Happy Friday! We’ve compiled our favorite articles and essays from the last month and beyond for you to browse and enjoy over the weekend.
“It takes more than a discounted health club membership to move the needle on employee well-being,” begins McKinsey Quarterly’s recent reflection on wellness in the workplace. Compiling emerging trends and thoughts on well-being from researchers, corporate leaders and McKinsey experts, McKinsey’s insights suggest a rising “willingness of leaders to invest in their people” and to see wellness in a broader light than just physical health. Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute David Rock shares:
“Connecting people socially gets a much bigger bang for the company buck than trying to help people eat better. That’s because social connectivity is deeply rewarding and activates a really nice oxytocin response. Most people’s social resources are dangerously low, however. They don’t have the tribe around them that their body craves. The feeling of loneliness, of isolation, is actually a pain response, the same as physical pain. In fact, the lack of social connection is twice as dangerous as smoking as a health factor.”
Elsewhere on the Internet:
The Baltimore Police Department has launched a new “humanities hour” during which officers read Plato, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky and more as part of a training program in policing techniques and best practices. David Dagan shares their story in The Atlantic.
Stefanie K. Johnson lays out her insights about corporate diversity after extensive interviews with eleven different major CEOs for the Harvard Business Review.
Poet Jason Reynolds reflects on the accessibility of poetry, calling it the “most distilled version of how the brain works” in an interview with Electric Literature.
Can you practice emotional intelligence? Fast Company examines how we can better manage our feelings through different listening tactics and verbal cues.
Quartz shares Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s thoughts on empathy as “something that needs to be developed over time” and more from a recent event for his new book Hit Refresh.
Image: Diego Rivera, Pan American Unity, 1940, [Fair Use] via WikiArt.org
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