Building Workforce Resilience

Dr. Joe Leutzinger, PhD | Wellness Directions

Dr. Kevin Rindal | Vimocity

What we're going to cover today is the business case for investing employee health, the connection between mental wellness and safety, and also opportunities for addressing employee mental health and safety risks.

So when we think about the employee wellness, what we often talk about is the BOI. And I would challenge you to think about, do you know the BOI of your organization? And the BOI is the burden of illness.

Another way to think about that is what's the cost of poor health for the organization? IBI, the Institute Integrated Benefits Institute, does some great work in the whole health and productivity space, and they identified through one of their studies about four thousand dollars per employee in cost of poor health.

We do some of that analysis ourselves with Wellness Directions. and we know that in some industries and among some particular, companies and demographics, that cost can even be higher. So when you start thinking about what's the cost of poor health for the organization, I encourage you to think about that first before you start looking at the ROI of wellness because you can quickly see that there's a huge opportunity cost when we think about that cost of poor health.

So another, good study from IBI, when they look at the source of employer health care costs, the point they they do a nice job of making is that productivity losses is the primary cost driver. And I always like to use this this graphic to show many have seen this before. But in the US, we focus so much on the health care cost side, and we have good reason to do that because of our system and and what we have, the challenges we have with that.

But just to emphasize that the majority of our cost, when we look at that four thousand per employee, those are related to health related productivity cost, which bake break down into absenteeism and presenteeism.

So I wanna talk about presenteeism a little bit. First, I wanna give you a definition. The definition I like to use is you're at work, but you're not as productive as you could be because of some health related issue. Now notice I said health related issue, not necessarily personal, could be family, could be extended family, could even be a coworker. But something is happening on the health side that's keeping you from being as productive as you could be. And many psychometricians point out that we're when we're at our best, right, when we think we're really having a productive day, we're at about eighty percent of our capacity.

So now if you start to think about measuring presenteeism and that being reduced by five, ten, fifteen, twenty percent, we could be as low as sixty percent of our capacity when we start adding in, adding in those those factors. So the other thing that I think is helpful is when we think about presenteeism, these four categories.

So personal issues, this could be related to the mental health that we're gonna talk about. Business issues, we all know that, job design, our work relationships, our our relationships with our supervisors, with our coworkers, how well we like our job, our autonomy, all those things tie into us feeling productive and and purposeful on the job. Then we have the physical health, so chronic illness, lifestyle risks, and then the psychological health issues.

So all four of those impact productivity. We're really gonna focus on three and four today.

So a couple classic studies I mentioned measuring productivity loss. This is a study by Lockheed Martin where they did a really nice job looking across these various mental, various medical conditions. And the point I wanna point out is two of the things that we're gonna talk about today. Doctor Kevin's gonna talk a lot about pain and also musculoskeletal.

So you could see that that is a significant factor as well as depression.

So we know that there are many, mental illness type related. So there can be anxiety, high stress. Depression, obviously, is the highest level. But we also know that if we can give people resilient skills, if we can help them before they get to that point, then we can offset some of that, not only for the for the productivity of the workforce, but really for their overall quality of life, which I think we would argue is is a bit more important.

Another classic study looked at absence. And, again, when we think about health related productivity, we're really talking about absence and presenteeism, like we talked about earlier, the definition. And so here you can see that this whole mental illness area is responsible for nearly twenty six days of absence per year. And when you look at the average loss over here to the far right, you can see it's almost double of that. So we know from study after study that mental illness has the biggest impact on health related productivity. But, again, the health of the worker is of paramount importance of helping them with their overall quality of life and outside of work as well.

So, Deb mentioned that I'm a business partner of Headversity, and Headversity has done some really great work in the area of their own research related to mental health, mental well-being, but also the compilation of of some of the research that's out there. And the one stat that I always like to pull attention to is this in the middle. Eighty four percent of us are gonna experience at least one mental health challenge over the past year, over the next year. And I often like to say, I think this is probably closer to a hundred percent when we really think about it.

But we know that the vast majority the vast majority are gonna face some kind of mental health challenge, during their work year. And so we talked about lost productivity. We can see about seventeen percent is related to mental health. We know that mental health is responsible for four times more absence.

If you have a fifty thousand dollar a year employee, it's gonna cost about twenty five thousand to replace that employee. So retention and recruitment is so important. And then when we start taking a look at health care costs and we know that those are already high for employers, we we know through research that mental health can increase that three thousand dollars per per employee that's suffering.

So one of the areas that, I wanna talk about is the whole area of mental well-being.

