Don't hesitate to get creative when building wellness habits with your team
Whether your team works from home or in an office, whether you are a business of one or one hundred and one, taking care and making time for wellness is becoming increasingly important. Stress levels because of what’s going on in the world around us are increasing. You may not even be aware of the outside stress someone is under.
Making sure you create an atmosphere where wellness is emphasized and made a priority is critical to successful performance. Stressed out employees make more mistakes and have difficulty making good decisions.
Host a Walking Zoom
If your team is working from home, encourage them to get outdoors for your next meeting. Ideally, they could walk and get some exercise with you but if not, encourage them to take the meeting outside (or if weather doesn’t agree, encourage them to try a new spot away from their desk). A change of scenery can be a pleasant uplifter and spur on conversation before the call.
Host a Sleep Challenge
Create your own 8-hour sleep challenge where you ask employees to track their sleep and challenge them to get 8 hours of rest every night. Deduct points if someone sends a late-night email. Reward them at the end for those who improved their sleep.
Most people have a competitive side. If a sleep challenge doesn’t work for your group, challenge them to something else like a movement challenge to become more active.
Bring in a Stress Reliever
Whether you bring in a masseuse or someone to talk about making mental health a priority, a professional stress reliever is a good idea to help ensure everyone has coping mechanisms in place when things get stressful, or they feel themselves getting overwhelmed.
Set Expectations
If your employees face the public, they could be under a lot of stress and may not always be treated well. Make sure they know you support them. While you never want a customer to be treated poorly by an employee, the same should be true for your staff. Make sure they know that while customers should be treated with respect, that is a two-way street.
Clarify Sick Days and Establish Protocols
Many people come to work when they are ill because they either need the money or they don’t feel like anyone is doing their job when they are out. The thought of the pile of work awaiting them when they return makes taking time off seem like a burden and stress inducer.
You can talk about wellness all day but if someone who is sick feels unable to take time off to recover, you run the risk of increased stress prolonging recovery, not to mention their contagion infecting your team. Try to ensure there are backup plans in place for the most pressing part of everyone’s role. If someone comes in with an obvious illness, send them home. Don’t make them feel like their health is secondary to the work. That won’t end well for either of you.
If you want your team to be more productive, you need to make wellness a priority. This does not happen purely by saying it’s true. You must lead through example in showing wellness is also a priority to you as well.