If you want to learn about me, my bio, you can go to the internet and Google my name, but seriously, you could go to LinkedIn, and you could also go to richardsophere.com. I'm going to just go past my credentials and tell you that I am the Chief Medical Director of Employee Health and Wellbeing at Johns Hopkins Medicine. I've been there for 12 years. I'm also the father of three kids, the last who's graduating from high school in a week, so I'm happy about that. We have a dog, a minivan, and we live in suburbia between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland. Columbia. Who said Columbia? Excellent. All right. We got some locals. Awesome. Now, I'm not much of a basketball fan. I played a little bit as a kid, but I was short. I was skinny. I had braces. Honestly, on the neighborhood basketball court, I didn't get a whole lot of action. I knew who this guy was, though, not in the 1980s when he was drafted to the Chicago Bulls, but when the Bulls started winning in the 90s, I knew that this was Michael Jordan because Michael is one of the greatest basketball players of all time, winning six NBA championship titles. Now, Michael clearly didn't win alone. There are five players on the court at any time, and there's a whole bench full of players waiting to come in if a starting player needs a break. Michael played in the NBA for 15 years, and he won the NBA championship six times, so if it had really been just about Michael, he would have won 15 times. Now, if you've ever been on a winning team, or maybe you're on one now, you can probably quickly recall that great feeling, that positive attitude, the sense of belonging, the collaboration, the collegiality. There's something special about being on a team where everyone's shooting for the same basket. There's a high level of trust. It makes us feel good inside, so instead of thinking about our well-being as something that we only do ourselves alone, I hope you'll start to begin to embrace the idea that well-being is a team sport. Now, I'm not being paid by pharma. I have no medical technology company behind me today, but I have to say I do have a book, and I do have a training program based on the book. Those are my disclosures. I promise you, by the end of our time together this morning, you will be much better equipped to support the health and well-being of your team, and even your entire organization. You're going to leave here knowing the essential ingredients of shaping the well-being culture in your workplace, and it's quite likely what you learned this morning will help explain some of your own well-being challenges. Now, sports teams have cultures, and part of that culture are team colors. For the Chicago Bulls, it's red and white. Sports teams also often have music, and what you're listening to is the theme music that's played when the Chicago Bulls are in the locker room waiting to run out onto the basketball court to be introduced to the fans. Cultures can use music to evoke emotions, and if you're not feeling something right now, if you want to get up, oh, please don't get up and run out of the room. You can sense, and it's palpable what this does for the fans. Sports cultures also have favorite foods. On the left is Chicago deep dish pizza and mascots. That's Benny the Bull on the right. But it's not just sports teams that have cultures. Your workplace also has a culture, and although you may not find your colleagues all wearing red and white to work every day, you probably have some semblance of either a dress code or there might be some parts of your organization that do wear a uniform. Perhaps you and your occupational health team wear scrubs or a lab jacket. If you have a security force, perhaps they wear a certain shirt, et cetera. Now, there are some healthy parts of workplace culture, like if you work in a hospital or in a health care clinic, one healthy aspect of that is washing our hands before and after we see patients. That helps keep the spread of infection at bay. But an unhealthy part of our workplace culture, let's stick to health care, we often keep pushing ourselves. And an unhealthy part of our workplace culture is we don't get enough sleep. Now, I am certainly not the first person to make this connection between health and culture. And some of you may be familiar with the blue zones. These are the regions around the world where there's a high number of centenarians. And they're labeled on this map here. And even though they're all around the globe, their cultures share many things in common. Culture is the shared behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes of those people defined by a certain element. And in this case, culture is defined by geography. But we've already talked about how workplaces can have their own culture, sports teams can have their own culture, religions, hobbies, professions. We have our own culture as health care professions, professionals. So what these blue zones have in common, I'll give you a few examples. One of which is that they eat a lot of food that grows in the ground. So fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, seeds. If they eat chicken or fish, it's not in the shape of a nugget. Another element that they have in common is that they build movement throughout their day. They're often either walking or riding their bike to do their errands. Many of them are growing their own fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains. They don't have to sign up for a gym. And they value relationships. Many of them have grown up in these communities and they have lifelong friends. And they're visiting with these friends and not just on their phone. They're actually in front of them. And they value their families. Many living in multi-generational households, not even knowing