Healthy Workforce, Healthy Projects

Janis is an award-winning journalist and editor who has covered many industries beyond project management, including health care, financial services, higher education and retail sales.

  Innovation   ProjectsAtWork  

Want to improve your project and program success rates? Work on the work environment first. An organizational psychologist explains why you need to care about employee wellness and how to get started.

Employee wellness isn’t a touchy-feely topic anymore. There is hard-dollar impact in ignoring the physical, mental and emotional needs of people in the workplace, according to Roger Benton, Ph.D., an organizational psychologist and the program manager for Healthy Workforce at Southern California Permanente Medical Group.

Spreading that message, Benton spoke at an April symposium titled “Stress and the Bottom Line: Lessons for Leaders,” sponsored by California State University, Fullerton, Mihaylo College of Business and Economics. As one of several presentations, he and a panel of Kaiser Permanente execs reviewed the details of their organization’s innovative national program to cultivate a healthier, more productive work environment.

Given the current economic landscape, which has increased workloads and responsibilities, project managers and their teams are likely feeling more anxiety, so that’s why Benton is emphatic about the importance of addressing wellness at both the organizational and personal level.

“Over the past few years, Kaiser Permanente, most large companies and many midsize companies have figured out that health …

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