And one thing that Hidversity has done a really good job of is identifying what is gonna help in this area thriving. So when we look below here, there's a lot of good vendors, a lot of good programs. They're really focused on that ten, twenty percent mental health, mental illness.

But when we think about where we want our employees to be and where we want our family members to be, it's up here. And so if we can give them skills of and practice that can help them enhance their mental health from mental health to mental well-being, that's really where we wanna get to. And I was thinking about that when we look in the wellness field well, I can remember back when we focused on risk reduction, and then we started talking about wellness, and then the whole well-being, area came up. And now when you look at the latest literature, they're really talking about thriving and flourishing. So we've seen a good progression into wellness space where we've gone from risk identification to getting beyond that into the whole area of thriving. So mental health has followed that same paradigm where before, it was even not appropriate, quote, unquote, to recognize mental health in the workplace.

Then we started recognizing it. Then we started providing resources.

Now mental health is talked about in a lot of areas, in a lot of workplaces in a good way. But I just challenge you that now we wanna move to that mental well-being. We wanna get to that so we give people the skills that they can get ahead of these adverse situations in their life. And so it's a nice continuum as we think about advancing our programs, both on the wellness side and the mental health side, that we really have this next tier that we can reach.

So when we think about the business case for mental health and I put this in here because many of you are dealing with senior management and trying to make that business case.

And going back to that eighty four percent, right, of us are gonna experience some kind of mental health challenge this year. So that eight hundred and forty employees out of a thousand employee workforce. This is very generous, but based off that IBI research and the research of others, let's say that there's one hour of lost productivity per day. I could argue that it's probably higher than that.

And, again, we're operating at the eighty percent. Right? Then we have eight more days of unplanned illness. We have two hundred forty that would turn over.

We have that three thousand more in health care expense. So the total cost of poor mental health, not even all of poor health, but just the mental health of a thousand employee workforce is about fifteen million dollars.

And then what I would say to you and say to your your senior management staff is, what if we invested ten percent of that to address that cost? Any CEO, CFO, CEO that I've talked to, if they saw a business opportunity like that, they could offset a fifteen million dollar problem or fifteen million dollar opportunity with a ten percent investment. They would definitely take take that to heart and do that within the organization.

So these are conservative numbers. I can grant you that. And still, it makes a compelling case for addressing mental health. And not only addressing mental health, that's important, but also helping our employees and our family members get to that mental well-being as well.

So I wanna shift a little bit and talk about, a study I was involved in back when I worked in the transportation industry. I'll just tell you a little story about this. So, my my boss at the time, medical director, was a a fantastic guy, doctor Dennis Richling, and we often try to get attention among the safety people. And one time in a meeting, it was mentioned that there's a relationship between health and safety, and the vice president quickly corrected and said there's a connection between safety and health.

So his point was safety is more important. But we took that we took that and we said, what if we did a study where we looked at the relationship between health risks and safety incidents on the job? So we took in our safety data, we took in the health risk appraisal data, and we looked at the correlation there. And what we found was that these four risk factors, smoking, fatigue, obesity, and depression, were statistically significant.

So when you see these p values of our off the charts, they truly are. So, typically, in research, you'll see point o five as being statistically significant. These were more than that. And so this is it's very important that you understand this is not saying that every smoker is gonna be injured or anybody who's fatigued is gonna be injured.

But what it's saying is that when we look at a large dataset, this was fifty one thousand health assessments and a thousand employees, is that we start to look at that relationship. Right? And is it beyond probability? Yes.

It is when we start looking at that relationship between health and safety. So this the implication of that was we were very much at U Pacific and in other companies where we shared this study. It was funded by the Federal Railway Administration, they started to put health on the same part as safety because they saw that relationship and saw some research like this saying, we need to pay attention not only to the safety and the and the practices and procedures, but we also have to look at the health side as well.

So we know that there's opportunities out there to address mental health.

One of the things that, Hedversity talks about is a pre AP or pre EAP. And, again, giving people the skills and resources and practice so that when they are faced with adversity in their life, they have the the skills and ability to deal with it. And then, hopefully, you saw from that brief illustration, our investment building that business case is very much worth it when you start thinking about mental and physical capacity in the overall area of resilience.

So, just to wrap up here, this was some great work that was done, the Health Performance Institute, which was a division of J and J, Johnson and Johnson. And, they talked about the corporate athlete. And one of the best people who talks about this that I've heard is is doctor Kevin, where he has that professional sports experience, but he also applies it to the workplace. So we just thought it'd be appropriate to kinda tie all this together when we talk about that mental, physical, emotional, capacity and how that fits together that we really can't compartmentalize it. It all fits together, for our employees that we have to address through our well wellness and mental well-being programs.

