AETHEON Flourishing at Work Community of Practice

Featured session in AETHEON's Flourishing at Work community of practice, moderated by AETHEON co-chair Marie Gill. Krystal was in conversation with Dr. Harris Eyre, physician and neuroscientist co-leading the Brain and Society Initiative at the Rice Brain Institute, on what it actually takes to translate neuroscience into how organizations operate.

Krystal pushed back on two common blind spots that organizations have when they try to act on brain health. The first is the assumption that fully insured workforces have functional access to care. "Even in fully insured working populations, there can be, from a mental health perspective in particular, months and months of wait time. That's a blind spot that has to be addressed because it's deeply impacting people and their longevity." The second is the reflex to put the responsibility back on the individual. "There's a lot of finger pointing back toward the individual. You need to exercise more, you need to eat right. And very little reflection on the role of the organization and its employees' health. What are those psychosocial risks that the organization puts in front of its employees that leads to those negative health outcomes? Those are not conversations that leaders typically want to have."

The discussion then moved into neurodesign and neuroarchitecture, a space Harris and Krystal had both been pulled into through corporate real-estate and built-environment conversations. Lighting, greenery, thermal conditions, and the flow of office space measurably change stress physiology and cognitive performance, and there is a growing field, including the Building Brains Coalition, working to codify those insights for designers and CEOs.

Krystal closed with a direct challenge to her own sector. "Companies need to stop being so secretive and proprietary. There's a very healthy dose of skepticism from the corporate world in engaging with academia, and a really heavy dose of skepticism in sharing any data. We cannot progress if it continues down that path. The corporate space needs to play along more nicely in order to progress this." She and Harris pointed to the Greater Houston Partnership's Center for Houston's Future brain economy initiative as one of the first credible attempts at a tiered, multi-sector governance structure that pulls universities, private companies, and NGOs into the same table.

Audience: HR and people-strategy practitioners across AETHEON's Flourishing at Work community of practice. Recording: https://youtu.be/NCq_8RNmZSI