Transcript: The Healthy Work Place Nudge

As a nation, 50% of our population has some form of chronic disease, and it's rising at about a 7% compounded rate. Healthcare comprises about 18% of our gross domestic product, and it's rising at about a 7% rate. So, it doesn't take a genius to do the math on what the compounding of that is. So, within the next 10 years, we will go from 18% GDP to 36% GDP. In the early 20% range, our economy will begin to implode.

And it's the first time in my life I saw a true existential threat to our country, not only to companies, but our country, that the way we've traditionally done wellness programs has failed and will continue to fail. Now, the stress at work is the key driver, because 78% of employees say that work is the number one cause of either high or very high stress. When you think about it, what are the key coping behaviors people have when they're burnt out, stressed out, or just unhappy? So, what drives the stress, and what are the environmental factors, and what can people do to reduce the friction of work?

90% of your life is in some form of built environment, and we're just beginning since 2013 to understand the implications of what the environment is doing to our health. And we go through kind of your whole body system and how the built environment actually interplays with that. The cost of that is incredible when you consider that the average cost of implementing a wellness program is approximately $700 per year per employee, and it doesn't include all the soft costs. So, when you do that, it's a couple thousand dollars per employee a year.

To improve your building, especially if you put it in the cycle of building maintenance and upgrades, it's about $500 per employee as a one-time cost. 100% of your employees get to benefit from it. Hello, and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it. Episode number 95. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects.

We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. Last week, you heard my last recap episode from the Voice of Blockchain Conference hosted by the Chicago Blockchain Project. You heard from Sharon Burns from BlockData for Good and a conversation between Paul Doherty from the Digit Group and Lizzie Nguyen with Women of Color in Blockchain and Stranger Labs. These conversations covered making it easier to track donor organizations and the values donated, diversity in thought, age, and ethnic backgrounds, and how human-centered design impacts cities.

If you haven't listened to that episode yet, check it out at constructor.com slash EP 94. Today we're speaking with Rex Miller, author of The Healthy Workplace Nudge, humanizing the education machine and change your space, change your culture. He is a speaker and consultant and principal at Go MindShift. Rex and I talk about his newest book, The Healthy Workplace Nudge, and the fundamentally different questions we as organizations have to ask in order to shift our wellness culture. Because wellness programs don't work and they haven't been working for the past 50 years.

We talk about studies that have been done about chronic diseases happening in America and how it is inevitably causing more of an economic strain than if we don't change our design criteria for behavior in our environments, in our built spaces. We speak further about the domino strategy to mitigate this epidemic. With that, let's get into the interview. So we are speaking with Rex Miller today, one of the authors for The Healthy Workplace Nudge. Welcome to the Constructor Podcast, Rex.

Thank you, Brittany. It's great to reconnect again. And I'm looking forward to having this conversation because the timing just seems to be on everybody's mind. I've been looking forward to this conversation as well. And I read every single page of the book and I had lots of different emotions come up, like excitement, sadness.

There was a little bit of a fire that came up with me, particularly about just driving a different mindset. I'm really excited to dig into some specific topics as it relates to return on humans versus return on investment. What does well-being mean? Some of the different approaches to this economic behavior. And before we get into all of that, I'd like for you to share a little bit about your personal journey to why you've even written this book in the first place, why you felt compelled to research wellness.

What was the journey like at the start of this research? Yeah, well, it's interesting when you launch on something like this that is really a huge topic. What you start out with isn't what you end up with in terms of the why behind it and how it just pulls you in. This was truly falling down the rabbit hole for us. And it started off quite logically because it was really a sequel to the previous book called Change Your Space, Change Your Culture.

And in that book, we tell a story about the CBRE headquarters in Los Angeles. And how well they handle change management. And you really can't describe it as change management. It was really a journey process asking the question, what is the environment we need in the new way we want to work? And it was stakeholder driven.

Twenty five percent of the office was engaged in the conversation and had different roles and different groups and committees. And they traveled the country, even the world, to come back to try to re-understand themselves. And then with the aid of Gensler as their architect, try to imagine what could this look like? So in telling that story, what led to the new research is that they kept ordering books. And I gave them as a participant, which I do for most people in our research, the author discount.

