Employee Wellbeing is not a big shiny initiative you need to implement, the most effective way to develop a really healthy culture is to embed it at the heart of everything you do. This is actually much easier to do than you might think at first.
Here are some top ideas from Founders of Monkey Puzzle Karen Meager and John McLachlan:
1) Banish a long hours culture.
We need to lose the long hours culture that still exists in some industries. Pulling in a late one occasionally for a special project is one thing; a culture where people are afraid to leave on time is another. If a company has a long hours culture they basically have a time management and productivity issue. People working in long hours cultures have more Cortisol (stress hormone) running around their body than is good for them, it’s like trying to outlive a famine that will never end and results in exhaustion, mental health problems and low productivity. It’s no wonder that people are uninspired and burn out early in some careers. It’s not hard to begin to bring working hour balance into your culture, here are some strategies organisations have used successfully:
- Focus on tangible deliverables and outcomes as a source of employee performance measurement.
- Avoid linking working late to praise or reward.
- Train people to manage their time well and have a good work life balance.
- Treat consistent working late as a problem and offer the person help with their workload.
- Tell leaders and managers to avoid sending e mails after work time, if they want to work late they can time the e mails to send the next morning.
Read the full guide on Employee Wellbeing here.
2) Develop your Leaders.
If you want employees to be well and happy in their work then the first place to look is at Leadership. A recent CMI study concluded that £39bn were lost in business each year in the UK because of bad leadership. This is the cost of staff being sick, staff turnover, bad management as well as tribunals and recruitment costs. Good leadership is not something we all strive for, it’s something we must have for businesses to be healthy and successful. It’s not about a big expensive leadership training initiative either, providing good basic training and providing leaders and future leaders with an opportunity to develop themselves through coaching, for example, is enough. If you have well balanced, clear thinking leaders your people will be healthier, more engaged and more productive.
Read the first chapter from Karen & John’s first book Real Leaders for the Real World for FREE. Click here to download it instantly.
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