Top 3 Wellbeing Initiatives for Staff in SMEs

Supporting your team through difficult times doesn’t need to be expensive or time consuming.

It really doesn’t.

You don’t need sleep pods installed in your offices or celebrities to deliver keynotes at your conferences or expensive, curated hampers couriered to all your staff. While those initiatives might have value for some employees, they’re usually well out of reach for most small and medium business owners. That doesn’t mean you should give up on trying to help your team but it does beg the question –?How can we help our team members who are struggling with the weight of lockdown life when all the usual ‘care’ offerings are beyond our means?

I’ve been fortunate enough to run a successful business for many years and have tried and tested many wellness initiatives throughout this time. I’ve discovered some several exceptional tools for fostering staff wellbeing that are both exceptional and inexpensive. Here are my top 3:?

5 ways to wellbeing

My personal favourite is the 5 Ways to Wellbeing website. The welcome video makes you feel like you’re catching up with a close friend, and the genuine, relatable content is sustained across the whole site. The program has been rolled out by The Royal Melbourne Hospital and was originally developed by the New Economics Foundation in the UK, so you can be confident it’s based on legitimate research . The basis of the program is that there are five components or ‘ways’ to wellbeing, and each part needs attention to keep us afloat. The ways are:

1.?????Connect

As human beings, we have an innate need to relate and form connections with other people. This is probably the most integral part of maintaining wellbeing and is about making sure we combat isolation by nurturing a variety of relationships in our lives, both strong and deep ones and broader connections within our communities and wider networks.

2.?????Be Active

I know people probably get sick of being told that exercise is the answer to anything that ails us, but the mind-body connection is undeniable! As well as having all the expected physical benefits, exercise can help lift our mood, improve our sleep, and add years to our lives. It doesn’t always have to be a marathon workout at the gym, either – every little bit helps.

3.?????Keep learning

You know that feel-good rush when you master something new? That’s your brain thanking you for learning, something that we often forget to be intentional about as adults. Our brains have an amazing capacity for rewiring and forming new neural pathways, and even small activities like learning to play a new board game can do wonders for our confidence, connectedness and cognitive plasticity.

4.?????Be aware

Oprah introduced many people to the idea of a gratitude practice a long time ago and mindfulness is the buzzword that has never really left us. Why? Because they are scientifically proven to be some of the most effective tools in our coping kits. Awareness of our own feelings and thoughts, living in the present and noticing small things that we can be grateful for are all important parts of this.

5.?????Help others

Did you know that altruism is its own reward? Helping other people is not only good for them, but for us, too! Not only do we get out of our own heads for a while, the satisfaction of being able to make a difference to someone else must be one of the greatest natural highs around. Plus, it activates the endorphins that help us feel happier, and happier people live longer (and enjoy it!).

You can check out more ideas on the 5 Ways to Wellbeing site here .

Audible Subscription

At $165 for a 12-month subscription, the gift of an Audible subscription for your team members is simple, flexible and great value for money. We recently launched it internally and I was pleasantly surprised at how popular it was! People were eminently grateful and it gave rise to an informal book club for sharing our finds, which was an excellent and organic boost to team morale and culture. It’s also given us a way to share something of ourselves that’s a little more personal than the usual workplace interactions but doesn’t involve forced intimacy or disclosure. Discussing how we felt about a book, how we perceived a character’s actions and why we felt the way we did about it provides a great forum for relating to each other, talking about the world, establishing common ground and connecting as people beyond our positions at work. My favourite recommendation from a team member so far has been ‘This is going to hurt’ by Adam Kay.

This way up

An option that truly puts the power in the hands of your people, the This Way Up site offers a range of self-paced online courses to help participants identify, understand, and address the mental health and wellbeing challenges that are interfering with their lives, whatever they may be. This Way Up is run by clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers, and web technicians based at the Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety and Depression (CRUfAD) – a joint facility of St Vincent’s Hospital and the University of New South Wales. This is actually the largest e-health learning platform in Australia and it’s available without any of the usual barriers of referral or assessment. Course topics include The Social Anxiety Course, The Panic Attacks Course, The Worry Course, The OCD Course and The Perinatal Mental Health Course, among others. With course costs around $60 (or free in some cases) and a duration of around six lessons to be done at the participant’s leisure, you can estimate that it will take a few months to complete. Why not allocate a couple of hours of work time each month for staff to complete a course of their choosing? When we feel better, we’re more productive. Everybody wins.

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As these examples have illustrated, showing that you care doesn’t have to cost the earth. A small but thoughtful gesture is sometimes all that’s needed for your team to know that you want to support them in a meaningful way. Over to you!