And that's 50 percent off. That's what I get on my books from Wiley. And I typically expect they might buy half a dozen books, maybe even a case of books. But after about 10 to 15 cases of books, I called up Lou Horn, who is the president of the Southern Division there, and said, Lou, obviously something's going on. You keep buying books.

And he was telling me that their clients are asking for the book because of the story we told. And I asked if I could come out and just hear what's going on. What is this story? And part of the story was it was transformational for Lou. It was transformational for the people in the office.

Forty percent more people are coming into the office. But I really missed the real story. It wasn't until I got out there that I really saw what their story was about. So in 2013, they partnered with Delos, Paul Schala. The story's in the book, The Healthy Workplace Nudge.

But they became the very first corporate space where building science and medical science to develop a measurably healthy building around a framework. And that framework has become the international well-building standard for corporate spaces. In 2013, they were the very first corporate space to get the certification. So that was exciting. And it was also happening at the same time when we were seeing lots of workshops around workplace wellness programs.

And as you can imagine, most of the wellness programs had a lot to do with basic assumptions about wellness and then how to do it better. But what I was seeing is that there was something more fundamental going on that took place in the CBRE experience that I wanted to bring others in just to ask the question, is there something happening here that is worth going deeper in or is this just a really good example of how to do wellness great? So we brought several leaders in, about a dozen leaders from across the country, very high-level leaders from different stakeholders in the built environment side of the equation to hear the experience and then begin a conversation.

And what we all came away with is that we need to do something more because this is a big issue. If done well, so to speak, it has profound effects. But for the most part, we're out there as an industry talking about things we know very little about. None of us are doctors. None of us are wellness experts.

None of us are actuaries. I mean, we're architects and designers and contractors and subcontractors and manufacturers, all of that. And what we're ending up doing is repackaging kind of the top level of what people talk about without really understanding what the real problem is and what the solutions are. So we came away saying, let's get ahead of this before it becomes like what happened in the sustainability days where it was called greenwashing. We were already starting to feel like we were getting ahead of ourselves as an industry in the conversation.

That's what launched it. And the thing that was really impressive for me and the thing that captured my imagination is that they asked a fundamentally different question that got to very different results. It wasn't about putting in better lighting and plants and having a yoga room. And they have all of that and hydration stations. They asked the question, how do we live and work healthier together?

And with that question and with the framework that the International Well-Building Institute developed, they were able to go on a journey that was truly a transformation. And they caught us to begin a similar journey for us. And it was a journey of discovery. So that led to recruiting a team. And the team we recruited, it included more than 100 leaders, subject matter experts from health care and wellness and corporate real estate and architecture and contracting and manufacturing owners.

And we began this journey. It sounds wonderful. And there are a couple of people that you mentioned during the book and will actually have them on the podcast or have already had them on the podcast. For instance, Lee Stringer wrote The Healthy Workplace and she was definitely instrumental in developing a lot of data as a result of the research that she did. And I think that was a really interesting perspective that she had.

She talked about a lot of the results that different businesses can have from a return on investment standpoint in her book. I think it's really interesting that you guys were looking at some of those more nuanced questions about why operate like you're going to build a healthy environment that is much broader than just you allow your employees to be more healthy. And I'd love to start to dig into that, but we're also going to be speaking with Brian Berthold. We've talked with Scott Moldaven about the Wellbuilding Institute and we have a discussion with him about what that entails.

So we'll definitely be digging into that. Pretty excited about that. Yeah, you've definitely got some of the best minds on that. Lee was really instrumental in opening doors to people in the wellness world that I didn't know. And Julie has done some of the best work on the best practices side of the conversation.

For those who haven't listened to that particular episode, it's constructor.com. slash EP 41. So check that out. I think it's a good pairing to this episode. But I must tell you, there was a point in time when I was reading the book and I felt morbid.

I felt like I had to put the book down and go to sleep because I was learning about the existing state of wellness right now and how companies look at treating wellness. And we're solving a false problem. I'd like for you to share about what that is exactly and how it's currently being addressed in a little bit more detail. Yeah. So that's a great description.

