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 that “connecting people socially gets a much bigger bang for the company buck than trying to help people eat better.” But is there science to back that up?
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Happy Friday! We’ve compiled our favorite articles and essays from the last month and beyond for you to browse and enjoy this weekend.
This summer, NPR shared a print segment about the work lives of oil rig workers from their podcast Invisibilia. In 1997, Shell began construction on “the world’s deepest offshore well,” a 48-story deepwater platform called Ursa. The unprecedented project challenged all notions of how the rig’s workers would plan and build safely. “Even though the men faced the risk of death every day,” one oil worker said, “they never showed any vulnerability. This made the work even more perilous, because the men didn’t ask for help, didn’t admit if they weren’t up to a certain job.”
Can being more vulnerable lead to a safer work environment?
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Happy Friday! We’ve scoured the web for thought-provoking articles and essays for you to enjoy over the weekend.
In The Atlantic, Bouree Lam interviews Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of the book Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life which looks at “how companies and employees can acknowledge uncomfortable experiences and react appropriately.” How can negative emotions like grief, fear or resentment actually benefit our workplaces?
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Happy Friday! We’ve scoured the web for thought-provoking articles and essays for you to enjoy over the weekend.
In the Paris Review, Benjamin Ehrlich writes about neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal and his early and fervent predilection for reading fiction. Cajal’s father earned a medical degree after a “grueling life” as the son of peasant farmers. He later despised all literary culture, allowing only medical books in the house. Cajal, however, had other ideas. How did reading fiction shape the mind of “the father of modern neuroscience”?
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Again and again, at Books@Work we hear from employers that Daniel Goleman’s concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) is important for creating a positive workplace culture and improving companies’ bottom lines. We also hear that Books@Work can be one part of a toolkit to improving EI among employees. Given a current controversy over the value of EI, we consider the various impacts of EI in the workplace, and the potential for companies to help employees improve EI.
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