The following guest post on "stress and creativity" is courtesy of our board member, Bruce Daisley.

It's very rare that someone at the top of their trade asks to receive no professional recognition. But in 2017 that is exactly what one of France's top chefs requested. Sébastien Bra was the chef at one of the country's top Michelin starred restaurants. In last year's guide just under 20 establishments had earned 3 of the coveted Guide's stars and he ran one of them. A trio of stars represents the pinnacle of gastronomic esteem by the editors. They were awarded to exceptional quality food delivered with inventiveness and creative flair.

Some chefs' life work is dedicated to earning a single star in the Guide. A pair of the accolades is seen as remarkable. Those who earn three stars - like Britain's Gordon Ramsay - can see their own status ascend to celebrity. Having inherited his restaurant from his Michelin recognised father he stood to lose more than his own reputation, Chef Bra was turning his back on family legacy.

Being the recipient of such a hard-won honour, it's hard to logically explain why someone would make such a dramatic act but Bra took to the internet to explain. Posting a video declaration on his Facebook page, Bra said the pressure of achieving the coveted accolade was killing his creativity. His creativity was being spilled from the skillet of success onto the hot plate of oblivion.

The chef's stern, resolute pronouncement was like a weary prisoner casting off his shackles. Maybe where the shackles were strings of onions. "Today we would like to go forward with a free spirit... without pressure". Even as tossed aside his scallion chains it was clear that there was some residual fear in Chef Bra's bones. His restaurant, Le Suquet, was established by his father. It's housed in Laguiole, a tiny town in Southern France, population 1200 people. There are tube trains with more people. Turning his back on this accolade can't have been an easy decision.

So why did he do it? Because exactly as the Chef had asserted, science shows us that fear and stress directly kills our ability to be creative.

Its 5000 miles from Laguiole to Washington State University but it was in a lab there that some of the science about stress and creativity was discovered by a man who admitted one of his favourite pleasures in life was tickling rats. Jaak Panksepp - a scientist who coined the term 'affective neuroscience' - spent his career studying the brains of rats - and drawing the conclusion that the brains of all mammals shared a good deal in common. Every mammal, he declared, has 7 brain systems. He styled these systems in bold capital letters to suggest the strength of them to power our decisions in life. Some of the systems, like the PLAY system or the SEEKING system helped stimulate our urge to explore, discover and create. However not all systems were created equal. In Panksepp's work the strongest system of them all was the FEAR system. And that certainly makes a lot of sense. We'd want our mammalian instincts to inhibit our sense of play if there was reason to show a feeling of fear. Panksepp found lots of evidence for this. In one experiment the professor would observe that a pair of rats would exhibit 50 instances of SEEKING/PLAY within a standard five minute observation window. Rats love exploring and it was clear that their creative enthusiasm was effervescent. This creativity - housed in the brain's ventrial striatum - was a natural activity in their lives.

That was until Panksepp brought stress into the rats' lives.

A small piece of cat hair had a powerful effect on the animals' creativity. Cat hair obviously indicated a potential perilous threat, its placement in the rats' home reduced their instances of creativity and play down to zero. When the rats' were given reason, their FEAR system killed the inventiveness of their SEEKING system. Even when the cat hair was removed it took days for the rats to return to show any observable instances of creative SEEKING. Fascinatingly they never returned to the peak levels even when the experiment ran for several weeks. It was almost as if the stress had inhibited the ability to abandon the brain to inventiveness.

Let's think about this. Stress stopped the rats being creative. Fear wiped out their sense of exploration and experimentation. Certainly the work of Panksepp seems to resonate with the visceral response of Chef Bras. When Chef Bras had an activated FEAR system, when he was worried about the Michelin star winning legacy of his father and himself then in light of Panksepp's work we can see that he was probably observing that his creativity wasn't flowing like he knew it could. Fear was stopping his inventiveness.

But of course, this isn't just true of caged rodents or white-hatted cuisineers, this is true of all of us. When we feel stressed then our creative flair can't flourish. And today that's more relevant than ever before. The latest research suggests that half of us who check our emails outside working hours exhibit high stress levels. The gesture of pulling out our phones can, in the moment, seem like it is reducing the remaining burden on us when we return to our desks. It's easy to regard swiping away a couple of emails as the act of staying on top of things. But the reality is actually very different.

