Why Workplace Well-being Matters

My first job was in a doctor’s office off a highway. It had a large plate glass window at the front entrance and a glass door. Upon entering, you had the choice of going downstairs, underground, where all the exam rooms were and no windows. Or you could go upstairs to physical therapy where there were also no windows. The whole office was done in dark wood paneling. Four women were corralled in a narrow reception pen to welcome patients – something they often did crankily. The space was dark and cramped. There was no air flow. It was overheated and dry. Filing cabinets lined the walls and overflowed. It’s ironic that this was a space people came to heal, to get better.

How do cultures get built? There are four essential pieces:

1.??How a space is designed: these are an organization’s value pillars that become a regular part of employees’ physical milieu.

2.??Are values modeled? Do leadership and management actively practice the values of the organization, giving permission to everyone else to do so?

3.??Is employee well-being integrated into their regular work flow?

4.??Frequent communication in a variety of forms: we are human and need continuous reminders and varied messaging to do what’s good for us.

Built-ins

WELL certified spaces have “built-in” values. At IWBI, six of the 10 central WELL certification concepts are built into the physical space and occupants benefit with no effort. There’s nothing they need to consciously do to gain the health benefits from thoughtful acoustics that dampen sound travel, or non-toxic materials used to paint walls or lay a carpet.

Yet someone needs to oversee proper maintenance to keep the space healthy, and this does take some effort. That’s a quiet, but important part of my role as steward of IWBI’s workforce well-being:

• To maintain clean air, quarterly HVAC maintenance is scheduled and air purifier filters changed.
• For thermal comfort, blankets and shawls get sent out for regular cleaning.
• Water purity requires semi-annual filter changes in our reverse osmosis system, ice machine maintenance, regular water testing.
• For non-toxic materials, natural cleaning products need re-stocking; a re-painting requires low VOC paint.

?Employee Engagement

“Active” values take reciprocal effort that are done via policies and programming that staff join. The four WELL concepts featured in this section are the human lifestyle habits that often need altering, and can be so very difficult to change: Nourishment, Movement, Mind, Community. Workplace Well-being consistently sets the stage to help make improvements in these areas more attainable.

“Active” values also happen to correlate with disease burden. The way we nourish ourselves often leads to overweight and obesity: driving forces of heart disease which is the leading cause of death in the U.S. and other developed nations. The way we move or not; sedentary living is the new smoking. This also contributes to heart disease.

How we care for our mental health; depression is the leading cause of missed workdays. According to the CDC, depression is estimated to cause 200 million lost workdays each year in the U.S. at a cost to employers of $17 to $44 billion. Burnout is also prevalent; nearly 70% of employees in a Deloitte survey report that employers don’t do enough to prevent or alleviate burnout.

What we naturally form at workplaces when people gather together each day, is community. Workplace Well-being leverages that, strengthens community, and uses it so that individual employees are reinforcing healthy habits for everyone else. How does this happen? Well, it’s a large part of how a healthy workplace culture is cultivated. Below are some examples.

Nourishment

Balanced meals. At IWBI, WW provides the organic, locally sourced produce from our nearby farmers’ market; just bring your protein. After just a few months of this practice, when we were all working in-office pre-pandemic, more staff were making their lunches than buying takeout.

·?????When we eat together, there is actual mealtime and it takes place away from the desk or work station.

·?????When we eat together, we do so socially. Conversation means eating more slowly.

·?????Built-in portion control when staff use company-provided dishware, guides portion sizes to resist excess.

Movement

Who has time? At IWBI, we make it part of our day through design and programming:

·?????Sit-stand desks, balance boards, 1:1 ergonomic consultation

·?????Active commuting: urban bike shares, individual wellness stipends to cover running shoes, roller blades

·?????Group fitness: virtually for remote staff, neighborhood studios for HQ staff

·?????Signage to encourage stair use over elevators

·?????More teams increasingly incorporating stretching into meetings

·?????Encourage walking meetings outdoors, use nearby park, pedestrian malls

Mind

We work actively to reduce stigma around mental health issues by offering:

·?????Mental health workshops, education and training

·?????Managers encourage staff to ask for help

·?????Continuously remind staff of mental health resources provided by health insurance and EAP

·?????Tell colleagues that therapy’s helped us and share recommendations of good, affordable in-network providers

·?????Meditation to start-off meetings

·?????Encourage 10-20 minute power naps in the wellness room over caffeinating in the late afternoon, which can compromise nighttime sleep

·?????Leadership and management reiterate the critical importance of dialing down after the workday and keeping laptops closed on the weekends

·?????Staff are reminded to take regular vacations – all of it, not just half – and to not check email during PTO

Community

And this brings me to Community – arguably the most important of the 10 concepts if we want health, or any central value of our company, baked into its being so that it truly becomes our shared culture. We do much of what I’ve just described together.

