Did you know that although one of the wealthiest nations in the world, the United States still lags behind in health metrics?
Join me on today's episode to unpack the US health landscape, exploring how fundamental needs like clean air, job security, and transportation are not met in many communities, directly impacting health conditions.
We delve into the role of stress in these conditions and how clinical interventions contribute only 10-20% of health outcomes. More importantly, we highlight how businesses - big and small - can play a significant role in improving this situation.
Switching gears to focus on small businesses, we discuss their crucial role in fostering equitable and thriving societies. With a staggering 70% of Americans trusting small businesses more than their larger counterparts, we believe they hold the key to driving meaningful change.
Further, we will examine how businesses can harness their resources to benefit communities, employees, and managers alike.
Thanks for listening.
Resources:
Community Health and Economic Prosperity
If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.
One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.
Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.
Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Learn more about Candice and her work here.
Did you know that although one of the wealthiest nations in the world, the United States still lags behind in health metrics?
Join me on today's episode to unpack the US health landscape, exploring how fundamental needs like clean air, job security, and transportation are not met in many communities, directly impacting health conditions.
We delve into the role of stress in these conditions and how clinical interventions contribute only 10-20% of health outcomes. More importantly, we highlight how businesses - big and small - can play a significant role in improving this situation.
Switching gears to focus on small businesses, we discuss their crucial role in fostering equitable and thriving societies. With a staggering 70% of Americans trusting small businesses more than their larger counterparts, we believe they hold the key to driving meaningful change.
Further, we will examine how businesses can harness their resources to benefit communities, employees, and managers alike.
Thanks for listening.
Resources:
Community Health and Economic Prosperity
If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.
One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.
Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.
Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.
Learn more about Candice and her work here.
The hearth is for you if you're a business leader with a team. Here we have conversations about how to keep growing. When you feel you've reached your capacity, when what you're doing is working but you're starting to see the cracks, when there's a gap between where you're at now and where you want to be, here we find ways to transition through the struggle of survival toward creating a thriving business that supports you and your team as whole humans. Your host is me, candice Elliott. I'm a business strategist and mentor who specializes in working with business owners who are going through periods of growth. Especially when you're adding more people to your team, the practices and systems that worked when your team was smaller just don't seem to fit anymore, and when you're caught in stress and reaction, it's tough to reimagine the way that you created your world of work, both your own personal one and the one that you created for others. I help people align their values and business practices to build practical, sustainable, thriving work ecosystems and no, this isn't just some work utopia talk. To do this, I bring forward my decade-long professional background in human resources and organizational development, working with growing businesses across many sectors, and my decades-long search for meaning and wholeness, which includes researching the history of work and how it came to be what it is today, practicing a trauma-informed approach to business and integrating work, life and spirituality into a meaningful whole. Let's take this journey together. Welcome back to the hearth.
Candice:Today we are going to be talking about the US health disadvantage and what businesses can do to help, so I guess where we'll start is what is the US health disadvantage? Yeah, I mean, when I talk to a lot of people in the United States, there's this idea that perhaps because the US is one of the wealthiest countries in the world the wealthiest country in the world that we should have the best healthcare and be the healthiest people in the world. And maybe we should be, but we're not. And that is what the US health disadvantage is is that, on average, the health of Americans is worse than the health of people in other wealthy countries and even in other less wealthy countries, and this information is widely available. You can find it in many places. Where I first came in contact with it was a study that the US Surgeon General did, I believe in 2021, and it was about businesses and creating thriving communities and the intersection of health, business and community. So what is that disadvantage Like. How does it show up?
Candice:So the US health disadvantage has its roots in communities where vital conditions that shape health are not met, and there are seven different vital conditions, and those include basic needs for health and safety, like clean air and water, nutritious food, a safe environment, meaningful work and wealth, including employment, job training, financial savings and security. Humane housing, like safe structures and affordable costs, and diverse neighborhoods. Proximity to work, school and recreation, so the ability to live near work, school and recreation. Reliable transportation, including time and energy use for transportation, so that could mean buses, or it could mean cars, it could be bikes, it could be anything. And then a thriving natural world, like a healthy natural environment and green spaces. And then also included in this is lifelong learning, including literacy and number skills and quality, early child education, elementary and high school education and access to career and adult education. And then belonging and civic muscles, so the ability to have a sense of inclusion and the power to influence the policies and practices that shape the world. And this talks about it specifically within government, but I can also see an application in the workplace as well, and so the way that this disadvantage shows up is in mental health issues, in alcohol and substance use issues, in high blood pressure, hypertension, insomnia, in the number of fatal car accidents that we have. There's a whole list of different ways that our health is not as good as other countries. Quite a long list. Autoimmune disease is another one, and so I've thought about coming at this from a lot of different angles, and I just don't I don't want it to seem like it is solely the job of businesses to fix this problem. It is not. This is a big. It's bigger than just businesses. It needs to be addressed from many different angles, but businesses have a part to play, I think, and I think it's a really important part to play. I mean, when we look at what's happening in the research I mean health care expenditures were 2.6 times higher in the United States than the average health care expenditures of other wealthier countries.