So just to tee up top, doctor Kevin, who's gonna talk about pain and and musculoskeletal disorders, we know that, musculoskeletal exceed cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular, and it's the number one issue for disability and lost workdays. So when we go back to earlier when we were talking about health related productivity, we can see that musculoskeletal plays a significant role in addressing that that whole area.

So just some summary points from me. The cost of poor health is often underestimated. Again, if if we talk about the BOI, the burden of illness instead of the ROI, happy to talk about the ROI, but we'll make sure the BOI is understood first when I work with organizations.

Because many times what happens is that serves as sticker shock in the opposite direction, where senior management will say, can our cost really be that high? And what I love to say is, I can guarantee you they're at least this, but I can give you three reasons why I know they're higher. And so it starts the conversation around, instead of being defensive, what's the ROI? It's we need to take advantage of this opportunity. And then we know that mental wellness has a direct impact on safety outcomes, and that musculoskeletal pain is really that low hanging fruit when we start taking a look at the physical capacity gains. So thank you for your time and attention, and I'll turn it over at this time to, doctor Kevin.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Joe. And I've know I've seen that study a couple times, but fascinating just how closely related that safety and wellness are to each other. Although often we treat them kind of as two two separate things. So, excellent job tying that together. And, I will turn it over to doctor Kevin, and Kevin is going to be talking a little bit more around, where Joe talked a lot about the productivity loss and presenteeism.

Kevin's gonna be talking about the other side of the coin in terms of capacity and how do we actually build capacity in our workforce. So turn it over to you, Kevin. Thanks so much.

Thank you so much, Deb. And doctor Joe, I so appreciate, your perspective.

And just on a personal note, I've I've gotten to know, doctor Joe over the last probably couple years, and I just appreciate his championing, the worker and really seeing the opportunity for us to to partner with companies as an opportunity to just make a huge difference in the quality of life for the workforce.

You know, as Deb mentioned, I have a background in sports medicine. I'm I'm super passionate about helping people perform at their highest level. I mean, that's always been, something that I've been so grateful for and got to be a part of two Olympics and and to see, you know, people perform at their highest level. But, really, what drew me to being able to to shift into working with the workforce is just this unbelievable, just point of view of seeing how hard people work on a daily basis to give us things like electricity, gas, take away our trash, all all these things that we take for granted, and it's it's physically demanding work.

And, you know, as a health care practitioner, I spent fifteen years working in my clinic. I got to see a lot of those people firsthand, dealing with strained backs or strained shoulders and seeing the impact that it had on who they were as a person and their overall well-being. And so, again, really coming today from the perspective of seeing there being a huge opportunity for us to help people become the best versions of themselves, through supporting their entire, well-being.

So we're gonna talk about building workforce resilience, and what we're gonna cover here is just a definition of what is workforce resilience and really setting the stage of what what that looks like. I know doctor Joe talked a lot about it from a mental perspective.

I'll be expanding on that. And then also talking about three ways that pain affects employees' mental health and safety outcomes.

Again, going back to what doctor Joe just talked about, that there is actually a safety component to people's overall health and well-being, and then opportunities for enhancing the mental and physical capacity of your workforce.

So let's jump in here and talk about what workforce resilience is. And so maybe I'll I'll set the stage by talking about athletic resilience. When I when I think about building resilience for an athlete, you know, football comes to mind. Football is one of those sports that's, physically demanding.

I mean, if you can imagine a running back in, you know, on an NFL team, they're gonna handle the ball, let's say, thirty two times a game, and they're gonna get hit over and over again. And they have that resilience physically to withstand that and do it over and over again. But they also have the mental resilience, to overcome the pain that they're probably experiencing to continue to push hard. And so it takes a ton of training to actually be able to do that.

I I oftentimes joke, you know, we we work with a lot of utility companies, and one of the big things that we're talking about right now are serious injuries and fatalities and limiting those. And I always joke that if I were to get the football and try to run it right at one time in an NFL game, there would be a serious injury or fatality that happened. It's because I don't have that physical resilience and capacity, that these athletes do. And so when we think about, the workforce, they're working day in and day out. Football player may only, you know, play a game three hours, one time per week, but, an industrial worker, construction worker, they're maybe spending, you know, eight to ten hours a day, five, six days per week working overtime. And so building that, capacity and resilience for them is really, really important.

