On average, we spend one-third of our lives at work. It is a place where we can thrive through making friends, learning new skills, realizing our potential, accomplishing goals, working as a team, and making a living for ourselves and our family. But, work doesn’t always contribute to our well-being. The workplace can also be a place where we suffer from stressful work environments, toxic relationships, and unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. And, bad work environments aren’t just bad for employees, they are bad for business.
For example:
• In a 2017 survey, 60% of workers in the United States reported being bullied at work.
• In 2018, almost 3 million injuries occurred at work and over 5000 employees were killed on the job in the United States alone.
• According to the National Sleep Foundation, approximately 15% of US workers perform shift work (e.g., doctors, nurses, pilots, commercial drivers), and their poorer sleep quality puts them at increased risk for a variety of chronic illnesses.
• A 2019 survey found that half of the respondents reported quitting a job due to a bad boss.
Lousy working conditions affect employee performance and lead to diminished business outcomes.
Behavioral science offers numerous insights for designing productive, supportive, and safe workplaces. When business leaders design work environments that enable their employees to be successful, safe, and enjoy their work, they also improve the bottom line.
The mission of the Bench to Boardroom blog is to bring behavioral science to bear on important issues affecting the workplace. Bench to Bedside is a term that originated out of healthcare, highlighting the importance of bringing research knowledge from the lab into mainstream healthcare quickly and responsibly. Our blog hopes to achieve a similar mission by synthesizing behavioral science research conducted in the workplace and offering accessible solutions for common workplace challenges that can be applied directly.
We will describe recent and relevant research, discuss current events and workplaces highlighted in the media, and interview professionals using behavioral science to improve the workplace. We will include guest bloggers who can provide insights on the issues listed above and more in the coming months. Behavioral science has a lot to offer business leaders, and we plan to highlight those opportunities in this blog.