It was a Friday afternoon.  She came home a little early because she felt extra tired.  She lied down on the couch to get a quick nap before her husband finished preparing dinner.  About 30 minutes later, her husband went to get her for dinner.  Her response was very sluggish, “just a few more minutes”.  He left her for another 15 minutes, then came back.  When he tried to wake her, she was completely unresponsive.  Even shaking her, she did not respond.  He immediately dialed 911.  The ambulance came and the Paramedics transported her to the nearest hospital.  After admitting her through the emergency room and spending a full day in the intensive care unit, she began to respond. Over two weeks later she was discharged from the hospital.  The doctors said her breathing was so shallow and her oxygen level so low she probably would not have survived the night.  What happened you ask?  It turns out she, my sister Martha, had a staph infection.  The doctors best estimate was that she had gotten infected almost two years earlier on a vacation outside the country. Over that time, the infection had gotten gradually worse and her body was losing the fight.

In hindsight, she recognized she had been declining gradually.  From time to time she said to herself, “I’m just not as energetic as I usually am”. “I’m not able to do this as easily as I could not long ago”.  She became less enthusiastic about weekends and going places.  She just needed more rest.  However, the decline happened so gradually over those two years, that the awareness of it never became clear.  My sister, Martha, is over six months past her hospital experience and doing very well.  She has changed the way she manages her health.  She has new routines, new approaches, new measures and new people in her life to help her try to consistently increase her health. She has changed the way she looks at her her health because her regular routines and mechanisms didn’t alert her to her condition.  Her exercise routine couldn’t make her aware of the illness growing in her.  Her regular diet couldn’t fight off the slow decline.  Her regular interactions with her husband, her kids, her peers couldn’t provide her feedback because there was not a traumatic event, or accident for them to observe.

I tell this story because I see the exact same conditions my sister had in the companies we talk to and serve, everyday.  We routinely hear leaders say something along the lines of, “We’ve got an excellent strategic plan and we are working our priorities”.  Or, “We measure employee satisfaction”.  Or, “We have good measures in place for customer satisfaction”. If you had asked my sister the day before her hospitilzation, how she felt, she would have said “fine”.   If you have good processes in place for these types of things, then you are doing better than most.  What we have come to recognize, is that very few companies have a good SYSTEM for how they think about their employees.  They have some tools, they have some training, they have compensation/benefits, they have some goals, they have promotion paths and the list goes on.

If you ask my sister what she does different now, you would hear something like this.  She doesn’t just workout on her stair climber 3 times a week.  She doesn’t just watch what she eats or just watch her weight.  No, if you listened carefully, you would understand that she now has a system.  Now, she views her health as a status and she plans and thinks about health in a completely different way.  She integrates specific ingredients into her diet, she uses supplements in a coordinated way, she has exercise routines that she changes up, she has goals for specific systems in her body, nervous, circulatory, musculoskeletal.  She has benchmarks she checks with her physician and specific times she does that.  O.K., sure, the way I’m describing her, she sounds a little crazy (love ya big sis!) but while she is doing a little more than she used to, it’s not that much.  It doesn’t take much more time than she used to spend and she doesn’t spend much more money than she used to.  The big change?  She has a system; a great plan, with lots of good thinking based on best practices.  She has experts she checks in with and good measurements.  She has outside observers to help her see her health objectively.  Hmmmm….now that I think of it, what my sister is doing sounds a lot like what we do here at ingaugement.  A system…best practices…inexpensive…doesn’t take a lot more time than what a company does now… but much better results.  If I was to describe my sister and her situation to a friend, I would probably say she is very “engaged” in her health.

Check back in, I’ll be talking more about one of my passions, employee engagement.