So thinking about what what is that resilience, it's the combination of strength, fitness, their mobility, the mental clarity they have, their ability to handle physical and mental stress, and, their ability to recover from exertion.

One of the things that I think has moved, industrial safety forward, a lot over the last five years is some of these newer frameworks that are being talked about. Like, one of them is called the capacity model, and again, it's going back to trying to prevent those serious injuries and fatalities from happening, by creating an environment where people can fail safely.

The one thing, though, that, and that that whole framework talks about, like, number one, acknowledging people make mistakes. You know, people oftentimes do not intentionally do things that are gonna harm themselves or others on the job site. It's it's the fallibility of humans.

And so if we can engineer an environment where people can fail safely, that's a huge step in the right direction. And I hundred percent agree with that, but I do think that the one component that may, be brought to that that would take it to the next level is building capacity, for the workforce. Because at the end of the day, if we can help the workforce have better capacity as we're gonna see here in these, subsequent slides, they're gonna be able to make better decisions and be safer, on the job and and bring that to the working environment to further reduce that that risk of injury.

So, again, when we think about what are, the different, threats to resilience, and we could we could actually have a webinar on any one of

Chapter

Threats to Resiliency

these different items and just focus on that today. What we're gonna do is we're just gonna focus on the threat, to resilience as it relates to pain.

And it's just because, honestly, like Joe said, it's the the low hanging fruit. We know that musculoskeletal disorders or MSDs account for forty percent of all workplace injuries, so it's the most common injury in the workplace, and it's also one of the most costly. As Doctor. Joe mentioned, presenteeism is basically being present but not productive. There was a great article with the American Medical Association that found that when somebody is dealing with pain and they bring that to work, they're less productive five point five hours of every week, just because of that that pain, condition.

And so, again, we know that there are people out there on a day to day basis that are dealing with pain and bringing that to to work, and it's no fault of their own. It's how do we help support them through that?

We did a study, with a hundred and twenty two line workers a couple years ago, and one of the interesting things that we found is that we asked them a whole host of questions, but one of those related to, do you experience pain? And what we found is that seventy nine percent of those line workers experienced least moderate pain, which is on a scale of zero to ten, like a six out of ten, lower back pain on a weekly basis. And we've done other studies along the way, and interestingly, even amongst office based workers, and what we see is that that number consistently hovers around eighty percent of the workforce experiencing I know we're on a webinar. I teach to live audiences all the time, and I would say that this holds true if I ask, the question, have you experienced pain at least one time this week?

Literally, almost a hundred percent of the the hands go up. So we know that this is something, that is very present for people, but, really, what do we do about that? What resources do we give them, and how do we help them navigate that?

So, I will talk about some of those solutions, but first, let's let's talk about why pain is the number one threat to employee resilience. And it really the three areas that we're gonna focus on are increased distraction, mood decline, and then compensatory injuries. And we'll talk about all three of these in greater detail.

So when it comes to increased distraction, there's actually a lot of research that shows, that pain has a huge impact on the way that our brain functions. And so, studies have shown that when we have, chronic pain, for instance, which means, that it's pain is present, on more like a daily or weekly basis, it can physically start to change the way that our brain processes information.

We start to have this narrow focus, which then basically leads to almost like a tunnel vision where we can't quite see the things around us in the same way.

And then, you know, if we're talking about a job site, one of the number one things that we know that, helps people prevent injuries is an awareness of the the recognition of hazards that are around them. And so if you have that altered, flow of brain processing and impaired hazard recognition, you're gonna be at a much greater risk for experiencing, a serious injury or fatality.

Additionally, it has a negative impact on mental health and quality of life. And speaking from a personal perspective, I come from a long line of people who work, have worked with their bodies most of their lives, and I saw over and over again, people within my own family who experienced, you know, the stress and strain on their bodies, the pain in their back, and turn to things like alcohol, opioids, different different substances to help, deal with that. And so, the reality is, is that it definitely can negatively impact mental health and quality of life. And so Just to to drive that, that these points home further, there was a study that was shown that, again, when it comes to hazard recognition as being one of the number one things that we can help people with in terms of preventing injuries, Fatal four injuries, which are falls caught in between some type of object being struck by something or an electrocution, Those are considered by OSHA as the four, fatal four, mechanisms of injuries that happen.

And so there's a study that that occurred in two thousand twenty that found that when they assess two hundred and eighty construction workers at fifty seven job sites, fifty seven percent of the fatal four hazards were identified.