The next time you feel the need to pull out your phone to clear some emails, whether at the weekend or as you sit on the sofa in the evening, give it a second thought. Think of the Chef. Stress and creativity don't go well together. If you're not careful the consequence of being engaged with work on a 24-7 basis might not be as harmless as you think. And the invisible victim might be your own creativity.

Today's post about a more engaging workplace culture comes to us from our EMEA board member Bruce Daisley, VP EMEA Twitter and Host of Eat Sleep Work Repeat, #1 Business Podcast on iTunes

Since the advent of email on our mobile devices work has gradually crept into more of our lives. One piece of research said the working day had increased by 27% up from 7.5 hours to 9.5 hours as we find ourselves adding email to every waking moment of travel and lunch.

The challenge is that once you check and reply to email more appears. Based on the increased volume of electronic work you'd be delighted if productivity and pay had gone up. Paradoxically in the last 10 years productivity - the amount of stuff our work produces - hasn't changed. In America the last decade has the slowest rate of growth in 60 years.

Productivity hasn't increased despite a revolution in computers smart phones and email. As I say, maybe the opposite has happened. Work seems to have made us more anxious and we're working longer to achieve the same. We seem to be a long way from an engaging workplace culture.

Emma Seppala is a Science Director at Stanford University:

We buy into this idea that in order to perform we need to be stressed that we have to tap into that fight or flight response, that stress response in order to get motivated. But the truth is that what you're doing in that process is you are burning out your body, your physiology but also your cognitive skills - memory and attention. For example do you come home at 5, 6pm at night from work and feel exhausted and burned out? Most people do. 

Emma's work has clearly identified that half of all people report feeling exhausted at work. So why is that? Why are we exhausted? If you asked most people in offices what was getting in the way of getting more done the answers would be rather predictable - email, meetings and office distraction.

Such is the nature of work now that there are an increasing number of people wondering if we urgently need to change our workplace culture.

Cal Newport is an enviously productive associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. At 35 not only is his tenured position unusually early but he has managed to combine the output needed to achieve it with writing 5 books. Want to know the secret of his success. Try emailing him… Cal has written a brilliant reimagining of our jobs called Deep Work. He explained to me what he thinks we're going through:

It is true that the modern work environment is actively hostile to Deep Work. I do want to add the caveat that I think this is going to be a sort of footnote in the evolution of knowledge work. I think the way that we're approaching knowledge work now we're going to look back at and say that was disastrously unproductive.

People today are more stressed than ever, and if you accept that people are working longer then they are actually producing less for each hour worked.

In order to change, the understanding of workplace culture needs to be better grounded in an understanding of neuroscience. Work is a practice of the brain. We need to be thinking of how we can get more from the brain. Dan Cable is a professor at London Business School. His forthcoming book _Alive at Work - the Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do' is remarkable exploration into the mind and work. Here's Dan.

There is a part of our brain dedicated to injecting cortisol into us when we experience a shock that is threatening. And we don't get to control those tendencies. What we want to do is conform. We want to fit in. We want to hide our uniqueness. That used to be good for Henry Ford. That's not so good for organisations that want people to be innovative and creative. Fortunately we have a different part of our brain that uses a different drug. It's not as strong as the fear system and that's something that's really powerful. Fear has to be quicker. The Seeking System takes longer. But the Seeking System uses dopamine and what it's interested in doing is causing us to explore and play. So when we're not afraid there's something in us that urges us to think about new ways to get resources.

So let's start with the brain and think about actively changing work.

Here's Jason Fried - he's the founder of Basecamp. He's an advocate for reinventing our routines:

It's funny isn't it how you have a lot of innovative companies and companies are always talking about disruption. Yet they're terrified to shatter the basics of how they work.

Jason's company, Basecamp, have experimented with lots of different methods of working and workplace culture but he's particularly got the commute in his sights.