what it would be like or not even entertaining the idea of a nursing home. You can shape a well-being culture in your workplace. Now, it's not going to be as easy as just telling your workforce to eat fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains. They know that. They know they need to move more. It's a bit more sophisticated than that. You can build and shape a well-being culture in your workplace by using the six well-being culture building blocks on the outside of this figure. There was an article published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 2018 that explains this model. And if you search JOEM with my last name, you'll find it. Today, I'm going to share with you these special ingredients to help shape your workplace culture. Once you create that well-being culture in your workplace, your employees are going to be more likely to answer agree or strongly agree when they see this statement. On a scale of one through five, a four or a five. And when your employees answer that they agree or strongly agree with this statement, they will be happier, they will be healthier. And it's not just a benefit to the employees. It's a benefit to your organization. Because when your employees are happier and healthier, they're going to be much more likely to stay, and they're going to be the best recruiters your company has because they're going to talk with their friends and family. We all talk about our jobs outside of work. As the Blue Zones taught us, relationships are important. And I'm going to start with the peer support building block. And I'd be naive not to recognize that we spend most of our waking hours in the workplace. So we must address the relationship we have with our coworkers. Our coworkers are our peers. Our friends are our peers. If we're in school and we're a student, the other students are our peers. They're equals. Our manager is not our peer. And if you're a manager, the people who report to you, they're not your peers. There's a power differential that we have to recognize and understand that peer support holds a special place in the workplace. Now, most of you know that when someone's trying to quit tobacco and they quit with a coworker or a family member, they're almost twice as likely to succeed. So what are we doing in the workplace to help our employees break unhealthy habits together? What may be less well known is that when your employees are trying to lose weight, they are much more likely to be successful and lose three times as much weight when their attempt is amongst a group of friends or coworkers or peers. They're also much more likely to keep that weight off longer. So what are we doing in the workplace to encourage our employees to learn healthy habits together? For some of our employees, just getting a lunch break is a challenge. Heck, for many of you, just getting a lunch break is probably a challenge. And this is a real problem because when we don't get a lunch break, we show up to our afternoon tired, both mentally and physically. And when we're not at our best, that increases our chance of having a workplace injury, right? We're certainly not going to be as effective. One-third, only one-third of American employees say their workplace culture supports taking breaks. And honestly, at the end of the day, if we haven't had a break, we're pretty drained. Is that fair to our spouse or our kids or our friends, the people that we're going to see after work, ourselves? What are we doing to encourage our employees to work together? And it's not just to get the job done. When employees work together, that gives them opportunities to share something about each other. And when those opportunities happen often, more is shared. And once we start to begin this cascade and learn more and more about our coworker, it makes it more likely that that person will share something about their own health and well-being. And when we get to that point where there's trust, that's when our employees can ask their coworkers for help. And we know the statistics bear out that regardless of what the healthy habit is, we're going to be more successful when we get the support of our peers. Now, most employers don't even know how we're doing with peer support. It's because most employers don't ask. I can't imagine that there are more than two employers. Is there anyone in this room whose company asks their employees for feedback? Are you getting peer support? We've got, wow, that's great. We've got probably a dozen hands. That's impressive. I'm with the right audience because that number is much greater than other groups that I've worked with. So on a scale of one to five, five being I strongly agree and one being I strongly disagree, you see in this health system they're doing pretty well. The employees answer just above agree. The next relationship I'll speak to is leadership engagement, not leadership support. There's a difference. It is one thing for a leader to say I support employee health and well-being, but there's another thing when a leader rolls up their sleeves and gets involved. So Michael was a great basketball player, but behind Michael was a great coach. This is Phil Jackson on the right, and he became the head coach of the Chicago Bulls about five years after Michael was drafted. And Phil won six NBA championship titles with the Chicago Bulls. Michael won six NBA championship titles with the Chicago Bulls. They won them together. Behind every successful team is a great coach. Now, I'd like to do an exercise. Could you all stand up, please? This is a well-being presentation, so you can't be surprised that I asked everyone to stand up. Thank you. I want you to think back to your childhood and think about all the sports coaches you had. I also want you to think back from the