5 top tips to improve wellbeing at work

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week and today I’m thinking about wellbeing at work.

As a manager, often I prioritise my team’s wellbeing over mine. Sound familiar?

But I’ve realised is that to empower my team to prioritise their wellbeing, I have to practice what I preach. When your staff see leadership enacting behaviours, we give implicit permission for them to enact them too.

Here are my five top tips for encouraging active wellbeing in your team:

1. Explicitly frame rest as part of work. I went on leadership training once by a woman who trained to climb Everest. She told me that good athletes build in rest proactively, because that’s how we build the muscular resilience to push ourselves harder.

Mental rest is the same. If we are constantly mentally active, we burn out. I tell my team explicitly that I value their rest because I care about them as people, but also because it makes them better workers. Reframing it as a professional strategy can help employees embrace rest.

2. Log off on time. If I tell my team to log off at half 5, and then they see emails the next day time-stamped 20.32, they know I’m working more hours than they are. If I want them to log off on time, I have to do the same.

My team need to see that little yellow Teams icon that means, ‘Kat’s left the building’. Their boss has left, so they can too. Specific actions speak louder than generic encouragement.

3. Admit failure. Last week I told my team, ‘I’ve got nine meetings today, I’m going to be so tired at the end of this. This is not a good way to work.’ I apologised to the relevant people, rescheduled, and reset my meeting habits for the following week.

We’re always going to get it wrong sometimes. I owned my mistake and changed it. Be open, fail with them and you’ll grow together.

4. Be transparent. I’ve worked in organisations that actively encouraged employees to exercise and look after their wellbeing. But when I looked along the row of desks, the management teams were all eating lunch at their desks and trailing eleven back-to-back meetings a day. Inevitably, I followed suit.?

We have to be role models. That means living by our own advice. I used to do wellbeing activities on the sly, sneaking out to go to the gym on my lunchbreak. Now, I role model work-life balance. I tell the team when I’m taking a long lunch break to exercise, or leave the office bang on time to meet friends.

Advertise your wellbeing choices and your team will receive implicit permission to do the same.

5. Spring clean your habits. Constant balance is impossible. Striving to always have a perfect work-life balance doesn’t take into account sudden deadlines, children getting sick or geopolitical events. Instead, embrace seasons. A season of working hard, a season of relaxing. A season of family, a season of networking.

Seasons can be a couple of weeks or a few months. Working with that seasonal flow, and proactively resetting your habits when they fall out of shape, is way more valuable than constantly striving for impossible perfection.

What are your top wellbeing tips?