Seeing somebody at a desk typing away or walking by their screen doesn't mean that they're working all they're doing is sitting at a desk typing away at a screen. The output of work is what you can judge. If someone's capable of doing that remotely then they should be allowed to do it remotely. If they're incapable of it that's a different story. If they're capable of it allowing them to work remotely makes a lot of sense.

In Fried's questioning of the commute he has a number of enlighted allies. Rory Sutherland is widely regarded as the greatest thinker in the advertising world, he decries our lack of reinvention:

If we're not changing our working behaviour at all in response to technology what was the point of inventing the internet?

For some reason we've mistaken email for the job, rather than an addition to the job. The worst part of this is it's putting us a state of panic. Waiting for another email to come in - trying to deal with the ones we've received.

Professor Sandy Pentland's work was so pioneering on the almost kinetic nature of idea creation that he styled it Social Physics - his conclusions in that book were that creativity was very strongly linked to workplace chat and conversations. If you've ever felt yourself anxiously pecking through emails hoping no one interrupts you. If you've put headphones on to escape people remind yourself that the way that work has evolved has been a time when productivity hasn't gone up. We're doing more to achieve less.

Here's Cal Newport again:

When we're first trying to understand these new technologies and these new industries we tend to gravitate towards things that are easy and convenient. It's too intimidating to try to tackle everything that's new about this new segment of the economy at first and then over time we get more sophisticated. That's what's happened with the Industrial Revolution. I think that's exactly what's going to happen with knowledge work. The very easiest thing we could do with the advent of front office computer networks. The very easiest reaction to that was just _let's plug everyone in to this hyperactive hive mind, let's give everyone an email address that's attached to their name, let's give everyone a Slack channel and just rock and roll'. Just have people rock and roll as the day unfolds we'll kind of figure things out with this unstructured conversation.

Here's the challenge for an engaging workplace culture. We need to challenge ourselves - if we want more productivity we can't keep trying the same methods to achieve it.

All of Bruce's interviews were conducted as part of his podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat. Read more about the challenges and solutions to better work in the summary of our always-on con debate on our blog.

Today's post is courtesy of Anastasia Dedyukhina, founder of Consciously Digital™.  Anastasia recently published _Homo Distractus' ­- a book exploring how we've allowed tech to take over our lives, and how we can claim our time back.

Tech removed the boundaries between our offices and homes - work can now be done almost anywhere and at any time. In some instances, it has been truly beneficial, and we love to be able to work flexibly.

In other cases, it's overwhelming. While tech was meant to make our lives easier and our working days shorter, in reality it has seriously lengthened the work day. About 47% office workers in the US say tech increased their working hours, according to Pew Research Center. And the 2015 Workplace Flexibility Study found that one in three employees feel they are expected to be reachable via phone or email after office hours.

Even if a company isn't forcing us to stay connected all the time, we often choose to do so ourselves, because we have no more clear boundaries as to where work finishes and our private life starts. 70% of employees check their emails straight away, but only 30% say it's the expectation from their colleagues, or boss (LSE).

Life with no boundaries

In non-digital times, your work was finished when you physically moved from the office, or any other workplace, to your home. Space separated your work from your private life. Technology removed not only the physical border (you can continue working from home); but also temporal (specific working time) and psychological (thinking about work-related issues out of working hours).

Finishing the work is now something that you need to ask a permission for. Most people at your work and your clients by default expect you to be available if not for a full-time job, then at least to answer their inquiries at any moment. This lack of boundaries can be damaging for mental health and productivity.

Keeping healthy boundaries is extremely important, because we tend to get recharged and gain energy at home (provided that our home offers us a supportive environment), and spend our energy at work. When we don't have boundaries in place, we end up having very little to no time to restore ourselves. A research by the Liuba Belkin from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, William Becker of Virginia Tech and Samantha A. Conroy of Colorado State University found that mere expectation of work-related emails at home was causing emotional exhaustion and stress. “Modern workplace technologies may be hurting the very employees those technologies were designed to help”, the researchers say.

Three types of boundaries

Depending on their industry and background, people choose one of three approaches to keeping their borders in an age of digital distractions, according to research by Andrew Thatcher and Andrew White.

