Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington’s new company possibly best known for promoting the value of sleep, is teaming with LinkedIn to improve our well beings even further.
Thrive is launching a new series of LinkedIn Learning courses to improve wellness—specifically to help professionals combat chronic conditions fueling stress and burnout.
“At the moment, professionals are living and working under the delusion that in order to succeed, they have to burn out,” Huffington tells Coins2Day, explaining the inspiration behind the program is to help people realize that making small changes can actually be more effective in helping people succeed and achieve what they want without burning out.
“Numerous studies evidence the fact that when we prioritize our well-being, our decision-making, creativity and productivity improve dramatically,” says Tanya Staples, LinkedIn Learning’s head of content, in a blog post on Wednesday.
LinkedIn and Thrive pointed toward a study by the Family and Work Institute finding that approximately 70% of U.S. Employees admit they feel burnt out. It only gets worse as 96% of professionals at senior leadership levels reported feeling burnt out.
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If that’s not enough to convince employers that such findings are dangerous for at least the mental and physical health of their employees, then maybe they’ll take the bottom line effects into account. The companies also cited Harvard Medical School research that sleep deprivation adds up to more than 11 days of lost productivity per worker per year—the equivalent of $2,280 in losses.
With speakers such as Huffington as well as Warby Parker CEO Dave Gilboa and NBA basketball star Kobe Bryant, the courses will be presented in the format of “Daily Bites,” described as easily digestible segments touted to be less than five minutes and can be watched 0n-the-go. Staples writes that “although wellness training should no longer be viewed as a nice to have, but a need to have, it can be challenging for professionals to dedicate full hours to supplemental learning.”
Six episodes will launch on Wednesday with several more in the pipeline. Some of the initial episodes focus on meditation, setting priorities, and learning to let go.
Reiterating the value of sleep and meditation as well as unplugging from technology and “dealing with the obnoxious roommate in your head,” Huffington describes the Daily Bites format as an incremental way to “drive, not just survive.”
“Making this connection between well being and performance is key to all of our e-courses,” says Huffington. She acknowledges that it might be easy to see even the Daily Bites program as another task, but says that once participants see the value, it’s “easier to stick to them as opposed to seeing them as another thing on your to-do list.”
With a simpler and shorter format, presumably there is less pressure (and stress) on the viewer to keep up with extensive coursework on top of existing workloads.
