Why Workplace (employee) Well-being Is Important
Employees matter
Leadership, Communication and Well-being- Forget psychometrics, start with the basics! Communication baseline is measured from a point of relaxation or ease. To get an idea of a person psychometric testing should be done at baseline.
How do you know someone's baseline?
Find out if they are living day to day from a point of survival and stress or from a point of ease, confidence and comfort!
Chronic stress may indicate a baseline re-order based on the person striving chronically to meet their basic needs (these are very different from the needs we need to meet to thrive). This foundation layer really sets a tone for potential, success and contentment. We can’t think about thriving until the foundations are stable.
A few questions to ask yourself to assess the stability of your foundations and therefore the possibility of you meeting your potential, being successful, finding contentment…
Do you notice your behaviour and language change when you are:
Tired
Worn down - static- too rigid in routine
Disconnected from friends, partner, family, colleagues
You struggle to meet cost of living i.e bills, rent/mortgage/food/clothing/toiletries
Explore your baseline with my free well-being audit- to see where your stress-levels are, and what behaviours maybe a clue to you to look to make small changes in your habits somewhere.
Low mood or morale seems common place in your professional culture- why is that?
Something as simple as lack of recovery or privacy affects both our well-being and behaviour? This is not my opinion or some trendy survey finding, this was first hypothesised by Maslow as seen on his basic-needs pyramid! Psychometric tests such as Enneagram, Myres-Briggs and Disc have a focus on shadow or negative elements of the personality thanks to the works of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud- these can be very useful tools when we are not stuck in survival mode. If we are however, chronically struggling to meet those basic needs then it will affect our well-being and behaviour which means psychometric testing is measuring our personality based on behavioural characteristics around meeting basic needs which rarely reflects our true potential or capabilities.
At the end of every month I hold a workshop to explore this is more detail to help you understand how you can become more effective as a manager or leader, and show you how to start developing awareness to really help well-being in the workplace become a profitable exercise- more than just a tick in a few boxes to keep up with legislation and sell the role.
Underestimating the role sleep plays in the workplace can be disastrous
There may be employees not sleeping which will affect the work culture. Ensuring well-being as priority can ensure your culture and company reputation stays positive.
Challenge: - Keep a sleep diary for 1 week - see what happens???
Mental Health benefits of sleep
Improved problem solving skills
Improved learning
Improved creativity
Increase in mental capacity which leads to better decision making and profit-making progress.
Part of structural organisation should be looking at contract changes- could you tailor a contract to meet both the needs of the employee whilst getting the most of their skill/time? is this better that a blanket contract? Longevity, trust, loyalty, culture are all a result of conversation and commitment by all parties.
Sleep doesn't just affect performance in the short term, it can affect people's overall health and well-being in the long term,
We all underestimate the prolonged impact of chronic lack of sleep, we look for solutions to get well in Employee Assistance Programme’s (EAP's) and other benefit packages- what if the benefit package focused on preventing and catching decline? rather than being a re-active tool? how would this contribute to profit and growth options? In my experience EAP’s are still more reactionary strategies rather than productive ones. They are a nice to have rather than seen as an integral part of strategy.
Physical rest is not the same as sleep or active rest, it is important for well-being, stabalising stress and helping us be aware of how we are communicating with people in work. People who do not take active rest are more prone to stress, stress related issues and making bad decisions based on short-term thinking!
What is active rest? - The planned intention to do nothing with the aim of giving the brain and body the recovery time it needs.
If you want to test this theory, consider making a medium-long term decision when you feel are your most vulnerable, how does that look/feel?
Would it be the same decision if you were well rested? would it feel like a better decision? one you didn’t have to micro-manage?
Rest is important- how does it add or take-away from your wellness though? - As it happens research suggests that rest reduces stress which helps keeps your immune system functioning well. This is important if you work with people in closed spaces, low immunity means more spread of viral illnesses! Regular breaks throughout the day can be especially helpful here- where possible don't focus on timing the rest, focus on the quality of it. See here for academic research
Our brains need R&R just like our other muscles. Regular breaks from concentration will help improve focus and decision making.
