Sara Shondrick, Ph.D., ACC of Mix Talent, Marissa Alert, PhD of MDA Wellness, and Patricia Grabarek, Ph.D. of Workr Beeing are the best! Together with these powerhouse women, we architected a panel to share and spark insights on work-life wellbeing for employees and leaders at the Annual Wellness Summit in Chicago. Sara summarized the takeaways eloquently. We hope you find them useful too! In sum, workplace wellbeing is not an initiative or even a program, but rather reflects how leaders operate their businesses and what sort of workplace culture they build along the way. Additionally, whether one is an executive or an individual contributor, knowing where you are at personally – including your physical, mental and emotional needs – and allowing yourself permission to take care of yourself is key, too.
Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday's session on improving employee #wellbeing at the Annual Wellness Summit - and especially those who stood and sat on the floor due to a packed room! Marissa Alert, PhD, Patricia Grabarek, Ph.D., Sharon Unis, and our audience shared a ton of great insights and practical wisdom regarding the challenges and possible solutions for a complex issue. Some of what I offered, and heard echoed by others: 🌱 Getting leadership buy-in is tough unless efforts are clearly aligned to the broader business strategy. 🌱 Employee wellbeing shouldn't be an HR initiative -- the business needs to sponsor, champion, and lead these efforts. Ideally in partnership with HR. 🌱 Employee wellbeing needs to be considered through a systemic lens that is influenced by societal values, government systems, and the employee's organization. Within companies, audit the ideal vs. actual culture to inform how to move the needle. 🌱 The most successful efforts target both culture and leadership development! 🌱 Assessing and measuring employee wellbeing can take many forms, from health diagnostics to surveys, conversations, and more. Survey fatigue is real -- consider what data the organization already has, and ensure you're collecting both leading and lagging indicators (e.g., work hours, tone of company messaging platforms, absenteeism, turnover rates & reasons for leaving, EAP usage, health insurance claims data, workplace/safety incidents). To get more candid feedback from employees, collect data anonymously through a third party (like Mix Talent!) -- and communicate clearly how that feedback is used to implement change. 🌱 We all know of amazing wellbeing resources that go underused within many organizations. If you want leaders to truly encourage their teams to use these resources, you first need to shift leaders' own mindsets about the extent to which independence leads to sustainable success. Many leaders got to where they are because they're incredibly independent -- in that light, asking or receiving help can easily be seen as signs of "weakness." (PS: Leadership coaching can help!) The only downside of the conference? Dottie the cat was so mad about my travels that she gave me the cold shoulder all night upon my return. Thankfully today she's back to her adorable mustached self. Thanks so much to WELCOA (Wellness Council of America) and National Wellness Institute for hosting this amazing conference, and to Mix Talent for supporting me in making it happen!