Great Video - Lip Dub from Clark Retirement Community and Grand Valley State University
Love this video from Clark Retirement Community in Grand Rapids, Michigan in conjunction with Grand Valley State University. What creativity!
Employee Wellness Programs, Workplace Innovation and the Bottom Line
What makes a great place to work? It’s an essential question in all businesses, but especially senior housing and services.
For insights into that question, we’ve turned to Robin Dunbar, vice president of human resources at Ecumen. Ecumen was recently named #11 on the Star Tribune’s “Top Workplace in Minnesota” list and the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal has honored the company as one of its “Best Places to Work” consistently since 2005.
CA Blog: What role does innovation play in creating a great workplace?
Dunbar: It’s extremely important because innovations come from people who are highly engaged in their work, enjoy it and want to make things better. We strive to provide ample opportunities for people to share their ideas and create a culture of collaboration and courage to turn ideas into reality.
An example of this is our recent launch of an online social media tool called Ecumen Idea Box, which is designed for employees, most of whom are separated by geography, to share ideas and connect with each other to try new approaches or make existing ones better. Innovation is a contact sport, and through Idea Box and other venues we seek to foster connections.
We also keep our ears wide open because workplace innovations can come from employees, customers, vendors – virtually anyone that is connected with our work environments.
CA Blog: What new trends are you seeing in companies striving to create a better workplace?
Dunbar: More and more companies are realizing how valuable of a resource people are and designing workplaces differently. For example, you now hear a lot about companies and their wellness programs. Employee wellness wasn’t as big a topic 10 years ago. Our local business journal just recognized the top corporate wellness programs. That’s new.
We’re seeing more flexible work schedules, where people are empowered to work in the way they find best to get the work done, rather than be tethered to a specific schedule in a specific place. That’s not as easy to do when you’re providing direct care for someone, but I think in the United States we’ll find new ways to provide more flexibility in the direct care area, also. I’d like to see us lead the way in that.
Another changing area is more employers recognizing the role of the family in one’s work life. For example, more and more employees are balancing caregiving for children and/or adult parents. That reality led us to create a flexible leave package the provides caregiver leave when they need to care for a seriously ill family member.
CA Blog: How can companies create a pro-employee culture that also benefits the bottom line?
Dunbar: I think a positive financial culture and positive financial performance go hand in hand. Without people, there are no products, no services, no business. Employees’ well-being has to be part of the overall business equation. It’s human nature to want to work in an environment that values you as a person and contributor.
One way to create a good culture that also is financially successful is to measure employee engagement just as you measure financial performance. It’s critically important to have an engaged work force. Another aspect that’s important is to look at a company’s “brand” much deeper than simply as a logo or piece of collateral. To build a strong brand and culture, you have to have team members who are aligned with the company’s values. As human beings we just feel more comfortable and more engaged in a place where we feel we fit. Another essential to creating a pro-employee culture that is also financially successful is to create a relationship of trust. If, for example, you say you empower people as a company, you have to back that up by empowering people.
CA Blog: What “little things” make a difference to employees?
Dunbar: I think the “little things” are actually big things. Showing gratitude, for example, is critically important. Gratitude doesn’t cost money. It’s simply one human being expressing appreciation and honor for another human being. Employees tell us one of the most important things to them is having a leader that will listen to them and that acknowledges their contribution in the work place.
Listening is another important thing we’re all capable of. No one has all the answers. Listening invites collaboration. Listening opens the door to possibilities. It tells the other person “I care.” And it’s an essential building block to creating a great workplace.
Robin Dunbar can be reached at 651-766-4351 or robindunbar@ecumen.org.
Jim Klobuchar - The New Fountain of Youth
The miracles of modern high-tech can now take you to the moon in three days. In 30 seconds it can trace your family history back to the tree dwellers. It can change your sex life with one trip to the drug store and put you in conversation with 35 people on four continents with one click on the keyboard.
These are considerable improvements over the drab years of peace and quiet in America.
But all of this pales beside the transformations that take place thousands of times a day in the automobiles of America that are linked with the entertainment circus called Satellite Radio.
This is the 21st century version of the old vaudeville shows that featured ventriloquists, itinerant banjo players, talking bears and left-handed knife throwers. Today you have your choice of more than 250 frequencies that feature evangelists, the latest tornado warnings, the Marriage of Figaro, hard rock and soft soap. Undocumented oracles tell you how to get rich in the middle of the recession. You can hear intimate talk for truckers, screaming football experts, political quacks and daily Spanish lessons.
