With an ever challenging Corporate Environment business leaders would agree there is a need to take a renewed view of how to best maximise the output from the employees they have. Organisations are challenged to attract, retain, engage and enhance productivity from scarce resources. In addition to this already significant and consuming challenge, many corporations realise that if they haven’t already, they now need to get serious about how to lessen their global footprint, increase their corporate social responsibility, and make a positive contribution toward the wellness of the planet.

Where does your organisation rate on these areas?

Are you leading the way like some of the top corporate businesses in Australia and around the world? Are you flourishing when it comes to the people within your business and the impact you are having on the community and planet? If the answer is NO, what affect might this have on your business? These are the questions you need to be asking. Beyond this you need to be searching for new answers, be involved in new conversations and push the boundaries of what is not only feasible to drive your business into new frontiers, but  what is possible at every edge of the boundaries.

The businesses that thrive in this decade and beyond will be those who are willing to engage innovative thinking, push boundaries, take a fresh look at their values and be brave enough to start a new conversation.

That new conversation started at the World Wellness Project Summit. The inaugural summit was held in Melbourne, Australia where over 40 speakers from around the world came together to engage on the health of business, the health of individuals, and the wellness of the planet.

The relatively new fields of positive psychology, positive organisational scholarship and workplace wellbeing are becoming robust evidence based practises that can enhance productivity for organisations. However, relatively few organisations are implementing these initiatives in a pervasive and holistic manner. Few are yet to understand the significant implications and outcomes of engaged, positive, healthy employees and their impact to the bottom line. These issues and what the leading edge companies are doing in these arenas were discussed and debated at the event.

Visionary business leaders who are placing global wellness at the forefront of their business, and making a profit from it shared their knowledge and understanding on the depth and breadth of the new wave of consumers, a market LOHAS conservatively estimated at $209 billion in the U.S. These consumers are the future of progressive social, environmental and economic change.

The Summit  explored the implications of new markets and how big business is shifting to meet these new demands, including how business can itself be an Agent for World Benefit. The world’s corporate organisations spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on corporate social responsibility programs. Individually and collectively, these organisations can and are having a profound impact globally on the wellness of the planet. The Summit heard from leading corporations who explained how they are helping support the wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants, and what the next wave of CSR could look like.