Resources › The Changing Landscape of Workplace Wellbeing [2022]
Resources › The Changing Landscape of Workplace Wellbeing [2022]
With that brings increasing demand to cope with mounting pressure. Whether we're working from home or on the front line, future of work looks very different today. When it comes to essential or front line workers, they often don't have good support systems in place. As non-desk workers, they're often forgotten and neglected when it comes to workplace wellbeing.
Workplace wellbeing, otherwise known as employee wellness or corporate wellbeing, relates to a safe and healthy physical environment for your employees to work, how workers feel about their work, their working environment, and company.
The three Fs no longer cut-it
Standard offerings around wellbeing, fruit, fitness, and flu shots, simply don't cut it anymore. Wellness isn't a 'one and done' conversation. It needs to be ongoing.
Wellbeing can shift
People struggle at different times; different triggers can upset them, Covid lockdown being a major trigger for many.
We're dealing with the most distracted workforce in history
Emails, texts, group chats – all this noise presents a real challenge to organisations. Put the focus on workplace wellbeing by "interrupting" employees.
Before you implement a workplace wellbeing program, here are three foundational guiding principles:
When it comes to mental wellbeing, organisations traditionally invest in those who are in offices or at their headquarters. What happens to non-desk, front line workers?
Technology makes it easier than ever to include people, and to be flexible in how we offer help.
The best organisations go beyond providing wellbeing for their employees.
There's a tendency now to also influence an employee's wider circle, like their family members. The most successful companies recognise that every team member's wellbeing extends far beyond themselves.
This may involve offering counselling sessions for families, flexible work hours, parental leave and more.
After engaging a popular speaker for a big bang launch, what happens next?
We need to provide our people with simple, practical content, tools and strategies they can use on an ongoing basis.
Scared people become scary people
Fear of the unknown is rippling. Open, honest communication is critical. In the first instance, the most powerful thing you can do is
to reassure people – about their role; and about the company's position.
You don't need all the answers
You simply need to consistently point people to where they can get the answers. There are powerful resources and tools out there – and you
don't have to 'go it alone' when designing a wellbeing program.
Role modelling is key
It's vital that as leaders, we show people that it's okay to not be okay. Walk the talk by scheduling 'away time' or meeting-free
time is one of the best ways in which we can support our people, because people will do what you do, not what you say.
A major road block companies face is getting ongoing cut-through for their workplace wellbeing messaging. While workshops are a great way to provide experiential learning in a group setting, we struggle to retain that information over time.
When it comes to influencing long term behaviour change, key messages need to be seen 17 times, using spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is where you space out the frequency of the message over time, rather than just displaying a message on repeat, which actually has the reverse effect.
For most organisations, the communication tools and channels fall short when it comes to delivering spaced repetition. Imagine sending
the same email or reposting the same message to Facebook Workplace or MS Teams 7 or 8 times, let alone 17 times. It will not only
infuriate everyone, including the person having to send it, but it will clutter the tool.
Snackable Learning blends the best parts of microlearning (the delivery of short bursts of bite size content) and nudge Learning (the positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions to influence behaviour). This style of learning combat the natural tendency for people to forget what they've learned.
The Flourishing Institute has partnered with Vibe.fyi on a number of industry-leading wellbeing programs that make it possible to deploy them at the touch of a button to screens throughout organisations using a 'snackable' learning strategy.
Vibe.fyi takes the key learnings from a workshop and delivers those throughout the workplace in a highly visual and engaging format;
at the level of frequency required to embed long term learning.
We are now able to share general company information and specific site information to large groups of people.
It suits our teams and contractors in different locations, which in the past has been difficult to communicate with.
Vibe helps us get internal messaging to staff in a fun, graphic format.
As well as the serious stuff, slideshows of staff events are very popular. Plus, promote our outward-facing social media content inwardly to staff and visitors.
We easily share information to staff in all locations that isn't always available to them.
The different templates are a bonus - there's always a layout that works.
You can just have it all on Vibe.
Even when you’re at home, you can have these snackable bits of content you can retain, instead of having to check an email, look at an announcement, go from one platform to another.
Before Vibe there was a lot of 'printed flyers' which is both costly and environmentally unfriendly.
With Vibe's on-screen format it’s easy to make changes instantly on the fly without the need for a reprint. No more excuses from staff not reading internal emails. Messaging is right there, on the screen.
We started with COVID messages, but after 6 months, we were communicating other business events on site.
We're using Vibe for EVERYTHING. Facebook groups, café menus, surveys (with a QR code), internal videos, welcoming our summer interns, Christmas messaging from our CEO + more!
This software has helped stop geographical office separation and team silos.
Meetings are shorter. We get immediate reporting to the whole business on performance without having to send more emails to get the data required.
It's very cool and a great way to communicate with and engage my non-wired employees.
The digital templates are extensive and the Vibe team support is outstanding. The feedback I get from my team tells me we're on the right track.
Really great for providing snackable and understandable content, it’s visually a great way to communicate.
The impact when people see our big digital wall at reception is great.
We have found Vibe very effective as an implementation model for dashboard content.
It helps us visualise data. It’s a great system and I would definitely recommend it.