And then when they looked at non fatal four workplace hazards, only eighteen percent of those, hazards were identified by these groups. Now pain wasn't a consideration amongst these people, so that wasn't something that we could, evaluate. But what seems to be interesting is that in the best, conditions, most of the time we're only able to, to see about forty five to sixty percent of the hazards that actually exist. And so when you throw paint on top of that, we know that that number goes down. So, again, anything that we can do to optimize performance when people are on the job is a win in the right direction.

Going back to my sports medicine career, I mean, I I traveled all over, the world of people so that they could shave one one thousandth of a second off their their time in the pool. And so I really think that those same concepts of giving everyone that extra little edge or advantage is huge in helping people, to moderate or prevent pain, seems to be, to me, one of the greatest opportunities when it comes to, helping people stay safe and healthy on the job.

So number one, again, relates to pain and distraction.

The second is the impact of pain on mood decline. And so, mood, covers a lot of different things, fatigue, anxiety, depression, joy. All those things, are fall in the classification of mood.

But we know that when people are in pain, there is a decrease in mood, and that again impacts, just the dynamics on a worksite, the dynamics of just interpersonal connection and and people being present when when they're on the job.

And that goes back to more of that quality of life as well. And so, again, an opportunity here, just from a quality of life perspective to provide people with that opportunity to, to deal with pain.

And then the third impact of pain, on on these type of situations is, the impact that pain has on compensatory injuries. And so we know that when people are in pain, it changes the way that they move. And I think all of us have probably been there before where, you know, maybe you have pain in your back, pain in your shoulder, and it caused you to lift a little bit differently, to bend differently.

You know, if you've ever had pain when you sneeze, you start to protect yourself in a different way. And so, again, if if people are on the job and they're performing repetitive tasks and they're experiencing discomfort, they're gonna figure out shortcuts. They're gonna figure out ways to get around that to prevent, even more pain. And again, all of those things, lead to, if not, an injury in that situation, repetitive stress that eventually will lead to someone experiencing a more serious injury later on down the road.

I oftentimes think of compensatory injuries kind of in, you know, poor movement or altering the way that you move kinda like bending a paper clip. You can only bend that so many times before it eventually breaks. And so oftentimes, when we look at these musculoskeletal injuries that occur, it's something simple. It's like someone picking a wrench up off the ground and their back goes out.

That type of activity shouldn't lead to that outcome. But when you compound doing that day in, day out improperly because you're avoiding pain, Eventually, it's the straw that breaks the camel's back, and that can, lead to a bigger injury.

So, again, I've painted kind of a a a picture here of the the impact of the problem. What I wanna do is spend the rest of the time focused on what is a solution for building a more resilient workforce. And, again, these are all things that, myself and many other people that are much smarter than me in sports medicine developed these concepts that relate to how do we help athletes build that capacity, build that resilience, create that those habits on a daily basis that are gonna cause their body to build up instead of break down?

And what can people do on a daily basis to invest in their movement health so that they're ready to perform the next day at at the same or higher level.

And so as as my team and I have helped develop, a strategy and adapted these principles to the workforce, really, we found that there are three buckets that really help support the movement health of the workforce. And the first one in the resilience, the first one is movement health. I'll go into greater detail in all three of these in a second.

Ergonomics and body positioning when performing repetitive tasks and then, strategies for improving recovery and performance optimization.

So when it comes to movement health, one of my observations when I first started working with the workforce is that a lot of the strategies to to help people prepare their bodies for activity were outdated. Like, most athletes hadn't done those type of things for twenty five years, and yet that was still the standard for how people would would begin their day.

No knock on stretch and flex. I still stretch myself, but, one of the things that we, you know, have done in in sports is we teach people a different way to prepare their bodies for activity. Stretching is great after we're warmed up or as recovery at the end of the day, but there are things that athletes do every day, every time they show up to the ballpark or, on the ice or at the pool deck. They they typically go through, a series of activities to prepare their body for that activity. And the formula that, that, you know, we promoted, to these athletes and we promote to the workers that we work with are rolling your muscles. And some of you may have experienced, like, a handheld massage tool.

The reason why I love these is, that it when you roll out a tight muscle, it brings blood flow oxygen to that tissue. It warms it up. It makes the tissue more elastic.

And then if you have a muscle knot or what we call myofascial adhesion, it can help release that so that you can gain better flexibility. So rolling is something that we promote as the first step to preparing the body for activity.

We know that, you know, people are not always gonna have a roller available, so there are other ways that we can, get around that, but it's it's the optimal setting. And the cool part too is that rolling also works really well as part of recovery at the end of the day.

