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Technology has suddenly spawned new, global work realities: imprisonment by screens and a powerful erosion of the line between now always-on “work” and “life.” And assembled experts agreed that we have not yet begun to grasp the wide-ranging impact on employees’ physical and mental health…and productivity.

Thierry Malleret dives into how one “must-watch” issue for wellness is the way in which governments are increasingly attempting to legislate to limit the consumption of unhealthy products. But the consensus is that taxing products like sugar/soda doesn’t do much to change behaviour.

Well, new evidence from Mexico, where 30 percent of the population is obese (and the average citizen drinks the equivalent of half a litre of Coca-Cola a day), shakes up that “doesn’t-work” established wisdom. Read how much consumption has dropped after new taxes—and for more insight on another “must watch” wellness issue…

Lately, I have been asked a lot about our focus on workplace wellness.

• It is the subject of a major research project this year at the Global Wellness Institute (GWI). 
• We have already had one roundtable in New York on the topic, with another scheduled for September in Miami. 
• We are having one main stage panel, possibly two, on workplace wellness at our Global Wellness Summit in Mexico City this November. 
• Various key speakers—including Deepak Chopra, MD, and Nerio Alessandri from Technogym—will incorporate the topic into their remarks. 

• “Wellness tourism taking the vacation world by storm” (Audio)
  – NPR News, August 16, 2015
• “Which Character Strengths Are Most Predictive of Well-Being?”
  – Scientific American, August 2, 2015
• “Why We’re Sick and Tired of Wellness”
  – Alternet, August 11, 2015
• “The Average Worker Loses 11 Days of Productivity Each Year Due to Insomnia, and Companies Are Taking Notice”
  – The Washington Post, July 30, 2015
• “Can We Reverse the Aging Process by Putting Young Blood into Older People?”
  – The Guardian, August 4, 2015

On July 15 the Global Wellness Institute held its seventh roundtable. This time the topic was “Redefining Workplace Wellness,” and the roundtable took place in Manhattan. Twenty-five-plus experts from high-profile organizations (like the Cleveland Clinic, the Clinton Global Initiative, Johnson & Johnson, Citi and Goldman Sachs) sat down for a wide-ranging discussion about how the very idea of “work”—and the profile of the global workforce—is now changing at lightning speed.

Our current workplace wellness moment is dominated by negative media and unscientific “studies” that baldly conclude that “workplace wellness doesn’t work”—along with the “selling” of programs to companies as a pure profit-driver. But the roundtable concluded that, in the future, companies will shift from a narrow focus on ROI to a recognition of wider “return on value”: not just lower healthcare costs, but important gains in retention and productivity.