beginning of your career and think about all of the managers you've had. Now, if you've ever had a bad coach or a bad manager, I'd like you to sit down. Okay, now look around. There's only seven or eight people standing. Thank you. You can sit down. The rest of us are jealous. I asked someone in the audience who was the only one standing, and he said he was self-employed his entire career. Now, UKG is a human resource software company in England. They create and own the software Kronos, the time management software. They did a study of 2,600 employees from four English-speaking countries, and they asked them a series of questions. One of the questions they asked is, who impacts your mental health, for good or for bad? Here's what the participants said. They said 50% said their doctor impacts their mental health. Okay. I hope you're not surprised that the number one answer is spouses. The number one answer is our spouses. What may surprise you, though, is that just as many participants answered their manager. Most managers don't realize this because no one's told them. But most of you sat down. When I ask that question in a workshop, and I have time to ask for three people to explain what made their coach or their manager a bad coach or manager, I get a lot of different answers. But then I ask some follow-up questions, and what ultimately comes out is that manager or that coach, they made that person not feel so good inside, or said more directly, made them feel bad inside. Most managers don't realize that they are the source of someone else's insomnia. Many times. Because our managers just aren't made aware. Most of us love kids. And why? Because when we see kids, they're often smiling. And I saw some of you smile when I put this slide up. Sometimes they're even laughing. And when you walk into a room and you see two people laughing, you might be inclined to ask, or maybe you think it, hey, what's so funny? Because we all want to laugh. We know it feels good inside. And these cute kids can quickly alter our emotions when the one behind us on the plane starts to kick and scream when the plane takes off. Our emotions can change quickly based on the people around us, and not just children. It happens in the workplace all the time, and leaders play an outsized role for the emotions of the people they lead. You might recall a time or two where you've been in a room waiting for the manager, and you're having a good time, there's some lighthearted talk, and the manager comes in, there's a scowl on his or her face, and all of a sudden the mood in the room changes. It's remarkable. The same can be said of the opposite. If the team is down because things aren't going right or there's a vacancy and we're all tired, and the team leader comes in with a positive attitude, that can really make the difference. But how many of our leaders understand the power they have to influence the emotions of the people they lead? I gather very few. It doesn't take much. It doesn't take much. Often and most often, leaders don't, they're not trying to bring everybody down. I'm sure of it. I believe in good faith. It doesn't take much to get ourselves into a better mood, but we have to start recognizing what mood we're in. We have to help our leaders understand their power and ask them to start recognizing, hey, can you check in with yourself before you walk into a room? Because if you're not in a good mood, you're going to bring everyone down. And if you're not in a good mood and you don't feel like wearing a wig and pulling out your air guitar, maybe it's as simple as putting your earbuds in and listening to some upbeat music. And if you're stressed out, maybe it's not upbeat music, maybe it's some classical music. Cultures can use music to evoke certain emotions. We can do that for ourselves as well. Now, around six months into the pandemic, my wife and I decided it was time to go and pick up some Chinese food and bring it home. And we did, or I did, and I got home and after we wiped off the containers with alcohol swabs and I peeled off my latex gloves, we ate our entrees, opened our fortune cookies, and this is the one that I got. And I handed it to my wife and we both had a good chuckle because we both know that she's the more fun of the two of us. And I said, Beth, you have to bring the fun out in me. Well, now I have this fortune taped to my frame of my monitor at work. It's been there for almost four years now because I know that the team I lead would rather have the fun manager than the serious manager. We got an amen. Now, I never thought that I would juggle in the workplace, but I have many times. I never thought I'd juggle in front of an audience, but I have many times. And I have juggled in front of the president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital during a serious meeting. Everybody wants to have fun. And even though we do serious work in healthcare, there is no reason why we can't find an opportunity to inject some fun into our day and bring the temperature down just a little. Now, another way to check in with ourselves and lower the stress level, change our mood, is to just take a breath. Now, too often when people are stressed, we hold our breath and we don't even realize it. And when we do that, it causes us to maybe have tighter muscles in our neck and shoulders. Our heart rate picks up a little bit. It's really unhealthy. But how often do we stop to think, hey, am I breathing? Of course I'm breathing, I'm upright. Hey, I'd like to do this exercise with you if you don't mind. And if you don't want to do it, that's okay too. I just appreciate if you don't want to do this with me that you don't start scrolling on your phone because that would make me feel a little bit weird. So it's not hard. We do this at Johns Hopkins