Too often, employee wellness is a burden–on the EMPLOYEE.
Organizations might provide health insurance (important!)
Organizations might offer time–paid vacation and holidays, sick leave, parental leave, flexible PTO (significant!)
Organizations might offer perks–discounts, wellness apps, incentives, access to therapy (nice!)
These are all good signs that an organization cares about wellness. But what else do all these offerings have in common? They leave it up to the employee to manage and use ON THEIR OWN TIME.
Suddenly, wellness divides work from the rest of our life. Wellness becomes something employees “do” so they can work more, work faster, work harder.
We desperately need a reframe: Wellness is NOT a job perk. Wellness is a result of Human-Centered Practices and supportive structures, policies, and practices.
Let’s start measuring employee wellness by:
- The quality of our work relationships
- How well we understand our job duties and methods of evaluation
- How stable we feel about our pay and job predictability
- Our psychological safety to ask questions, not have the answers, and make mistakes
- How much we trust ourselves, our supervisors, and our teams
- How free we feel to disagree, voice concerns, and work through conflict
- The level of empathy we can expect from others
- Our ability to disagree, engage in healthy conflict, and work across differences
- Our sense of belonging and value within the organization
All of these wellness measures require structures at work and practices during work.
Read more about how Leverage to Lead helps organizations build supportive and nurturing structures, systems, policies & procedures that help employees and leaders thrive, and how we see wellness built into our work culture.
Interested in how Human-Centered Practices will help you build systems and structures designed for wellbeing?