Posts byAaron Halliday

The Power of Slumber: Can You Sleep Your Way to Better Mental Health?

Key Points: Quality sleep significantly influences mental wellbeing. Improving sleep can lead to reduced depression, anxiety, stress, and better overall mental health. Prioritize rest and create clear boundaries between work and personal life to combat the “always-on” culture. This promotes wellbeing and enhances productivity. To support mental wellness, employers can offer access to care and
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Lean on Me: A Leader’s Impact on Wellness

Key Points: Mental health is a vital occupational health factor that organizations should prioritize by actively developing positive leaders who reflect effective leadership styles and behaviours, implementing supportive policies, and proactively monitoring employee well-being to create a more productive and inclusive work environment. Effective leadership styles like transformational leadership, relations-oriented leadership, and task-oriented leadership, and
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How an Employer-Employee Identity Discrepancy May be Exhausting Your People and Bleeding Your Profits

Key Points: Studies indicate that employees identify with organizations when there is an alignment in values, feelings of support, and they feel trust in the organization’s leaders to make the right decisions. The evidence suggests that organizational identification is malleable and can change with changes in the values of the organization or with changes in
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Finding The Right Match Can Be Tricky: The Effectiveness of Various Candidate Selection Methods May Shock You!

Key Points: Selection tools are quite different in their ability to predict performance than previously thought. Some less, some more. Overall (rather than contextualized) personality measures and years of job experience, are not meaningful predictors of performance. Structured Interviews, Job Knowledge, Biodata, Work Samples, Cognitive Ability and Integrity Tests are useful assessment methods and criteria.
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Job Insecurity: Why It Matters and Is It All Inside Your Head?

Key Points: Job insecurity is significantly related to a staggering 51 unique negative work and individual outcomes. Cognitive job insecurity – thoughts tied to job insecurity – and affective job insecurity – feelings tied to job insecurity – are found to be related but different concepts. Feelings related to job insecurity seem to be more
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If you want to motivate people, avoid these four words: “You have no choice!”

Key Points: Providing support for autonomy can help provide the basic underlying needs for intrinsic motivation – autonomy, competence and connectedness. When these needs are satisfied, employees are more likely to experience intrinsic motivation for their work. This is in-turn related to higher levels of general well-being, work engagement and positive work behaviors, and lower
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Goal setting can influence job performance. But under which conditions?

Key Points: Set challenging and specific goals for higher performance. Use data, feedback, and progress monitoring to achieve goals effectively. Consider individual differences and intrinsic motivation for successful goal setting. This Evidence-Based Summary has been made available in an audio-based format. Click play to give it a try! Most personal and professional progress is directed
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Myth-Busting: How Believing Smart People to be Socially Stunted Could be Costing You and Your Business

Key Points: The belief that highly intelligent people lack social skills is a common stereotype, but recent research suggests it is more likely a myth than an informative stereotype. Findings suggest that smarter people tend to be better at accurately interpreting and responding to the social and emotional cues of others. By using objective data,
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What Can You Do to Encourage Discussions About Accommodating Employee Disabilities?

Key Points: People with disabilities face barriers in employment, and accommodations such as accessibility facilities, flexible policies, and modified equipment are crucial for their work experience and quality of life. Many Canadian companies lack clear accommodation practices, resulting in less than 20% of people with disabilities using accommodations despite their right to be accommodated. The
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Let Me Be: Why People and Businesses Should Prioritize Work-Life Boundaries and How to Implement Them

Detachment from work is an important component required for rest and recovery from work and yet many organizations are failing to provide their people with work experiences that take this key variable into account. Detachment is positively related to recovery, mental and physical health, wellbeing, having access to job resources, and task performance on-the-job. Detachment
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How Mindfulness Can Benefit Leaders, Their Followers, and Make for More Profitable Business

Key Points: Mindfulness is positively correlated with many highly sought health and wellness indicators. Mindfulness is similarly correlated with highly sought and highly effective leadership styles like transformational leadership, authentic leadership, and with specific leader behaviours like less leader abuse. Organizations would do well to implement demonstrably effective evidence-based mindfulness training as it’s both cost
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Personality and Workplace Deviance: Big Five Versus HEXACO

Key Points: Scientists have been studying personality at work for a century and they’ve created some fantastic measures of personality like the Big Five and the HEXACO. A recent meta-analysis examined which assessment was better at predicting deviant work behaviour, the newer HEXACO model or the much more established Big Five model. They found that
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Job Satisfaction and Job Performance: Do They Have a Causal Relationship?

Key Points: Work attitudes do seem to have a small causal impact on job satisfaction. Job satisfaction does not seem to cause an improvement in work attitudes. The impact of attitudes fades over time. Everyone on Earth has probably experienced just how much our attitudes can impact our work. Many of us have elucidating moments
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It’s All Fun and Games Until You’ve Created a Hostile Work Environment: How Workplace Bullying is Linked to Mental Health

Key Points: Workplace bullying has been linked to negative outcomes of health and mental illness. Although depression, anxiety, stress, and burnout were all associated with being bullied. Symptoms of depression were most consistently. Anxiety and stress fall into two categories: Generalized anxiety and PTSD, which had stronger relationships with workplace bullying. Similarly, burnout symptoms were
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How to create work that gets employees energized

The drivers, factors, and contexts that boost work motivation. Key Points: Stand out elements for work motivation are goal setting, feedback, and feeling supported by your manager. Human motivation is not fixed; it can change through mindsets, circumstances, and outcomes. Tasks that involve creativity, autonomy, teamwork, and well-being are strong drivers of intrinsic motivation, the
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