Total Health

At 8 a.m. every workday, an alarm sounds at the Member Services Call Center in Denver. Instantly, Olivia Johnson and her entire unit-based team of customer service representatives to leap out of their seats.

And dance.

The dance break tradition started when one of Johnson’s co-workers set a regular medication alarm that plays music.

“He started dancing when his alarm went off, then another person started dancing with him. Now it’s all of us dancing every morning,” says Johnson, a member of SEIU Local 105. “Afterwards we clap and tell each other it’s going to be a good day.”

Shaking their groove thing, having regular potlucks and sharing information that might make work easier for others are ways Johnson’s team combats potential stress at work. Constant stress can result in faster breathing and an increased heart rate, which the American Heart Association says can lead to physical pain, depression and unhealthy behaviors to compensate.

The members of Johnson’s UBT also alternate work assignments, so that representatives aren’t doing the same thing every week. One week, half of the team fields the calls from Kaiser Permanente members, while the other half answers questions from all of Colorado’s customer service representatives via SameTime chat. The next week, they switch. The variety helps keep the demands of the job manageable.

Stress comes with the job

Terrence J. Cooper, who manages the Maple Lawn Call Center in Fulton, Maryland, says one reason working in a call center can be stressful is, simply, the nature of the work.

“We take complaints here,” says Cooper, who has been at Kaiser Permanente since 2006. “Complaints alone can be stressful.”

Cooper, who manages 20 people, tries to keep his team upbeat by injecting humor into his UBT’s daily huddles and team meetings. The team also host potlucks and does team-building activities outside of work, such as bowling.

“This allows us to catch up as a team,” Cooper says. “We talk about the weekend or the kids. It gives everyone an opportunity to take their minds off that last call.”

Cooper also serves as the local co-lead for the Kaiser Permanente wellness program “Live Well, Be Well” and tries to promote a healthy work environment to reduce stress. Frequently, fitness video games, board games or music are available in the break room to help folks “de-stress,” he says. “We try to lighten the mood.”

There’s a serious side to adding fun and festivities to the job: A study in the 2006 Ivey Business Journal Online found that workers who feel empowered and engaged—one of the outcomes of the light-hearted endeavors—are more productive and have fewer safety incidents.

Giving people a say

Another key element to reducing stress is giving people the ability to make more decisions at work, says Deashimikia Williams, a customer service representative in Maryland and member of OPEIU Local 2. Williams also serves as her UBT’s union co-lead and is a member of the national call center “Super UBT,” whose membership crosses regional boundaries.

Williams says empowering workers and improving their work processes can have a positive impact on stress at work. Making customer service representatives, CSRs, aware of what they can do to resolve a member’s issue also reduces frustration, says Williams, whose role on the Super UBT includes exploring different improvements.

“We look at the issues CSRs and managers experience on the floor. If we streamline a process, it may not be as stressful,” Williams says. “If we can let them know what can be done by each department and who can help resolve a member’s problem, it reduces frustration.” 

Our bodies metabolize the excessive sugar in processed foods just as it processes alcohol and other toxins, causing damage to our liver and other organs.

Sugar makes us more likely to develop a variety of risk factors that lead to serious illness, while making us crave sweet even more.

In fact, sugar causes a cycle of addiction in the brain in much the same way as drugs and alcohol—and cigarettes. When it comes to addictiveness, nicotine takes the, um, cake.

Physicians at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), led by outspoken pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, MD, published a paper in February in the journal Nature showing that like alcohol and tobacco, sugar is a toxic, addictive substance. They argue that it should, therefore, be closely regulated, with taxes, laws on where and to whom it can be advertised and age-restricted sales. The researchers said that increased global consumption of sugar is primarily responsible for a whole range of chronic diseases that are reaching epidemic levels around the world.

Is sugar—so pervasive in processed foods, soda and junk food in general—the new tobacco? Let’s see.                                    

It can kill you.

If Lustig and his colleagues—and many other independent researchers—are even half right, sugar and junk food have been responsible for millions of preventable deaths. According to journalist Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation” and the children’s book “Chew on This,” poor diet and lack of exercise may soon surpass smoking as the No. 1 cause of preventable death.

People make huge amounts of money by selling it.

Remember how long the tobacco industry denied the link between tobacco, advertising, and lung cancer and heart disease? We are hearing the same protestations from the processed food industry today. Don’t buy it!

Schlosser, a keynote speaker at the 2012 Union Delegates Conference, recounts how McDonald’s was built. Founder Ray Kroc discovered that profits were higher when kids ate out with their parents. So he lured children in with lollipops. Later, he added a clown. Today, fast food chains hire child psychologists, hold focus groups for toddlers and put 5-year-olds in MRI machines to see which part of their brain is responsible for brand loyalty.

“Think about the profit margin in a soda,” Schlosser says. The raw materials are water, food coloring, sugar and a paper cup. Nutritional value: less than zero. Cost to produce: pennies. Now there’s a profit margin!

An imaginary friend of mine smokes, is decidedly chunky, and has high blood pressure and high cholesterol. His kids nag him about the cigarettes and weight; his wife worries more about the hidden conditions.

This fellow could be any one of many of us, and if he wanted to track his efforts to improve his health, he could use the “cloverleaf” graphic introduced in this issue of Hank—a visual summary of the four measures of health at the heart of the new Total Health Incentive Plan.

The cloverleaf has a lot in common with the Value Compass, which illustrates the interconnectedness of service, quality, affordability and the workplace environment. The Value Compass reminds us that improving in one area at the expense of another isn’t progress—and that improving in one area frequently leads to improvements in other areas.

So it is with health. If I take up smoking and have a cigarette each time I’m tempted to eat something sweet, I may improve my Body Mass Index, or BMI—but I won’t have improved my health. If my imaginary friend starts to make better food choices and ups his exercise, however, he’s likely to see improvement across the spectrum of health issues he’s facing. By measuring improvement in several areas, the new incentive plan puts the emphasis on bringing the whole person into better balance.

And by putting the focus on collective improvement, the plan recognizes that all of us are making decisions as individuals in a social system—a system that can make it harder, or easier, to make better choices. Losing the dougnuts at a breakfast meeting may seem like a small gesture, but many such gestures add up to powerful change.