Wellbeing in the workplace is a crucial cornerstone of both employee wellbeing and motivation, as well as business success. In addition to being an important factor in employee performance, wellbeing also has a significant impact on the overall workplace atmosphere and engagement.
At Feedwork, we know that creating a work environment where people can thrive and flourish should always be a top priority - it's simple really: when employees are happy and thrive in their work, they're simply more likely to create great, sustainable results and momentum.
That's why in this article, we're going to dive a little deeper into the importance of wellbeing - and look at concrete advice on how to improve wellbeing in the workplace:
What is wellbeing in the workplace?
Wellbeing is one of those words that gets thrown around in everyday speech - but what does wellbeing in the workplace actually mean? Fundamentally, wellbeing is about ensuring a work environment where employees feel good both mentally and physically. It involves creating a workplace where employees feel valued, motivated and supported, as well as creating a framework for a healthy working life and a focus on reducing stress in the workplace. In the modern workplace, wellbeing is also very much about ensuring a good work-life balance, promoting healthy social interaction and providing opportunities for personal and professional development.
(If you want to learn more about wellbeing, read our article "Wellbeing at work - productive employees and conscientious business")
The benefits of high wellbeing
Most people can probably agree that it's a good idea to focus on wellbeing in the workplace. However, we think it's important to take a few sentences to spell it out - because wellbeing is actually crucial to having a successful business, so hang on a second:-)
- High wellbeing has almost become synonymous with a positive environment that creates a comfortable and safe atmosphere for all employees. Basically, employees are more likely to engage more actively in their work when they feel comfortable in their workplace.
- While this may resonate with most people, make no mistake that an engaged team is crucial to a successful business, as it leads to both increased productivity and higher quality work.
- Of course, it's not just about a positive and pleasant environment. In addition to happy and confident employees being more focused and productive, wellbeing can also have a few other benefits. Among other things, high wellbeing reduces the likelihood of high sick leave and also ensures much higher employee retention - in short, it pays off to spend energy and resources on wellbeing if you want a stronger bottom line, as you reduce the annoying costs of sick leave, terminations and recruitment.
What factors affect wellbeing in the workplace?
There is hopefully no doubt by now that preventing poor wellbeing should be a top priority for all companies. The question is more likely to be "How do we create wellbeing in the workplace?".
In its purest form, it's about being aware of - and proactive about - potential stressors. It's about being aware of - and proactive about - potential stressors, and creating a safe and pleasant environment that allows you to be yourself in the workplace, inspires a healthy work-life balance and good social interaction. It might seem like a no-brainer, so let's dive in a little deeper!
First, we'll take a look at the factors that affect wellbeing, and then we'll give you some concrete advice on how to prevent poor wellbeing in the workplace.
Learn about trust-based leadership here
A healthy working life
One of the keys to better wellbeing in the workplace is ensuring a healthy working life. In the prevention of poor wellbeing in the workplace, a healthy work life plays a major role in ensuring both physical and mental wellbeing.
So what is a healthy working life?
- Balanced workload:
As a company, it's important to keep an eye on ensuring a balanced workload for your employees - that is, having a realistic allocation of tasks and being aware of resource allocation and support before things get out of hand.
- Work-life balance:
There is a growing demand for companies to offer flexibility and a good work-life balance in order to ensure a healthy working life. Having the option of flexible working hours or the ability to work from home can also promote work-life balance, which contributes to a healthier working life.
- Flexible working hours:
Flexibilitycan also allow employees to adapt their work routines to their own needs, allowing them to actually reach their full potential - it's important to remember that not all employees work the same and thrive in the same boxes. For example, some employees thrive with lots of people around them, while others need more silence for contemplation. Similarly, some people work best in the evening, while others are most energized first thing in the morning.
Psychological safety & communication
At Feedwork, we also see psychological safety and good communication as cornerstones in creating high well-being.
