When people talk about Wellness Initiatives, it often brings to mind physical challenges, but wellness encompasses so much more. It’s important to start by expanding our definition of wellness to be inclusive of mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. It’s more important than ever to focus on wellness initiatives, as evidenced in the 2022 Gartner HR Trends. One of the top five trends reported is around the erosion of workforce health. Our people are experiencing chronic stress, burnout, anxiety, and more after two years of a pandemic interrupting their personal lives and professional work environment.
This month we talked to Jackie Suarez, Senior People Operations Consultant at Reverb, and Angela Klein, Co-Founder at The Well Experiment, about their experiences creating wellness initiatives, common mistakes with wellness programs, and some best practices for creating successful wellness initiatives within companies. Here are our key takeaways:
There’s not a one size fits all approach to wellness initiatives.
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- It’s important to fit your initiatives to your culture. What’s successful in one organization might not be successful in yours.
- Survey your people and ask what they want. It’s a common mistake to make assumptions on what people want and implement costly solutions that don’t meet the need. It’s best to get their feedback.
Leadership involvement and ownership are key to the success of your initiatives.
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- Seeing leaders participate and talk about the initiatives creates a safe space for people to be well and not feel guilt for prioritizing themselves.
- Support your managers with training on how to use the tools available to support their teams and themselves.
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Adoption takes time. Have patience with your programs.
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- Start small with your offerings and gain momentum. It’s a common mistake to start too big and not focus on the success and measurement of each offering.
- You need to continuously communicate and encourage the offerings. It takes several times of communicating before someone internalizes the information and has time to participate.
- Set up a process to measure the success of your programs through your engagement or benefits survey to ensure they are meeting the needs. Use that data to refine your programs and get buy-in to offer more.
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Here are some creative wellness initiatives that Jackie and Angela shared that you could implement outside of providing access to digital tools like TalkSpace, Headspace, or Calm. Remember, movement and nutrition are deeply personal. People will approach these differently based on their own abilities and experiences, so it is important to create a safe forum where people can share openly about their abilities, preferences, and triggers when it comes to wellness so that your initiatives are as inclusive as possible.
Collective Breaks
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- Having a shared time off/away from your desk can help not feel guilt for stepping away or anxious of what they might be missing.
- This could be a collective lunch break, hour away, or even 4 day work week which research has reported lower burnout and higher wellbeing among employees.
Food to Fight Stress
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- On a weekly or monthly basis, share science based information on food that can help reduce stress and ask team members to share their creations using that ingredient.
- This creates community and connection among your team and promotes stress reduction. l
Conquer Events
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- Conquer events are virtual challenges that you can join and contribute to as a team. We love these because you can track any movement, so no matter your ability, there is something for everyone. You might be logging your run miles, while someone else could be logging their yoga practice and everyone will contribute to your team’s success (plus, you’ll all get medals!)
Mindful Moments
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- Start meetings with some 4-7-8 breathing, or encourage your team to share a few gratitudes before launching into the meeting agenda.
Need help with your company’s wellness initiatives? Reach out to info@reverbpeople.com, we’d love to help!