You're not the first person to say that the first section of the book is pretty heavy to get through. It's like waking up from a bad dream, so to speak, because let's start with where we had to begin. We started with all the premises that we have a health crisis in the country, that prevention is better than the cure, and that wellness programs are the tool of choice to solve that. But our work and our work always begins with let's question all the assumptions. And the good news is because of our ignorance on the topic, we didn't have to go very deep to admit that we really didn't know what we didn't know.

So we started out with some of the top experts in the industry, and that included Dr. Royzen with the Cleveland Clinic to really understand, so what is the problem that wellness is designed to solve? And then we started going into the experts, Sorin Matke, the author of The Rand Report, or Tom Emmerich, the former head of benefits for Walmart, BP, and Burger King, who is an actuary by background, and a former chief petty officer too, which makes him an interesting character. And then Al Lewis, who is a Harvard grad, the father of disease management.

So we just started diving in trying to understand these things, and what we came out with, starting with a blank sheet of paper, we came away with completely flipped assumptions, and it was even an existential issue for us as a research project. Do we continue to go down this road? And then what's our story going to be? Because what we discovered through Al Lewis and Sorin Matke and Tom Emmerich is that wellness programs do not work, and they can't work by design. They're just fundamentally designed not to be able to work.

And all the data supports the fact that they're not working, and they haven't worked for the last 50 years. But what really started us to ask the questions was the interview with Dr. Royzen on, so what is the problem and what is it that we're trying to solve? Yeah. So Dr.

Royzen, he has a pretty popular book. It's called The Real Age Makeover. A lot of his findings came, obviously, out of all of the research he's done over his career. But I think that real age makeover book is really interesting because it identifies what age you are health wise. So if you could talk a little bit about that, that would be really helpful to demarcate how drastically different our real ages might be to our health ages.

Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a backstory to why he even got to this. And it was dealing with when he was at the University of Chicago. Actually, it goes back to his days in California.

But we'll start with when he was in Chicago. He had a particular patient that was extremely wealthy, poor lifestyle. And Dr. Royzen basically was telling him that if you don't change your lifestyle, you'll die. Well, all the research shows that giving people the news that their lifestyle is killing them, even if it's a life and death, about one out of nine people will actually change.

Now, Dr. Royzen's research has shown some very simple things that people can do. And what he did is he flipped the framework of the conversation and said, how would you like to live younger? So his framework to this individual was you're 55 now, but you have a body of a 65 year old. How would you like to feel like you're 45 again?

Well, mentally and psychologically, that's a whole different framework. And it was effective. So that led him to develop this assessment online that would allow you to go in and fill out the assessment to see the difference between your chronological age and what I call your body age. And then out of that, it gives you all these kinds of suggestions as to what you can do to essentially live and feel younger. So that's the real age assessment.

And it's a real eye opener if you take it. It's something we're recommending everybody we're working with to take it to at least get a baseline. And then we can help either organizations or individuals. We can help coach them on ways to actually live and feel younger than what their body age tells them they are. So we're finding that people who work in our typical office environments also choose to not choose healthy actions within their lifestyle.

They will tend to have an older body age. And that's what his data seems to support. Is that true? That's true. And it's even starting younger.

That's the big problem. So my time with Dr. Roy's the first time was so disturbing to me that I asked to come back to let me process and then just dive a little deeper and understand the implications. He basically was showing me that as a nation, 50% of our population has some form of chronic disease. It's diabetes, it's early heart conditions, all kinds of autoimmune conditions, all these lifestyle type of drivers.

And it's rising at about a 7% compounded rate. Then he showed me the data on all of the ripple effect and how chronic disease leads into heart failure, hip replacements, early Alzheimer's, all these things that it affects and what it's doing to our economy. Now healthcare comprises about, well now it's 18% of our gross domestic product, 18% of GDP. And it's rising at about a 7% rate. So it doesn't take a genius to do the math on what the compounding of that is.

So within the next 10 years we will go from 18% GDP to 36% GDP. And Dr. Roy's in this projecting that somewhere when we hit in the early 20% range, our economy will begin to implode and we will have higher disparities between incomes, those who can afford health and those who can't. I just got my premium for my family, which is $3,900 a month for four people with a $12,000 deductible. That's $50,000 a year.

