The Healthy Workplace

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Create a Healthy Organizational Culture

A MAJOR REASON EMPLOYEES ARE not engaging in healthy behaviors at work has to do with organizational culture. Culture is often difficult to define or measure, but it controls our behavior in a very real way. Organizational culture, defined by consultants Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy in their classic book Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life as “the way things get done around here,” includes the organization’s vision values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits. It is also the pattern of collective behaviors and assumptions that are taught to people ...