Border expanders simply don't see a border, and keep on going no matter what. They often blur the border between work and life out of the need of career advancement. Predominantly border expanders are people in client-facing roles. It can be an investment banker who goes on a date and keeps checking his messages, then leaving earlier because he needs to go back to work. It's a busy lawyer who ignores her kids and goes to the office on a Sunday because she needs to address some questions the client raised at 11pm the previous night.

There's no such thing as no-working time for border expanders, work can come in any minute and it needs to be addressed. These are people, whose fingers are glued to their phones (usually more than one), and who can never be convinced to let go of the device.

Border adapters evaluate, whether the message is urgent or not by pre-screening them and watching notifications. These are the most grateful audience of wearables. They change their acting scenario depending on the screening result. They will answer the phone depending on who's calling. They will check their emails and see which of them require an urgent answer, and will answer those, and ignore the rest.

Border enforcers are people who have established for themselves really rigid boundaries. Their work finishes when they've left the office, and they aren't taking calls or messages. They may even prefer not to have any kind of phone to keep work at work. They are likely to have had burn-outs before and learned to keep their boundaries the hard way. Quite a few of them probably changed their jobs at least once or several times, looking for a company culture that allows them not to be on the digital leash all the time.

What can companies do?

All three types of behaviour can co-exist within one type of organization or family, although the corporate culture will determine one predominant type of behaviour. Usually this culture is influenced by the behaviour of senior management: if they expect others to read emails outside of the working hours, or do so themselves, people will be striving to do the same. Border enforcers will feel very uncomfortable in such an environment.

While companies often try to choose one of the ways to establish boundaries, this is not the best way. “One-fit all approach doesn't work in this situation, because it takes away the whole benefit of flexible working, says Marta Cecchinato from UCL, who researches online behaviour”.

A much better way is to offer some corporate standards as to what kind of behaviour is rewarded, and what is not. For example, make it clear that people get assessed based on how they perform, and not on how fast they reply to emails if they are not part of clients services. Better yet is to have an opt-in policy that allows people to disconnect and connect when they need to. However, it needs to have a serious buy-in from senior management. “Neither those who want to be in the office for 12 hours, or those who want to unplug and do part of their work offline, should be criticized by colleagues”, says Cecchinato.

This is an extract from Anastasia Dedyukhina's new book Homo Distractus: Fight For Your Choices and Freedom in The Digital Age. You can pre-order the book here.

How do you characterize yourself when it comes to the work life border?

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At the beginning of 2016, Kronos rolled out an unlimited vacation program for employees in the US and Canada we call myTime.  The objectives of the myTime program are to support Kronos' commitment to being a great place to work; promote an inspired culture that attracts and retains great employees; and thereby delivers great results to our customers.  Before myTime, there were specified categories and numbers of paid time off (PTO) days that employees could use each year.  Post myTime, days off for vacation, sick time, personal time, floating holidays, volunteer hours, and bereavement are consolidated into one myTime category.

The rollout of this program was a significant undertaking.  Both managers and employees needed to be educated about how to negotiate time off in a world where there were no longer one-size-fits-all PTO entitlements.  Both managers and employees needed to be able to have direct conversations about how the employee's request for time off could be managed within the needs of the business.  Almost 2 years later, the myTime program has been well adopted at Kronos.

In fact, this program has drawn a lot of attention from HR leaders who are considering whether and how to roll out a program like this for their organizations.  Our story has been shared in the Harvard Business Review and other leading publications.   If you are considering a program like this, we are happy to share some of the insights we've gained during the last two years based on the questions we are asked most frequently about myTime:

How do you get any work done?  It seems like people might take advantage of a program like this.

Before myTime, most Kronos employees in the US and Canada were not using all of their allotted PTO each year.  In fact, the average employee used fewer days than s/he was entitled to each year.  Since the program was rolled out, we've found the average person takes just 2.65 more days per year than s/he was taking before.

What do you consider to be the key driver that makes this program work?

According to our CEO, Aron Ain, "You can't even think about making a change like this unless you have fundamental trust in the people who work for you."  A program like this works when leaders focus on results vs. face time.

How does this program impact the cost of employee PTO?

