The wrong job could make your employees sick
`It's in the genes,' argues vocational expert
"What school ever told you there is something you can do better than anyone else - and in good health?" With that rhetorical question, D.E. Seymour lays the foundation for the argument that most employees are not working at jobs that maximize their individual talents and foster good health.
"Take a look at the drugstore shelves; the largest shelves are for heartburn and headache remedies, to salve wounds of work," says Seymour, a researcher and vocational guidance director who directs the Vocational Guidance Institute, a private non-profit organization in Milwaukee.
"There is something everyone can do better and in better health than what they do now," says Seymour. "In our research, we have identified over 40,000 occupations out there. 1 We're just not finding them, or we wouldn't have all these drugs on the shelves. The more a person is fitted to his job, the fewer health problems he has, the fewer days he'll miss, and the more enjoyable getting up Monday morning will be."
Seymour says that it is our genetic makeup that determines our most healthful occupation. "We are each of us a different genetic structure; there are no two of us alike; there never has been and there never will be," he observes. "We are built by our genes, and there is something we can do - based on our genetic structure - better than anyone else."
To find out what that is, employees need to find which of those occupations is the most challenging, the most interesting, the least boring, and the most healthful. Seymour has taken the first step with a survey that measures an employee's level of positive response for a given occupation. (See the chart, at left.)
He has further broken down these occupations into job tasks and activities. For instance, a secretary takes dictation, answers the phone, writes letters, and keeps the boss's agenda. "Maybe she loves keeping the agenda, hates filing, likes typing, but hates answering the telephone," says Seymour. "Your body says to you, `Hey, I don't want to do this thing, and I will punish you if you do it.'"
Or take a baseball pitcher. As part of his occupation, he sits with his coach, analyzes the hitter, pitches, recognizes the catcher's signals, and covers first base. "But the activity of throwing the ball is a human activity; just throwing to first base is a human activity," Seymour explains. "A person may like the whole job task, but there may be one human activity he prefers. The more things we can do in a single occupation that we really enjoy, the healthier we are."
Teach positive outlook on jobs
To maximize the work/health relationship, Seymour offers these three recommendations to employee health professionals:
1. Educate employees to believe that there is an occupation that best fits their maximum talent capability.
2. Sit down with the employee, and analyze the job tasks and human activities in his or her job. If there is a mismatch, perhaps he or she can be moved to another area or a job that better suits that employee's health.
Another option is for the employee to change jobs. While this may seem counterproductive at first, your company will get a new employee who fits the job - and is healthier - rather than one who doesn't, and the employee who left will be healthier in his or her new position, thus boosting the overall health of the workforce.
Seymour is not satisfied with the progress he has made. "We have to have some way for an individual's genetic structure to be run across those 40,000 occupations to find the most healthful, creative occupation for that individual," he says. "A `strong' occupational test today has 150 occupations [and no genetic component]."
Making the perfect match
Seymour's dream is the creation of an occupational analog to the Human Genome Project in Bethesda, MD, which is currently seeking to sequence every human gene.
"This could be similar but even more important," he argues. "Instead of sequencing genes, we need to sequence human activities and make a profile of each person's preferred human activities combined into an occupation. Then we could take all 40,000 known human occupations and create an occupation human activity profile. Finally, we could match a person to a given activity profile."
Such a profile, Seymour asserts, would enable every employee to find the occupation most conducive to his or her health and happiness.
[Editor's Note: For more information, contact: D.E. Seymour, 3900 West Brown Deer Road, Suite A#110, Milwaukee, WI 53209. Telephone: (414) 228-1266. Fax: (414) 228-0185.]
Reference
1. Seymour DE. The Key to Your Unknown Talent. Milwaukee: Talent Discovery Press; 1996.
You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content