Medicine. We integrate this into our wellbeing culture. I obviously don't have my Hopkins ID badge on today, but if I did, I would flip it up and you'd see another badge the same size with this figure. It's been up on computer monitor savers. It's been on LED screens in our hallways. We teach it to our new employees at orientation. It's in new manager orientation. We have integrated this into our wellbeing culture. And I'd like to share it with you today. It's simple. It's called four, seven, eight breathing because we're going to breathe in through our nose for four seconds. We're going to hold our breath for seven and we're going to breathe out for eight. And we're going to do it four times. And it's going to take just as long as it's taken me to give you the instructions. So before we start, I'll just ask you to put your both feet on the floor and rest your arms because you're wanting to like relax your muscles. If you lose count, don't worry. Just jump back in. And before I start this process, I will do four rounds. On the fourth round, I'll probably just say inhale. I'll count in my head. Hold, I'll count in my head. So you get a break from my voice and I get a break from my voice. And think about how you're feeling right now, okay? And we'll check back in in about 90 seconds. You may want to either gaze down at your knees or the chair in front of you. That's to keep you from having some visual stimuli from distracting you. If you want to close your eyes, that's fine too. So take a cleansing breath in and out. Inhale, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Exhale, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Okay, you can open your eyes. Anyone comfortable enough to share how they feel now compared to how they felt before the exercise? More relaxed. I've had people say, I thought I was relaxed, and then we did that, and I realized, well, maybe I actually wasn't as relaxed as I could have been. I've had people say that they feel more focused, that they didn't realize their neck and shoulders were tense. It doesn't take much to reset ourselves, and it's important that our leaders reset themselves if they're having negative energy. Now, leaders serve as role models, and every week we issue a wellness weekly. And once a month, one of those issues is highlighting a leader's well-being journey. We give them a list of 20 questions and ask them to choose five. They write the answers. We do a little editing, and then we publish it. And we do that so that our employees can know that our leaders are actually taking care of themselves. And we did not tell this vice president of HR to write that she uses the 4-7-8 breathing technique to help her fall asleep. This both is some assurance that we're impacting her, but it's also a good message to our employees that, hey, you don't just have to do this at work. There are so many simple things that leaders can do that make a difference. This leader, let's say that the man wearing glasses is the leader, he's smiling. We saw how easy it is to make other people smile, and it makes them feel good. He's also shaking this person's hand. He's probably showing some appreciation. Appreciation is a well-being strategy. It's not all about eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains that grow in the ground. And our employees need to hear appreciative words five times as much as they hear constructive feedback. You have to imagine that maybe there's two managers here, and one of them has their back to us, and that they're dressed differently than the rest of the people in this picture. They got up from their office, and they went to where these employees are. That's a high level of respect. What can we do as leaders to go out of our way to show the people we work with how much they mean to us? And wouldn't it be easier to take a lunch break if you saw your leader taking a lunch break? And what does that do to our own permission if we want to take a lunch break, but I see my boss working in his office again through lunch? It's an unspoken message. Now, many people say they don't have time for lunch, or they don't have time for this or this well-being. I don't have time to breathe. I don't get that one. We have to remember that if well-being is a priority, we need to find the time. And well-being, excuse me, setting priorities is a well-being strategy. We need to do a better job, our leaders need to do a better job of setting priorities. And that means like a handful of things, not like two hands and two feet full of things. Because if our list is too long, clearly we haven't honestly figured out what our priorities are. When our employees don't know what their priorities are, it's no wonder they say they have too much to do, because things are being thrown at them, and they don't know what to say no to. And you see from this data that when our employees know what their priorities are, they're much more likely to be happy. They're much more likely to stay in their current job. The only way to know how our leaders are doing is to ask our employees. We need to give them an opportunity to answer questions anonymously. This is another question in our set of 12 questions. We call it our culture of health survey that we've been delivering for eight years. And you see here that the immediate supervisors are doing pretty well. The vast majority of our employees, or our employees average out to a little bit more than agree. The last relationship that I'll speak to in the workplace is norms. Now norms are the expected behavior of a group. It's like it's expected that we do X, and therefore you're going to do it. Now norms are very powerful forces, and norms have been around since early mankind. It's part of our innate interest in surviving, right? Right along food, water, and