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A quick summary:
- What exactly is holistic wellbeing? 🧘
- Getting to know your team on a personal level 🤝
- Giving employees the opportunity to discover purpose 🔑
- Why you need to encourage physical fitness 🏃♀️
- Offer the tailor-made initiatives and support 🔎
Supporting holistic wellness in the work environment could be the difference between a good team, and a great one. Of course, “holistic” isn’t often the buzzword of many offices, but this new strategy can help transform employee health and wellbeing tenfold.
Below, we’ll dive into the four key attributes that make for a healthy workplace; exploring why they work and what leaders need to know to take holistic wellbeing much more seriously. By the end, you’ll be ready with the tools and techniques to implement holistic wellness into your business.
What is Holistic wellbeing?
Before we get started on the four key attributes of holistic wellness in the workplace, what does holistic wellbeing mean generally? More often than not, holistic wellbeing can be confused with yoga - and nothing more than yoga.
Fortunately, we’re here with the definition to really open some eyes! It may come as a surprise to hear that holistic wellbeing actually considers wellbeing from a multifaceted perspective.
It concerns itself with the physical, emotional, mental, intellectual, social and spiritual sense of wellbeing. And also seeks out alternative means of therapy such as acupuncture or naturopathy.
In the workplace, this means looking at employee wellbeing from a fresh angle; how to build healthier, happier teams outside of pay increases and pizza Fridays. It’s those new and inventive ways to care for and support your team.
Understand your employees on a personal level
To begin with, let’s talk about understanding your team on a personal level. What many leaders fail to achieve is really getting to know employees; their thoughts, feelings and ideas. Not only does this lack of understanding drive a distance between leadership and everyone else, but it also doesn’t build trust and loyalty.
When people feel their thoughts and feelings are valued, they are more open about things. As we mentioned above, holistic wellness refers to mental, emotional and social - three reasons to start communicating much more openly and effectively with your team.
If your team feel that they must hide how their emotions, not only will it discourage honesty, but could increase absenteeism and presenteeism in the work environment. Approach communication holistically and let your employees know you’re there for them and their feelings.
Help Employees find their sense of purpose
Regardless of who we are or where we’re from, “purpose” is one of the most difficult things to find. Sometimes, we need help discovering our purpose, and leaders who support their team with this are more likely to build a holistic work environment.
Great leaders recognise that, just like themselves, employees are also on a journey to achieving and becoming more. Recognising this is one thing, and putting into action new ways to help people pursue their purpose is another.
For many, purpose means developing a certain skill or trying a new experience. Leaders can help employees search for purpose through learning and development opportunities.
Of course, these often have to align with the existing role and duties of an employee - it makes no sense to help someone learn Chinese when your business operates solely in the U.K. That said, providing learning and development opportunities that are relevant is a great way to help employees find purpose.
Ultimately, purpose comes from having an impact. We can produce more impactful moments in our careers by learning more and doing more. Start quizzing your team on the kind of career ambitions they have. You may find ways to support their strive for specific goals.
How will you empower people to make an impact and develop a deeper sense of purpose in the workplace? That’s the question unlock holistic wellness within your business.
Offer the tailor-made initiatives and support 🔎
When it comes to offering initiatives, leaders must avoid a generic approach. People want to be supported with meaningful initiatives that can have an immediate impact on their lives. Things like mental health consultation and financial education support must come centre stage.
Gone are the days of generic incentives which came across as more of a ‘box-ticking’ technique. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees realised their mental and emotional health could be better.
Employees spoke up against the toxic workplace treatment they had received and expressed their suffering of anxiety and depression. This drove a lot of businesses to create better mental health initiatives; improved training for managers in dealing with employee burnout.
However, as we move past the pandemic, employees still want more in the way of better wellbeing benefits. If you ask 100 employees what wellbeing means to them, you will likely receive a range of answers.
It’s these answers that your initiatives and benefits must reflect - that’s if you want to support employees on an individual level, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Because as we all know too well, this approach doesn’t really work in most scenarios of life.
Encourage physical fitness among your employees
Physical fitness is a big part of a healthy lifestyle. Our physical wellbeing is also an element of holistic wellness, as discussed above. While some of these techniques revolve around mental and emotional wellbeing, it’s important employees are encouraged to exercise.
Physical fitness has been proven to boost both mood and happiness. Not only does it help us manage our weight, but it’s also great for both bones and muscles too. When it comes to the workplace, it’s important leaders are pushing employees to improve their physical fitness - allowing employees to flourish in holistic wellness.
For leaders, consider hosting a weekly or monthly physical fitness challenge. Why not try to get your team on board with a fundraising fitness challenge? This way, your team can contribute to a great cause while working together on a physical challenge! Alternatively, consider fitness events like ToughMudder or a local marathon; things like this are both great fun and challenging.
What are some other benefits of physical fitness?
- Boost your quality of sleep
- Minimise feelings of anxiety and depression
- Reduce the risk of a lot of chronic diseases
- Enhance memory and brain function
- Improve energy levels for the rest of the day
Clearly, there’s a lot to take advantage of with physical fitness! It’s a huge element of general wellbeing and can be the missing piece to the puzzle. Start promoting physical fitness within your team, but remember to lead by example. Telling your team they must get active just isn’t enough, join in with the challenges and events you organise - that’s true leadership.
Transforming holistic wellness for a healthy workplace
As we’ve learnt, holistic wellness can really be a great tool to transform your work environment. These techniques above can help you to build a healthy workplace that people want to be a part of.
Still looking for new ways to support your team?
Through our employee wellbeing platform, leaders are improving their employee wellbeing strategy tenfold! With a monthly allowance, Heka members are able to book and buy from thousands of wellbeing experiences, services and products. What’s more, our benefits platform supports both remote employees too!
Whether it’s treetop climbing with GoApe, candle-making kits, or life coaching, Heka has it all, and for every one of your team! Don’t just take our word for it, see what some of our customers say!
If you’re ready to find out how exactly your team can benefit from using Heka, book a demo without wellbeing experts now!