Making this change does do away with the need to accrue a leave liability. Many companies who've made this change have opted to drop this savings to their bottom line.  We made the decision to reinvest those savings in other employee benefits. So in addition to offering an open vacation policy, we increased maternity leave, parental leave, and adoption leave; we increased the 401(k) match; we created a scholarship program for employees' children; we launched a child care assistance program; and we began contributing up to $500 a year toward employees' student loans.

How did you train managers to manage this program and these employee conversations?

Managers were given training about the program before it was rolled out to employees, starting with an announcement from our Chief People Officer, Dave Almeda.   This communication directed people managers to a library of resources including video and mandatory training.   HR business partners supported the roll out by coaching managers as needed.

How did employees react?

Not all employees immediately initially embraced this change.  Some were concerned their managers would deny them vacation if there wasn't a prescriptive policy.  Some managers had difficulty saying no when there wasn't a hard and fast rule to rely on.  Both sides have needed to learn to have time off conversations in the context of the needs of the business, the needs of the employee, and the performance level of the employee.

How has this program impacted employee engagement and retention?

One year after we launched myTime, engagement rose to 87% (from 84% the prior year). Year over year, our voluntary turnover dropped from 6.4% to 5.6%.  Anecdotally, we're seeing positive comments on sites like Glassdoor and hearing from job candidates that this is a differentiating benefit.

How do you continue to educate employees about myTime?

All new hires in the US and Canada are walked through this presentation that explains the basics of the program and where to find more information on the Kronos intranet.  You can download this presentation by clicking on its title below. Then you can view the voiceover notes that explain each slide.

Overview of Kronos myTime from Joyce Maroney

How can I learn more about the Kronos myTime program?

If you have questions about the Kronos myTime program, please submit them by commenting on this post below and we'll do our best to get back to you in a timely fashion.  You may also want to listen to this podcast in which I talk to Kronos Chief People Officer Dave Almeda and Sharlyn Lauby (the HR Bartender) about the program.

Additional resources you may find helpful:

Kronos CEO Aron Ain discusses unlimited time off with Harvard Business Review (podcast and transcript of the podcast)

Aron Ain discusses Kronos unlimited time off program and results on National Public Radio

Forbes interview with Aron Ain about Kronos culture

Today's post is courtesy of Claire Richardson, director of the Workforce Institute Europe.

U.K. workers are not delivering - at least compared to their European counterparts. They are simply less productive at work: Brits spend more work time on social media, take more work home with them, and sleep fewer hours than the leading European nations according to new research from the Workforce Institute Europe at Kronos Incorporated. The study of more than 3,000 full-time workers across Germany, France, and the U.K. found that this trend is poised to continue, with younger generations less able to regulate their working lives in the face of new technology and changing working practices.

The research shows significant differences in the way U.K., German, and French workers operate, and a close correlation between an Always On relationship with technology and lower productivity. To halt the consistent decline in U.K. productivity, all industries need to take a close look at the way we work with technology and develop a tailored and flexible strategy that helps our workers balance work and life according to how they work best. Technology has a key role to play in improving productivity, and our role as employers is to provide the workforce with the skills they need to become empowered, not less productive, by technology. The Workforce Institute Europe will continue to collaborate with experts in this field to set the agenda for the workplace of the future.

Research Highlights:

There has been a lot of noise in the news lately about companies like IBM pulling back on flexible work options.  This is an ironic move for IBM given that their own research and publications suggest that "teleworkers are more highly engaged, more likely to consider their workplaces as innovative, happier about their job prospects and less stressed than their more traditional, office-bound colleagues."  Leaders in the companies who are pulling back on remote work options are arguing that presence is required for productive collaboration and innovation.

Perhaps some of these leaders should talk to Kristen Wylie, Director of Product Marketing at Kronos.  Kristen spent 8 months on the road with her 9 and 13 year old daughters over the past year while they performed in the national touring company of the musical Annie.  That would be daunting enough for any parent, but Kristen did this while continuing to do her full time job at Kronos.  In fact, Kristen was promoted to director while she was on the road.

I spoke to Kristen recently about her experience exercising this "extreme flexibility".   With the support of her boss and her team, Kristen spent eight months juggling a demanding job and supporting her daughters' life on the road.  We talked about how she pulled it off and what lessons other organizations and employees might learn from Kristen's story.