(Learn more about psychological safety here)
- Psychological safety:
Ensuring a psychologically safe work environment has a direct impact on wellbeing - it's about creating an environment where employees feel safe to express themselves and share thoughts, ideas and concerns - and generally dare to be 100% themselves in the workplace. Without fear of negative consequences. This results in a workplace characterized by trust and learning, where employees feel heard and respected, and where innovation, personal growth and the really good solutions come to light.
- Open and honest communication:
If you want to ensure wellbeing, it's also worth taking a look at your company's communication. Promoting open and honest communication is key to detecting and resolving issues in time - whether it's employee unhappiness and insecurity, conflicts or more task-related deliverables. This includes establishing good communication habits, both from management to employees and vice versa.
- Constructive feedback dialogues:
It is important to encourage a culture where constructive feedback dialogues are paramount (link to article on feedback), and especially where feedback is a natural (and valued) part of the work environment. Good feedback dialogues and psychological safety are inextricably linked, as it's all about creating an environment where you feel safe to communicate honestly and openly - without feeling like you have to tiptoe around or fear the reaction of your manager or colleagues.
Good socializing
Finally, the importance of having a strong social community should not be underestimated when aiming for wellbeing in the workplace.
- Sense of community:
While it's obviously very different for each employee in terms of their social needs, a positive sense of community is still important for a workplace as it creates a sense of belonging and support among employees. It helps to increase motivation, as well as giving people a sense of belonging to something bigger and meaningful, where employees are more likely to support each other and share their knowledge and experience.
- Safe team:
Being comfortable in your team makes employees more likely to think outside the box and contribute new ideas and solutions, ensuring better collaboration and thus productivity.
- Included and valued:
A strong sense of community in the workplace also reduces feelings of isolation and loneliness, which can be strong catalysts for stress and unhappiness. Therefore, community can be an important part of feeling included and valued, and therefore ensuring higher wellbeing.
5 tips to prevent poor well-being in the workplace
Now is the time to get your hands out of your pockets and actively make a difference to wellbeing in your workplace. Here are 5 tips to prevent poor wellbeing in your workplace:
1. Create a framework for community
As the section above showed, there's no doubt that community is worth putting some energy into if you want to prevent poor wellbeing. To create a sense of community, you can engage in various team building activities(we're happy to help!), organize good social events, provide meeting places in the workplace for more informal chats or create good opportunities for social communities such as running clubs, knitting clubs, Friday bar, coffee club, etc.
At Feedwork, we love our weekly check-in on Mondays, where the weekend's activities and the day's energy level are also on the agenda - as well as our weekly check-out, where we always end with a gratitude round (a big favorite in the office). It leaves room for smiles and meeting each other in more than just talking about tasks and deliverables.
2. Stress management
It's also relevant to have a good stress management program - both for preventative purposes and when the house of cards has been completely toppled. This could include coaching, mindfulness training, a quiet room in the office for meditation, powernaps or just a moment of peace, as well as stress management workshops or various counseling options for employees.
3. Bringing nature into the workplace
A healthy working life and wellbeing can also be supported by encouraging time spent in nature during the working day - it often has a positive impact on employees' mental health - and certainly their productivity. This could be encouraging a mid-day walk, lunch outside, a short break in the fresh air, outdoor meetings - or generally creating workspaces that take nature into account. At Feedwork, we ourselves are very fond of our frequent walk-and-talks, where a meeting is held while we go for a walk in the scenic area next to our office - it makes a world of difference to a slightly tired afternoon brain :-) However, it's important to point out that it takes initiative and encouragement from the company/manager for such initiatives to seem legitimate in the eyes of the employees - and often you as a manager have to take the lead and actively make use of the initiatives before it can spread to the rest of the team.
4. inclusion and support
In preventing poor wellbeing, it's important to create an inclusive and supportive environment so that employees feel safe to perform at their very best. If a company wants to make a real effort to create an inclusive and supportive environment, it's crucial to establish guidelines for respectful behavior, provide psychological safety training, and be ready to deal with any instances of unwanted behavior or discrimination.
