When employees feel supported, healthy and engaged, they are more likely to perform at their best.
5 ways well-being tactics can increase productivity
- Reduce Stress
- Address Mental Health Concerns
- Nurture a Positive Environment
- Meaningful Work-Life Balance
- Increase Morale
1. Reduce Stress
Stress is so subjective that of course, it is impossible to eliminate stress in the workplace. What is stress to one person is stimulation, excitement, and competition to another person. All you can do is listen to the concerns of the individuals involved and create solutions for them personally. Of course, there are some common denominators when it comes to stress reduction – the top being management style, and managers too pressed and pressurised to dedicate time to actually managing – It can be that managers just bark out instructions and deadlines. Thus, the very first tactic, to take care of an employee’s wellbeing is for managers to switch on their listening ears. It tends to be that an employee reaches an exploding point when the issue is critical rather than asking for help so looking for signs is key – working late and at all hours, anger, outbursts, impatience, stories of drinking binges, excess coffee drinking can all be tell-tell signs that someone has reached that critical busting point.
One solution is to not offer on-tap coffee – make it just a little more difficult to keep returning for another shot, or give alternatives like a caffeine-free version – of course, we all know that coffee is addictive (and not good if you are already stressed) and it impacts the adrenal glands (the glands that moderate your stress reaction) – with addiction to any drug, you reach tolerance and have to keep upping the dose to get the same hit.
2. Address Mental Health Concerns
Many companies have Mental Health Ambassadors, and identifying problems and looking for signs (many with an overlap of stress symptoms) is a key step – but, pre-identifying the overwhelm stage is to stop mental health problems from bubbling up, and becoming insurmountable in the first place – Also we need to differentiate between what might be termed emotional health issues Vs serious Mental Health Problems, that need to be addressed by a professional – whilst mental health is a term we readily adopt these days, Mental Health Problems requiring the help of a doctor, medication and intervention are not as common as our emotional health being triggered by say, the extraordinary circumstances over the last few years. It might be deemed “perfectly normal” to struggle with the various crises, both political and health-wise over the last few years, and the ramifications that has on resilience, and health, both of mind and body – so, providing help with financial education, wellbeing information, and compassionate listening to the individual concerned are essential.
Mental health is something we should all “own” by creating better structures both at a company level and a societal level, and we should take the emphasis off the individual and look at where we can improve support – huge is creating an authentic community – we can do this at a company level by encouraging sports, clubs, lunches and events around food so that your team feel part of something – we are social animals, so feeling a part of something and not a cog in the machine helps them feel supported, and in return engagement.
3. Nurture a Positive Attitude
Bringing well-being programmes back to a human scale – rather than top-down measured, and implemented – often without the people the well-being programme is meant to serve is key to nurturing a positive workplace – A familiar theme, but if people feel listened to and not ignored, employees are a lot more likely to feel positive. Looking for solutions, rather than problems is also very important –being careful not to dismiss concerns. Deliver on promises you make, and don’t make promises you can’t keep!
4. Meaningful work-life balance
Make meaningful life work balance a priority – meaningful because it is easy to bandy around the concept of work-life balance without actually putting in place the means to make it a reality – simple solutions can be getting employees to put out-of-office responses for blocks of time, so they can actually get work done, rather than filling up the day with meetings then having to do the actual work out of hours, or at weekends when it is quiet enough to concentrate.
5. Increase Morale
In difficult times, such as the one we are living in, it is easy for staff to get de-moralised – they may even have an underlying fear of retaining their job. The best we can do is make sure that you are straightforward, honest, and communicating clearly and transparently – Whilst budgets are always tight, it might be worth considering employee-centric programmes that deal with people as individuals and on a really human scale – rather than slickly corporate, introducing human to human solution, full of hope and enthusiasm and wellbeing tactics not only for you as a company to for your people as individuals
To create a meaningful, human-scale well-being programme or session, get hold of Kate who would be delighted to chat further – with nearly 25 years of experience, Kate is dedicated to empowering your workforce to find optimum health and happiness www.katecook.biz
