Talking positively about health is important to promote wellness, reduce absenteeism and maximize retention. Workplace health and wellness may vary depending on industry, company size, resources, and culture. However, some of the shared issues and best practices for addressing these are discussed below. As management knows, decreased productivity and motivation usually results from burnout, stress, and dissatisfaction caused by overwork, a vicious cycle that impacts wellness and productivity. Burnout, on the other hand, can have a major impact on work productivity, focus and presents itself as physical and emotional exhaustion. At the end of this article, we offer ten questions to ask yourself to determine if you’re ready to address workplace wellness.
When seeking to deal with any one or mix of the issues particular to your business, a holistic approach is needed to recognize needs and gaps – contact us with any of your questions.
Chief Challenges in the Workplace
Lack of Work-Life Balance
Too much work can lead to burnout, stress, and decreased job satisfaction, affecting mental and physical health. Lack of work-life balance strains professional and personal relationships, resulting in the possibility of burnout, chronic stress, and decreased productivity. The cycle tends to go unnoticed until it becomes exhausted. The imbalance also strains personal relationships, resulting in a feeling of isolation and dissatisfaction. Teams and individuals must be able to recognize signs, and support boundaries between work and personal life with flexible work arrangements and realistic workload assumptions. Managers need to make work-life balance a part of their personal agenda and their employees’. Creating a culture with an emphasis on mental well-being grants employees license to do the same. Call us for a work-life balance, wellness audit.
Stress and Burnout
Overloaded workloads, rigid deadlines, and high-pressure environments can contribute to stress and burnout in workers. Chronic stress can contribute to physical conditions such as cardiovascular disease and weakened immune systems. Solutions should not be too late. Burnout and stress both have serious and longer-term health impacts. Staff often require medical intervention or prolonged periods of absence from work in order to return to function. Ensure that workplace well-being fosters actual health for all. To go off sick, only to find mounting and overwhelming workloads, difficult staff and scant resources, continues the issues. Returning to the same working environment that causes stress, is counter-intuitive. Including strategies such as workload management, flexible work arrangements, and promoting work-life balance. Too frequently due to gender roles or perceptions or expectations – asking for help, breaking perfectionism, throwing your life into your work – are all self-reinforcing behaviors that are difficult to change and require long-term solutions, self-awareness, and broad-based therapeutic modalities. Finding the cause – is there proper management and team support and allocation of work? Do we have the words to ask for help and provide help? Is there a culture of reinforced cooperation? (Supported by equitable reward and remuneration).
Challenging People
Handling difficult colleagues and managers can result in stress, anxiety, and lowered self-esteem due to resentment, unfinished conflict, unexpressed assumptions, and unrealistic expectations. Negative exchanges have a cumulative nibbling effect on self-esteem, causing individuals to doubt their ability and worth. We’ve come to understand generations’ differences in work attitude, communication, and “quiet quitting.” Hostile workplaces are illegal as well as promote isolation, burnout, and depression. Promote open communication, managing conflict and not sidestepping it, good conflict resolution training (tailored to your staff’s needs), opening up channels for employees to discuss issues without fear of reprisal, and resolving conflict positively and before it happens. Repair in most cases comes from an external third-party perspective such as the employer or HR, and glosses over the issue. Company reputation comes into play here, since people’s awareness is made viral. We need a better approach to reconciliation which isn’t emerging from HR gimmicks – that we care for each other in a human way and recompense the harm done – and to repair, rather than retribution and concealment. Placing clear boundaries around difficult individuals will reduce harmful consequences and help towards an ethic of mending, avoidance, and friendship. Promote work-life balance initiatives and effective leadership to develop a positive work culture.
Mental Health Stigma
Mental health stigma continues and calls for gendered and cultural consideration. The stigma, real or perceived might discourage employees from seeking assistance or reporting their ordeal, leading to uncured mental illnesses, strained personal relationships, and reduced workplace reciprocity. Rather, develop an open and supportive culture of mental health by raising awareness, providing mental health literacy training, and making discussion about mental health more normal. This is an investment for the long term in helping teams and wider society (their families and friends). A one-off copied workshop on mental health is not enough. Make sure that it is customized. Make confidential mental health services available and encourage managers to make their work environment supportive to team members. There are a number of evidence based practices for reducing mental health illness and symptoms which can be utilized in organizations with adjustments for industry, culture and other demographics.
