Caring for your people (2)

Welcome back and welcome to the weekend. I trust your week did not rush past without any significance. We started this topic last week. Where do we start with caring for our people?

Employee well-being is defined as the overall mental, physical, emotional, and economic health of your employees. It’s influenced by various factors such as their relationships with co-workers, their decisions, and the tools and resources they have access to.

Back to where to start. Begin with understanding what your existing culture is really made of and how this affects your workforce on any given day. Do you support employees when they fail? What do you really measure during employee performance reviews, results or effort?

Discuss with executives and managers about what type of culture you want to create going forward and which parts you would be willing to change. Then, turn to your people for feedback. Conduct a thorough research to understand employee needs and figure out how you can meet them.

You could ask questions which include, how certain benefits contributed to your work-life balance? Have you ever felt overly stressed at your current position and why? What measures/benefits would you suggest to improve well-being at work? Which one of our current benefits do you need the least?

These survey results will show you the next steps. For instance, you may find out that it’s more important for your employees to have access to stress-management services rather than in-house breakfast or maybe even vice versa. A possible adjustment would be to provide personal counselling sessions and put a pause to breakfast for a while.

Many factors that hinder employee well-being might not exist if managers invested in building effective leadership skills. Understanding your employees’ boundaries and work habits and respecting their unique needs and motives will help you provide the best opportunities to them. Ask managers to make the most of one-on-one meetings and practice providing constructive feedback to employees.

Praising employees for results is reasonable, as numbers are crucial to keep a business at the top. However, focusing solely on results is counter intuitive. In an exclusively target-driven and competitive environment, it’s easy to neglect the values of respect and personal development.

Instead of simply saying kudos to employees for their results, praise them for their effort, their patience and resilience as well. Prove to them that their growth is your number-one priority and that you value them first as humans and second as performers. They’ll feel safer this way, ready to fail, learn and succeed against all odds. In fact, begin each week by letting your workforce understand their value by sharing a motivational quote that will reinforce this fact.

Read also: Caring for your people (1)

Another good practice would be to revisit the narrative of your workplace culture and see if you need to change anything. For example, how is your company’s mission and vision portrayed? What is your tone when communicating with employees? Is your slogan caring and inspiring? Do you even have a slogan? If it includes words such as “share,” “care,” “respect” and “grow,” you are winning.

Many companies take reactive rather than proactive measures to support employees suffering from exhaustion and fatigue. This is not the way to go because prevention is better than cure and a stitch in time saves nine.

For instance, if you invest in mental health services early on, you’ll see fewer cases of employee burnout, absenteeism, and so on. Nurture a well-being-friendly approach before your employees and business are at risk to avoid irreversible consequences such as increased employee turnover. When employees feel fatigued and stressed, they are unable to use their strengths to contribute to business growth.

To support well-being at work, build and maintain a workplace culture that makes employees feel safe, a company that feels like a second home. When it’s well thought-out and effectively implemented, you’ll see lower incidences of employee burnout and higher rates of engagement.

Creating a work culture in which employees can develop supportive relationships with their colleagues can be an essential strategy for increasing worker well-being. Research has found that such relationships at work are associated with lower psychological distress, an indicator of poor mental health.

Many factors contribute to an employee’s well-being, like a good salary, paid vacation, and a complete benefits package is undoubtedly crucial to workplace well-being. Still, there are a lot of other factors that companies should consider when attempting to build a team that will stay loyal and motivated for the long term.

This by no means is an exhausting write up about this topic. This is where you must brainstorm to find out what will work best for your organisation. This is where industries should collaborate. This is not only about the organisation. It could be your contribution to the well-being of the family unit and the country at large.