Four ways to create sustainable wellness at work

Four keys steps towards building workplace wellness:

Understand your current culture

Take an all-around look at the current culture that exists within your company and asks, what are your company’s strengths and challenges? In what areas could you be doing something different to boost engagement across the entire company?

Start with a plan that is ultimately going to change not only the way you work but the way every person within that organisation also works. You need to start asking the big questions, how will your employees respond to a new culture change? Who do you anticipate will get involved? Where do you anticipate the most obstacles?

Try and make comparisons to the way you previously worked and how you would like that to entirely change – talk to employees about it, get everyone’s feedback, you can’t change the culture if you only ask a handful of employees, get a general consensus.

What is the action plan?

As a leader, what are your priorities? Each demographic have different needs, but what if you have more of one age range than another? What if you need to accommodate for those who need flexible working due to children commitments, but other employees without children also want the ability to work flexibly? Identify your specific business commitments and priorities.

Overcoming obstacles

As mentioned previously, consider what are the challenges in your workplace? There are endless options but these are some of the more regularly mentioned challenges; employee attitude, engagement, cultural, physical, or even geographical difficulties – but what if you could come up with solutions for all of these barriers?

To jump over a barrier, identify them and commit to finding solutions. If you consider the well-being of your employees, food is a huge topic. How can you make healthy food more accessible? Invest in buying healthy food, make it accessible for employees not only encouraging a social workplace but also actively encouraging healthy eating.

Another key area of workplace wellbeing is preventing sedentary work, one barrier may be employees do not feel they have the workload flexibility and management’s support to take short mid-day breaks. Empower your people to feel happy and secure at work.

Commit to a culture of wellness

How can companies better promote wellness through targeted policies? What are managers and leaders doing to encourage staff to use available wellness opportunities? Examples include sufficient work-release for exercise classes or health programming. Could break-time or scheduling be restructured to allow staff more flexibility to get involved?

Emily Sexton-Brown

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