A lot of this can turn you into an immediate convert to the simple joy of undistracted driving. But a few days ago I found on one of my XM channels a service called Escape, subtitled Beautiful Music. This was not symphonic music, which is nice and often beautiful. This was not operatic music, which is nice and very often translatable. This was the music of my adolescence, and then a little later the music of my 20s, with those rites of passage that define our time, the roads we took, the fulfillments we experienced and the dreams and fantasies that recede.
And suddenly about the time I was making the turn to the fitness center here was the voice of Perry Como, 60 years earlier, singing one of the all time torch songs of the century, called “Prisoner of Love.” And I was back in high school years, listening to the family Philco, and Perry, the most melodious barber in history. He was crushed and grieving “what’s the good of my caring if someone isn’t sharing those arms with me…” and about now I was getting soapy and humming along to the part where he his voice reaches up into climactic dirge and cries “she’s in my dreams awake or sleeping, upon my knees to her I’m creeping, my very heart is in her keeping, I’m just a prisoner of love.”
Folks, that is true and uncontaminated misery.
In the face of all this grief one has to be respectful, of one’s distant youth if nothing else. And the tunes played on. “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from “Oklahoma,” Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” The Andrew Sisters singing “Drinking Rum and Co-Cah’ Cola” from the Caribbean during wartime. I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes and listened to Linda Ronstad re-breaking my heart with Blue Bayou, where the fishes play, and then to the guy telling me what happened by the time he got to Phoenix, and then to Albuquerque and I was now trying to imagine a road map to make sense of the geography..
It occurred to me about then that there might be diminishing returns in this soapy little exercise in reverting back to another time and another pace, and that the real moral in all of this was simply an innocent sense of gratitude for having experienced this other time, with its wins and losses and above all its gifts. I was about to click off when Ray Charles started to sing “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” How can you hang up on Ray Charles? It wasn’t just the music. This was, after all, part of the times we remember. And one of those times was a Monday morning after the first Minnesota Vikings had lost a game and the first year coach, Norm Van Brocklin, called one of the writers(me) inviting him to have some coffee in the morning to assess the calamity of it. It would have been impossible today. Coaches and writers don’t have and shouldn’t have that kind of connection. And no coach imaginable today could take a Monday morning off after a Sunday game and go anyplace but back to the pits—film, analysis, next Sunday’s game, injuries, a hundred checkpoints.
But Van Brocklin was a tempestuous guy who wrote his own time tables, a brooding, snarling man, combative, ornery and brilliant. We quarreled all the time. But he was also companionable. We met at a 3.2. beer joint in a suburb and drank coffee and coke. Van Brocklin mourned the game. He wanted to talk. But before we talked he went to the juke box and played Ray Charles and I Can’t Stop Loving You. “Can’t get enough of this guy,” he said. He put in four quarters and played it four times. And we talked and talked and for the first time in while we laughed at each other because he also put in a fifth quarter.
We didn’t talk the last four years of his life. Whose fault? Who knows? It was a time long ago, but one to remember. So this was not the music of escape. The music of what? Well, maybe reunion. And you really can’t get enough of Ray Charles. Some times don’t change.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Three Salutes for Changing Aging in the World
- In an era, where pundits say most of us are going to have to work longer, the Florida Marlins on Monday hired Jack McKeon as their manager. The 80-year-old McKeon wasn't hired because he needed a job. It was because he's great at what he does, he enjoys his work, and team management is confident he'll gain the attention of the 20-something players and make the Marlins better.
- The world's oldest person Maria Gomes Valentim died on Tuesday. She was born in 1896 in Carangola, a city in southeast Brazil, where she lived her whole life. She was just weeks away from celebrating what would have been her 115th birthday. Who could have ever thought someone would live to 115? Use the Live to 100 Calculator and see your longevity odds.
- TedX (Technology, Education and Design) confererences are places you'll find cutting-edge, innovative ideas across the U.S. Changing aging recently took center stage when acclaimed geriatrician Bill Thomas spoke at the San Franciso TedX Conference. You can watch his presentation: Elderhood Rising: The Dawn of a New World age below:
Ecumen 11th among Minnesota's Top 100 Workplaces
The Star Tribune's "Top Workplaces 2011" recognizes the most progressive companies in Minnesota based on employee opinions about company leadership, communication, career opportunities, workplace environment, managerial skills, pay and benefits. We're thrilled to add this distinction to our six year run as one of Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal's "Best Places to Work" and our recent ranking by Minnesota Monthly as, you guessed it, one of Minnesota's "Best Places to Work."