Number two, relates to to breathing in, and I know that seems a little bit abstract, but breathing is something that we do twenty thousand times a day. We take twenty thousand breaths.

And when you think about, like, our core stability, the core of our core comes from us being able to control our diaphragm and create stability within our spine. But breathing also is something that, that we can control and so we can control that breath, and we know that if we can do controlled breathing like a technique that we oftentimes promote is called box breathing, That actually helps lower the blood pressure, lowers the heart rate, reduces stress. So even in, like, a situation where somebody might be experiencing anxiety, pain, or just anything along those lines, breathing is one of the most powerful things that we can do, to help us overcome that situation. But it's also a great way to reset everything, get oxygen to the brain so that we're present and able to perform that, task at the highest level.

And then the third step is dynamic movements to prepare the body for activity. And so this is taking joints through a full range of motion so that we can really maximize the range that we're gonna be working through. So if I'm an overhead worker, I'm gonna be doing activities that are gonna get my shoulders and upper back prepared for that type of an activity.

So rolling, breathing, and moving, in movement help is the first step.

The second step is body positioning and ergonomics. And so we're oftentimes say is that no amount of movement health can offset chronically performing things improperly. So we can see in this picture, you know, there are three ways that this, this line worker can approach pulling cable.

The third option on the right, he's positioning his body so that he can maximize the amount of force production, maximize his strength. He has a much, more stable base.

And when he does that type of a task in this manner, he's reducing strain to his body.

One of the the, mindset that I oftentimes encounter is that people, believe that the work that they do on a daily basis breaks them down. But what's what's interesting is if I'm an athlete and I go to the gym, I'm actually intentionally trying to create stress on my body. I'm lifting heavy weights. I'm doing all different types of things that are challenging my body so that I can become stronger. And so I have a really strong belief that if we can teach the workforce how to move better and incorporate concepts related to the positioning of their base trunk and shoulders when they perform these tasks, they can actually make themselves stronger through repetition rather than breaking themselves down. And so, again, it goes back to, some of the mindset, but also the education in the way that we teach people how to go about their job.

And then the third component is recovery and performance optimization. So there are so many things that we're in control of when it comes to, our performance, and we know that hydration, nutrition, sleep, stress reduction, incorporating movement health concepts for recovery are all absolutely critical for creating a position where our body can actually heal, recover, and repair and be prepared to perform the next day.

And what's kind of crazy is things like as simple as hydration. We know that two percent of dehydration actually impacts the way that the brain functions.

We'll start to have clouded judgment, like, make less sound decisions when we're on the job and potentially be at high risk for injury when we're dehydrated.

Additionally, we know that two percent dehydration will also, increase the risk of soft tissue injury, and so people are more susceptible to things like springs and strains when they're dehydrated. So, again, strong correlation between all these things and being able to help support the workforce.

So thinking about what this looks like, on a day to day basis and how you can build workforce resilience into the workday, there's some really, I think, key opportunities to to optimize that. Number one is through pre job briefings and hazard recognition. So when it comes to avoiding injuries, creating a safe environment, creating the capacity for people to fail safely, that pre job briefing has consistently been shown to be the most, important part of the workday, to protect people and identify the hazards and give them those opportunities to, prepare for the activity that they're about ready to perform.

I also advocate for the fact that, you know, we oftentimes will do a three sixty walk around of our vehicle or tools to make sure that they're safe to operate. But maybe part of that pre job briefing conversation should involve us doing a three sixty walk around of our own body and ensuring that we're actually physically capable capable to perform that job on that day. And if we're in pain, if if our bodies aren't ready to perform, maybe that needs to be a part of that conversation to, again, not put yourself or others at risk, because, you may not be prepared to to perform at that level on that day.

That pre job briefing, is also a great opportunity to incorporate, the pre job warm up, the movement health aspects, as part of that preparation.

An opportunity to talk about, how to best perform that job task. So have a conversation about body positioning and ergonomics, and then be thinking about recovery and performance optimization strategies, that can take place on that job site. So, I mean, it's getting hot out there right now. And so even having a conversation about hydration with electrolytes as part of the, the plan for that job for that day could be a great way to, again, protect the workforce, ensure that their heads are in the game, and they're ready to perform.

So in summary, again, I think, it's very well documented. Again, appreciate doctor Joe, laying the foundation here. The pain is a threat to workforce resilience and can lead to things like distraction, mood decline, compensatory injuries.

