Focus on well-being improves worker health while lowering costs

September 23, 2015
Science Daily/Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
One company's program to improve employee well-being led to improvements in worker health and productivity while decreasing health care costs, reports a case study on the issue.

Following a "comprehensive, multi-year well-being improvement strategy," the company was able to reduce health care costs and create "more engaged, healthy, and productive employees" during the transition to a consumer-driven health plan (CDHP), according to the new research by Aaron Wells, PhD, of Healthways, Inc., in Franklin, Tenn.

The study evaluated the long-term impact of a plan offering employees a range of benefits to promote well-being: for example, on-site fitness activities and intensive smoking cessation and weight loss programs.

Analysis of more than 2,000 individuals over five years found significant improvements in employee (and dependent) health and well-being. Average scores on a well-being index increased by 13.5 percent, mainly in the first two years of the program.

The well-being improvement strategy was also associated with a 5.2 percent decrease in average health care costs. Obesity and smoking rates decreased by 4.8 and 9.7 percent per person per year, respectively.

Worker absenteeism declined, while productivity increased. All of these changes were significantly associated with the improvement in well-being scores.

As they prepare for the "Cadillac tax" provision of the Affordable Care Act, more companies are transitioning from self-insured to CDHPs, which call on employees to share more of the costs of care. By improving well-being, the company in the study hoped to offset the possible adverse impact of increased cost-sharing on worker health.

"Transitioning to a CDHP combined with a robust well-being improvement strategy is an effective means for both employer and employees to benefit," Dr. Wells and coauthors conclude. "Both entities save money and are more productive as a result."
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150923134404.htm

Over half of workers with depression do not recognize need for treatment Researchers say unrecognized need for care among workers is a major barrier to treatment, contributes to productivity loss

October 7, 2015
Science Daily/Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
More than half of workers who reported symptoms of depression did not perceive a need for treatment, according to a study that investigated barriers to mental health care experienced by workers and the resulting impact on productivity.

The study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, investigated barriers to mental health care experienced by workers and the resulting impact on productivity. As many as 40 per cent of participants were experiencing significant depressive symptoms and, of that group, 52.8 per cent did not recognize a need to seek help. Similar rates have also been observed in population studies in the United States and Australia.

"Our results suggest that a significant number of workers who are experiencing symptoms of depression do not recognize they could benefit from help, and so do not it," says Dr. Carolyn Dewa, head of CAMH's Centre for Research on Employment and Workplace Health and lead author of the study. "This barrier has a significant impact on health and work productivity, and is an area where employers can focus efforts to reduce work productivity loss."

The findings are based on responses from 2,219 Ontario adults who completed either a telephone questionnaire or a web-based survey. Participants were between 18-65 years old and had been in the workforce during the preceding 12 months.

As part of the study, researchers also developed a model to help employers identify key barriers to treatment. Strategies could be targeted to these barriers to increase the use of mental health services among workers with symptoms of depression. Dr. Dewa and her team calculated that by removing the barrier caused by the unrecognized need for treatment, there would be a 33 per cent decrease in work productivity loss.

"It's important for employers to know where to start when it comes to tackling productivity loss related to untreated depression," says Dr. Dewa. "Our study suggests that helping workers understand when they should be seeking help would significantly boost work productivity."

In addition to treatment need, researches also assessed attitudinal and structural barriers to accessing mental health services. Attitudinal barriers include stigma of mental illness and belief that treatment is ineffective. Structural barriers include financial limitations and difficulty accessing appropriate mental health care. When all three types of barriers were removed, researchers found that loss of work productivity was reduced by nearly 50 per cent.

"Improving recognition for treatment is not the only opportunity for employers," says Dr. Dewa. "The most effective workplace mental health strategies will acknowledge the complexity of the problem and address all aspects in a comprehensive way."
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151007124812.htm

Workplace mentors benefit female employees more than men

October 12, 2015
Science Daily/University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business
The success of online networking sites such as LinkedIn illustrates the popularity of building a wide-ranging contact list. Yet when it comes to raising one's profile within the workplace, female employees stand much to gain from formal, face-to-face mentoring programs, according to a new study.

The success of online networking sites such as LinkedIn illustrates the popularity of building a wide-ranging contact list. Yet when it comes to raising one's profile within the workplace, female employees stand much to gain from formal, face-to-face mentoring programs, according to a new study.