Developing simple routines through the day to have 5 mins of recovery can reap so many benefits so science tells us, and this is easy to test and free, all it needs is encouragement and time.
Can you think of ways to get those few minutes in regularly? Can you think of some of the benefits this may give you?
Do you work in HR? What do you think you could do to help your colleagues feel safe to take regular 'brain' breaks to enhance both their well-being and performance?
Nutrition- Skipping or rushing meals - not staying hydrated not only makes you feel unwell it affects your capacity to handle stress. Now the odd occasion things happen, we get caught out, but if this is/or becoming your norm you could be setting yourself or an environment up to nurture issues. Our e-book Food Made Easy can support individuals to coach themselves in food nutrition. Food and our approach to it matters, and whilst it is personal choice whether or not we diet, follow restrictive protocols or the latest fad, our appetite or lack of it and how we feed it affects our sleep, performance and judgement.
Having appropriate information and support for your employees could be useful thing to include within an EAP as an inexpensive preventitive measure that saves you long-term as well.
Hunger, mal-nutrition and mental health go hand-in-hand. Diets and restrictive eating patterns can lead to mental health issues including not dealing with stress, not sleeping, fatigue and chronic health problems. Genetics plays a part but so does environment and how we go about meeting our basic needs. Access to good information and building healthy boundaries and cultures helps, these are all ways of communicating to your employees that they matter to you as humans as well as skilled workers, without you having to make too much effort!
art of a healthy and productive workplace culture or any culture is a healthy attitude toward meal times. Meal times are important for providing energy, reducing stress, supporting sleep and decision making, impacting the way we communicate. They can also support team-bonding!
Here’s a few general tips to improve workplace culture:
Encourage movement - just walking a bit more, a bit more time away from the desk to prevent fatigue and invigorate the body.
Find out what people enjoy doing- ensure they have time for that.
If a member of your team is struggling don't make assumptions, ask if they want need support, be genuine connection builds trusts, fake connection destroys it.
Feeling clean and having a sense of identity, affects the way we behave, feel and think.
If you consider someone in a uniformed job, the 'ritual' as-it-were of putting on a uniform for work will affect their mindset.
For non-uniformed workers the work wardrobe will affect how you think and feel and how others perceive you.
For those who wear what they like, you create an identity of who you are and how others will see you. Knowingly or otherwise.
Personal hygiene has an affect here too- consider how you treat someone in a uniformed role vs non-uniformed role. Consider how people may treat you differently dependent on your hygiene and clothes.
A sense of shelter and safety will impact our thoughts and behaviours. "The empirical results reveal that strategic decision-making abilities are affected by five factors: attention, memory, thinking, emotion, and sentiment, and whose influence mechanisms and degrees are varied." 31 Oct 2022 NIH PMCID: PMC9662586 PMID: 36389590
For people on minimum wage who may feel like they are fighting to survive daily may feel emotional stress much easier than people in more senior roles and higher-paying roles. "Just under 30% of those aged 40 and under said they were living pay cheque to pay cheque, which fell to 26% for those over 40 and 16% for those aged 60 and above. Older adults may be less likely to have dependent children and more likely to have paid off their mortgage." taken form the Independent November 2023
A good way to start your personal journey into health or to get back on track is to take stock of where you are and use that as a marker to develop a routine that both suits you and gets you heading in the right direction without turning your life upside down. If you have a position in work where you are managing, leading or developing people and their careers support here would be a great investment for both yourself and the team. Join us st the end of the month on our introductory workshop to discover more.
You can get a free copy of our well-being audit on our free resources page we also made a couple of short books to help you get started with meal planning and incorporating daily habits to help you reduce stress and stay mindful with confidence these are available in our shop here
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I hope you enjoyed this article and took some useable knowledge from it to help you understand your biology and meet your needs in relation to your goals. Please leave a comment, press the heart button and share it to help more people take control of their health, well-being and fitness.
Samantha