5. psychological safety & constructive feedback dialogues
It can be hard to make sense of it all, but if your team or workplace needs to get off to a good start with either psychological safety or feedback, take a look at our digital team courses.
How do you measure wellbeing in an organization?
When talking about wellbeing in the workplace, it's crucial to have a finger on the pulse of whether your team or workplace is actually thriving. Therefore, it can be important to know how to actually measure wellbeing in your organization.
But first: why does a wellbeing survey even make sense? Measuring the wellbeing of your team is crucial to understanding your situation. It provides valuable insights into your employees' experiences and needs, how (and if) your employees are thriving, and helps identify areas that are either working really well (and should be maintained) or areas that can (and should) be improved.
Wellbeing surveys can take many different forms. The most well-known is probably surveys, where the company collects data on employee wellbeing and satisfaction through questionnaires covering a wide range of topics such as the work environment, management quality, workload and job satisfaction. This can either be anonymous or by name.
Measuring wellbeing can also be done through either focus groups or more individual meetings, both of which allow for a more in-depth conversation about challenges and opportunities. The one-on-one sessions provide more opportunity to discuss wellbeing-related topics on a personal level, identifying individual needs and feelings.
No matter what type of wellbeing measurement you choose, it's crucial to create an open and trusting space to gather honest and valuable feedback about real wellbeing. Encouraging openness and actively listening to employees' concerns and suggestions is a top priority for managers. If you fail to create a safe space for this, you might as well throw the wellbeing survey in the trash - it will be misleading and useless anyway.
Regular well-being interviews
While it's very popular to use the aforementioned questionnaires to measure wellbeing, we at Feedwork always recommend that they should never replace regular wellbeing conversations with employees. If you manage to make wellbeing conversations a natural part of everyday life, it will be much easier to talk about when problems or unhappiness actually arise.
In addition to creating a safe environment for difficult conversations (which wellbeing conversations can quickly become), it's a good idea to create occasions or times when you can address issues. Some companies even have it on the agenda for weekly meetings - i.e. a 'wellbeing point' - while others have scheduled regular (and frequent) 1:1s with their employees, where they are not allowed to talk about tasks and the like, but only focus on wellbeing, workload, new needs, development wishes, etc. We have a tendency to quickly make the conversations task-oriented, which can stifle the possibility of the employee wanting to bring up well-being issues - for fear that it won't seem relevant or effective enough.
(If you need help, check out our guide to successful 1:1 conversations)
It's important to create space for these types of conversations, as many issues can be nipped in the bud. When you prioritize taking the pulse of your employees' wellbeing on a regular basis, it gives you insight into everyday challenges and an opportunity to actually lead based on reality - not how you think the workplace is doing (or what the annual survey shows). Many employees only go to their manager if things have gotten really bad because there doesn't seem to be a place to discuss it on an ongoing basis - so do everyone a favor and keep a regular eye out for potential challenges. Both your employees and your bottom line will thank you for it.
From result to action
And one last, but very important thing to remember! Measuring wellbeing is only the first step - it's crucial that you as a manager actually use the results from the wellbeing survey or the points from your conversations. Otherwise, it's just empty talk and will actually affect employees' wellbeing in the wrong direction when they don't feel like their concerns and challenges are being taken seriously.
So, taking action on the wellbeing survey is crucial to send a signal to employees that they have been heard and recognized. And yes, sometimes there will be situations where an employee's challenges and concerns can't be resolved on the spot. But in those cases, it's just as important to simply empathize with the employee's situation by listening attentively, showing understanding and acknowledging their challenges. Showing support and possibly offering resources for guidance, as well as creating a safe and secure space for them to share their concerns, sends a clear signal to the employee that you as a manager care about their wellbeing and creates an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust.
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