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.
Find out how you could leverage a snackable learning approach in your organisation.
Get our plug and play wellbeing program by The Flourishing Institute for your people from just $0.95c* per employee per month (excl. GST).
Employees have different expectations of wellbeing now. What companies used to do is no longer good enough when it comes to creating an environment where staff thrive.
We caught up with Jane Davis, founder and director of The Flourishing Institute to find out what the future of corporate wellness looks like, and what businesses can do about it.
Watch the webinar to understand:
Above: Watch the full webinar!
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. Luckily, that's where The Flourishing Institute shines.
“Knowing what we do, the danger is for leaders to want to solve it all…and solve it now. But this places undue pressure on anyone wanting to
improve workplace wellbeing in a sustainable way,” believes Jane. This is where three key principles come into play:
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.
The great news is you don’t have to start from scratch when it comes to workplace wellbeing. There are material and sites out there that you can proactively remind your employees about on an ongoing basis or use to upskill yourself. In our wellbeing webinar, we touched on some free resources :
Mental Health Foundation NZ
Their collection of free online resources includes powerful workplace, personal and leadership resources.
Depression.org.nz
A great site to point to if anyone in your team is struggling with their mental wellbeing.
Wellplace.nz
Offers great free resources for building a healthy workplace, including coping with Covid19.
Some additional, practical actions you can take include:
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 stye of learning combat the natural tendency for people to forget what they’ve learnt.
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. Watch the video below to get a preview of what it would look like:
The program is available across:
Find out how you could leverage a snackable learning approach within your organisation.
Get our plug and play wellbeing program by The Flourishing Institute for your people from just $0.95c* per employee per month (excl. GST).
*Contact us for full pricing details.
We started with COVID messages, but by mid-Nov 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!
It's a really simple and effective way to help communicate key messages to all workers on our construction sites.
Rather than settling for basic posters that don't get updated often, Vibe's moving imagery and fun colors catches the eye.
It's transformed our communications for our non-wired staff.
The comm's tools we used previously for our non-wired employees weren’t up to the same level as those for wired.
Vibe has been a hit from the beginning! Better collaboration, visibility, sharing and accountability.
We’ve also experienced a 60% increase in awareness of upcoming events in the business calendar and were able to celebrate at least five times more staff achievements than we could have using email.
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.
Our people love the wellbeing program content!
Our people are impressed that we are providing them with communication that is timely and will help improve their safety, health and wellbeing.
Great way to engage with our team. Different to standard notice boards where the team don't look at it.
Keeps areas noise-free and are able to just have a tv screen with rolling information.
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.
The Vibe team are great to work with - super proactive, super helpful.
Infact we haven't needed them too much because it's really easy to use and very simple and effective.
Vibe provides a way of supporting the key messages around safety, wellbeing, operational updates and employee recognition.
When choosing a product, Vibe.fyi ticked all the boxes.
Vibe was head and shoulders above the rest, because it offered the best and simplest application.
We originally needed a mechanism to push out health and safety information to all of our people.
After a few years, we now use the screens for Health & Safety, general notices, reporting dashboards, news, financial and wellness programs.
I'm not an IT person at all, but the Vibe system is super easy to use, requiring minimal input.
The screens are fabulous and have been a great tool for improving the accuracy of information, removing a lot of frustration around the village.
We’ve experienced a 20% reduction in volume of emails.
With an obviously more positive, interactive, connected and engaged workforce, who appear a lot happier!
It saves us time, plus it's a very modern solution and it helps engage and inspire our people.
I haven't seen a solution this powerful before!
Our people absolutely love it and it's helped us transform how we communicate.
Vibe is a great internal communications tool that is user-friendly and customised to our business.
Their customer service team is friendly and quick to get in touch if you have a query or issue.
There was a lot of printing of flyers and posters 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.
Their customer service is exceptional.
From our very first introductory meeting, they have always been on hand to offer information and support. They proactively step-in to find ways to make things work. Friendly, knowledgeable and very responsive!
If we took it away now, there would be a riot!
Being able to set all the screens up differently is fantastic. It provides a real 'feel-good' factor for residents.
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.
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.
Vibe is a great tool for bringing staff together and sharing news and event footage internally.
Vibe.fyi has helped the team improve resident engagement
The MATV feed is hugely popular with residents who don't have to leave the comfort of their own room to access information about what's going on in the village.
It has helped raise awareness around services we offer.
The screens have not only been a great visual aid for residents, they have also been an excellent marketing and sales tool.
The flexibility of the Vibe.fyi solution impressed our project team
Some screens show events; others display news, weather and quizzes; and others a ‘personal touch’, with birthdays and anniversaries.
People love Vibe. I would say using Vibe.fyi has been 100% effective!
Employees stop and look at the screens. Our deskless workforce say they feel more informed, as they saw something before their team leader told them.
One of our favourite features is the ability to show social media feeds - with Yammer.
Our people can keep their finger on the pulse of what's happening and they don't have to be stuck behind their desks all day.
I like having the ability to control what content is displayed on each screen with playlists.
We have screens across two different locations with a different audience requirement for each one.
Vibe has worked during COVID-19; and beyond.
As an essential service, needed Vibe in all Distribution Centres during the first lockdown to provide H&S information. It's been the solution we needed to reach all of our staff in a timely manner.
Vibe gets cut-through
Vibe is now officially part of our channel mix and is becoming one of our main channels of communication (and has the potential to become the main channel).
We're saving time and increasing team efficiency!
Vibe.fyi has had a positive impact on team meetings – the duration of meetings has reduced by approximately 30% because of not needing to cover the tracking of core services.
Vibe helps us drive engagement. Definitely a very positive tool!
It has enabled us to display life-saving rules, incentive tracking and information that hasn't been available to non-wired staff previously.
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.
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.
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.
With uncertain times, we have another communication channel to ensure our business key messages are been seen.
Specifically for those that communicate with our customers.
Being a construction project we also use Vibe to show our office-bound staff what’s happening out on site.
This helps promote a greater understanding of progress and gives a feel of inclusion.
The results have surpassed our own expectations.
Our key stakeholders have wanted to know how we implemented such a stunning platform. Our CEO has been raving about it!
We can easily share information to staff across New Zealand that isn't always available to them.
The different templates are a bonus - there's always a layout that works with what you want to share.