shelter. The reason why norms are part of our survival instinct is that when we are part of a group, we know that there's some level of protection. And to be part of a group, we have to conform to that group norms. And so when a wild animal is out on the prairie while we're foraging for fruits and vegetables and nuts, that we know there's a group that's there to protect us, and we don't have to fight this animal ourselves. There's research that shows that as young as kindergarten, we start to learn about the power of norms and conform to them. That's how powerful they are. When we're part of a group, it lowers our stress level. Now this is a common norm on Sunday afternoons across America. Much of America sits on the sofa and watches football. But norms don't have to go across an entire country. Norms can be regional. And we learned that in 2020 when parts of the United States were wearing masks, and parts of the United States were not. Again, that was reinforced in 2021 when parts of our country were getting vaccinated, and parts weren't. The same is true in your organization. Some of your organization has one norm, and others do not. This could be the norm for some departments in your organization on Sunday afternoons. They're not watching football. They're doing email. They're finishing documents. Maybe your team's doing medical records. Even if you're the person who just wants to watch football and relax, the power of norms, the message that everybody else on your team is working is enough to suck you in. And because of that, it's hard to create a new habit, even if we want to, because no one wants to be seen as the weak link. Third lunch break slide. Because lunch breaks are influenced by team norms. Imagine you're the new employee, and it's 1130 on your first day of work, and you're looking forward to lunch. I wonder where everyone's going to eat. And so you start to look around. But, you know, you're also working, right? And at 1145, no one's moving yet, but that's okay. It's not noon. Noon comes. You still don't see anyone moving. And so at 1215, you decide you're going to walk to the bathroom just nonchalantly so that you can see what's going on. Maybe you missed something. And on the way to the bathroom, there's a few people with sandwiches that are half eaten on their desks. And on the way back, you notice some salad bowls that are almost empty. And you sit down back in your desk, and you realize, I guess we're eating lunch at our desk today. Now, how likely is it that that new employee is going to be the one who gets up and leaves the area and goes to eat lunch? Not impossible, but unlikely. They are learning how the team functions. Now, in the previous slides, these different parts of the organization had very similar answers. But you see here there's a difference between outpatient center A and outpatient center B that I think is noteworthy. That outpatient center B, the employees there, they don't feel quite as supported that their part of the organization believes that the norm of health is expected and accepted. This is an opportunity for leaders from organization or outpatient center A to work with outpatient center B. They're both outpatient centers. What is the difference? Compare notes and work together so that the employees in outpatient center B can benefit. Or you can help outpatient center B because you know what it might take to improve this perception. Now, I'm not going to have time, unfortunately, to review the rest of the six building blocks. But on my last slide, you'll see, or my second to last slide, you'll see some resources where you can learn about the other three well-being culture building blocks. Now, up until now, we've been talking about how people in the workplace are influencing each other. But we can't ignore the idea that many people in our workplace are lonely. In fact, depending on the research you read, 25 to 50% of employees feel lonely at any time during the work week. That is a ton of people. It might be shocking to some. It may not be shocking to others who've heard this data before. It's more than just sitting next to somebody in a crowded building. It's about being seen, heard, and feeling connected. Feeling lonely in the workplace doesn't just feel bad. It increases our risk of depression, obesity, heart disease, diabetes. This one shocked me when I learned it a year ago, stroke. It weakens our immune system. And it's not just bad for our health. It's going to shorten our life. The risk of premature death from loneliness is greater than smoking, sitting in our chair all day. I mean, it's terrible. 25 to 50%, that's a lot of people inside your organization. And it's not just bad for those individuals. It's bad for us as an employer. Because when people feel lonely, when they don't feel connected to their coworkers, they're going to be looking for another job. If you just look at the gold bar here, those people who are feeling connected, much less likely to be interviewing for another job. And on the right, they're much more likely. They are intentionally going to be staying at that job. There are other ramifications for the employer when their employees feel lonely. And we need to pay attention because they're all around us. And they're not going to tell their manager when the manager walks by and they say, how are you doing today? The most likely answer is fine or good, right? How many of us tell our managers the truth about how we're doing? It's not likely. Now, this is data from Deloitte. I'm going to walk you through this. Thousands of employees answered the question, how is your physical well-being on a scale of one to five, four being good and five being very good. Sixty-five percent said good or very good. And then they asked executives at these four companies