Financial wellbeing
There is no doubt that financial and mental wellbeing are closely connected. If an employee is worried about personal finances, it’s inevitable this will in some way impact on their time at work. Financial anxiety can be a considerable cause of workplace stress and can lead to a drop in productivity.
If organisations recognise this and take steps to help employees better manage their finances, it will be a positive contributor to good mental health at work. What does this mean in practice? It can be as simple as highlighting resources available to employees to help them better manage their money, training and webinars around money management, financial modelling tools and even in-house financial advisors.
The first step is to establish from your employee pool what assistance they would benefit from, consider the affordability of this, and shape your approach to financial wellbeing from there.
Social wellbeing
How connected do your employees feel to others in the workplace? This is a key question for organisations to consider.
With many organisations encouraging employees to work ‘virtually’ more often these days, it’s much easier for people to become disconnected and miss out on the human interaction which is so important to thrive at work.
Employers today must be much more aware of this and take measured steps to encourage employees to connect face to face with each other when appropriate. This could include encouraging employees to form networks of people with similar interests, setting up a sports club or a group of working parents and carers, for example. This can help employees connect on a level outside of their day-to-day role and facilitate the formation of vital support networks.
Funded social events are a great way to increase team morale and ensure teams have an opportunity to socialise together on a regular basis. This may also include dedicating time to talking about team strategy, vision, and team wins and successes.
The key is to identify opportunities for people to make connections with others in the workplace and ultimately ensure face to face interaction is not lost in this ever-increasing virtual world.
Professional development
Investing in professional development can be a powerful tool to engage and motivate employees. People want to feel connected to the work they are doing and often want visibility of opportunities to make progress in their career whether this be through promotion or lateral moves to other parts of the organisation.
A structured development programme which includes regular technical updates and softer skills training can be valuable. Especially alongside a thorough performance management approach which sets out the skills and behaviours which may be required for different roles and levels within the organisation.
Professional development is often overlooked when thinking about wellbeing at work - it’s important organisations make this connection and include this as a key strand of their wellbeing strategy.
Many organisations will already have these strands, to varying different degrees, in place but they are often not connected to a specific wellbeing strategy. There is a real opportunity for organisations to join up the dots and think much more broadly about what their wellbeing strategy encompasses.