The KUPMC Blog

A report on the Business Wire indicates that, according to MetLife’s 8th annual Employee Benefits Trends Study, 68% of employees said that over the last 12 months they were affected by increased feelings of job insecurity, a decrease in the quality of their work, an increase in their workload or being distracted at work because of financial worries.

The challenge, of course, is that managers are asking more from their employees because of the very conditions that are causing these stresses.

What would help? The MetLife report suggests that providing access to health and wellness programs, work/life balance programs, and financial advice and guidance in the workplace could be a win-win as approximately eight out of ten employees say that they believe their productivity would be favorably impacted by these programs:

* 77% of employees said financial advice and guidance programs would improve their productivity.
* 81% said that health and wellness programs would improve their productivity.
* 82% stated that work/life balance programs would improve their productivity.

Many employers have yet to act on this information, however, even when they recognize the value of such wellness programs. Read more.

By now all but the most diligent among us have given up on or simply forgotten our New Year’s resolutions-our plans for making changes in our lives prove remarkably difficult to stick with.

Since this is the case for each of us as individuals, it shouldn’t be surprising how often plans for affecting changes in groups of people-whether teams, departments or whole organizations-fall by the wayside. There can be a vast distance between the way things are and the way we want them to be, and the temptation is to make big changes all at once. Do major overhauls. Out with the old, in with the new. Sometimes this works.

Yet most of us resist change, and we are often better able to deal with it and more likely to stick with it when it happens incrementally. Here’s a great post by Peter Bergman on the Harvard Business Review blog reflecting on the very significant effects that can flow from smaller changes. He offers both personal and professional examples to illustrate his point.

What’s your experience with small changes? Have you ever made a big change by making small adjustments?