Garth Koyle

The beginning of March we had four auditors in the office for a week. While they were here the snacks and drinks in the vending machines were flying off the shelves, with sales  nearly doubling from the previous week. With those numbers, I’m thinking that our auditors were verifying the quality of more than just our books. Oinkers?

Now, although the auditors may have purchased a snack or two, I doubt we can attribute the major increase in snacking to just those four people. The average snack level of the entire office must have increased during the audit.

Morrena, who restocks our vending machines, said: “I can always tell how stressed the office is by how fast the drinks and snacks go out of the vending machines. When the auditors were here I couldn’t keep it stocked.”

Stress in the work place can be expensive. The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reports that: “Health care expenditures are nearly 50% greater for workers who report high levels of stress.”

Not only are people eating more junk food, which is unhealthy, they are feeling more stress at work. Vending machine inventory turnover can give managers more than an ethereal way to quantify the stress level of their employees and office.

I’m a huge fan of performance based compensation. This Compare Hospital tool from the Department of Health and Human services should help empower health care patients to avoid poor health care treatment, and what to expect in terms of both treatment and cost.

The Hospital Compare tool lets you compare 1) how well your local hospitals care for their adult patients, 2) the RESULT of care or treatment – whether they lived or died within 30 days of treatment, 3) what patients are saying about their recent hospital stay, and 4) how much Medicare hospitals paid on average for certain conditions or procedures.

You should really check out your local hospitals, but return and let me know if you were surprised at the results of your local hospitals, like I was? Have you shared this with your friends and family, because it could save their lives – literally.



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