Plus: Loyalty’s Health (and Salary) Benefits and a Fun Workplace Prank at Legoland.

Stay Healthy (and Get Richer) by Being Loyal
Loyalty is good for your health and creativity and can even boost job wages, research suggests. While a slowly recovering economy and a wave of political scandal might inspire doubt or mistrust, people who remain loyal to their employers, romantic partners and even sports teams may find solace in knowing that their fidelity inspires a positive health and monetary outcome, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Scientists have found that those in a committed long-term romantic relationship have better health and satisfaction, and a study by the RAND Center for the Study of Aging has determined that married men in their 50s-70s lived longer than those who were never married, divorced or widowed. Generally, those with solid social support also have a lower risk of diabetes, hypertension and heart attacks.

Yet the benefits of commitment extend far beyond marriage. Both employers and employees can benefit from workers who commit, in years, to the same company.

“People who had a minimum experience of five years with a single employer typically got 8 percent increases in compensation a year compared with about 5 percent for people with a history of job hopping,” the Journal notes. Commitment to the same company also inspires productivity and creativity among employees, research has found.

Loyalty also carries over to the sports world, as team members and fans achieve psychological benefits by staying devoted to the same team, achieving better motivation and sense of identity.

But loyalty isn’t all roses. People who forgave their partner either too quickly or without receiving a proper apology found that their self-respect declined, according to research.

Does Your Boss Bug You on Weekends?
One in three employees often gets e-mail messages from his or her boss over the weekend and is expected to reply, according to new findings by Right Management, ManpowerGroup’s talent management expert.

In a survey of more than 569 employees in North America, Right Management also found that an additional one-third of respondents also said they get weekend e-mail messages from their boss “from time to time.”

Right Management specifically asked if workers were expected to respond to the e-mail from their boss, Douglas Matthews, the company’s president and COO, noted. “[W]e were not talking about broadcast e-mails or purely informational communications, but those intended for a particular person and looking for a response.”

According to Matthews, the survey findings are another indication of an increasingly 24/7 workplace.

“Everybody once thought technology would reduce the drudgery and make the workplace more efficient, Matthews said. “Sure, technology has delivered great benefits to employees, but also crosses the boundary between the workplace and the worker’s own private space. It seems one can no longer get away at all from work or responsibility.”

Workplace Prank at Legoland
Employees at the Legoland theme park in California pulled a workplace prank on their general manager this week by switching his Volvo with a full-size model made of LEGO™ bricks.

On Monday, one of the employees snatched the boss’s car keys, moved his car and returned the keys, at which point a forklift transported the LEGO vehicle to the manager’s usual parking space, the Huffington Post explains.

The “toy” model version of the car — a replica of a Volvo XC90 — contained 201,076 LEGO bricks and weighed 2,934 lbs., the Los Angeles Times explains.

This isn’t the first time the Legoland staff has pulled a prank on a co-worker involving their bricks. Employees turned one manager’s office into an igloo and he had to crawl through the gap to get into his cubicle,” NBC San Diego says.

Cheers.