Top ten factors when implementing a robust wellness strategy.

Have you identified that you are a busy CEO or owner/founder, who also understands that your employees are your best asset?  I’m assuming you know that their wellness is paramount to helping build a productive, resilient company and you want to take some positive steps towards putting in place something that is easy to implement but most importantly that works.

When working with founders and CEO’s my experience has shown me that one of the top challenges after attracting customers is how to increase productivity of your employee’s or even yourself. You don’t always have time to do the things that you know are important because you’re too busy running your business; marketing, attracting customers, keeping up with legislation and just fighting fires sometimes.

You know only too well that it isn’t always possible to do those bigger projects like integrate a wellness strategy. But especially in the Covid pandemic you will have recognised how important this is. Studies from January 2020 show online searches for “burnout symptoms” have increased by 24% that year alone, reaching 12,100 searches in one month.

“By August 2020, 47% of managers raised concerns that employee burnout was highly likely to rise due to stress associated with the pandemic.

However, many managers and team leaders are struggling with managing changing business objectives, distributed workforces, and absenteeism together with their own personal challenges with the new ways of working.

Especially at times when the business is under threat for any reason or when there are other external challenges, it’s even more essential to have a healthy, happy, resilient team around you who can continue to be productive, focused and calm rather than stressed, distracted or absent due to stress related sickness.

You probably know, or you may have read the large-scale Deloitte research which demonstrates that for every £1 a company invests on wellness, there’s a £5 return, and this is significant whatever the size of your organisation.  Research also shows us that presenteeism (when your people are showing up, but totally disengaged and unproductive or worse, disruptive), costs the economy something in the region of £15 billion a year, so it’s highly likely having an impact somewhere in your business as well.

So those things are really important, and when you look the investment that you want to make, you can see how your investment might be well-placed if you do invest in wellness. But it’s a big decision when you’re running a business, and you may not have the time, you may not have the funds. So in this article, as I promised, I am going to give you 10 free tips that you can start implementing today in your business.

Now I know that you are busy, so this will not be pages and pages of dry facts. There won’t be any kind of salesy things at the end or me telling you how well I have done in my business I know that you want genuine helpful content to help you apply to your business starting from today.

So, what I’m going to do is give you a snippet of top 10 tips that you can apply, these are from my SHINE Wellness program. This is a program you can access either online or face to face in your organisation that helps CEOs, and their employees develop a culture of health in under 10 hours. Employees have accountability, it teaches foundations to self-coach, comes with useful worksheets, tools, insights, and guidance. The full programme covers over 25 strategies and ideas on wellness, broken down into five key health areas. And so through the program whether you decide to take the training option or a combination of training and coaching you can still apply these learnings. With the addition of the coaching element if you decide that this personal and tailored approach is right for you then the strategies are directly applicable to your company, to your employees, to your situation.

But the 10 things that I’m going to share with you today can be applied to any organization. They are simple to do meaning you don’t need to have a huge amount of wellness coaching experience, but it’s necessary that you do know that these concepts are well-researched processes that actually work, they have been trialled in larger organizations with great success. Importantly there are ways in which you can generate a wellness strategy that works, and ways in which you can do a wellness strategy that that doesn’t work. We know now from the experts that doing the odd charity mud run is not something that is going to be sustainable. We need to be developing a culture of wellness embedded within the organization, and this is basically what I’ll cover in this article.

1. Your mission and company values.

So as an organization, you may well have a mission statement or a vision, and you possibly have values as well, and these are what’s important to the organization, what’s going to drive the organization forward. Possibly you’re at a stage where you might have had a values session and came up with five key values. Well, if one of these isn’t around health, that it is your value as an organization to place a huge emphasis on the health of your team members, of your people, then it’s probably not going to trickle down into the employees. So having health and wellness as one of the values and outlining in some way the behaviours that fulfilling this value is the first thing that you can do. This helps embed this into the culture and helps to start building that culture of wellness. So, to do this look at the policies, the operations, the pay and reward, the company benefits. Do they reflect ‘health’. What behaviours do you and the senior team role model that say, ‘I take health seriously’? Do you avoid breaks, take lunch at your desk and answer emails from your bed at night? Or do you advocate walking meetings, regular ‘meeting free/thinking days’, talk about your exercise regime and how it increases your energy levels and turn off your devices when your meant to be ‘off’. Remember the culture is ‘the way we do things round here’.

2. Research what your employees really want, and what they really need.

As an example, one company that I worked with recently, through the COVID pandemic, identified that as they have about 30, mostly female employees with school aged children, so to have flexible homeworking was impactful for their wellness. In particular for their mental wellness, for their levels of stress. So, this organisation introduced this and said, absolutely yes, whenever you need to you can work from home. So, they introduced a very flexible homeworking system, which hasn’t happened in lots of other companies. In other organisations this might not work. But the key piece here is that it was identified that because predominantly they were female and they had children, this was going to really work for them.

Another company that I worked with were mainly young men. They were quite high energy, quite competitive just to note I’m not generalising about men but just describing the personalities of this group of employees). What really worked for them, what they really wanted, was a kind of competitive boxercise class delivered online. They designed a leader board and they got competitive and had a lot of fun when learning the boxing routines, it kept them fit, took their minds off work for a while as they got into a flow state, and it developed the relationships and trust. So just think about what they really want. Not everyone wants a lunchtime yoga session, so ask them, do a simple quick survey, or ask your HR person or wellness team to do some research.

3. What do they value?

Similarly, to what they want is what they value. Identify your employees value system, and how that aligns with their role and their rewards and their responsibility. So, what’s important, for example, for 24-year-old Becky is not going to be the same when she’s 27, her values are going to be changing. What’s important for 54-year-old Mike is not going to be the same when he’s 59. So have a look at that, check in with your people all the time. What’s important to them? What do they really value? More flexible working, a different pension scheme, help with childcare?