Work-Related Injuries and Ergonomics
The injury and death rates at work have a tendency to increase in Canada, except during slower work phase during COVID-19. Young workers tend to have the highest rates of incidents. Substandard ergonomics and risky work methods can lead to occupational injury, including strains, sprains, and repetitive motion injuries. Investing ahead of time in these areas allows employees to remain on the job or avoid injury altogether. Perform ergonomic and safety evaluations frequently to identify and remove risk factors. Offer ergonomic tools and training to guarantee correct workstation arrangement and safe work methods. Promote regular break times and stretching exercises to help decrease the risk of injury.
Sedentary Lifestyle
Growing evidence points to remote working leading to extended durations of sitting time that are greater than 30 minutes. These longer periods of sitting times are riskier to health. Physical inactivity and sitting for extended periods cause various health ailments like obesity, cardiovascular disease, and musculoskeletal disorders. Promoting movement breaks every few minutes, designing ergonomic working spaces, and stimulating employees to become active by sponsoring wellness challenges, gym memberships, or on-campus fitness classes are some of the solutions.
Poor Nutrition
During the cost of living crisis in a great deal of the world, it is difficult to eat enough and well. Health behaviours are difficult to address and alter, but possible. Poor dietary habits, as mentioned above, and dietary habits – consumption of sugary snacks, processed food, and not consuming enough healthy foods – can damage health, concentration, moods, and efficiency. Providing healthier foods at the workplace, i.e., fruits, vegetables, and healthier snacks, are simple solutions. Provision of education on nutrition and encouraging healthy eating habits through wellness programs and initiatives, such as hiring a naturopath or a nutritionist to provide an employees’ work plan.
Encourage open communication, with reprimand, and provide additional stress management and mental health services, such as Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) or counseling, and regular wellness programs that address your group’s specific needs.
Wellness Audit (Free!)
Use this guide as a point of discussion when making future choices or polling your group.
- Are employees reporting greater levels of stress?
- Are employees reporting greater levels of indicators of burnout? (burnout and stress are distinct)
- Have there been any recent changes in workload, work environment, or company policy that might influence employee well-being?
- Are there any visible changes in behavior or performance that would imply underlying health or well-being issues?
- Are employees regularly taking sick leave? (this may be a euphemism for avoiding the workplace, or genuine health issues arising as a result of accidents at work)
- Have there been any complaints made by employees regarding work-life balance or stress within the workplace?
- Is there insufficient participation or interest in current wellness programs or initiatives? Why?
- Have there been any recent workplace conflicts or tensions that will affect employee morale and mental health? Have you fully investigated the underlying cause?
- Are there any specific demographics within the workforce that will be more prone to stress or health issues?
- Has turnover or retention increased that may be linked to employee well-being?
- Are there industry-specific issues, such as tight deadlines or demanding client requirements, that can impact employee wellness?
Saying “yes” to several of these questions can indicate a need for a wellness assessment to identify areas for improvement and the creation of targeted interventions to improve employee well-being. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation.
Addressing Wellness
Discussing wellness, health, and mental health is undisputable and is directly connected to the work environment, where we spent considerable hours a day. Solutions must be holistic in nature and entail creating a support culture, providing resources and assistance services, and employing proactive tools to create authentic well-being, and not simply a free lunch. It is not a culture that is easy to build, if morale is poor, trust has broken down and other issues that have been neglected for so long.
Positive workplaces help to create morale, sense of belonging and retention. Our behaviors have to be consistent with our values. Incongruent behavior produces discordant results.
Disagreement, tension and conflict are difficult and painful to navigate – we understand. But confronting the effects of toxic colleagues and decision-makers on mental health requires something of a cross-sectional approach of individuals and organizations in collaboration towards the creation of a healthy, positive culture. We must recognize that the 21st century and younger generations are experiencing a very different lifestyle than earlier generations who created institutions before them. These differences are not to be overlooked, but through a strengths perspective – teams work best when validated and connected, not negated and invalidated. Feedback systems and ongoing monitoring can be applied to gauge intervention effectiveness and areas of improvement.
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