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Practical Strategies for Maintaining Employee Wellbeing in a High-Pressure World
Best Practices Strategy

Practical Strategies for Maintaining Employee Wellbeing in a High-Pressure World

By Rajarshi March 08, 2024 - 188 views

Maintaining employee wellbeing at the workplace is of paramount importance. Not only does this prevent unwarranted employee burnout, but also helps in maintaining productivity. In fact, it does not always have to be an expensive affair when it comes to improving the wellbeing of your employees in a high-pressure environment. It can be an excellent investment, as an instance of a work-redesign blueprint at a Fortune 500 firm’s IT division indicated. It generated a positive ROI for the company by lowering turnover costs considerably.

Everything from flexible work arrangements to encouraging mindfulness practices and stress management techniques has immense value in terms of boosting employee wellbeing and satisfaction. On that note, here are some practical strategies to help you maintain employee wellbeing in an increasingly competitive and changing world.

Strategies to Help Boost Employee Wellbeing at the Workplace

How do you increase employee wellbeing at the workplace and prevent employee burnout and other issues like frequent absenteeism, low motivation, reduced productivity, and eventual attrition rate jumps? Here’s how:

  1. Have a mission for your company/organization- Your employees will naturally feel more motivated and driven when you have clearly defined organizational/company goals. Help them understand how their roles and duties contribute towards this core mission and also to your customers/target demographics.
  2. Minimize over-scheduling and overtime- Employee burnout is often a direct effect of long working hours and immense pressure to meet deadlines. This may negatively impact employee wellbeing and health considerably. It may lead to stress and several other issues. You should look at using the right resource and project management and allocation tools for efficiently distributing workloads and lowering overtime and over-scheduling.
  3. Train your leadership team on occupational mental health and mindfulness practices. The leadership should be trained on the signs, reasons, and preventive measures linked to mental health problems. This will help them back up their teams with the right stress management techniques and other measures. Trained managers can enable their employees to discover suitable work-life balance while helping them boost performance and morale alike.
  4. You should look at offering specific benefits that boost the physical health of employees. This is a vital aspect of the wellbeing quotient of employees. You should focus on physical health and wellness initiatives including memberships of gymnasiums, extensive health insurance coverage, group exercise and motivational sessions, and activity-based engagement and trips.
  5. Set up a plan for helping employees tackle financial issues. Hardship funds and other strategies can help your employees manage sudden emergencies or financial obligations without undue stress.
  6. Flexible work arrangements also go a long way towards helping employees beat stress. Offering remote and flexi-work choices will enable employees to balance all aspects of their life. This will also lower their travel costs and commute times, while helping them spend more time with their loved ones.
  7. Build a supportive company culture without any judgment. Employees will feel motivated and driven in the right environment. Encourage your leaders and managers to recognize the efforts of employees to enhance their motivation levels, wellbeing, and performance. Build a culture where employees can openly talk about mental health and other issues, ask for any help, and promote overall wellbeing.

Companies are now more aware about employee wellbeing being directly connected towards organizational growth and future success. A successful wellbeing blueprint necessitates suitable participation of employees and planning along with commitment on your part for the long haul. Boosting employee wellbeing will lower flagging employee engagement, absenteeism, low morale, productivity issues, and other problems that may snowball into bigger obstacles in the long run.

Giving employees more control and ownership of their work and duties is another good strategy in this case while ensuring stable schedules with minimal fluctuations, as much as possible. Giving employees control and responsibility towards identifying and fixing issues at the workplace is also a god move while you should look at adequate staffing and planning to keep workloads at optimal levels. Your employee wellbeing blueprint should encompass physical (diet, sleep, fatigue, activity and fitness sessions), emotional (mental health, work-life balance, mental health awareness), financial (emergency funds and financial programs along with personal finance management), social (interactions, team bonding, picnics and group activities), career (remote work options, higher compensation, wellness initiatives) and purpose-based (syncing of objectives of employees with the company, up-skilling and re-skilling and mentoring programs).

FAQs

What resources or training programs can organizations provide to help employees manage stress and build resilience?

There are several training or resource programs that may be offered by organizations to help their employees manage stress better. These include stress management and mindfulness programs along with resources that help them reach out and ask for help and manage stress better.

How do technology and remote work impact employee well-being, and what measures can be taken to mitigate potential negative effects?

Technology and remote work will positively impact the wellbeing of employees. It will help them manage their time better and balance workloads accordingly. Mitigating potential negative effects of the same will require a proper monitoring and work management policy on the part of the organization.

What are the key components of a successful flexible work policy?

A flexible work policy that is successful, will essentially look at aligning jobs and planning innovatively to ensure that employees can work flexibly at their preferred times as much as possible, while having clear deadlines and duties that have to be met. Availability, attendance, guidelines and timelines are some of the core aspects in this case.

How can companies measure the success of their employee wellbeing initiatives?

Some of the ways to measure the success levels of employee wellbeing initiatives include focus groups and surveys to assess employee satisfaction and engagement levels. Employee participation rates can also be tracked in wellness programs and initiatives.

Are there legal considerations or best practices that companies should be aware of when implementing wellbeing programs?

Company wellness programs should adhere to ethical guidelines along with data privacy regulations. There should also be adherence to workplace codes and labor standards/acts along with non-discrimination-related guidelines.

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