Listen in by clicking on the player at the bottom of this post to hear Kristen's responses to these and other questions about how she did it:

  1. What went through your head when you learned your daughters had been cast in Annie regarding your position at Kronos?
  2. How did you work it out with your manager to do your job from the road? Was he supportive or did you need to sell this idea?
  3. You were touring with a theater company - which operates on very different hours than a normal work environment. Where there changes you made in how you got certain things done given the crazy schedule?
  4. How did you take care of your children and yourself while under this pressure?  It seems like there wasn't much downtime for any of you.
  5. You manage other people. How did they feel about working under these circumstances and what did you do to make this arrangement work for them?
  6. During the time you were touring with your daughters, you got promoted. Beyond the obvious insight that you do a great job for Kronos, do you think your ability to juggle as you did helped make this happen?
  7. A lot of working parents hearing your story will think “that could never happen at my organization”. What would you tell a working parent who'd like to have greater flexibility at work how to broach that topic and sell it as a benefit to their organization?

How does your organization support flexible work options?  Can you see a story like Kristen's happening in your workplace?

The following post is courtesy of our board member John Hollon.

For many workers, it's a rite of summer -- cutting out early to get the weekend going a little sooner.

But now it's becoming more than that for a lot of companies.

According to a study released this month by CEB (now Gartner), some 42 percent of the companies that were surveyed will offer employees a "Summer Friday" arrangement where employees have the flexibility to leave early on Friday, or in some cases, take the entire day off.

This is a great perk if you can get it.

As The Washington Post notes:

“(This) benefit is ... a no-brainer for companies to offer. As flexible work arrangements have grown and the average office worker is just a text or phone call away, many people already duck out early on Friday afternoons, especially before long holiday weekends. Making it official gives the company a way to plug their generosity without spending much at all."

What makes this great is that it not only acknowledges something that a lot of employees are already doing, but that it also doesn't cost the organization much to do it. Anytime you can offer something that employees love with little financial impact, that's a huge win-win for everyone.

This also shows that companies are working to get more creative with their benefit offerings, especially for things that have a lot of value for employees (like getting some longer weekends during the summer) yet don't really detract from the bottom line.

And, it is a perk that benefits employees up and down the workplace totem pole, from down in the trenches up to the executive level.

Sounds too good to be true, no? Well, not exactly.

While generally touting the Summer Friday concept, The Washington Post also pointed out that this is a benefit that is designed largely - and only - for salaried workers:

“Of course, summer Fridays are hardly a benefit offered to all employees. They're yet another example of the bonus and benefit divide that exists as professional office workers get perks that hourly workers -- who are less likely to get variable pay and often receive less cushy benefits, such as paid leave -- don't. Letting cashiers or production line workers skip out at noon the Friday before Memorial Day just isn't in the cards for most companies."

I can see the point The Post is making, and I agree that there will be a lot of workers that won't benefit from Summer Fridays, but I still think they're a valuable benefit for employers to consider.

My experience is that ANYTHING that helps to move the needle on employee benefits is a good thing. Yes, there are a lot of people who won't be able to utilize a Summer Friday off, but it's rare when any benefit comes along that is something all employees can utilize universally across-the-board.

In the real world, new benefits get tried and tested, and if they seem to be working, companies and organizations start looking for ways to spread them to more and more employees.

This is especially true if they don't cost much to implement.

So consider me a fan of the Summer Fridays concept even if it doesn't reach everybody in every workplace everywhere. You gotta start somewhere with these things, and I seem to remember reading that we shouldn't "let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Those are a few good words to remember whether we're talking about life, or, the offering of a new benefit.

How about your workplace - are you giving your employees extra flexibility this summer?  

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Traci Fenton, Founder and CEO of WorldBlu.  She founded  WorldBlu in 1997 and has had clients in over 80 countries globally representing over $30 billion in annual revenue. Traci was recently recognized byInc. Magazine as a Top 50 Leadership Thinker, along with other world-class leaders such as Dan Pink, Brene Brown and Marshall Goldsmith.

