The bedrock of wellness in the workplace is the company culture

Many companies unfortunately overlook that the main driving factor supporting employee wellness and in turn performance, is their company culture.

A workplace culture is the shared values, belief systems, attitudes, and the set of assumptions that people in a workplace share. This is shaped by individual upbringing, social and cultural context. 

In a workplace, the leadership and the strategic organisational directions and management influence the workplace culture to a huge extent.  So, if you were really to get an honest opinion from your staff, what do you think this would reveal about your company culture? 

Through our research we have heard from employees who say that they have observed “toxic positive” work cultures in some organisations, which in many cases they have found worse than experiencing negative cultures.   

One example raised was an employee plucking up the courage to tell their manager that they felt swamped with the current workload and the manager simply replied, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, I know you, this is nothing for you, you have got this!”  The employee left with no solution and instead just enhanced guilt that they should be able to cope with the workload at hand.  

We believe no one should have to face this type of scenario at work.  Creating a truly great wellness culture at work is easy, but it takes collective work, and it won’t happen organically.

If you want to get ahead, we advocate for the following steps.

1.     Shared Company Wellness Values and Ethos

If you don’t have a wellness strategy how are managers and employees expected to do the right thing and know how to operate intentionally when crisis situations arise.

2.     Collaboration and Communication around the Expectations of Wellness in your Workplace

Involving your staff in your wellness programmes is essential if the programme is to tick all the right boxes and support them in the right way.  Communicating is also important, many businesses are rolling out extensive programmes, but employees are lost struggling to know what is happening when and where.

3.     Creating a Safe Diverse and Inclusive Work Environment

The best workplaces are diverse in all aspects and ensure that no one is left out. 

4.     Ensuring your external brand values translate to real daily lived experiences by your staff

For example, if you sell fitness apparel, do your teams find time to move each day?

5.     Reward Employees who Add to Company Culture.

Often, we see those staff who are running networks and making a huge difference to the way people work, taking these roles on in addition to their actual job and with no reward.  When instead these individuals should be celebrated for going out of their way to positively add to culture.  E.g., First Aiders, Fire Wardens, Mental Health First Aiders etc.

6.     Constantly Review your Wellness Programme

What is working now in your programme, may not work in two months’ time, you can’t rest on your laurels and expect your wellness programme to work forever.

7.     Create an Employee Wellness Manifesto 

Use the design principle of the US Navy created in 1960 - KISS – “Keep it super simple” what are the expectations for your staff and ensure managers are trained to support them.

8.     Regular Management Training

If your people are your most valuable resource, then provide them with the tools and resources to have solution-based conversations with their staff.

9.     Meeting Culture

Are Zoom meetings back-to-back and giving no space for recharge breaks, work time or lunch? 

10.  Work is enjoyable and Fun

If people enjoy work, they do more, if the culture allows for mistakes and learned from failures then people will do more and speak up more.

If you need our help, please just give us a shout, we love people, wellness and most importantly we have the time and resources to shape this when the reality is that for many busy managers you probably don’t.