People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1 - 6

from the special issue editor

Organizational Health and
Wellness Are Business Relevant

he invitation to compile and edit this
issue arrived unexpectedly during a
visit to Google's New York City offices
on a Friday afternoon in 2013. Brian Welle,
director of people analytics at Google and a
member of a local organization of I-O Psychologists (the Friday Group), was hosting a visit.
He had presented Google's initiatives to "nudge"
people into living longer. For my part, I had
shared a few words about McKinsey's Organizational Health Index business. Perhaps
coincidentally, perhaps not, Anna Tavis, executive editor of the People & Strategy journal (and
a Friday Group colleague), floated the idea of
publishing a special issue of this journal focusing
on organizational health and wellness.
This issue is the result.
One core belief informed the call for papers:
Organizations need to measure and manage
their health with the same rigor they apply to
performance. Consequently, readers will find
evidence of, well, evidence throughout the
majority of our feature articles and in our lead
Perspectives, Six Lessons on Leadership (p. 8),
by Bob Hogan.
Another core belief informed the special editor's
decisions: Organizational health is one of the
most powerful levers leaders have to drive performance in the short term and set up the
organization for long-term success. Evidence
abounds throughout-from the estimated $1.2
billion advantage in long-term shareholder
value creation for the healthiest companies to
the estimated $1,600 per employee advantage
in health care savings for superior wellness initiatives, excluding other benefits, e.g., reduced
sick days and health risks.
What is the evidence that organizational health is
related to company performance? Securing Lasting Value through Organizational Health (p. 24 )
links McKinsey & Company's Organizational
Health Index scores from hundreds of companies
and millions of respondents to nine-year total
return to shareholders (TRS) and key performance indicators (KPIs) that companies actually
use to run their businesses, like production costs.
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PEOPLE & STRATEGY

What is the evidence that organizational health
helped Ford Motor Company turn itself around?
A case study mined more than 160 structured
interviews with managers and employees illustrates how Ford captured the value of
organizational health. Their road from nearbankruptcy to profit leadership in the automotive
industry is told in Regaining Organizational
Health and Vitality: Ford Motor Company's
Positive Adaption to the Challenges of the Automotive Industry Crisis (p. 46).
What is the evidence that holistic well-being is
related to leadership effectiveness and the
engagement of employees? Tone at the Top:
Leadership as a Foundation of Organizational
Health and Wellness (p. 36) subjects Gallup's
and Healthy Company's datasets of 360-degree
ratings of leaders to multivariate statistical treatments (communicated in plain English) to make
the case.
What is the evidence that employers can derive
more value from their health and wellness programs-and how much? Data from three
Towers Watson surveys is mined to address
these questions in Capturing the Value of Health
and Productivity Programs (p. 30).
The bottom line for CHROs and other readers
in policy roles is that value propositions that
make sense to line leaders are not only possible,

but they are also happening and crystallizing a
new expectation for the role: business relevance.
In our experience, there are many capable HR
leaders who get it, and are quite adept. (There
are also some who do not, and aren't.) Chris
Gagnon, a solution partner at McKinsey
reminds us of that in his first-person interview
with executive editor Anna Tavis (p. 56).
Client experience, and the first-person interview
with Professor Warner Burke of Columbia University Teachers College (p. 52), tell us that the
proverbial "seat at the table," once earned, is
only as valuable as the respect HR leaders earn
through relevance in the form of strategic
change skills, evidence-based persuasion, and
value-based ideas and initiatives.
Done well, impact with the senior team and the
enterprise is sure to follow.
Dr. Michael N. Bazigos

People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1