Waking Up To Healthy Living

Why female leaders are buying into corporate wellness and supporting thrive global’S drive to revolutionize the workplace.

- T.L. Stanley

If it’s tempting to dismiss emotional and physical wellness as a soft subject, here’s a hard truth: Stress and burnout cost U.S. companies more than $300 billion annually in lost productivity, missed workdays, healthcare bills, on-the-job accidents and attrition.

It’s a bottom-line issue that media mogul and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington has been talking about for several years, penning related best-selling books Thrive and The Sleep Revolution, and now turning it into her latest business venture called Thrive Global, with the goal of putting a perpetually wired and tired population on the path to healthy living.

The 6-month-old startup has tentacles in everything from ecommerce and consumer products (pop-up shops, fitness trackers, mattresses) and media (web hub, digital videos, podcasts) to management consulting, seminars and tech (apps that silence smartphones and manage email during vacations).

Huffington doesn’t see wellness as a gender-specific topic, but she’s not surprised that some of her first partnerships have been cemented with women, at companies like JPMorgan Chase, Accenture and SAP North America. (Thrive also has alliances with Glassdoor, Airbnb, Uber and others.)