May is National Employee Health and Fitness Month! It is time to shift our focus from adapting to new healthcare regulation to evaluating the actual health and well being of our companies and their workforces. Healthy people will not thrive in an organization that doesn’t have a wellness mindset. Responsibility for a company’s health and wellness is equally up to the employer and employee. In 2015, the key to employee engagement is corporate health and wellness. In preparation for National Employee Health and Fitness Month, individuals and companies need to create a plan to look inward at their own health and the health of their organizations.
The environment you enter into when you go to work is essential to your motivation and work output. Creating a culture where people can flourish is key to their feeling nurtured, valued and respected. This is the foundation needed in order for them to prosper and fully engage in their work.
There are three key areas to survey when looking at employee engagement: retention, absenteeism and presenteeism. The biggest threat to employers in the short-term is turnover, presenteeism and attitude. You want those who are showing up to be fully attentive and present while they are in the office, not playing on their phone, escaping mindlessly into social media or becoming negative or ambivalent in their attitude towards their work. Companies that have to recruit, rehire, retrain and refit will see costs rise six times on average. However, this is proven to be less harmful than the damage that is done with disengaged employees.
Some examples of healthy companies I like are The Container Store, Google, Liquid Paper and Kaiser Permanente. The Container Store is a perennial ‘Best Companies to Work For' recipient. They provide financial incentives for their employees who are investing in their own health and wellness. Google incorporates activities to make a longer workday possible and enhances their employees’ experience by providing onsite workout centers and cafés as well as creativity lounges. Dallas entrepreneur and philanthropist Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper in the 50s, was a trailblazer. She started a private elementary school with daycare until six in the evening for single and working parents. She also built a prayer and meditation room in her factory where workers would have 20 minutes per day to take a break and read or worship or just enjoy the quiet beauty of the sculpture and circular cushioned bench seating in the room. Kaiser Permanente incorporates 10-minute physical fitness breaks during the workday.
I recently worked with a mid-size banking institute and they appropriated part of a room at the back part of their kitchen where employees could relax and study in a modern setting. You can create a healthy environment on any budget.
What can we do? Try the following:
For Individuals
- Meditate: Engage in a good solid 20 minutes twice a day
- Practice mindfulness: Concentrate on specific things – laser focus – there are practitioners available in most communities who can teach this skill.
- Exercise: Go for a walk or jog during lunch or before or after work. Research what public spaces are near your office.
- Concentrate on being present for things in your life: Deep-breathing exercises at your desk can help with this.
- Invest in a business or health coach: This person can help the individual identify their trap doors and show them what stress does to them and where it’s showing up in their career and job.
For Employers
- Incorporate an on-site fitness center or provide employees gym memberships coupons, design the workday with breaks and workout time.
- Focus on organic nutrients: There are e-commerce companies who bring fruit to workplaces. For example, the company Fruit Share brings fresh fruit biweekly to offices and offers an employee wellness program. Create a café with healthy snacks at the office.
- Do some culture work: Shift the environment so it appreciates the talent it has which may entail tweaking some activities during the day. It really is about if you are living what you say. Go over, establish or reinforce the company’s Core Values or create new ones that can drive your organizational goals. You want to have the leaders actually act and react to support those values in place. For your senior management ask, “Is our leadership in line with our values and what we want our culture to reflect?” “Are their actions, reactions and behaviors in congruence with these values?” “Does our organizational culture support the accomplishment of our yearly strategic goals so that our leaders and our organization can be successful?”
- Take an online quiz as individuals and as an organization: Lumina Life is an organizational health and wellness assessment from Lumina Learning. Each employee completes the assessment, which addresses their personal, mental, emotional and physical factors including how they handle stress and pressure. In the second half of the assessment, the employee addresses similar factors regarding their organization. Certified Lumina Learning Practitioners work externally with organizations to deliver and analyze the results, so all responses are kept confidential. The executive team is then presented with an executive overview of the analysis providing them with valuable information on how their employees view the culture and wellness of the overall organization.
