GrokTalk Blog

Karl’s co-workers have noticed that he hasn’t been himself lately. Once collaborative, energetic, and deadline-driven, Karl now snaps at people in meetings, is lethargic, and requires multiple reminders to submit his reports. He always seems to be watching the clock, yet constantly complains about feeling like he doesn’t have enough time in the day to get everything done.

Karl is exhibiting classic signs of burnout. Coined in the 1970s by the psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, there is no single, widely accepted definition of burnout¹. However, it’s become a fairly widespread modern malady, due in part to our always-on culture.

The modern office is full of nutritional minefields: Donuts on Monday morning, unlimited candy jars, cake on Sarah’s birthday ... (and it seems like it’s always someone’s birthday).

Employees with poor nutritional balance report 21% more sick-related absences and 11% lower productivity than healthier colleagues. Better nutrition means more time on the job and more alert and focused employees. It’s good business to make sure your employees are fueled well for work, but it’s not always easy to convince them to make healthy food choices.

Here are six tips to get your employees’ nutrition moving in the right direction:

The old saying “my job is killing me” may really be true. New studies featured by Harvard Business School in “The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States” by Joel Goh, show stress at work is responsible for about $190 billion in healthcare costs in the United States.*

Every single year, there are at least 450 million days of missed work for full-time workers. The result? Lost revenue, to the tune of billions, and increased stress for workers and business owners, who all suffer under the weight of the sickening side-effects of stress induced illness in the workplace. Issues such as high-blood pressure, mental illness, drug abuse, alcoholism, and other stress created illnesses plague the American workplace.

Reap the rewards of a culture of wellness in the workplace.

Every disruption has its upside, and in today’s workplace, that’s good news since change is the mantra being heard from every sector of business. But embracing change is quite challenging for most managers and business owners. How do you please the Millennials, who comprise more than one of three in the workforce, and also offer something worthwhile that will benefit all members of your staff? Businesses are realizing the importance of an amazing culture but the reality is that most are still not getting it right.

At Grokker, we want to give everyone the tools necessary to lead a healthier and happier life. And we’ve found that your employers want that for you too! We’ve created Grokker for Enterprise, a comprehensive wellness program to make it easy for your employer to bring all the benefits of Grokker to their entire employee base.

If you and your colleagues would benefit from Grokker for Enterprise - now’s the time to raise your hand! Enter our #GrokkerAtWork contest and your company could win 50% off their Grokker for Enterprise plan.

There is a scary trend right now, well there has been for quite some time actually, of people feeling like they are required to work through their lunch, eating at their desk whilst tapping away and thinking about anything other that what they are eating. Not only is it a seriously unhealthy habit to pick up but it can also make you gain weight. The decrease in physical activity plays a part but it’s also down to us not focusing on what we’re eating, this lack of attention can result in us almost forgetting what we have eaten, making us feel hungrier, quicker. So, if you find yourself reaching for the biscuit tin mid afternoon, perhaps it’s time to step outside on your lunch break, rack up some steps as you walk to a park or your favourite coffee shop and eat your lunch in relative leisure.

Here are my top 5 things that I like to do on my lunch break that leave me feeling refreshed and geared up for a long afternoon at work;

There is a wellness revolution happening in corporate America. As the secret has gotten out that healthy employees are more productive and handle stress better, companies have been scrambling to put together wellness programs for their employees. It makes sense from a business perspective. Having healthy employees can increase profitability, sales, and morale. But are employee wellness programs actually improving the health of employees and companies?

We know that workplace wellness programs have endemically low participation rates (Grokker’s Deborah Holstein has some tips for solving that problem), but how are well attended wellness programs working out? Well, it depends.

Workplace wellness programs are an awesome way to improve employee health, happiness, and productivity. But these programs can only be effective if employees participate, and disappointing participation levels are endemic. So what can your company do to make sure that employees get all of the benefits of a workplace wellness program? The answer might lie in a little bit of competition. 

People are powerfully motivated by competition, rewards, and teamwork. Therefore, incorporating these elements into a wellness program is likely to improve health outcomes for employees and increase participation levels. So how exactly do you incorporate these elements? Why, using wellness challenges of course!

It may not be news that employees see their own stress as a top issue. Now Towers Watson’s 2013/2014 Staying@Work Report confirms that 78% of employers also see it as their top too.

An employee’s stress level is a top concern of their employer because it costs American businesses ~ $300 billion/year in increased healthcare costs and lost productivity from absenteeism and low engagement.

It would be ideal if each employee felt that wellness was valued so highly at their company that taking a 30 minute fitness or meditation break would be supported whole-heartedly. But until this ideal is a reality, employers may want to consider the full range of benefits of regular exercise.

Conscientious companies are getting in-tune with what Arianna Huffington calls the Third Metric of Success and are making workplace wellness a top priority. In reading Harvard Business Review’s Regular Exercise is Part of Your Job, there are simply too many benefits for the individual and employer to ignore.

 “When we take care of ourselves, we are only going to be better at everything,” proclaimed Arianna Huffington at a Business Chicks event in Sydney. Huffington is promoting her new book “Thrive” and her new lifestyle of doing less, not more. “Drop the things that no longer serve you,” she says.

After collapsing in her office due to sheer exhaustion in 2007, she committed to getting a full eight hours of sleep a night and abandoning a life of chronic busyness and unfinished aspirations, like wanting to be good skier. “I’m never going to invest the time and energy to become a good skier so it was liberating to complete that project by dropping it.”