Michael Graves New Design on Target for Changing Demographics
Just added a post at Minneapolis Star Tribune.com on Michael Graves, designer of those hip Target housewares, and his new designs that are focused on empowerment and a "new normal" in America.
Ecumen Leader Kathryn Roberts Featured in Radical CEO Series
Kathryn Roberts, Ecumen CEO, was featured in today's Radical CEO blog series at Star Tribune.com. You can read the post and about other radical CEOs in the Twin Cities here.
Jim Klobuchar - The Treasure Masked by an Ugly Slag Pile
A new post by Ecumen Changing Aging contributor Jim Klobuchar:
It was not the prescribed atmosphere for a harmless reverie: drizzly Sunday morning at daybreak on a lonely highway, snags of cloud hanging low. Apart from my car, nothing else moved though the shapeless mist that lifted every few minutes. It revealed man-made buttes hundreds of feet high, dull red, formed by the abandoned tailings of the now-silent iron ore pits that are part of the landmarks of the northern Minnesota mining country.
When we were children they dominated the environment of our growing up, engineered by giant power shovels carving those vast canyons that produced 90 per cent of America’s steel.
Over the years the government and tourism agencies have invested sizable cash into removing or cleaning up the unlovely detritus. They have succeeded remarkably in some places by creating permanent blue lakes, camouflaging the old open pits, or by growing virtual arboretums in some of them.
But what I was thinking on this damp Sunday morning had nothing much to do with sprucing up old ore dumps, beautifying them--if you don’t mind-- as a sensible salute to a heritage. I was thinking about the America I had lived; about gifts that had come into my life because there was iron ore, and there were miners. I remembered the muted thunder-claps thousands of feet beneath the surface that I could hear in my bed as a child, dynamite being a detonated by a night shift, possibly by my dad’s crew.
In my town the steel-building iron ore lay nearly a half mile beneath the earth’s surface and could not be reached with the huge steam shovels that created those vast open canyons. Where we lived the ore was extracted underground with dynamite and winches through a network of tunnels and then lifted nearly 2,000 feet in big elevator cages.
My father had labored in the underground since he was 15, leaving school to work after the eighth grade after both of his parents had died and he was the oldest boy in a family of eight. There were few safety nets then and even fewer when the Great Depression struck the country. The children wanted to stay together. So the oldest boy became their support.
It was his choice and the mining company pretended not to notice his age. And yet he lived a fruitful life, working, hunting and fishing, helping to raise two children. It’s what was done in those years. He and my mother were the children of immigrants, most of whom came to America in who like the others came in part because of their hunger to educate their children. This they did, with the security of work in the mines.
So that became the progression. The immigrants mined and built their homes and told their kids to study. Their children could go into adult life with a high school education and the chances that came with it to expand their lives; and their grandchildren could attend college if they studied and if it meant enough to them.
And so this happened in our household: my brother and I could attend the junior colleges that flourished in northern Minnesota, and advance those credits directly to the big university. And my dad’s grandchildren, the third generation, both have significant government positions today, one in Washington, the other in Iowa.
So driving through the north country the other day I felt no esthetic pain seeing those slag piles penetrating the fog, even the uglier ones that had eluded the beautification patrols. Like my brother, I had worked underground between college terms to help pay the tuition, which wasn’t all that onerous to begin with.
What was painful in that morning mist was the glimpses it revealed of a time when America was beginning to surge; when a quality education was coming available to almost all who wanted it. It was a time when America was beginning to discover the genuine power of democracy, building a society in which almost everybody had a chance to compete at some level. It was a time of an America that recognized the sins of its discriminations against people of color, against women and tried to meet the responsibilities of a truly open society.
America’s people hold so much potential, but we’re not fully mining it. Yes times change, but something that should never diminish is the conscience and promise of the country in opening the door to everyone for a chance at a quality education. It’s education that carries a person through life and empowers one to the very end.
Those silent slabs of ore might be reminding us of a better way. One in which we’re interconnected. And that’s a treasure worth preserving.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Age Wave = Change Wave Video
The future announces itself from the horizon. And look at the unprecedented statistics before us in this short video. The age wave is the change wave, an unprecedented opportunity for innovation.