where they gather this data, hey, how do you think your employees are doing with their health and well-being? And 89% said either good or very good. There's a huge disconnect. Our executives think everything is going great, right? And maybe those are the executives who are causing people to have insomnia at night. It's hard to know everything. I'm not blaming our leadership. But I am noting that there is a problem, that we can't do this work alone. Well-being is a team sport and that our executives need to get involved. Now, Phil Jackson was a great coach. He knew a lot, but he didn't know everything. He knew that one of the challenges of being a basketball player was staying focused because the fans are screaming, they're waving their arms, they're purposely trying to distract the opposing player so they miss the basket. Phil also knew that mindfulness was a technique to help a practitioner or someone who's practicing mindfulness to focus. But he wasn't a certified mindfulness instructor. He didn't know how to do that. So he hired George Mumford, a sports psychologist. And it was George who taught the Chicago Bulls players how to be mindful. This is in the 1990s, long before mindfulness was common in our society. Can you imagine the conversation in the locker room? Well, it helped. Chicago Bulls went on to win six NBA championship titles that decade. It got me to wondering, how are our leaders being trained? So I went and did a review of some core curriculum of some prestigious NBA programs in the United States. I went to about a half a dozen websites and looked at their core curriculum. And I found courses on accounting, economics, finance, marketing. You will not find a class on employee health and well-being. I remember slumping in my chair in my office that day. But then I'm thinking, and I'm like, you know what? Most leaders don't have MBAs. So maybe this is not that all is lost. But you know who impacts employees at almost all organizations? Human resources. Now maybe you're not familiar with SHRM. But they are the largest human resource professional organization across the world. They have more than 300,000 members in 165 countries. And 100,000 of them are certified. And if you want to get certified, they're going to ask you to study their manual, their guide. And you can see that although diversity and inclusion and relationship management are related to well-being, there is no module on employee health and well-being. So how are we possibly going to move the needle? Our employees don't need to hear smoking is bad anymore. They don't need to hear eat more apples. I've had the pleasure of doing a lot of virtual presentations over the last couple of years. And I decided that perhaps, you know, it's not being trained in MBA programs. It's not part of the SHRM certification program. So maybe organizations are training their leaders themselves. And so I have done this survey three times now, this question I'm about to share with you, for audiences between 100 and 200 using the polling feature on the virtual webinar. Are you training your leaders how to support the health and well-being of those they lead? Yes or no? And if it's yes, is it voluntary or mandatory? It is remarkable how consistent the answers have been. Two-thirds said no. And of the third that said yes, we are training our leaders a very small fraction, make it mandatory. And what are the chances that our leaders are going to take time out of their day to do a voluntary training program? So you've seen these questions on the left before. They're part of a set of 12 questions we ask on a culture of health survey. You've also seen the answers in the middle, average score for all employees. What you haven't seen was what's on the right. Last January, or actually for the last two Januarys, we have a cohort of middle managers who go through a leadership development program. So about 50 middle managers. And we asked them to do this survey. We aggregated their results together. Every question, not just the ones on the right, I'm sorry, not just the ones on the board here, all 12 questions, our managers are scoring lower. Our managers do not feel supported on their health and well-being journey, which is consistent with published literature that our managers are struggling even more than the frontline employees. We can't allow that to happen because they're going to leave. They are leaving. Here's data from Deloitte that shows that, no, I'm sorry, this data is also from the UKG study that shows that not only are employees willing to take a job that pays less if it better supports their mental health, but 70% of managers would take a pay cut for a job that better supports mental health. So there's a lot that you can take away from this today. I'm just going to leave you with a few ideas. One, check in with yourself. Most of us have not gotten into a good pattern of checking in with ourselves because who taught us to check in with ourselves? No one. It's not part of the orientation when you start school. And it's not part of the orientation when you start in the workforce. You can't be the best leader that you want to be if you don't identify how you're feeling inside first and then make adjustments with whatever practice you choose to learn so that you can be in a better place, not only for yourself and not only for the workers around you, but for your family and your friends. I'm often asked, what's the one thing I can do? I'm like, one thing. Most of the time, I say put well-being on the agenda because most team leaders have standing agendas. And if you don't put well-being on the agenda, it will be ignored. You'll forget about this presentation in a few weeks. If you have patient safety, widget production, financial stuff on your, if you don't put well-being