coming and those companies built on fear, threat and control may soon be too sick to survive it. Revolution, you say? Doesn’t that mean anarchy? Dictatorship? Bad beards? Before you grab your Che Guavara T-Shirt and copy of ‘Das Republic’, let me explain...
The Coming Revolution in corporate Wellness
For more than 200 years, companies have been built like profit machines. Their topdown management systems were designed to standardise and control, encouraging the retention of rigid organisational structures and archaic management practices that saw revenue come first and people’s needs come second. Thankfully, the growing public trend towards wellness, health and spirituality has expanded beyond the sphere of hippies, gurus and spiritual quacks and exploded into the global consciousness. The result? More and more employees are realising that a business with healthy profits can still be a very sick place to work.
unicycle businessman outdoor balance ©istockphoto.com/ZoneCreative
writer Michael Stevens
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LOOKING BACK During the industrial revolution the average workday was between 13 and 15 hours, the work week often seven days and children as young as seven commonly cleaned machinery because they could crawl into smaller spaces than adults. What seemed normal at other historical epochs today seems cruel, exploitative and even criminal. In 50 years time, when we look back at the businesses of today, perhaps we will feel similar bewilderment at companies that built their fortunes on stress, anger and little appreciation of the connection between emotional and physical wellness. The Role of Peptides Peptides are short chains of amino acids that communicate emotions in the physical form. They are secreted by glands and are distributed throughout the body, attaching to receptors in all the major organs. If a person is habitually angry or stressed, for example, the anger or stress peptide will be repeatedly released into the body and stored by the receptor. In short: negative emotions transform into a physical reaction. This
ultimately means that long-term exposure to negative occupational environments can result in extreme physical dysfunction. If you want proof, here it is. In 1973, Dr. Grossarth-Maticek conducted a self-regulation test with almost six thousand 40-66 year-old German participants. The test measured whether people were able to create a positive sense of wellbeing in their life by adapting negative habits, behaviors and influences. 15 years later, quite incredibly, 86 percent of those people who ranked themselves as highly adaptable were still alive compared to only 1.6 percent who ranked themselves as unadaptable. Indeed, higher death rates from cancer, coronary heart disease and virtually all other causes correlated directly with lower self-regulation scores. Dr. Grossarth-Maticek showed that people who cannot adapt to negative influences live approximately eight years less than those who can. It proves what many of have suspected for a long time. Companies that are stressful, fear generating, shaming environments are poisoning their employees. Fact. The Wellness Revolution The modern business leader is as responsible for creating a healthy occupational environment as providing the right safety gear. In future, people are increasingly going to naturally select companies that nurture them emotionally and spiritually, not stress them out. Sounds simple enough but for environments to change, business leaders first need to realise that the occupational environments they have created aren’t up to scratch and that wellness policies aren’t just a passing fad. New Business Models In the not-too-distant-future, businesses are going to find it increasingly difficult to hire the ‘best’ people because employees
will be demanding healthy spirit-based environments that are people-driven, not ego-based companies that are profitdriven. Consequently companies seriously pursuing a long-term future will need to seek professional guidance to cure their spiritual ills in the same way that they once hired TQM and ISO experts to fix their systems. no quick fix Wellness programmes are a great start but there is a key difference between well companies and companies that are merely investing in wellness programs. “So many companies are jumping on the wave of wellness but few of them are learning to surf,” agrees world renowned healer and holistic consultant Roger Moore. “In many companies wellness is skin deep but wellness, by definition, is concerned with everything that makes a person whole.” Moore (whose client list includes Madonna, U2 and Sting) describes a shift from a ‘What’s in-it-for-me?’ culture to ‘What can I do for you?’ culture. “The profit-focused business is a fearful business because it is motivated by survival and destroying opponents,” says Moore. “The alternative is a business focused on achievement. When people are aligned, entrained and working for something that is more emotionally appealing than profit, the synergy created is simply awe-inspiring. If we could take our eye off the bottom line for a moment, we would see the incredible power to be explored within higher ideals.” This implies that a ‘well’ business is one that creates the right environment because they understand human needs, not because it will affect their bottom line. This is illustrated by statistics recorded by the National Business Group on Health in 2008, which indicated that while companies with wellness programs increased productivity
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