In the paper, "Network Intervention: A Field Experiment to Assess the Effects of Formal Mentoring on Workplace Networks," Assistant Professor Sameer Srivastava of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business documents the results of a field experiment involving 139 "high potential" employees at a software development lab for a U.S.-based company in China. The paper reports that women gained more social capital from affiliation with a high-status mentor than their male counterparts.

Srivastava says that formal mentoring can expand professional networks in a variety of ways -- for example, by building social skills and providing access to the elite members of an organization. Notably, simply being publicly affiliated with a high-status mentor appeared to benefit women more than it did the men in the program. Qualitative interviews pointed to one main reason: women experienced a greater increase in visibility and legitimacy as a result of their mentor affiliations than did male participants. As a result, women became more attractive network partners for their colleagues.

"It is well understood that networks form organically. In contrast, I am interested in understanding how managers can actively shape workplace networks," says Srivastava. "In this company, as in many other comparable companies, technical employees tended to build relatively small networks, mostly within their own groups. Senior leadership believed that the people who did well in the organization were those who had not only depth but also breadth of social capital."

The company had been experimenting with different ways to help employees develop this breadth of social capital and tried, among other things, a formal mentoring program. The program assigned employees to shadow a more senior person in another part of the organization for about a dozen days over a two-to-three-month period.

During this time, the protégés attended meetings with their mentors and worked on short project assignments. The senior employees' objective: transfer some of their organizational social capital to their protégés.

"Most mentoring research is based on cross-sectional surveys that are ill-suited to assessing whether formal mentoring programs actually work. The goal of this study was to provide more credible evidence about whether these programs can work, and if so, for which kinds of employees," says Srivastava.

The study provided this evidence by comparing the size of participants' reported networks before and after their mentoring assignments. Srivastava then assessed this change relative to a control group of employees with similar past performance and perceived potential who did not participate in the program. He also compared network changes across two groups of employees who participated in the program at different times.

Because the study was based on one particular organization and set of employees, Srivastava says that care must be taken in generalizing the findings to other contexts. Nevertheless, he believes the findings support the idea of formal mentoring programs as a means of addressing differences in the kinds of organizational networks that women and men tend to form, which, in turn, contribute to gender inequality in the workplace.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151012180930.htm

Can work stress be linked to stroke?

October 14, 2015
Science Daily/American Academy of Neurology (AAN)
Having a high stress job may be linked to a higher risk of stroke, according to an analysis of several studies.

"Having a lot of job stress has been linked to heart disease, but studies on job stress and stroke have shown inconsistent results," said Dingli Xu, MD, with Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China. "It's possible that high stress jobs lead to more unhealthy behaviors, such as poor eating habits, smoking and a lack of exercise."

The analysis looked at all of the available research on job strain and stroke risk. The six studies analyzed involved a total of 138,782 participants who were followed for three to 17 years.

Jobs were classified into four groups based on how much control workers had over their jobs and how hard they worked, or the psychological demands of the job. The job demands included time pressure, mental load and coordination burdens. Physical labor and total number of hours worked were not included.

Passive jobs were those with low demand and low control. Examples include janitors, miners and other manual laborers. Low stress jobs are those with low demand and high control. Examples are natural scientists and architects. High stress jobs, which are high demand and low control, are found in the service industry and include waitresses and nursing aides. Active jobs with high demand and high control include doctors, teachers and engineers. In the six studies, the percentage of those with high stress jobs ranged from 11 percent to 27 percent of participants.

The analysis found that people with high stress jobs had a 22 percent higher risk of stroke than those with low stress jobs. Women with high stress jobs had a 33 percent higher risk of stroke than women with low stress jobs. People with high stress jobs were 58 percent more likely to have an ischemic stroke than those with low stress jobs. Ischemic stroke, which is the most common type of stroke, is caused by blockage of blood flow. People in passive and active jobs did not have any increased risk of stroke.

The researchers calculated that 4.4 percent of the stroke risk was due to the high stress jobs. For women, that number increased to 6.5 percent.

"Based on this study, it is reasonable to consider testing interventions aimed at increasing job control, such as decentralization of decision-making and flexibility in job structure, such as telecommuting. If effective, such workplace changes could have a major public health impact," said Jennifer J. Majersik, MD, MS, with the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the American Academy of Neurology, who wrote a corresponding editorial.

