Does your workplace wellness programme include the community pillar?

As humans we crave connection and a feeling of belonging and building a community is a huge part of how we can create these feelings.

The ability to share a goal bonds a community and so you would imagine that this would be easy to create at work.  However, the truth is it’s much more difficult in practice.

At Invigorate Spaces one of our wellbeing pillars that we focus heavily on when advising on workplace wellbeing programmes is Community.  For clarity when we refer to community, we don’t just mean our teammates or colleagues, we also mean our external community.  For example, how can we support the local community either around our workplaces or our client base and how we can impact in terms of positive change.

If we consider the community, we split this into three distinct segments of focus:

1.     Diversity Equity & Inclusion

Any company should be ensuring this occurs in their organisation and in the community projects that they take part in.  

If people cannot show up as their authentic selves at work and all be treated equally then in truth it is a recipe for disaster.  

There are a good range of benchmarks to review how your company is doing in this area related to your staff, it might be worth considering:

1.     Diversity of employee’s vs application pool

2.     Diversity across organisation levels

3.     Job satisfaction

4.     Job retention

5.     Gender pay gaps

6.     Staff Surveys to really get to the heart of engagement.

2.     Psychological Safety

It is worth considering that to show up authentically at work, there needs to be psychological safety, and this is hard to build as it must be based on trust at every level of the organisation.  

If an employee, finally plucks up the courage to call out something that is counteractive to their wellbeing or the DE+I strategy etc. then the business needs to ensure there are no ramifications on the individual for this action. 

Managers also need to be trained to hear of staff failures and instead of punishing, learn ways to be support better and innovate more.  

Managers also need to be able to support their staff or that of their colleagues in handling vulnerability in normal work conversations.  For some this doesn’t come easy and needs daily practice.

3.     Give Back

Does your company offer a give back scheme, a way you as an individual can give back to the community or those around you?  

Many organisations are now offering a chunk of your working week to go away from the day-to-day work and instead invest in charitable outreach projects that really make a difference.  It is so true that the act of giving really makes you feel good and gives you purpose which can sometimes be missing when you are staring at excel spreadsheets all day.

If you would like to ignite your community pillar, please get in touch for our help.