I'm not sure how many people can afford a $50,000 a year bite of insurance. And in that respect, I can't afford it. So I use a health co-op as my backup and insurance. Now if I can't figure out how to make this work and companies are bearing the burden of most of this, at some point there's going to be a breaking point in all of this. So he's projecting in the next five to seven years that we're going to start seeing this kind of unraveling of the social structures that we have and the ability to do this.

When I left that first time, like I said, I was truly disturbed. And you pick that up in the book on how dark this is because when you've got 50% of the population and it's moving, how do you slow this steamroller down? And it's the first time in my life I saw a true existential threat to our country, not only to companies, but our country. And I had to come back and ask, so where do we go with this and how do we shift this and what's it going to take to do that?

160 million people work for companies. Another 130 million go to schools. So those are the two key areas that I researched and the two key areas I'm trying to bring this message because if companies can get it right and if schools can get it right, and I shared with you earlier about a university, both of you and I know that the average age of an 18 year old freshman, they give everybody the real age assessment. The average age for a freshman is 28 years old. 22% of freshmen are coming into college either overweight or obese.

42% are leaving college overweight and obese. 75% of our population is either overweight or obese, which leads to metabolic syndrome, which leads to chronic disease. I get the point again and I think that the listeners get the point as to how bad of a path we're on. Talking to Dr. Royzen and talking to Al Lewis seemed to have really shifted the approach to the research based upon what I identified in the book.

And you started circling around a subject called well-being and I'd like for you to talk about that transition that took place and what well-being really means and how shifting the focus from wellness to well-being is pivotal. Dr. Royzen gave us a sense of real mission. Al Lewis shifted our thinking about what the right tool is. And so Al Lewis and Sorin and Tom Emmerich and a few others started showing us that the way we've traditionally done wellness programs has failed and will continue to fail.

So now the question was, you know, and we're still digging for the root, trying to get to the root. And what we found is that 80% of our health costs are driven by five lifestyle challenges. It's smoking, it's drinking, it's abusing drugs and alcohol and it's a sedentary lifestyle. What we didn't realize or didn't connect the dots is that all the efforts to eating better and taking steps and all of that doesn't matter if you're not a good fit for your job and if you have a boss that you don't like.

And when we went to the Mayo Clinic and met with Dr. Ahmed Sood, he started shifting our whole focus and saying the real focus should be on happiness first or well-being. That is the precursor or leads to wellness. And so the industry, for lots of good rational reasons, has it reversed. We've got the cart before the horse.

And so the stress at work is the key driver. And when you think about it, what are the key coping behaviors people have when they're burnt out, stressed out or just unhappy? I know I go for a coffee and a donut or ice cream and just watching Netflix. There you go. Yeah.

And so what if that is the issue and what if it's stress in the workplace? Because 78% of employees say that work is the number one cause of either high or very high stress. So that got us looking into, so what drives the stress and what are the environmental factors and what can people do to reduce what you might call the friction of work? So that led us into a whole other path to really focus on going upstream to kind of the stress side of the conversation or the happiness, well-being side before we get into the wellness side.

Well, that's really good. And I think when you were discussing well-being, there was a man named Dr. Solomon who's written a book around flourishing. And that struck me because I felt that the idea of having well-being is to flourish. It seems as if well-being itself, where the etymology of the word is, it's Greek and it means eudaimonia, which means good spirit.

I would never have associated those words with the word well-being. And then again, Dr. Seligman talked about well-being relating to flourishing. And it just really kind of puts your mindset in a completely different state when you think about what being well really means. It is happiness.

It's fulfillment in life. And if companies can enable that, it's definitely a really different thought process versus say, how do we prevent people from getting sick or how do we treat them or make sure they can get treatment plans through their healthcare providers? Yeah. So you're on a fascinating path in this. And when you start going down that path, you begin to completely rethink what work is, what it can be, and what good work does for people.

You're right. Eudaimonia, U means well in Greek and noumos is spirit. So it's good spirit. But it gets into your full potential. Dr.

Seligman's work began with people with post-traumatic stress syndrome. He is called the father of positive psychology and former president of the American Psychological Association. And he's at the University of Pennsylvania. Now his book called Flourish has an acronym called PERMA. We actually started using this as a design criteria, not only for work, but for the built environment.

