Companies have realized the profound positive effects when employee happiness elevates. Let's dive into how wellness improves not only happiness but also business and work. With this knowledge, you can recognize and promote elements of wellness that improve your organization's overall happiness and health as a professional or manager at work.
Wellness is a term that's gained much traction and notoriety in the past couple of decades. Traditionally, wellness recognizes the physical aspect, which is physical activity, nutrition, and biometrics (blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar).
The conventional advice to maintain physical wellness is to eat healthily and exercise consistently. Although people quickly learned that working out and eating healthy isn't always enough to improve one's wellness.
Wellness expands far past only physical wellness as its definition has grown to encompass more components. More components outside of physical wellness contribute to one's overall happiness – people now recognize the need for additional mental/emotional, social, environmental, and financial components.
In recent years, the workplace has made significant strides in offering employees services in each of these five areas. Here will I help you understand why and how a happy employee is much more productive.
Why Wellness in the Workplace?
Besides the obvious of physical wellness, mental/emotional, social, environmental, and financial are critical components that all play a role in one's happiness. Therefore, workplaces should include services that help employees in these different elements.
In today's current age, many vendors offer counseling to assist employees. These services provided at work provide a tremendous value proposition for the employer to help retain employees and get the most out of them.
How Does Wellness in the Workplace Improve Your Business and Happiness?
Staying active through exercise and movement and eating healthy are significant physical steps to help reduce stress. Work can become very stressful, and the harmful effects of unrelenting stress have detrimental effects on our emotional health.
Social wellness is overlooked. Humans are social beings, and spending time with coworkers and maintaining relationships with our family and peers is extremely valuable for our happiness.
Environmental wellness considers the more significant role we play in keeping our community and the planet healthy by giving back. The world has given us so much, so giving back is essential and feels gratifying.
Lastly, having support financially and mentally at work helps improve happiness and reduce stress as finances are the most common stressor in the U.S.
What is Included in a Company Wellness Program?
A well-rounded wellness program in the workplace should have the following things
- Access to workout equipment or a stipend to spend on fitness-related equipment
- Rewards for healthy biometrics
- Bodyweight
- Blood pressure
- Blood sugar
- Cholesterol
- Access to a financial expert
- Access to a mental health professional
- Company organized parties, celebrations, off-sites, and cross-department gatherings.
- Community engagement, improvement, and outreach
- Positive change within the community
Have any suggestions for fantastic workplace wellness programs? Please send them our way!
What Does Wellness at Work Mean?
Wellness means something different to everyone’s work-life balance. I like to describe wellness as the process and act of healthy habits and actions. So, instead of focusing on your work result, I invite you to try and focus on the process. The classic expression of "give a person a fish, they eat for a day, teach a person to fish, they eat for a lifetime" reigns true.
Process-Focused Over Results-Focused Work-Life Wellness
So often in our health, we become results-focused, meaning the end goal becomes the only focus. While goals are necessary, it is only part of the equation.
A roadmap is needed to help you reach your goals which shifts the focus to the process. For example, if the goal is to lose weight, gain muscle, or run a 5k, the process is the actionable step to achieve this goal.
Wellness is process-focused because it enforces healthy habits and behaviors which take you to a goal or endpoint. Enjoying the process of going to the grocery store, planning out meals, and carving out time for exercise within a busy week are the unsexy parts of seeing results come to fruition.
A similar processed-focused approach to the other elements of work-related wellness will help you see results. Enjoy the process and feeling happy and healthy never feels like work to you.
