Support your employees during the holiday season

The holiday season can bring a myriad of challenges for your employees, from pre-holiday stress to family pressures. As a supportive employer, you may not be able to fix everything, but you can make their work experience stress-free.

Understanding your employees' individual challenges is key to providing effective support. With the rise of remote and hybrid work, staying connected to your team's well-being has become more challenging yet crucial.

So, how do you measure employee wellbeing over the festive season?

Here are five dimensions to track your employees' well-being during the holidays:

1.?Meaningfulness

The holiday season is often a time that inspires reflection (good and bad).

"Where am I in life?", "What have or haven’t I achieved?", "Am I truly doing what I love?", "Do I feel that I am making a positive contribution to the world?"...

Many of these questions relate to their sense of meaningfulness.

Your employee’s sense of purpose, how connected they feel to their work and motivation to do their best for your organisation.

Meaningfulness is the third most significant factor that impacts turnover , so make sure to track it before the New Year's resolution resignations begin...

2. Inclusion

When employees feel included, job performance increases by 56% and they’re 50% less likely to leave. They’re also 167% more likely to recommend your organisation as a great place to work, helping with future recruitment.

But the holiday season can be divisive. Every organisation is a melting pot of perspectives, cultures, opinions. Emotions run high.

To know where to provide extra support, you need to understand how included your teams feel — and whether that differs between employee groups and whether it’s changed over the holidays.

3. Stress

Stress is one of the most obvious signs your people might be struggling.

Winningtemp customers often report seeing a big uptick in stress over the holiday period, from a whole heap of factors you might not always expect.

(This is why having the ability to track in real-time how your teams are feeling is critical. And beyond this, it’s invaluable when your employees can add qualitative comments to clarify or contextualise.)

Assumptions could do more harm than good, because one person’s perfect Christmas is another’s total nightmare.

You’ll struggle to provide meaningful support unless you know exactly what’s stressing your people out.

4. Workload

Theoretically, the festive period is a time to relax and unwind.

But the reality is often very different, with employees racing to get projects finished before the holidays and team members picking up extra slack as colleagues break early.

Research shows overloaded employees are three times more likely to experience poor wellbeing. In total, 75% of employees feeling overburdened by their workload have low wellbeing scores. And worse, more than 60% are also at risk for turnover.

Knowing how your employees feel about their workloads is important, both to protect their wellbeing and to predict problems that could derail deadlines.

(There’s nothing worse than discovering a week before the holidays that the team needs to work overtime to finish a key project...)

5. Teamspirit

We often think of the festive period as a time for coming together; for family. But this is far from universal, and many employees can feel lonelier than ever over the holidays.

The holiday season has a way of bringing loneliness home, whether it’s absent friends or family or feelings of being lonely despite the crowd.

These feelings can result in employees becoming withdrawn and distracted, pulling back from colleagues and workplace friends. But, close-knit teams with great energy can also be one of the biggest antidotes to seasonal loneliness, helping an employee feel supported and connected.

Tracking team spirit gives HR and managers a heads-up when something’s going on for their team – and helps get the team back on track, at a time when that really matters.

Last but not least...

You can’t act to support your people unless you truly understand the challenges they face (during the holidays and all year long!)

Winningtemp helps you measure what really matters, and act on it.