as a standing item, it's going to fall to the wayside. Train and support your leaders. My guess is that most leaders want to, don't want to be the cause of somebody else's insomnia. Most leaders want to be a force of good. And I honestly don't think they know how to be. If you haven't put together a peer support system, you might consider developing a well-being champion system in place. No one team can do this work alone. And honestly, many employees are uncomfortable going to HR, going to AHRQ Health, going to their manager with problems. If you have trained employees who know where the resources are, perhaps when they get into that discussion about what their challenges are, that peer can point them in the right direction. The other benefit is that those peers can bring feedback to you so that you know how to get better, so you have more information to adjust your strategy. And finally, think about creating a healthy work-life balance norm on your team, or if you can, across your organization. Work-life balance gets a lot of talk, let's say, and not a lot of action. It weighs heavily on the health and well-being of your workforce, and possibly even you. I do a whole presentation on work-life balance because it's not only important to the individual, it's critical for the success of the organization to achieve a better state. Now, I've got one more slide before we release you to your next session, but I'm going to take a moment to ask you if you have any questions, if you'd come up to the microphone, please. I'd be very happy to hear a question or two, and I think your coworkers, your colleagues here would like that as well. So, the microphones here, listen, we have five training programs now at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Some of them are voluntary, some of them are mandatory, some of them are an hour and a half long, some of them are ten minutes. Ten-minute well-being tips for managers, it's actually housed on YouTube. You can find it. I mean, we did it live, we did it virtual. We have six hospitals across Maryland, Virginia, Maryland, D.C., and Florida. And anyway, you're not going to see a video about eating more apples or quit smoking. You are going to see a video, ten minutes, about setting priorities, how to get better work-life balance, how to set boundaries. I mean, these are well-being strategies that most organizations don't realize. They don't take advantage of. If you want to email me directly and ask a question, that's great. Just in the subject line, if you don't mind putting ACOM in there, so I remember where we connected, and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, and you can go to richardsaphir.com if you want to learn more about the other well-being culture building blocks. There's some blogs on there. There's links to podcasts, et cetera. And it looks like we have a question. Thank you. And could you start by telling us your name and what you do or what brings you to this conference? Tom Winters, Occupational Health in Boston, and been doing it for a while. Great talk. You're a great speaker. Thanks. Nice work. To enhance your Phil Jackson story, he's been a friend of 50 years, and George Mumford, I introduced him to Phil. Oh, my. He came from the John Kabat-Zinn Meditation Program that I helped develop at UMass Medical Center 40 years ago. John became famous, and George did, and I'm still doing Occ Health. I'm singing George's praises. Thank you. Hey, I actually, I have something for you. I came here today thinking to myself, whoever asks the first question or first comment, I'm going to give you a copy of my book, because I think it takes a little. I think it takes a little bravery to stand up. So thank you for coming up and asking a question. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for a great talk. I appreciate all that you're saying, and as the site physician, I really encourage that. But I've had, I do primary care in Boston, primary care, occupational medicine, urgent care, and one of the things, one of my patients came to me. I happen to be in the medical, in the working place. He said, my boss said, I'm going to keep on piling things on you until you crack, like carbon becomes, the pressure with carbon becomes a diamond. And now that's a, that's an extreme case, but it's not a unique case. How can somebody like us, you know, we're occupational medicine physicians. They're like, just take care of our people and leave us alone, do the medical surveillance. Change that culture. I mean, that's a huge responsibility and that's a huge change. That's, and you, to get champions, let alone champions. Yes, yes. So can you give some insights on that? Yes. First, I'm sorry that's happening to you, and I'm sorry it happens elsewhere. No, it's not to me. It's my patient or my employee. Okay, I'm sorry. Sorry about that. No, no, no, that's okay. I, I'm sorry it's happening to your patient. It does happen all over the place. So, every situation is unique. If you have a relationship with just the patient or the patient's company, do you have a relationship with the patient's company? Yes, I do. I work for the same company. Okay. Yeah. Well, I think that it, it, I'm just being creative and we can talk about this offline too. Why not put a survey in your waiting room and get anonymous feedback from the patients who come in asking questions that reflect the six well-being culture building blocks so that you can go to your HR leader at the end of, I don't know what, you choose the time period, or maybe the first hundred answers and say, hey, I just thought you should see this. We got a whole bunch of employees who say that their supervisor doesn't support their health and well-being. And by the way, did you know, here's the data that shows that these people are