Candice:The number of Americans that have one chronic health condition is 6 out of 10, and 4 out of 10 have two or more chronic conditions, and this includes a significant number of younger folks, like in that 18 to 44 year zone it is 18%, and then when you get above 45 years old, it's 50% of people. So one out of every two have two chronic health conditions. This has an effect on people's ability to work right, because if you have a chronic health condition, that gets in the way of your ability to do your job and it puts a strain on the company and the employer and also the employee, to be able to meet the conditions of the work environment that they need to meet. I talked in my previous episode about employee health and the workplace and ways to decrease stress. Stress is one of the main factors in chronic conditions that happen for people, and so being able to decrease stress helps people to have less chronic health conditions, along with a variety of other things like what I just listed financial savings, human housing, reliable transportation, a thriving natural world to access, belonging and civic muscle and all these different pieces. This is what creates a thriving community.
Candice:But something to know is that I think the other side of this right I said businesses are not solely responsible for this right, obviously, but I think the healthcare system is also not solely responsible for this right. In the research, it shows that only 10 to 20% of health outcomes are directly related to what is happening in the clinics and the hospitals, and so that's 80 to 90% of health outcomes are really determined by the ways that we are living our lives, if we have enough sleep, if we have nutritious food, if moderating the amount of stress that we're continually enduring, the amount of quality time we're able to spend outside, the amount of social interaction that we have. This is all related to health, and so, if we keep ignoring this situation, there are some trends that are currently happening that could get worse. I mean, one big one that I actually didn't even know until I started doing this research is that US life expectancy is ranked last among industrialized nations and is declining. So for years, decades, hundreds of years, us life expectancy kept increasing over time. Right, it was like we're making all of these wonderful advances and life expectancy is getting longer, but now we're starting to see the reverse of that Life expectancy is starting to go down, so that our children will not live longer than us.
Candice:There's one way to think about that, and one of the postulations about why this is happening is because of the pressure to succeed and the pressure to keep hustling and doing all the time that the American idea of the self-made individual and a land of opportunity, and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps which had social support to back it up in previous generations. It's just not the same anymore and that continuing to prioritize that hard work and hustle in the form that we are doing it right now, in the types of workplaces that we're doing it right now, is is harming our health. That's not to say that people shouldn't work hard, that people who are driven shouldn't be driven, or that people who love something should not be doing what they love, or that it doesn't sometimes take difficulty to get to a place where you want to go. Those are all very true things, but the pressure to be always on and to be always doing more and better creates harm. And having a more cyclical view of things to understand that as we go through life we have ups and downs. We have times when we have more and less capacity. We have times when we have more and less financial ability and more and less ability to lead, and you know different capacities to be able to be involved in our communities in different ways. The more we can embrace that and to let go of the things that are not fitting and to be okay with letting them go, the more that will help us to not only do the work that is the most important work for us to do in our businesses instead of all the work that we could possibly do, but also will help us to address this issue of the US health disadvantage. Something else to think about in this world is just the disparities that we find in health in different kinds of neighborhoods. Primarily BIPOC neighborhoods have much worse conditions for the predeterminance of health, for example, things like access to nature right or even just creating the space and the time to spend time in nature for one thing to think about. One of the organizations that I work with is Santa Cruz County Park Friends and they have a program. They did a program recently where they were taking kids who live in Watsonville, which is very close to the ocean, a 10-minute drive to the ocean so kids who grew up in this town that's, 10 minutes from the ocean, who had never seen it before. So these are the kinds of things that they have an effect on health and they have an effect on our community and where we're going and our businesses can participate in order to bring these things into a reality. Some like optimistic kinds of things within this, like things that businesses can do.
