Touch-points:

Employee wellbeing is big news right now, and rightly so. The global pandemic has highlighted the benefits of a more all-encompassing approach to wellbeing.  Through greater awareness and normalisation of wellbeing and mental health in workplaces across our nation, the worldwide pandemic has ushered in a more comprehensive approach to wellbeing for businesses.

Although burnout and weariness aren’t going away, businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the need to look after their employees’ needs and wellness, taking steps to identify it early and maintain a positive culture.

Our People and Culture Team are consistently being called upon to improve company culture and consult to a number of organisations with wellbeing at the fore. We thought it was a great time to share our wellbeing strategy and the journey we are on to connect, collaborate, create and care.

We know it’s important to continue the conversation beyond simply offering our folks EAP services and physical health monitoring. Which is why we look to Sir Mason Duries holistic wellbeing model: Te Whare Tapa Whā  to build a culture of holistic health and wellbeing.  This considers a number of factors including Te Taha Wairua (Spiritual), Te Taha Hinengaro (Mental & Emotional), Te Taha Tinana (Physical), and Te Taha Whanau (Family & Social) of our people, because when all these things are in balance, we thrive. When one or more of these is out of balance our wellbeing is impacted.

You may think of workplace wellness initiatives around free eye exams, medical evaluations, gym membership discounts, walk-to-work programmes, and even a fruit bowl in the workplace. These are all amazing initiatives and help deliver employee satisfaction but with a number of people working from home and also these initiatives just being there they tend to be forgotten and/or blend into the everyday wall-paper of the added benefits from your workplace. For us to really make a bigger impact across our team and ensure we were inspiring we looked to the 4 c’s Connect, Collaborate, Create and Care, we wanted everyone to take a role in their own well-being but also each others.

Our initial start was to consider how we would create our wellbeing strategy:

Considerations for creating our own Wellbeing Strategy

  • Put an emphasis on proactive and preventative wellbeing support to increase our employee resilience.
  • Get our people involved, collaborate to create and nurture the value of wellbeing in our business.
  • Promote healthy lifestyle behaviours, research and science-based wellbeing activities that are shown to promote general health and wellbeing, and get our people involved to build and cultivate the value of wellbeing at our business.
  • Make investments in long-term wellbeing initiatives (i.e. over several years).
  • Provide opportunities for our people to engage in health and wellbeing activities at work, at home and in their communities.

How did we do it?

In November 2021  we connected off-site for our Annual Health and Wellbeing Workshop and as a team listened to a variety of speakers as well as participated in some learning exercises that we could implement at home and at work. With the exercises and off-site session it gave us all some simple tools to incorporate into our daily lives. Following this session the whole team were involved in collaborating and creating our Wellbeing Strategy and Health and Wellbeing Policy.

Connecting as a team, collaborating and creating our strategy and our 12 month wellbeing calendar with monthly activities driven by a member of the team each month allows us to all to take charge and drive the wellbeing and health for the entire team with the impetus being shared around and each member adopting a key activity that they are passionate about.

Check our evolving activity planner below:

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In addition to this, the Wellbeing Strategy inspired the following initiatives:

Office Love Project: A group of volunteers dedicated to bringing the office back to life, going so far as to create a mood board (thanks to the expertise of the Brand and Marketing space in bringing ideas to life more visually) that would help everyone take more ownership of making the office a beautiful place to work. We did a reshuffle, a tidy up, added plants and have several more initiatives that the team are working on and will continue to work on in this space.

Employee Recognition: We have a monthly recognition programme whereby employees are recognised by other employees for their demonstration of, and commitment to, our values. We call it the ‘Wheel of Gold’ and each prize on the wheel is up to the value of $100. We updated the prize options to better reflect the Te Wha Tapa Wha model.

Support a Charity: Whilst we have supported charitable organisations and causes in the past, it has been rather sporadic. We decided that we wanted to align ourselves more longer-term with a charity. Knowing that we are a team of big-hearted people who all contribute to the community in our own ways, we wanted to give our people the opportunity to present a pitch to the rest of the team on a charity that they were passionate about, their chosen charity. Safe to say there wasn’t a dry eye in the room! We are excited to be working away behind the scenes on bringing this to life. Watch this space…

All great stuff, right…how will you know that your wellbeing strategy is genuinely effective?

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so getting employee feedback can help you gauge how employees feel about your wellbeing plan and spot trends that can help you make it even better. Work together, then work together some more.

Additionally, as your workplace wellbeing programmes need to be tailored to your business and employees, it is important to monitor how various initiatives are received both individually and collectively. Check in with your people, what are they enjoying and what are they not.

The focus on nurturing employee well-being and mental health is critical to developing workplace resilience and how businesses manage this over the coming years could significantly impact their retention (helping to stem the great resignation) and productivity (more engaged employees).

Keep going! Keep measuring, listening, and improving, and never stop.

Contact one of our People and Culture Consultants if you need some professional advice on your workplace wellness strategy or initiatives, we would love to help.

06 759 7044 or charlotte@strategycollective.co.nz

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