Health and Fitness in The Workplace

Problems in Today's Society

The increasing complexity of modern society with the accompanying breakdown in traditional values and structures creates a wide range of pressures and stressors that challenges each of us.

The high mobility of the nuclear family has put great distances between family members. Almost one half of today's marriages end in divorce. The search for personal privacy causes neighbors to be strangers. The "cashless" society creates a false sense of financial worth. The decreasing value of the Canadian dollar, rising real estate values, and increased taxes make first-time home ownership a financial burden or an unrealistic goal for many young couples.

Stress management has become a very timely and popular workshop, and numerous groups and professionals now offer stress management programs. Certain components in a stress management program distinguish a poor to mediocre program from a professional, state-of-theart program. Any program that provides more than a few hours of material should have more than a single focus. For example, programs that focus solely on time management or on relaxation training are providing only one technique for stress management. Also, programs that focus only on identifying the stressors (those things in our work and personal lives that are sources of stress) and then spend the remaining time suggesting ways to change those outside sources of stress are neglecting one of the more powerful techniques in stress management, that of changing certain thoughts, perceptions, and beliefs about those stressors.

Like many others interested in the science of enhancing human performance, I, too, read In Search of Excellence ( Peters and Waterman 1984). Quite frankly, I was not overwhelmed by its contents. I would not go so far as the famous management writer Peter F. Drucker ( 1984) who labeled the book "juvenile." The focus of the book was to enhance the corporate effectiveness of U.S. organizations and addressed the crisis that the U.S. economy was experiencing at the time. U.S. business was witnessing increased competition from the Japanese and reduced productivity from its work force and was in the midst of a recession. Organizations needed to be reminded of business basics, such as the importance of staying closer to their customers or the groups they were serving, listening to their employees (at all levels) so as to benefit from their observations, and creating an innovative, creative, and responsive work environment.