And when it comes to building a workforce that is resilient, a winning strategy all day long is movement health, body positioning or ergonomics, and performance in optimization and recovery. And just to reiterate, doctor Joe's points, I I think there's such a strong business case to making that type of investment, especially when you're talking about hundreds and thousands of workers out there. And, being able to to give them that advantage, has some huge outcomes.

As I mentioned, we work with a lot of utility companies, and if you look at the mission statement of almost any utility company out there, they oftentimes say that their mission is to deliver safe and reliable energy.

But I feel really strongly that providing safe and reliable energy also requires a safe and resilient workforce.

And and really if you can invest in that way, it does provide better health and safety outcomes, more productive and engaged in safer workforce, and then, ultimately leads to that higher employee satisfaction and retention.

So thank you so much. I I really appreciate the opportunity to, be a part of this conversation.

And I I'll turn it back over to Deb, and I think we have a little bit of time to be able to answer some questions.

Yes. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Kevin. Definitely myself having been spent a decent amount with, utilities and other companies, I've seen firsthand just how important resilience is, not only for the folks who are out there on the field, but also those who are in the call centers and sitting at desk. Everyone, can definitely benefit from that, and when they're out of pain. So, thank you again, doctor Joe and doctor Kevin. Great tidbits and great insights.

So, we will be opening it up now to q and a. So, again, if you have any questions that you'd like answered, please do put those in the chat, and in the q and a there at the bottom, and we will do our best to answer those.

One question that did come through was, doctors for doctor Joe. He talked a lot about retention, and kind of the impact of financial impact on retention.

The question was around, like, what are the factors question.

Answer that two different ways. One is we know that when people leave their job, they don't do it so much for money. They do it because they don't feel like there's a match between them and the supervisor and them and their job.

That's one way to look at that from an organizational development standpoint.

The other side of it is we know that employees are asking more and more for resources, not only for themselves, but their families to deal with their to deal with their personal health and even even concierge services. So as part of compensation and part of quality of work satisfaction, it's all of those benefits that we see related to health and quality of life that really make a tremendous impact on, recruitment, retention, and more importantly, just overall work satisfaction.

Great. Kevin, do you care to follow-up on that question, or do you wanna move to the next one?

Yeah. Joe, I think you did a great job answering that. I I do see one in the chat.

How long does it take to incorporate those preventative concepts into the workday?

I'm happy to speak on that first, and, Joe, if there's anything you wanna add. But, really not that long at all. And that's why I think that making those components a part of the pre job briefing is really powerful because it's just part of the work gain. It's not like you're setting aside a bunch of extra time. So, typically, what we find is that for most customers that we work with that incorporate, like, the movement health, talking about, you know, the risks related to, body positioning in the, the lifestyle or the performance optimization.

Really, I mean, you can incorporate that five to ten minutes, as part of their workday. So, again, I think it's well worth the investment.

Doctor Joe, anything else that you'd like to add to that?

Yeah. Kevin, you do such a nice job of providing certain real practical tips that you can incorporate right away. I think that's fantastic. The two things I would mention, one is, to think about your overall strategy, health and safety strategy as a strategy.

So really having a one year plan that lays out the, role delineation and also the goals and objectives related to what you're trying to accomplish. And then the other thing is we know when people get busy, they tend to then take shortcuts on some of the things you were talking about, Kevin. So making a policy around that, making it part of the Workday, that's something we do around here. It's part of the culture through our policies can be really powerful.

And then we have another question here that says, can you share some of the examples of innovative corporate thinking and actions, that have been taken to support worker health?

Well, one project I I'm sorry, Kevin. Go ahead, please.

No. Go for it, Joe.

One project I was gonna mention, it's it's, it's really an incredible project when you think about. It was called LNG. It was the largest construction project in North America. And what they did right from the beginning is they thought about the mental health and safety of the workforce. And there are I won't share, all of them, but there are multiple anecdotes from the employees talking about how that prework that was done to help with their mental wellness really helped them get through the project. Because they were up there in the, you know, in Northern Canada during the winter months by themselves or just with their coworkers really deal with all the not only the workplace stresses, but the mental health and physical challenges as well.

So that's just one example of a very large project, a very large company that was able to incorporate this. And when you start, the reason why I give that example is when you start thinking about companies of all sizes, you can always argue either way, but there's always a way that you can address health and safety with any any, workforce.

That's great. Thank you. Yeah. I was just, thinking back to, like, in the very early days of when we first started working with companies.