going to cost us more. They're more likely to be injured on the job, and eventually they're just going to leave and you're going to have vacancies. Your HR leaders need your help. They need all of your help. HR, you, so listen, you are in a much better position than any other profession to positively impact employee health and well-being, because this is you. You have the credibility. And so, thank you for asking the question. I would suggest that you, you read more about this. You can find more information on richardsophere.com, and you'll probably come up with a few ways. Maybe talk to your peers inside your group and see what they think as well. Good luck to you. It's important. Good morning, Ray. Good morning. Dr. Ray Fabius, co-founder of Health Next and former global medical leader for General Electric, chief medical officer for Thomson Reuter, and medical advisor for Walgreens, among other jobs. I only share my background with all of you because Dr. Safer's made a remarkable contribution to this movement that's been afoot now for the better part of a couple of decades. We need all of you. The point that he just made that I think is so important is, this is a remarkably important component of occupational health. I'm so happy to see such a large number of people at this session, and I encourage all of you to read his book. Thank you. Thank you, Ray, and we've all benefited from your work as well, obviously. Thank you very much for being here. This will be our last question. I have one more slide, and it'll be about the bulls. So, stay tuned for the rest of the story. Well, thank you very much for the lecture. You may have to hold it up. Yeah. Sorry. My name is Kashif Khan. Thank you for the lecture. Very interesting. I like it. The only reason I'm here, because I'm asking the last question, so I thought maybe you'll give me a book, too. Okay. Well, just kidding. Very important talk, and I have been also, you know, dealing with managers and leaders who really need training on how to manage their employees and workers. Are there any good resources for occupational health physicians, or is it the responsibility of human resources, or a combination of OH and as well as HR? Yeah. So, I'm going to just paraphrase. Who's responsible for training the leaders in your organization? Okay. Thank you for the question. It could be you. It could be HR. I would suggest that it's a combination of you. Depending on the size of your organization, you probably have an organizational development and learning person or team, depending on the size. They're really the professionals who can help create a meaningful and refined experience for the leaders to engage, and not only hear what you're saying, but absorb it. But I don't think that the HR, most HR leaders are not going to take the initiative to pursue this, because most of them don't realize the huge problem that exists, nor do they feel comfortable talking about health and well-being. You have that advantage. As far as resources are concerned, I know of a handful of other companies who are also doing training of leaders, just as Johns Hopkins are. I know that if you go on LinkedIn, you're going to get bombarded. I'd be very careful about who's selling you what. The 10-minute well-being tips for managers, I would just read, just watch a few of them. You could do that. Okay. It takes a little bit of research for each topic. But you can do that. I mean, you can also just use ours. Just ask your HR people to watch it with you and figure out if you can use them. I don't care. But you do need to start somewhere and make a dent, because without giving leaders some foot in the door, it's highly unlikely we're going to be able to make a difference. Thanks. So, you know, I'm sorry I don't remember the name of the woman who asked the question about the patient who came to her saying, thank you. You know, that plays perfectly into this idea that, you know, many of us feel kind of hopeless, because they know that their manager or their CEO doesn't believe in this stuff, and that there are negative forces out there. How are we possibly going to change the tide? Just pause and remember that slide from UKG that just as many people said their manager impacts their mental health as their spouse. There are managers out there who believe in this, who want to support the health and well-being of their team. Find them and support them. Use them as a pilot, as a case study. Help them be successful, because when they are, the people on that team will feel good. They'll be happier and healthier, and they will tell the co-workers outside of that team. And then other teams are going to want you to help them as well. Eventually, there'll be enough teams that some leader's going to realize, hey, something's going on, and something good is going on. And then some leader's going to get interested, because you know what? Leaders want to be associated with success, right? As soon as something good's going on, they want to take credit or be part of it. Let's return to the Chicago Bulls, and let's fast forward from the 1990s to 2018. In that year, the NBA signed a contract with Headspace, a mindfulness app. And now everybody who's working for the NBA, not just the players, has a mindfulness tool. We have to remember that mindfulness did not come to the NBA from the commissioner back in the 90s. It didn't even come from the owner of the Chicago Bulls. It came from one team coach. Phil Jackson had a tremendous impact on the Chicago Bulls, but he also had a tremendous impact on the NBA. You can have a tremendous impact on your organization. Good luck to you. Thank you.

Dr. Richard Sferra

well-being

team sport

workplace

leaders

employee health

training programs

organizational norms

occupational health professionals