Today’s work environment can be stressful. It can be notoriously difficult to find and strike the right balance between the demands of the workplace and the responsibilities of life outside of work. While it’s true that there are a number of things you can do as a manager or business owner to help improve conditions in the workplace on behalf of those who work for you, there are also a number of things they can do for themselves, and you should quietly encourage them to do so. Here are a few ideas designed to help get your mind turning on the subject:
Publish Your Available Resources
Sometimes, your employees may not realize all the great resources you already make available to them to help them manage their day and foster wellness. The good news is that that’s easy to remedy. Just send out a friendly reminder as a refresher at periodic intervals so it stays in the forefront of everyone’s mind.
A Failure To Plan Is Planning To Fail
An organized work day is a less stressful and more productive work day. Planning can take a variety of forms but the simplest incarnation is one of the oldest and most reliable. The Action List. A simple list of the three to five most important things your employee wants or needs to accomplish on any given day.
Armed with such a list, it becomes easier by orders of magnitude to move the ball forward and make meaningful progress toward your goals and theirs. Progress is something everyone feels good about.
Encourage Journaling
Writing things down is powerful. Writing a goal down makes it real and gives it power. Writing about your stressors helps purge them from your system, making them easier to deal with. If you want your employees to encourage journaling, giving journals as gifts or awards for recognition is a handy way to reinforce that.
Encourage Interactions
Too often, employees tend to isolate themselves, eating lunches at their desks, spending long hours enclosed in their own little bubbles where they toil away. Encourage something different. The more time your employees spend interacting with each other, the more they can help each other. Sharing meals together on a regular basis fosters a great deal of camaraderie which can go a long way toward helping take the stressful edges off of any given day.
Your Attitude Has Ripple Effects
If you want your employees to have better attitudes, you have to have a better attitude as well. Your employees take many of their cues from you. If you come to work each day in a dour mood, you can’t very well expect your employees to be happy go lucky, and if you’re unhappy with the state of the culture at your firm, you have to be big enough to recognize that that’s a failure on your part and take steps to correct that.
These things, of course, are just the beginning. There are any number of other things you can do or encourage to improve conditions in your office. Consider setting up periodic “wellness days” to let your employees know you’re serious about their wellbeing.
If your budget allows, think about perhaps bringing in a masseuse as a special reward. Even if you can’t do any of that, if you focus just on the things mentioned above, you will notice significant improvements.