(Personal) leadership; vitality in optima forma

Work is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. Yet the enormous importance of the relationship between vitality and work is not yet sufficiently recognized. Someone who enjoys going to work is less likely to get sick. The employee who feels involved with his work, his colleagues and his employer, experiences less work pressure, less stress and therefore also remains physically healthier. Rudo Vissers, CEO of paraDIGMA groep, explains why he wants to make the change at the front end with paraDIGMA groep , and why management and organizational culture have a key role in this.

Mutual responsibility

"The employee should show responsibility for his own vitality in and around his work. The employer should facilitate the employee's vitality, through good leadership, good working conditions and the facilitation of preventive interventions. This mutual responsibility can be summarized as (personal) leadership," says Rudo Vissers. "The early deployment of interventions, both physical and mental, with a strong appeal to the employee's ownership, shortens the duration of absence enormously or even prevents absence completely. (Personal) leadership thus ensures sustainable employability. Partly due to outdated laws and regulations, organizations are still guided by medical factors and hardly ever by leadership and culture. For example, when someone walks away angry after a poor performance interview and reports sick the next day, a company doctor is called in and the actual management problem is turned into a medical problem."

Work absenteeism

"And so there are an awful lot of examples of what is not medical, but is made medical," Vissers continues. "And in doing so, you create patients unnecessarily. You help each other precisely by calling the problems by their names, i.e. by talking about that bad performance review. If you don't, you force people into the role of patient, and it's at the expense of the vitality of people, organizations and ultimately society."

Vissers: "I applaud the extra attention to good health, nutrition and exercise. However, I would like to see the translation to organizations more explicitly. Every day we see far too many cases at the company doctor's office that actually belong with management."

"The fact that almost everywhere is still mistakenly talking about sick leave instead of absenteeism from work is telling."

(Personal) leadership

paraDIGMA groep provides a different perspective on people who drop out within organizations. With training, coaching and targeted interventions, we try to give the employee, but also the employer, more responsibility and thus (personal) leadership. Illness is only one of the reasons for disability. The fact that almost everywhere people still wrongly talk about sick leave instead of absenteeism from work is telling. The connection between work and vitality, ensuring an open culture and daring to name problems will lead to a happy employee, who will take responsibility and call in sick less often. The employer saves very substantial costs and the pressure on care will decrease for a healthy future of organizations and our society. "Investing on the front end, yields huge tangible and intangible gains at the back end!"