Candice:I was like going through a bunch of Gallup polls and noticed that 70% of Americans have a great deal of confidence in small businesses. Within confidence, it's like that they are being responsible, that they're supporting their communities, that they're creating good jobs and that they're participating well as businesses. This is compared with 21% of Americans that have confidence in large businesses. 63% of US adults were dissatisfied with the size and influence of major corporations. Versus this, like the other side of it, where 70% of Americans are supportive of small businesses. Right, and small businesses, by number, are the biggest number of businesses that there are in our country. They don't employ the most people, but they are the largest number of businesses. So just know that generally, if you're a small business, the public is rooting for you. They're wanting you to succeed and believing that you're doing well, and so you know, if you go out on a limb a little bit to work on these kinds of health objectives, it'll just even support that even more.
Candice:Another thing to think about as a business owner or as a business is that, like within the world of inequality and lack of economic opportunity, those who have power and resources are more likely to benefit, while workers, mid-level managers and consumers are more likely to receive less. So if you are a person with power and resources, it is more likely that you will continue to have power and resources than power and resources going to other businesses, workers, managers and the community as a whole. And so, as a person with power and resources, you can decide how to channel those resources into your community, your employees, your managers, to create a thriving ecosystem, cultural ecosystem, and so there are a lot of ways to do this. You can start small. You can start or not small, but you can start within your own company of looking at okay, how are my workers doing, like, financially? That's one piece that you could look at. How are my workers doing financially compared to other workers in this area? Are they able to afford the kind of housing that is stable? Are they able to have reliable transportation? Are they able to go out and do things that they enjoy, or are they stuck in places where they can't do that? Are my managers seeing opportunity for growth or are they stuck where they're at? How do we create pathways for people to be able to have more autonomy and agency over their own lives and to be able to participate in a way that brings them health, to be not stressed, so that they're able to do things that make them feel healthy and actually are healthy for their bodies. Another way to think about it is what organizations are already in my community doing things that I really believe in and then finding ways to support those organizations. And then a third thing that I really find to be so important to do is to be involved in your local government so that, as issues come up that affect you and your business and your employees that affect your community, that you're a part of the conversation that's happening around what is happening in your community and what it is becoming and the direction of the decision making that's happening. I happen to live in a community that has a very vibrant local political scene and that there is a lot of contention sometimes in that, and what I have enjoyed about the process of local politics here is working through those issues where we don't all agree and seeing where there is space to move forward and where things are aligned so that we can create the kind of community that we want to see, that we want to give to the next generations.
Candice:And then, just from this report, I wanted to share that there were three things that they proposed businesses do in order to create thriving communities. One is to focus on the well-being of people, so employee and dependent benefits, workplace policies and environment and customer well-being fit into that category. The second thing is the well-being of places, so the vital conditions of community access to opportunity, broader community systems. And then the third thing is equity, also ensuring that resources are focused on those most in need and that everyone has the opportunity to thrive and that, as these rules are aligned, they get incorporated into the meaning of being in business and why you're even doing it in the first place. So what are some ways to get started?
Candice:Just a couple ideas. One is to just look at your internal practices through this lens well-being of your people, well-being of place, and then equity and to see where there may be room for growth. Another thing is to join an aligned business organization. I am currently a member of the Santa Cruz County Business Council, which I find to be a wonderful organization, not just to meet peers, but also to really have the tough discussions around the issues that are coming up in our community and that affect other communities all throughout the country as well. So there are all different kinds of business organizations and professional organizations, and just finding one that is the right fit for you, or looking at what's available around you to start could be a good way to go. And then a third thing is just looking for a nonprofit partner, one that is in your community that's already doing really good work, and then reaching out to them and finding out how you can support All right. Well, as always, please take from this what works for you. I'm not saying that because I've found this research that you have to accept or go with any of this, but I did wanna share it with you because it seemed really important and was fascinating to me. If you have any questions or you wanna dig into any of these things further, let me know. I would love to do that with you and we'll have links for you also in the show notes. Thanks, see you next week. Hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out and, if you're feeling generous, please leave a review.
Candice:Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource. If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart and you'd like to connect with me, there are a few ways to do that. One is my newsletter, where I put most of my time and energy when I'm not working with clients or with my family, or working on this podcast Sorry, social media. The newsletter is a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and, of course, updates on what's happening with the podcast. Whenever something's going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first. Another resource that I have for you is my guide to doing work differently. This guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place if you're looking for somewhere to get started. Last, if you've got a burning question, a comment or a situation you'd like my eyes on, you can email me. All those links are in the show notes. Take care, brave Soul. Catch you next time.