4. Learn how to recognize stress in your employees.

This is a key point. You may know about the Yerkes-Dodson performance curve, and this is as the pressure goes up, so does the performance, but notably it does reach a peak and it doesn’t carry on going. So, recognize when your employees are going over the top of that curve. You need to look out for things like changes in their behaviour, so maybe they were quite chatty and recently a few people note how quiet they’ve become. Maybe they were very active and now they’re not very active, or vice versa. Possibly small mistakes are being made, more conflicts are happening, a person is taking a few more sick days. So, looking for changes, just checking in with them now, and then, asking that question at the beginning of a call, “How are you? No, how are you really?” And just checking in, recognizing those stress signals.

Equally important to stress is recognizing the other end of that spectrum. If they are in what we call ‘rust out’ phase, they are not being pressured enough, or engaged enough, or challenged enough, or stretched enough, and therefore they’re not really getting into that fantastic kind of flow mindset that we talk about. So, there’s burnout, or rust out, learn to recognize the signals for both of those.

5. Help them to belong

Make them part of something greater. Not just make them feel but help them recognise HOW they are part of something greater and understand their individual impact on the mission and how they do belong. So, for example where possible involve them in the business decisions, in the objectives, ask them. They could help produce your culture deck for example or run a survey on what benefits employees wanted or have a day a month for ‘downing tools and creating new business ideas’.

The great Aristotle quote “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” applies here – how can you help them understand that they do belong.

This connectivity to the mission is not only good for wellness, for resilience, for engagement but directly for productivity. So, get them involved, and help them to belong. From that famous example, the guy sweeping the floor at the launchpad was helping to put a man on the moon.

6. Incorporate all types of wellness and health in your strategy.

Also, in your objectives. This isn’t just about putting a fruit bowl out, or encouraging running at lunchtime, which would cover the physical aspects of health. You need to be thinking about physical, emotional health, social health, occupational health, and spiritual health, whatever that means for your team and for your organization. So, covering those five areas is really, important. It’s not just doing the odd muddy obstacle run, and in fact we now know that these kinds of one-time only wellness activities really don’t work. A recent Harvard business review article showed that potentially they may do more harm than good. So, when you’re doing this, you need to be thinking about how these strategies are going to be consistent. Who’s going to be accountable for them, how are they going to grow and continue? And having them in your mission, as I said, at the beginning, is one of the things that will really help that.

7. Make wellness ‘cool’.

Make it cool, make it acceptable, make it a normal part of the day and lead by example. Make it absolutely fine for somebody to be walking around in their gym kit before they go for their run, let people know that it’s fine to have a flexible lunch break.  Make it a completely normal part of the day. If you can put showers in, have a company bike or two for people to use in their break or have standing desks just make it really, normal. Wellness is normal. If people want to go off and meditate, is there quiet space that they can do that? And make it very acceptable to go and do that in the day. Key here is leading by example. If the senior management team never take a lunch break and always work late, then this will start to become part of the culture so ensure that ‘well-ness’ becomes something that ‘we do round here’.

8. Good communication.

So, this is really, important for wellness. So much communication is lost digitally if we’re just emailing, or we’re just texting on a WhatsApp or a Slack group, or something like that. So much communication is misunderstanding, and it can cause upset, unrest, resentment and mistakes or delays. There’s lots of tools that you can use to understand the different communication types of your team. An idea is to use one of those tools; Facet5, DISC, Insights, Myers Briggs for example, or just make sure that you’re speaking each other’s ‘language’, and that you try and adjust to other’s language. If somebody is very visual and very energetic, then adjust to that. If they are much more of a green or a blue type, then adjust to that as well; so, have a slower tone, give them more time to process. Focus on how you adjust to their communication style. Much of our software now has an accessibility checker for neurodiversity, use it! Have a look at introducing Equality and Impact Assessments so that you aren’t discriminating.

9. Invest in management skills.

Bad management is one of the biggest reasons for people leaving companies. There’s also a piece of research that shows that bad management is also one of the biggest causes of bad backs, and that’s obviously to do with stress! Bad management can cause conflicts, toxic relationships, misunderstandings, projects not running to time absenteeism and presenteeism. The assumption is frequent made that if a person is good at their specialist job, then they will automatically be good at managing a team and usually this is an entirely different skill set. Whilst an employee may want to progress making her or him a manger isn’t necessarily the best way to do this. Your people being well mentally and emotionally will be impacted by their manager so ensure your managers are well trained and understand the different roles they need to take to keep their teams well.

10. Develop your teams, or your people’s, emotional intelligence.

Now emotional intelligence, it isn’t something that we are born with having set in stone, like our IQ, our emotional intelligence, or our EQ, can be developed, can be increased, and this is something that you can help to do. Help your employees to develop their skill of managing their emotions, understanding their beliefs and motivations, their innovation, their creativity, their resilience. Help develop their self-awareness and confidence so that they flourish and capitalise on their internal drive and strengths. We are now seeing a drive for people to have autonomy; entrepreneurial skill sets and leadership skills as standard and these come with good emotional intelligence. There are lots of great tools to help you do this from online learning platforms to webinars and workshops, find something that fits with your employees needs and your culture.

In conclusion I hope that there have been several of these tips that you can adopt in your organisation to help develop a robust wellness strategy and create a more efficient, fulfilled, productive and progressive organisation. What steps will you take and how will these benefit your organisation? Who else can you get involved with this? When will you start?

If you would like to talk more or utilise my skills and experience to support, you let’s have a chat! Stay well!