Putting the health into healthcare
Here at Havas Health Plus, health and healthcare come with the territory — it’s what we do in our professional lives. We’re storytellers, innovators, inventors, and designers, but we’re also fitness pursuers, curious yoga students, mindfulness practitioners, and home cooks. We’re busy parents or caring for aging ones. We’re people who want to log our 10,000 steps. And we’re people who snack on donuts and leftover conference room food. Like much of America, we have good intentions, we really do. We’re all doing the best we can to walk the walk and talk the talk when it comes to healthy choices. But it’s sometimes (a lot of times!) hard to integrate healthy behaviors in the middle of a workday. And too often, we put our own health low on the list of priorities when there is so much else competing for our attention.
The Havas Health Plus Culture Club realized they could bridge employees’ outside interests with our day-to-day workflow and reinforce healthy behaviors at the same time. They have done this before. Recently, they invited a yoga teacher to come to the office once weekly, and now several agency folks break for an hour, turning our lounge area into a yoga sanctuary. There’s a palpable energy shift post-practice, with colleagues exuding calmness and focus, ready to take on the inevitable workday challenges.
That’s where I come in. I’m an account planner with a recently completed masters in Nutrition Science. When Culture Club got wind of this, they saw an opportunity for me to share my nutrition expertise with the Plus’s collective desire to eat and feel better, and maybe even contribute to better work.
I’m not sure to what extent the rest of the world would consider nutrition and pharmaceuticals to be in the same category, but in this pursuit of health, and ultimately of well-being, they are complementary parts working together to create a more complete whole. I have a few nutrition clients I work with in off-work hours, and I’m certainly guilty of pushing nutrition lessons on friends and family with more enthusiasm for sharing than maybe my listeners have for listening. But here were people asking, and with the chance for a large captive audience, how could I say no?
Turnout was good. 20% of the agency in a post-holiday week? I’ll take it. We had a lot to cover, but only an hour to do it. I readied my biggest talking points:
1. Sugar is making us fat and sick, and sapping our energy over the long-term
2. Debunking the myth of “killer” cholesterol
3. The wonder of fiber and the microbiome
4. The need for protein (but not too much!)
5. The potential for broccoli (and other cruciferous veggies) to save us all
The challenge in talking about nutrition is that just about everything is relative. If you choose not to eat X then you have to choose to eat Y in its place, and in that way there are no good or bad choices, but rather better or worse ones. Audiences are relative, too. Some are more seasoned — they have already pursued their own nutrition information from the plethora of available sources — while others are more of a clean slate, primed for learning the few universal truths in the field. Timing is critical as well. The general statement of “Americans tend to over-consume protein,” while anecdotally proven true in my and others’ experience, isn’t necessarily valid immediately post-workout, where protein demands are higher. In a sense, there can be conditional truths.
The solution for that challenge of conditional truths is usually to create a sequence of lectures, delivered at the right cadence and at the right level for each audience. This means the first lesson is generally high-level, with the few universal truths forming the foundation, and complemented by just enough of the more complex and evolving science to generate further interest. That plan worked here, with my fellow Plus-ers eagerly asking questions about what counts as refined sugar, how fiber connects to weight loss at the physiological level, and as you’re likely to hear at any agency, “How do I eat well with such a busy life?” On the last question, there are no easy answers, but there’s a lot we can do. It just had to wait until our next talk.
It’s supremely satisfying, if not outright inspiring, to work at an agency willing to bridge the personal and professional, to recognize that our offline pursuits aren’t mere distractions but rather energizing activities that help to power what we do at the office. Using our workspace as a physical bridge between those worlds seems like a natural move among employees, but often falls short at the executive level where maximum efficiency and billable hours tend to reign. At Havas Health Plus, we’re fortunate to have the right mix of an impassioned and eclectic personnel coupled with an executive group that has the courage to fight for infusing work with just a little more ‘play’ and the foresight to know that doing so will only lead to more enthusiasm, happier employees, and by extension, better work.
