Course category of the month - May: employee wellbeing

May: Employee wellbeing

Some have labelled workplace wellbeing the new workplace health and safety. WH&S is everywhere, always monitored and managed efficiently. Right now, does your workplace wellbeing program look the same? Wellbeing is defined by Australian employees as "when they have found balance across physical, mental, social and spiritual life."

Every dollar spent on effective mental health action returns $2.30 in benefits to an organisation. So the question is, why not start investing in your employees wellbeing today?

Mentally healthy workplaces are positive and productive. They are environments where people want to come to work. Most research points to the fact that workers who are stressed (extremely/very) about their work are 2.5 times more likely to look for a new job in the next 12 months than workers who are not at all stressed about work. By investing in wellbeing you are investing in productive staff, who are committed to their workplace, reducing your staff turnover rates and driving engagement.

Drivers of wellbeing in the workplace

Where to begin when thinking about workplace wellbeing?

• The three core parts of a safe workplace: the environment (the space and culture), the individuals (your employees), and management that is conducive to supporting its staff wellbeing.

Healthy space

Wellbeing should be at the core of every business’ health and safety policy. Ensure the physical space is conducive to success and ergonomically set-up, but also consider the culture within that workspace. A chaotic workplace environment of frequent, uncontrollable events adversely affects people’s motivation, their cognition and learning, and their emotional state. Having a general culture of competition, low collaboration and teamwork will quickly impact the health of employees

61% identify high team morale as the greatest indicator of employee wellbeing. A culture of social support reinforces for employees that they are valued, and thus helps in a company’s efforts to attract and retain people.

Healthy people

Supporting a healthy lifestyle in your office can ensure your people are healthy. A good work-life balance is key to securing a good standard of mental health. You can focus on the individual's needs such as improving access to healthy lifestyle choices (food or exercise), as well as building the knowledge and skills of your staff. Effective workplace health and wellbeing will have positive impact on worker productivity and performance as well as the health and wellbeing of employees. Health and wellbeing includes the management of stress, fatigue and mental health support.

Healthy relationships

Micromanaging is also common at work, simply because many managers are poor at coaching and facilitating others to do their jobs better. The management must be equipped with skills to support their team to succeed and build relationships that are founded on communication, so that workers don't end up feeling like their wellbeing has not been considered when making business decisions. The mismanagement of employees will discourage individuals' autonomy, decease feelings of control and then employee engagement will plummet.

The right management practices characterised by open communication can decrease the likelihood of unrealistic workload expectations, which causes stress, burnout and overall negative impact on wellbeing in the workplace.

Where to begin?

Go1 has an amazing variety of providers who create content to support workplace wellbeing.

Mind Channel, one of our Premium providers who specialise in bite-sized learning items content, has various courses on mindfulness, stress management, fatigue fighting and healthy eating. Their bite-sized wellbeing courses (under 5 minutes) are in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French!

Come back next week to find more Go1 courses available in Global Premium that address this month's topic of health and wellbeing.