One of the things that, we collaborated with one of our customers on was how do you gamify, like, helping people create behaviors that are positive. And so, one of the first things that we did is we actually created so that five minute warm up that we talked about, the rolling, breathing, moving, we call the daily five. And so what we did with one customer is we broke them the entire organization up into teams. And so every time people did their daily five and recorded it, they earned points for their team, and then we sent out, like, a WWE championship belt to the winning team.

And we thought it was gonna be super corny, but then what we realized is that people actually love competition. And so it it really gamified, helping people reinforce this behavior, and it became this annual competition where people wanted to retain the the heavyweight belt. And, so that's become something that we've just continued with all of our customers, to a certain extent because we found that people like competition, and it's reinforcing the right habits.

The other thing that we found is that one of our customers had a wellness platform, and so we were actually able to create an API and integration between our technology and their technology so that when people, did things like the daily five, they actually earned wellness points. They could get reductions on their health insurance premiums. And so it just created more of an ecosystem. And what we heard from those customers, and it was one of the first times that, that health and wellness and the safety were really working together, because oftentimes within organizations, those are completely siloed departments. And so I think that's, like, one of the big opportunities right now is being able to create even closer partnerships between health, wellness, and safety, to really support the entire worker.

Wonderful. Great sources of innovation right there.

We had a question about, in a season of budget cuts, what do you have any advice on navigating, getting leadership buy in and senior leadership buy in?

Kevin, you want me to take that one?

Yeah. Go, Virgil.

Yeah.

Well, I would I would continue thinking about building the business case. And one of the challenges we have in the in the health and wellness space is that we sometimes get treated differently.

What we want is to be part of the organization. We wanna be treated like every other aspect of the company. And to do that, we need to make sure that we have a plan in place, we have a business case, and we're able to implement and measure that, business case going forward. On the other hand, many times in the wellness space, we often get criticized for the ROI side of it. And what I like to ask, organizations, especially senior management when I, work with them is we want to match that rigor.

So show me how you measure your safety program, how you measure your training program, how you measure other programs outside of the core business, and what kind of rigor you apply to those evaluation. And what you often find is wellness has held to this different standard. And I think it it's related to a sense of urgency. So not only is the business case important, but also building that sense of urgency.

And looking at one of the questions I love to ask, benefit people is, do you see benefits as an expense or an investment?

Because the answer to that question can be very telling. What are we trying to do to our expenses? We try to reduce them. But if we are making an investment, we try to enhance that investment. So when we start thinking about the whole area of human capital and investing in our human capital, I know budget cuts are tough and they're there and they're they're reality. But thinking about that investment side of the business, I think, needs to change that mindset.

Hey. Thank you. And I know we're just about at time, but I would say the the only other thing again, I come from a perspective where organizations pay millions of dollars to invest in innovation and prevention to keep athletes, you know, performing at their highest level and on the field. I mean, there's so much money that's spent in professional sports to keep athletes healthy.

And, when you look at the amount of, money that most programs like this cost versus how much it cost to actually retain the workforce, when people are off the job. I know, one of my, close, colleagues, he did a whole study that looked at an electric lineman. And by the time somebody goes through apprenticeship training school, becomes a journeyman electric electrician, they're on the job. There's, like, one point two million dollars invested in in that person and their, you know, career.

And so to think about not having one of your your strongest players on the field, and to save, you know, a couple thousand dollars, there's a little bit of a disconnect there. And so I I think that, you know, as leaders seeing the workforce, especially in a time where there are fewer and fewer skilled workers, to do the work, Maintaining your current workforce, I think, is should be one of the top priorities when it comes to maintaining, those goals that you have as a organization.

Great. Well, as Kevin mentioned, we are almost at the top of the hour here.

So just wanted to, give a quick plug here. If you found what you heard today helpful, and valuable, we are gonna be having another webinar. We're really excited for it. This one is on safety leadership. It's gonna be, Tuesday, June eighteenth, eleven AM Pacific Standard Time.

We have great speakers, lined up. So really excited to share the details of that.

If you are interested, you can follow us on search on LinkedIn, and you'll be able to see all the details coming up, on how to join and get involved with that. So really excited. And then, of course, if you do have any follow-up questions for speakers, I know we ran out of time for, additional questions here today.

Their contact information is on the screen here, and I'll leave this up here for, about a minute or so just so that folks can, jot that down if they need to. But, thank you again all so much for joining us. Again, we know that you have plenty of other places you could be spending your time, and we sure hope that you found today valuable and, walked away with some new insights. So thank you so much, and hope to see you guys again soon. And thank you, Joe and Kevin, for taking the time.

Thank you.

Bye. Thank you.