First of all, the foundation was his methodology was to find soldiers coming back. And he did a lot of research with the military coming back from their missions. Some came back stronger having similar traumatic experiences. So you might call those post-traumatic strength syndrome. So what was it different about these people?

And when you aggregate it, first of all, they had positive expectations. In other words, events in life were viewed through a filter of it'll make me stronger, I'll learn something about it, it'll help me grow. Now that's something companies can train for. Cummins, for example, trains in these very basic life skills. And you read it in the book.

Their chief medical officer, they have programs of gratitude and forgiveness and basic, basic life skills. Now you can create an environment and design an environment that nudges positive expectations in it, the best in us. And not in a cheesy way, but in a very authentic way. So the E stands for engagement. That really gets to the heart of a lot of Gallup's work.

And their assessment leads you to understand what you naturally do best and enjoy most. And when you are in an environment that's designed to allow you to naturally do what you do best, then you do better work, you learn faster. It feels satisfying. It really is healing. It's rejuvenating to be able to do.

You know that if you have a hobby or if anybody has a hobby that you get lost in time and you know, it just feels very satisfying at the end. We can do that. We can design environments and design work around what people naturally do best and enjoy most. The R are relationships, connected relationships. And there's one book called Connected by a psychologist who basically said that if you wanted to eradicate most of the depression, you could do that by having vital relationships.

So vital relationships and how do you foster that at work and how do you design an environment that encourages vital relationships? You know, one company we went to, they have a common table. So if you go down to Cousins Properties in Atlanta, they have this room and instead of having lots of breakout tables, they have one common table that everybody comes to and shares the day and eats together and things like that. And then the M is for meaning. How is the work I'm doing or how does the work I do connect with something greater and beyond and how can we help people see that?

And then the A is accomplishment. Am I getting weekly feedback that I'm making progress, I'm learning or I'm getting corrective help? So turning PERMA into some kind of design criteria, both the environment, the workplace culture, it's a great way to begin moving a company to simply doing remediation work into true flourishing work. I'm going to take a step back here and talk a little bit about just the business perspective. You've spoken with a lot of companies, quite a lot, and you've obviously had the opportunity of researching and discussing with a lot of companies about what they're doing well.

But the focus for a lot of companies is return on investment. And that's how they choose to approach wellness. A lot of the times that there is a very interesting chapter in the book called the financial nudge, the return on humans. And it'd be really helpful if you shared what that means to you and what that really covers. It's a big topic, so I'll distill it down.

And I'm glad you're going to be interviewing Scott Moldaven because he's one of the best at tying the building valuation and real estate development into this equation of how does a building improve the actual performance of people inside the building? But the return on humans concept is kind of a basic. Most companies spend most of their time trying to manage, if you look at company costs, it's an iceberg and we have the image in the book, less than 20% of your costs go into the built environment, operations and technology, while more than 80% of your costs are in people.

So we spend most of our time trying to reduce the cost, what's on top, the top of the iceberg or the tip of the iceberg, without ever asking the question of are we squeezing pennies and losing dollars underneath. So it takes a different kind of look. We have to become better at measuring leading indicators. ROI is a lagging indicator. And anything that has kind of an intangible or long term or ambiguous kind of process to the end is going to lose to a mindset of ROI.

It's inevitable and it's what happens in 90% of our companies. But the talent driven companies get this. Some of the Silicon Valley companies, their profit per employee is in the million dollar range and plus. So they understand that a small investment in technology or environment or having lunches at work, what they get from that employee, the revenue generation and the profit generation, it's not even a question. Now, it doesn't mean that they're extravagant or they splurge.

Some do, but most are very smart. They got there by being smart. What we discovered is that it even works for companies that are in low margin manufacturing. So if you go down to St. Louis to Barry Waymiller and look at Bob Chapman's company, 16,000 employees, not a very glamorous business model.

They basically make packaging, dog food packaging, beer can packaging, and lots of remote kind of rust belt places in the US and around the world. But they have what we call a healthy culture and they have a philosophy that we want to send an employee home happier and healthier when they go home than when they came in. And they realize that the value of that rubs off on the family. So if an employee goes home happy and healthier, he's going to affect the three or four people in their household and they're going to positively affect people in their network.