·?????We volunteer in the community together, working on causes that matter to us: sustainability, universal design, literacy, food insecurity.

·?????We share with each other a great in-network dentist that half the office ends up using.

·?????We not only eat meals together, but also make them together on certain days and sometimes procure ingredients together at the local farmers’ market.

At IWBI, we meditate together in meetings during a mindful minute.?Workout together. Discuss books and films. We share tips and tricks in Snack ‘n Chats about basic organizing, managing our inboxes, and keeping firm boundaries around our workday. We make sure that in addition to all this, we make room after work each month for regular social time with each other to converse and laugh about anything but work.

Nudges & Novelty

Staff at IWBI are as human as anyone else and we often require reminders, incentives and novelty to motivate us to do what can feel inconvenient or easy to neglect when we have pressing work to complete and a sitter at home to relieve by a set time.

So plenty of nudges are built into our culture to keep healthy options front and center, appealing, and accessible.

·?????Fresh produce is not only provided for a lunchtime salad or healthy snacks, but may also be made into a salad for all on a given day or cut into an attractive plate of crudité left on the kitchen counter. (That’s what I do.)

·?????Mandarins or lady apples may fill a clear glass flower vase as an edible decoration at the reception desk for anyone to grab passing by.

·?????Blue glass water bottles are filled and chilled for taking to meetings and glass pitchers are refilled with freshly brewed herbal teas throughout the day to encourage hydration and cut down on single use plastics.

·?????Signage all around the office reminds us of the WELL features we have in place.

·?????Prizes are offered for top contenders in fitness and other health challenges.?

Novelty switches up programming so no one gets too used to any one thing. Meditation, for example, can be delivered in all different ways: guided in the wellness room, outdoors in the park, a special training in a new technique, offering free subscriptions to an app. Nudges are key to all of us no matter our line of work. As much as I personally love to exercise, I’ll always love flopping down on the couch and reading a book more or meeting a friend at a café to chat. We’re all human and can always use a push to do what’s good for us.?

Info-sharing

Internally at IWBI, we message Workplace Well-being repeatedly via Slack, our company-wide Monday AM meeting, a Workplace Well-being Weekly email each Friday, and frequent reinforcement from Leadership and Management. Repetition via slightly different media is key to having employees truly believe they are meant to engage in Workplace Well-being and take care of themselves. Externally, we are always learning how other organizations are activating and developing this critical area. We share out what IWBI does at every opportunity, and welcome suggestions from staff when they hear of something cool at another workplace.

Culture

A test of whether a company’s Workplace Well-being program has integrated into company culture is to see if it travels. Does the whole become a part of most everyone in the workplace, so that they carry that healthy culture home with them? And does that culture keep evolving to reflect the needs and desires of its workforce? It should if a Workplace Well-being program reflects employee input and feedback.

·?????How baked into our company’s being are these values?

·?????Are they supported and modelled by leadership?

·?????Is there consistency in delivery?

·?????Is there tweaking to ensure that programming is not received in a lopsided manner; so that teams with lots of tight deadlines or a more breakneck workstream are not left out?

Constant checking into who’s involved, who isn’t and why. Don’t want to be? Fine. Ideally, however, we want to offer something that’s appealing and accessible to everyone. Variety matters.

·?????Can’t participate because of too much work? Then company/managers/leadership are made aware of healthy balance being off-kilter and can step in to rectify.

·?????Work and family obligations don’t allow? That signals we need to offer wellness programming that involves kids and families, making it available and fun for all.

Why I Do What I Do

If my father were alive today, I can hear him saying to me, “What is this thing you do? It’s nice, but not necessary. People go to work, they do their job, they earn money and take care of their families. Everyone has stress. You deal with it. You keep going.”

True. I come from a suck-it-up type of family. You do what you need to do. My father was successful on many accounts. He’s the doctor that owned that windowless office I described earlier. But he also drank daily – scotch, whiskey, rum. As soon as he got home, the glass and bottle were in front of him and remained on the table ‘til after dinner. He struggled with obesity and developed Type II diabetes. He didn’t die particularly young or old. But he did die quite suddenly of a massive heart attack when he was walking through Penn Station on his way to work.?

The way I would describe Workplace Well-being to my father is that it strives to help working people pace themselves, reach for a balance that their workplace is not working against, but rather supporting. Workplace Well-being policies and programming permit people to be human and grant permission to take care of oneself. It, in fact, prioritizes self-care as number one.

Because a company is only as good as its people. It’s only as healthy as its workforce. And if we have big plans to accomplish, then we need to be here for the long haul. To see things through. We can only do this by investing fully in the sustainability of the people who make up our companies.

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