A holistic approach to workplace wellbeing

Physical wellbeing

“You do not have to be ill to get better”

If you want to support your employees’ physical wellbeing, consider what is needed to keep all your staff physically healthy and energized. Occupational health professionals are moving from the historic absence of disease approach driven by local law and legislation towards overall health promotion and energy management including policies around healthy nutrition, physical activity, smoking, alcohol and drug abuse.
In doing so, the biggest challenge is to get those that are not naturally active nor enthusiastic about healthy eating to move more and eat veggies. And that is one of the hardest things to do. It is easy to offer a gym membership for all, however data shows that you often impact those that are already active. In nudging all employees into healthy behaviors start making the healthy choice the easy choice. Things to think of if you are serious about this are:

• How to strategically offer and change your canteen offering
• Reorganizing your buildings to foster frequent movement
• Allow recovery breaks during the workday, make it a company habit
• Set up and implement healthy meeting guidelines
• Launch policies on alcohol and drug abuse
• Support smoker health programs
• Organize step challenges
• Facilitate sport, movement, and relaxation during work hours

Emotional wellbeing

Emotional wellbeing is closely interlinked with mental and social wellbeing. When talking about emotional wellbeing what we mean is that your employees experience positive emotions at work the majority of the time.

Some of the biggest positivity derailers for employees are non-effective and hierarchical work processes, non-effective social work relations and lack of recognition and trust.
Here are key areas you should look at as a company if you want to boost positivity:

• Simplify the bureaucratic struggle. Shape your organization toward effective work processes.
• Provide autonomy and equip so they can do their job. Assign them with an outcome (what) instead of the steps and procedures (how).
• Foster supportive and non-judgmental social relations at work .
• Make work enjoyable! Provide opportunities to have fun and release the tension, be it a game rooms, social activities… Laughter creates positive emotions; it is also a way to bond while also releasing tension.
• Welcome emotions at the workplace, both the positive and the more survival-based emotions. Give permission to feel. As humans, have a long history of disregarding our feelings. But hey, we are only human after all!

Career wellbeing

Do you still feel you like your job and can develop yourself? Are your talents used and valued?

The more employees can align their job content to their individual aspirations and their personal definition of career success, the more they will be happy, healthy, and productive [4]. Careers today are very dynamic and the contemporary careers playing field is rapidly changing, having a huge impact on many of your employees. This challenges the way companies have historically managed and viewed careers. As skills change rapidly, so do our organizational need for talent, and where we struggle to find the right people on one hand we have employees in jobs that do not match their skills anymore. Career Wellbeing talks about the best fit between the needs of the employer and the wishes of the employee from a long-term perspective. How do you start to move the needle here?

• Acknowledge that we are in a huge mental paradigm shift in our thinking about careers. Start conversations around this to create a common language and understanding.
• Stop managing careers, instead start facilitating them. Help your staff understand what they aspire to and how do they define career success. Once they know, get them trained on career skills so they start driving their own careers and are motivated to take ownership of their development.
• Design jobs that allow job crafting and development. Allow employees to craft their jobs to focus on what drives most energy and where they feel successful or want to develop.
• Allow individual work arrangements. We all differ, and the “everyone is the same and should be treated the same” belongs to the previous century. Just as health and wellbeing are personal, our career values, or job motivators and energy givers/drainers are as well. Allow for differentiation and build a good rationale for why you do so.

Purpose and business wellbeing

Last but not least, an important part of wellbeing is linked to purpose and values. There are 2 sides of a mutual coin called success: a personal and a company’s side. Wellbeing here comes down to the alignment on both sides.

For organizations, a big piece here is culture and practice what you preach.

For individuals, they need to feel engaged by the company’s wider mission –Why do we exist and what does it mean to work here?, feel that they belong and can contribute –how and why am I part of this?, and develop awareness about how their personal purpose is aligning with the overall business goals and missions.

So what should you consider here?

• Firstly, think about how do you bring your employees along on your company’s journey and how do they embody the values and the mission of your company? What behaviors align with your company’s values and purpose and how do you model these within the organization?
• Practice what you preach and stay aligned. Ask yourself what is rewarded and recognized within your organization and how is that aligned with your mission and your values? How aligned is what you actually do to what you communicate? If you say you care, how do your company’s behaviors model this, and what KPIs monitor it? Greenwashing is becoming less and less acceptable especially to the younger generations and is a sign of a lack of organizational wellbeing.
• Help your employees find their own personal life mission and support them to become their best selves. Let them make connections between their personal purpose and the organization’s purpose, and where there are misalignments, help your employees process this.