Conversely, if someone works their tail off all day long and gets chewed out for one thing that they missed, what do they take home? They take home that negative energy too. Well, they've been extremely profitable. They continue to grow. They're a model company.

They're part of the conscious capitalism network of companies. And they have an interesting philosophy. And I was with their head of human resources and met with Bob Chapman and some of the others. And he said when he took over the job of human resources, he was taking over from an old school spreadsheet benefits cost management person, which is probably most human resource roles in the country. ROI spreadsheet.

Here's why we're doing this. Bob Chapman, when he came in with the spreadsheet, said, what are you doing with a spreadsheet? And he tried to justify it. And Bob Chapman asked him a question. Is this the right thing to do for our people?

And then he said, if it is the right thing, then I expect you as managers and leaders in this company to make it work from a business standpoint. In the future, I don't want to see spreadsheets in here. Now, he's obviously on the extreme edge. But the success of their company and if you look at Tudhill, another manufacturing company up in Berwyn, Illinois, which is in your backyard, and Cummins, a diesel manufacturing company, all these companies practice this well-being side and treating employees well and they perform well.

So the return on humans works, but you need courageous leadership. You need to really understand the practices and disciplines to make it work and it'll pay off. The quote that stuck out to me from Bob Chapman that I think is particularly highlighted, he says, we just need to care, period. That's it. You can tell by the story you just described here about his approach to starting that position there at Barry Wimmiller that his focus was caring about the employees.

And it is really a shift in expectations for the subsequent leaders, for the leaders that you are working with and the rest of the organization. It's really a trust mechanism. Yeah, it does go against the grain. And he wasn't always that way. So his story is significant too.

And we tell a little bit in the book, but in his own book, he was one of those RLI hard decision kind of CEOs. And then in the 1980s, he began to go through his own epiphany about what he was doing to himself and to his employees. And then it flipped. Steve Carter, who is also one of the key supporters of the project, and he's also in the Chicago area, he talks about and forced us when we were at the Mayo Clinic Summit to think about, are we talking about human resources with the emphasis on the resources or the emphasis on the humans?

Because depending on that dividing line, that'll determine the path you take in your approach to helping your employees implement or live a better life. Are you trying to do it to reduce costs, to minimize risk? Are you doing it as a perk? Or are you doing it because they're human and you care? Yeah.

So let's talk about tools and practices. Obviously, you call quite a few out in the book and of course, highly recommended to get the book. And I'll have that link in the show notes. But if you had some particular practices that you would recommend as far as focusing on for the listeners today, what would those be? Yeah, great question.

So I'll focus on just three or four. We've got several. But I'll preface it with, we didn't start with the normal approach. We took what we called a domino nudge strategy, where the end of it is leadership. Now, most books would probably talk about getting great leadership.

But what we found is that's rare, great leadership who can go upstream, stay resilient, not compromise when the economy turns around. It's rare. If you can get that, it's best. So we asked the question, what do you do if you don't have great leadership? And how can you make a big difference?

So the first and least expensive is the whole idea of nudges or change architecture, which is borrowing from Richard Thaler's work on nudge and Daniel Kahneman's and Amos Tversky's work in behavioral economics. Getting the healthy choices, the default choices you want, making them easy and making the unhealthy choices a little harder and creating your environment to be a healthy, friendly environment to be in food wise, movement wise, all of that. That's your least expensive and it affects 100% of your employees. So it's classic public health strategy.

So our breakthrough is that up until our research, it was primarily seen as the domain of policy, like 401ks and organ donors and things like that. But we really tried to bring it into the built environment with those implications. The second is to create a healthy building. We have several platforms. We really were immersed in the international well building standard.

It's probably, well, it is the most comprehensive. There are others out there. There's Fitwell, which is a great get started. It's great, you know, kind of a beginner's way into this, you know, not with high demands, but helps educate you. So with those two as frameworks, what you find is that 90% of your life is in some form of built environment.

And we're just beginning since 2013 to understand the implications of what the environment is doing to our health. And we go through kind of your whole body system from your circadian optic nerve to your hormonal system, digestive system, and how the built environment actually interplays with that. So the light you and I are being exposed to right now, it's going to affect how we sleep tonight. Now, the cost of that is incredible when you consider that the average cost of implementing a wellness program, according to the SHRM, Society for Health Resource Managers, is approximately $700 per year per employee.

