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We’ve all been there. Your company decides to introduce a ‘brilliant’ new wellbeing initiative. You should be pleased, even grateful that your employer cares. But inwardly you roll your eyes. Taking time to even think about wellbeing feels like a luxury with your workload, let alone finding a spare thirty minutes to practice online mindfulness. Attempting to shoe-horn it into your crazy-long to do list is stress-inducing. Oh, the irony.

Sound familiar? Yep, us too. But it doesn’t have to be this way

Done right, wellbeing is a powerful lever to motivate, engage and empower employees. But a tick- box approach can make it feel like a burden and more often than not, its money wasted.

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Aligning company culture, behavior and benefits are key. Here’s how;

1.     Normalise wellbeing culture by establishing it as a hygiene factor for both prospective and existing employees; highlight employee wellbeing culture in job adverts, set employee objectives using a dual (commercial and wellbeing) lens, offer employees simple but regular opportunities to share their levels of stress, job satisfaction and engagement, publish employee wellbeing metrics in annual reports, target people leaders to reduce stress-related absence amongst their teams.

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2.     Embed wellbeing in the everyday. Weaving wellbeing into the fabric of your organisation needn’t be complex; allow line managers sufficient time to ask employees how they’re doing, task all people leaders to schedule regular breaks away from meetings or screens, make existing wellbeing tools visible and accessible (try regular ‘spotlighting’ during team meetings or town halls and across your physical and virtual office spaces too).

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3.     Consider existing health and wellbeing benefits carefully before investing in new initiatives. How well used are existing benefits? Do they resonate with employees? Are they good value for money? Do they align to your wellbeing culture? If not, why not? Use your line-manager community and engage employees directly to identify solutions that will make the biggest impact before you spend.  

Lime are the experts in simple, affordable whole of workforce healthcare. To find out how we can help companies just like yours get in touch here

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