Experience, Inc.

CHAPTER 9Thriving at Work: A Focus on Health

If your house was on fire, and assuming every living creature in it was safely out, what's the one thing you would grab on your way out?

One of my favorite teachers, Bill Lawson, posed that question to us in our 11th grade Humanities class, and of course it got all of us thinking – a bunch of 17-year-olds starting to consider big issues and the wider world.

But such a question makes anyone think, at any age. It challenges you to consider hard what matters – what really matters, when you're asked to make sacrifices.

As long as people have been working, they've been asking this question: Is work worth it?

Today, there is a greater number of people than ever pondering the question. Employees are facing a growing list of challenges that are causing them to take a hard look at work: a historic misalignment in the U.S. labor market, the unprecedented number of people quitting jobs and not immediately looking for other ones, the pandemic and its aftermath and the economic and social toll they have taken. All of these point to an existential crisis for so many – employees, future employees, ex-employees – about the way most of us spend most of our waking hours.

It's not hard for work to overwhelm us. For all the good intentions of leaders to make the employee experience positive and balanced, for many workers, including the most skilled, their job essentially starts the moment they wake up. It continues when they get home, since they're ...