Traci has a clear passion for her mission, and impressive case studies of how organizations like Davita and WD-40 have transformed their workplaces to engender employee engagement and better results.

Please listen in and  join the conversation by adding your comments to this post. Below the podcast player are the discussion questions we cover.

  1. Your mission is about promoting freedom and democracy in the workplace.  Can you expand on what that means and what it looks like in action?
  2. How do business results of organizations that pursue freedom and democracy in the workplace compare to those who don't make that a focus?
  3. Annually you publish a list of the Most Freedom-Centered Workplaces™.  Can you give us a few examples of organizations who've earned this distinction from WorldBlu and why they stood out for you?
  4. Do you have statistics you can share about how employee engagement and retention is impacted when organizations pursue workplace democracy and freedom?
  5. If leaders want to explore how to implement these kinds of practices in their own organizations, what can they do to get started?

 How much is freedom and democracy the norm in your workplace?

Today, Kronos held our annual Employee Appreciation Picnic at our headquarters in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Every summer, this event is a fun and much anticipated way for Kronites to come together, eat delicious food, play games, and simply hang out outside of the office. The location also couldn't be more convenient: the picnic is held right in our building's back parking lot!

Picnic1

This year's event featured food trucks (Taco Party and Captain Marden's), Ben & Jerry's ice cream, lawn games, a mechanical bull, and some incredible raffle prizes - including gift cards to the spa, Lowe's, and Starbucks, as well as Oakley and Tiffany sunglasses, an Amazon Echo, a Nutri Ninja Blender, a Callaway Golf Bag, a FitBit, and a yoga set.

Picnic3

This yearly event helps to not only bring Kronites together to have a good time, but also serves as an important reminder about how much their hard work is appreciated. The event is also during work hours, allowing Kronites to not miss time at home with their families.

Picnic4

Kronos offers their employees a breadth of healthy living benefits, and the activities at our annual picnic only echo our commitment to health and wellness. A basketball tournament, corn hole, and football were just a few of the games that helped to encourage employees to get out of their seats and be active. The raffle prizes we gave away also inspire a healthy, fun lifestyle.

Picnic2

To see all of the photos from today's celebration, check out our Facebook album.

Thanks to all Kronos employees for attending this year's picnic!

employeeburnoutWe had a very engaging tweet chat today regarding employee burnout and fatigue in the workplace. A number of thought leaders weighed in on how burnout affects employees and their employers; best practices on how to help prevent employee burnout/fatigue; how technology plays a role; and more.

You can view the entire tweet chat below (as well as here), or search via #KronosChat on Twitter. We'd love to know what you think about this topic - tweet us using #KronosChat, or comment below to share your thoughts.

Last Thursday, Kronos held its second annual 5K walk/run in Chelmsford, Massachusetts (home to our headquarters). Participation was complimentary and open to all Kronos employees and their families.

Kronos5K3

Our now-annual 5K is a great way to get Kronites outside and active together - whether you're an experienced runner or you'd just prefer to walk the 3.1-mile loop.

Kronos5K2

Leading up to the event, we held a Desk to 5K program for anyone who wanted to get fully prepared for the race. (It's Kronos' version of the popular Couch to 5K program). In addition to engaging employees, this program also successfully increased participants' endurance for race day.

Kronos5K1

Although the 5K is a great incentive to get Kronites active and engaged, we're lucky that it's only one element to Kronos' breadth of healthy living benefits. From our on-site, fully-equipped gyms to the Quit for Life program to Weight Watchers discounts (to name a few), Kronites throughout the world are constantly encouraged to live healthy, happy lives - inside and outside of work. (To see all the photos from this year's 5K, visit Kronos' Facebook page).

What are your tips for staying healthy - and active - inside and outside of work?

tweetchatWe had a very engaging tweet chat today regarding workplace culture and who defines it, based off our recent survey data. We had quite a few thought leaders weigh in on why HR, managers, and employees have very different opinions about workplace culture; who drives it and why; what's important to creating a great one; and what can destroy workplace culture.

You can view the entire tweet chat below (as well as here), or search via #KronosChat on Twitter. We'd love to know what you think about workplace culture and who defines it - tweet us using #KronosChat, or comment below to share your thoughts.

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