Optimising health, enhancing performance

References - Staying ahead, the health advantage

1. Musich S, Hook D, Baaner S, Edington DW. The association of two productivity measures with health risks and medical conditions in an Australian employee population. Am J Health Promot. 2006 May-Jun;20(5):353-63.

2. Ricci JA, Chee E, Lorandeau AL, Berger J. Fatigue in the U.S. workforce: prevalence and implications for lost productive work time. J Occup Environ Med. 2007 Jan;49(1):1-10.

3. Caruso DR., Salovey P. The emotionally intelligent manager: how to develop and use the four key emotional skills of leadership. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. 2004.

4. Ramani S, Gruppen L, Kachur EK. Twelve tips for developing effective mentors. Med Teach. 2006 Aug;28(5):404-8.


Productivity is the quality of being productive and in economic terms is the rate at which goods or services are produced, often measured as the amount of output per unit of input (e.g. labour, materials, etc).

• Competition in our modern society often means that we are pressured to keep increasing our productivity. For example, we may be pressured to produce the same output in a smaller amount of time because we are given additional responsibilities within our working week and if we can’t achieve this then we may have to work longer hours (often with no extra remuneration) in order to complete the extra workload.
• However, extra workload may not be sustainable in the longer-term if it reduces our rest and leisure time too much, or if we begin to feel that we are being taken advantage of to the point that we suffer an effort-reward imbalance (see below).
• Both a lack of rest and leisure and effort-reward imbalance are associated with poor health and well-being.

Effort-reward balance fairly balances the reward you receive for the effort you provide. High efforts spent and low rewards received may result in emotional distress and adverse health effects (Kumari M, Head J, Marmot M. Prospective study of social and other risk factors for incidence of type 2 diabetes in the Whitehall II study. Arch Int Med. 2004; 164:1873-80).