Xu said limitations of the research were that job stress was measured at only one point in time and that other factors, such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol, were not adequately adjusted for in the original studies.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151014163632.htm

Burnout, depression: Two entities or one?

October 19, 2015
Science Daily/City College of New York
Burnout and depression overlap considerably, according to the latest study on the subject. The findings are based on a survey taken by 1,386 public school teachers, from pre-K to 12th grade across the United States during the 2013-14 academic year.

Burnout and depression overlap considerably, according to the latest study on the subject led by psychology Professor Irvin S. Schonfeld of The City College of New York's Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership and his colleague, Renzo Bianchi, of the Institute of Work and Organizational Psychology, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. The findings are based on a survey taken by 1,386 public school teachers, from pre-K to 12th grade across the United States, including New York, during the 2013-14 academic year.

Based on their responses to a burnout measure, the teachers were categorized as belonging to either a burnout or no-burnout group. Less than one percent of the no-burnout group met criteria for a provisional diagnosis of depression, whereas 86 percent of the burnout group met these criteria.

In addition, the teachers in the burnout group were about three times as likely to have a history of depression and almost four times as likely to be currently taking antidepressant medication. Teachers in the burnout group were also more than twice as likely to report a history of anxiety disorders. When burnout and depression were treated as continuous dimensions, they were very highly correlated.

"Our purpose was not to determine the prevalence of burnout or depressive symptoms in a representative sample of teachers," explain Schonfeld and Bianchi. "Our analytic purpose was to determine the extent to which burnout and depression overlap, both dimensionally and categorically."
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151019142936.htm

Feeling emotionally attached to work leads to improved well-being

October 20, 2015
Science Daily/Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Workers who feel emotionally attached to and identify with their work have better psychological well-being, reports a study.

Efforts to increase affective organizational commitment (AOC) may lead to a happier, healthier workforce -- and possibly contribute to reducing employee turnover, suggests the new research by Thomas Clausen of the Danish National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Copenhagen, and colleagues.

Affective organizational commitment is defined as "the employee's emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization." The new study looked at how AOC affected psychological well-being and other health-related outcomes in approximately 5,000 Danish eldercare workers, organized into 300 workgroups.

The results showed significantly higher well-being for employees in workgroups with higher AOC. Workgroups with high AOC also had lower sickness absence rates and fewer sleep disturbances, as reported by workers.

The relationship between group-level AOC and psychological well-being was completely explained by individual-level AOC. But group AOC contributed to the differences in sick days and sleep problems, independent of individual AOC.

Previous studies have suggested that employees' emotional attachment to and identification with their work is an important motivating factor that affects absenteeism and other key organizational outcomes. The new study adds evidence that group-level AOC "is an important predictor of employee well-being in contemporary healthcare organizations."

Within workgroups, high AOC may act like an "emotional contagion" -- with "effects on individual-level well-being that are relatively independent of the level of AOC of the individual," Dr. Clausen and colleagues write. They suggest that strategies aimed at enhancing AOC might help to address the high rates of burnout and turnover among employees in healthcare and eldercare services.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151020141546.htm

Could your job be making you obese?

October 28, 2015
Science Daily/Elsevier
Research reveals link between having to make lots of decisions at work and increased BMI. The findings suggest for the first time that these two psychological measures of control at work may actually have very different effects on our waistlines, so should be assessed separately.
    
The new study, by researchers at the University of Adelaide, Central Queensland University and the University of South Australia, shows that having skills and the freedom to use them at work is linked to lower BMI and smaller waist size, whereas needing to make a lot of decisions is linked to bigger waist size.

The findings suggest for the first time that these two psychological measures of control at work may actually have very different effects on our waistlines, so should be assessed separately.

Control in your job can come in two broad forms: skill discretion -- having and being able to apply skills -- and decision authority. Traditionally, increasing an employee's level of job control has been seen as a good thing and the two factors have been considered together when looking at their effect on people's health. However, the new study suggests that the two aspects of job control should be considered separately in terms of their effects on health, and obesity in particular.

In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults worldwide were overweight; of these, more than 600 million were obese. One area of interest for researchers has been how the kinds of work people do, and their experience of their work, can contribute to obesity.