And it doesn't include all the soft costs. So when you do that, it's a couple thousand dollars per employee a year. To improve your building, especially if you put it in the cycle of building maintenance and upgrades, it's about $500 per employee as a one-time cost. 100% of your employees get to benefit from it. The passive health benefits of healthy air, proper CO2, proper filtration, circadian lighting, ergonomics, hydration, all that stuff.

It's a minimal investment. And both the nudges and a healthy building affect 100% of your employees. So those are the two key areas. Then the third is working on looking at the stress or maybe changing your framework and saying, how do we take the friction out of the workplace? How do we help people do more focus work with fewer interruptions?

How do we make accessing resources easier and not clumsy and hard? How do we make things as simple as plug and play technology actually work? All the friction points. You can almost take a client journey. It's what the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton does.

As they look at the whole day in the life of a customer, and they look at all the touch points and the interface points and where the friction is and where you make it easy. It's that kind of thinking. So if you just took those three, you would be able to cover 90% of the areas and immediately begin to improve the health and happiness of the people in your workplace. Thank you for sharing that, Rex. I have a really, really hard question for you.

That question is, what is, I don't want to say your favorite, but at least one of your favorite quotes in the book. There are so many that are throughout that are so great. I wanted to find out what your favorite might be. Well, Joseph Campbell is one of the people that really has influenced not only my life, but my work. And like I said at the very beginning, what we thought we were getting into didn't turn out to be what we ended up with.

In fact, it was totally transforming. And part of it was, in all these projects we do, these MindShift projects where we bring leaders together and try to tackle big questions, whether it's in K-12 or workplace engagement or delivering capital projects, they become personal journeys. In this particular one, it quickly turned from research into a personal quest because in one year I lost my mom, I lost my brother to opioid addiction and medical errors, my mom to medical neglect, my mother-in-law, and then my daughter, 26-year-old daughter, was diagnosed with MS.

So now this becomes not just a research project, but this becomes trying to figure out this machine that is really dehumanizing and challenging and will really wear down the best of you in the process. So Joseph Campbell says, I think this is true for most of what we're doing. I think it's true for what you're doing with this podcast. We're not on a journey to save the world, but to save ourselves. But in doing that, we do end up saving the world.

The influence of a vital person vitalizes. And I think that would ring true for the people who participated in this. We didn't start out trying to save the world. We're trying to answer questions for our own companies. How do we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace?

How do we solve the wellness challenge in our own companies? How do we deliver more effective wellness for others? But that's not what we ended up with. So I would say that's my favorite quote. I have goosebumps over here.

Thank you for taking the time out and doing the investment into this project. The time, the leadership that it takes to ask those humble questions. You can tell it is a labor of love. So I really have to tell you, I appreciate that. And I'd like to ask, how can people get in touch with you, learn more about you, learn more about the healthy workplace nudge?

Well, my website is rexmiller.com. And right now, we have a special offer on the book. So you can go to the website and you can get two copies of the book and two comic books, which is something kind of unique that we do. We create a comic book version. We jokingly say it's the executive version.

And you can get that for the price of one book. So that's a great way to get to know us. It's a great way to check out our website. And this kind of research is about 30% of what we do. It's the most engaging and meaningful work we do.

But it's a good way to start. Well, thank you once again, Rex. It's been a pleasure. Brittany, thank you for this time. And thank you for the work you're doing.

If you like this episode, find out more in the show notes at constructor.com slash EP 95. If you learned something valuable in this episode, share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn. You can just email me too at Brittany at constructor.com. That's B R I T T A N I E at construct double R.com.

Next week, we will be speaking with Brian Berthold, managing director of workplace strategy and change management at Cushman and Wakefield. We talk about holistic approaches to workplace strategy, measuring experience per square foot, and some examples of clients he's worked with and how they've driven the decisions they make based on experience per square foot and how they made some monumental changes to how happy their employee base is and how this impacts ROI in the long run. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at your preferred podcast player.

I look forward to connecting with you next week. Thank you.