Can Your Communications Strategy Improve People’s Health?
Posted in Employee communication, Health, Social Media, Strategy, Uncategorized on April 28th, 2009 by dsweeney – Be the first to commentSo many of the conversations about corporate communications revolve around how to do it efficiently and effectively and with impact. All critical goals, but what if we can communicate in way that can positively affect the health of the person to whom the communication is directed?
I have the good fortune to work with some friends who are committed to bringing people together to explore social conditions that are the major influences of health and illness. (For more on their work, check out www.communitiesofhealth.org.) Working with them has given me access to some interesting thinking about the underlying causes of poor health, as well as unconventional approaches to improving health.
Recently, four articles in particular have given me pause to think about how we approach communications in an organization could potentially positively influence the overall health of an individual. (The approach also could have a negative health impact, but for this blog posting I will only focus on the positive.)
The four articles are:
“Love is Real Medicine”– In this Newsweek article Dr. Dean Ornish wrote a few years ago, he highlights studies he conducted demonstrating the positive impacts relationships have on people who had heart attacks.
“What are Friends For? A Longer Life” — A recent NY Times article highlighting a study that shows people with good friendships live longer and are healthier than those without close relationships.
“Ning Hits 1 Million Social Networks”– The one millionth social network was recently created using the build-it-yourself Ning platform.
“Whitehall II Study” — The last piece is not an article, but a study. The study was “set up by Professor Sir Michael Marmot to investigate the importance of social class, psychosocial factors and life style as determinants of disease by following a cohort of 10,308 men and women.” The study found the following:
A person’s health is influenced by the conditions in which he or she lives and works. The “Work, Stress and Health” booklet summarises some key findings from the Whitehall II study including:
- The more senior someone is in the employment hierarchy, the longer he or she might be expected to live compared to people in lower employment grades.
- The combination of high demands and low control at work predicts poor health.
- Workers reporting high effort-reward imbalance are at increased risk of coronary hearth disease and poor health.
- A healthy diet, exercise and quitting smoking all reduce the risk of disease and promote well-being.
After reading these and other writings on the connections between relationships, stress, autonomy and health, I am left wondering if health improvement could be an effective goal and measurement for a company’s communications strategy. If the anwer is yes, how could we achieve something like that? Other questions to consider include:
- With social media becoming a larger part of corporate communications strategies, is it possible to leverage them in such a way so they become a mechanism for people to form genuine friendships? What would that look like? Should an employer encourage these kinds of relationships?
- How can a company use an application like Ning to create a platform for communications that give employees a sense of autonomy and control? What kind of control would a company have to let go of to make this happen?
- How can knowledge of the benefits of relationships and autonomy influence a commuincation strategy and implementation?
I am sure there are more questions and implications from thinking about communications as a driver for improving health, so feel free to post them here. In the meantime, I will keep searching for the study that shows hanging out on Facebook has better health benefits as hitting the treadmill. You never know. This stuff is always developing . . .