"Many people point to 'eating too much and not moving enough' as the cause of obesity," said lead author Mr. Christopher Bean, a health psychology PhD candidate from the University of Adelaide. "While this might explain how weight gain often happens, it does not acknowledge things such as environmental, psychological, social or cultural factors -- these are some of the important why reasons that obesity happens."

For the study, which was part of the North West Adelaide Health Study, Bean and colleagues looked at a sub-set of data from 450 mostly middle-aged participants (230 women, 220 men), who worked in a variety of different occupations, both blue and white-collar. They measured participants' height, weight and waist circumference in a clinic and conducted telephone interviews to collect information about their work. They used a model called the Job Demand-Control-Support (JDCS) model to assess the psychosocial qualities of their work.

Traditionally, high job demands are considered stressful, while high job control has been considered useful in mitigating the effects of high demands. However, skill discretion and decision authority are usually assessed together. In the new study, the team took these two factors separately. After controlling for sex, age, household income, work hours and job nature, these two factors were comparatively strongly associated with obesity, with surprisingly opposite effects.

"When looking at the wide system of factors that cause and maintain obesity, work stress is just a small part of a very large and tangled network of interactive factors," said Mr. Bean. "On the other hand, work is a fundamental part of life for many, so it is important to find innovative ways of extending our understanding of how factors at work may be implicated in the development and maintenance of obesity. It is important to challenge the status quo and explore unexpected or counter-intuitive findings with curiosity."
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151028084927.htm

Weighing the options

"If you experience a strong calling, you need to be cognizant of your relative preferences for intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards and potential trade-offs between the two, then decide accordingly," said Dr. Heller. "However, we found that, in certain fields, one's drive or passion afforded a competitive advantage over others, even when unrelated to objective ability or talent.

"In general, society benefits from an excess of talented people competing for a limited number of positions in winner-take-all labor markets," Dr. Heller continued. "Individuals who 'win' in this market are exemplary. Although individuals entering this type of market eventually 'lose' in extrinsic terms by definition, they still benefit from intrinsic rewards and garner subjective value and well-being, such as the satisfaction derived from attempting to fulfil their calling, even for a short time."

The researchers are currently examining the implications of career choice on overall wellbeing.

Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151029134256.htm

The head vs. the heart

"Given the economic reality today, people commonly face trade-offs as they make decisions that pit the two sides of careers -- the 'heart,' or intrinsic side, and the 'head,' or extrinsic side -- against one another," said Dr. Heller, "We wanted to examine people who chose to follow more challenging career paths, such as those in the arts, and assess their chances of 'making it.'"

Dr. Heller and Dr. Riza surveyed some 450 high-school music students at two elite US summer music programs over the course of 11 years (2001-2012) as they developed from adolescents to young adults to professional musicians.

"We found that participants with stronger callings toward music in adolescence were likely to assess their musical abilities more favorably and were more likely to pursue music professionally as adults regardless of actual musical ability," said Dr. Heller.

Even so, difficulties in pursuing their dreams were still evident. According to the study, participants who were involved in music professionally, even at a minimum, earned considerably less (a gap of $12,000 per year on average) than freelancers or amateurs who pursued their musical interests outside of work. But they also reported similar or greater satisfaction with their jobs and lives. For those with strong callings, personal rewards such as satisfaction may matter more than professional rewards such as income
 

Follow your heart as you pursue your career Study finds talent is less important than passion when it comes to professional success

October 29, 2015
Science Daily/American Friends of Tel Aviv University
Young people with strong callings are more likely to take risks, persist, and ultimately get jobs in their chosen fields, satisfying both their personal and professional career needs. Researchers also found that those who exhibit a passion for these interests in their teens are more likely to be successful later on, regardless of their inherent talent.

More than half of working Americans feel disengaged from their jobs, according to Gallup's latest State of the American Workplace poll. Unenthusiastic, uncommitted, and uninvolved, male and female workers alike are now, more than ever before, unlikely to be "doing what they love" at work. Should you pursue your passion or strive toward a secure living?

A new Tel Aviv University study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology finds that the two objectives are not mutually exclusive -- in fact, each feeds the other. Young people with strong callings are more likely to take risks, persist, and ultimately get jobs in their chosen fields, satisfying both their personal and professional career needs. The researchers also found that those who exhibit a passion for these interests in their teens are more likely to be successful later on, regardless of their inherent talent.

