Holistic Approaches to Workplace Wellness.
(Article appeared in Safety Magazine - July 08)
Workplace wellness has emerged as the catch cry in many New Zealand workplaces in the past five years judging by the number of articles on the topic in professional magazines, the multitudes of providers offering services and the number of New Zealand businesses talking about their wellness programmes.
What is driving this surge of interest and activity? Firstly, there is a growing understanding that physical and mental wellnesses contribute to increased workplace productivity and safety. The growing impact of lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and obesity and an aging workforce are costing New Zealand businesses millions of dollars through sick days, absenteeism and lowered productivity. Secondly, employers are focused on retaining staff in a competitive labour market and wellness initiatives for staff and families can contribute to being an employer of choice. And thirdly, changes to the Health and Safety in Employment Act in 2002 included stress and fatigue as identifiable hazards for the first time. This has placed employee’s psychological safety and wellbeing foremost in the minds of many employers.
An effective wellness programme needs to have three ingredients – a holistic approach to staff needs including physical, psychological and social/spiritual needs; management sponsorship but employee ownership; and some simple measures of effectiveness.
The range of physical wellness activities available for implementation in a workplace is large and need not be expensive. The key to choosing the right activities for your workplace is understanding what the biggest risk factors are for your workforce. Simple self reporting questionnaires on lifestyle or health concerns may be the first step to engaging staff and targeting the most effective initiatives. For example, a sedentary office bound workforce concerned about blood pressure and weight gain may benefit from activities such as a team pedometer challenge or signing up to initiatives such as the National Heart Foundations Heartbeat Challenge. Employer sponsored medical checks before and after such challenges are one way to measure changes for the participants.
Other physical initiatives include employer sponsored seminars on nutrition, medical checks, sponsored health insurance, quit smoking programmes, weight loss groups and many others. The great thing about many of these programmes is that they can be fun and informative, build teams, and have tangible results for participants thus building employee ownership and encouraging participation.
Psychological wellness is often perceived as less tangible and more difficult to manage than physical health. Many organisations have an employee assistance programme which enables employees to discuss problems with a trained counsellor or other mental health professionals. Seminars and informative websites are widely available on topics such as managing stress, work life balance and mental health issues in the workplace. Tools such as regular staff climate surveys or exit interviews can provide you with both information on the perceived stressors in your workplace and a measure over time of the success of any initiatives you have taken to address them.
Be prepared to consider wellness in its broadest context. Literacy may be the biggest challenge for some workplaces and workplace literacy programmes may be the best wellness programme to implement to increase the workforces understanding of health and safety requirements as well as improving the self esteem of individuals. Some workplaces have found ways to provide spaces for spiritual and meditative reflection on their sites to cater for the spiritual needs of their staff and this may be particularly important for employees from different cultures where religious practices are part of the working day.
In this information age there really is every opportunity for employers and managers to become aware of what workplace wellness is, why it is important, and how to go about addressing it in their own workplace. Any web search engine will throw up thousands of entries for New Zealand alone on the topic including suggestions for cost effective activities, case studies and success stories. The challenge may be just to get started.