The research was conducted by by Dr. Daniel Heller of TAU's Recanati School of Business, in collaboration with Dr. Shoshana Dobrow Riza of the London School of Economics
 

White matter

Analysis of the white matter in the two groups also revealed major differences.

Local differences in white matter are evident between high and low risk-takers as illustrated by the coloured areas adjacent to the prefrontal cortex, within interhemispheric tracts, and in the rear of the brain that controls vision.

"Daring and risk-willingness activate and challenge the brain's capacity and contribute towards learning, coping strategies and development," says Moe. "They can stimulate behaviour in the direction of higher levels of risk-taking in people already predisposed to adapt to cope optimally in such situations. "We must stop regarding daring and risk-willingness simply as undesirable and uncontrolled behaviour patterns," he says.

Together with the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Turku, Moe is currently planning a new study to investigate educational approaches directed towards both high and low risk-seekers.

"This project will be incorporated within the 'Mind, Brain and Education (MBE)' concept, in which knowledge about the brain is more closely integrated into our understanding of educational methods and teaching outcomes," he says.

"We believe that this result is a very important contribution towards our understanding of how important factors such as curiosity, daring and play are for the development of the brain, as well as our physical and mental skills," he says, referring to Fridtjof Nansen's characterisation of the phenomenon: 'A spirit of daring is deeply ingrained in our nature -- in each and every one of us. But accidents will befall those who are unprepared'.
Science Daily/SOURCE :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151130113545.htm

Risk-takers are smarter

November 30, 2015
Science Daily/SINTEF
Do you often take chances and yet still land on your feet? Then you probably have a well-developed brain.
https://images.sciencedaily.com/2015/11/151130113545_1_540x360.jpg
The researchers employed a driving game in which participants were awarded points according to the level of risk they were willing to take.
Credit: Image courtesy of SINTEF

This surprising discovery has been made as part of a project studying the brains of young male high and low risk-takers. The tests were carried out at the University of Turku in Finland under the direction of SINTEF, using both the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) techniques to measure activation-related and structural correlates of risky behaviour, respectively.

The aim of the project was to investigate the decision-making processes within the brains of 34 young men aged 18 or 19. Based on psychological tests, they were divided into two groups of low and high risk-takers, respectively.

"We expected to find that young men who spend time considering what they are going to do in a given risk situation would have more highly developed neural networks in their brains than those who make quick decisions and take chances," says SINTEF researcher and behavioural analyst Dagfinn Moe. "This has been well documented in a series of studies, but our project revealed the complete opposite," he says.
 

Taking time-off work to raise children is damaging to the careers of highly skilled, high earning women

December 1, 2016

Science Daily/American Sociological Association (ASA)
Mothers who leave work to raise children often sacrifice more than the pay for their time off; when they come back their wages reflect lost raises.

The study, "Do Highly Paid, Highly Skilled Women Experience the Largest Motherhood Penalty?," published in the December issue of the American Sociological Review, examines women's employment and family data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Tracking 4,658 women who participated in the survey, the data spanned from 1976, when the women first completed the survey as 14- to 21-year-olds, to their 2010 interviews, when they were largely past their childrearing years at ages 45 to 52.

"In the case of highly skilled white women with high wages, what is striking is that they have the highest penalties despite the fact that they have the most continuous work experience of any group of women, which, other things being equal, would reduce their penalties," wrote England. "Their high returns to experience and tenure mean that loss of every year of work caused by motherhood is much more costly for their future wages, even in proportionate terms, than it is for other groups of women."

England investigated how motherhood penalized white and black women, and how this varied by the skill and wage level of the women. She found that:

• Highly skilled, highly paid white women lose an average of 10 percent in their wage per child.

• White women with lower skills and/or lower wages lose significantly less, between 4 and 7 percent of their wage per child.

• The penalties were lower for black women than for white women; however, unlike the white women, the penalties for black women did not differ significantly by skill or wage.

England continued, "Women with the highest total motherhood penalties are in an advantaged group with high skills and high wages; even after they become mothers and suffer the steepest penalty, they are typically affluent because their own earnings are still relatively high, and many of them are married to high-earning men. Given their relative privilege, we might still want to give priority to policies, such as child care subsidies, that help low-income women. But, in an era when there are still few women CEOs and we have yet to elect a woman president, it is important to understand how much motherhood affects the careers of women at the top and to consider how this can be changed."

Science Daily/SOURCE :https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161201093910.htm