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No matter who you are as an organization, a startup disrupting their respective market, or an enterprise capturing the dominant market share, employees are the foundation of your strength.
Done right, your team can open up the floodgates of opportunities. Failure to meet their expectations, chances are it will break the nervous system of your organization.
This makes employee performance optimization a critical task for your company's HR (human resource) team. But executing this appears to be much simpler.
There are many things that you can deploy to keep your employee performance at peak. From learning programs to perks and benefits, office tours, and more. But here's the thing.
All of your initiatives are vulnerable to failure if your hires are not at their best health, both physical and cognitive. This makes wellness programs the foundations of employee performance programs.
Still unsure how?
This post demystifies the six benefits that counseling and wellness initiatives can bring to your employees in 2021.
6 benefits that your employee counseling and wellness initiatives can bring to the team in 2021
In business, any investment, time, or money into building a high-performance team is a resource well invested.
It not only improves your team performance today but reinforces a strong relationship between your employees and your organization. But if you need to be specific to employee wellness and counseling for staff, there are primarily six benefits, detailed in the following section.
But before that here's a word of caution.
In order to achieve success, you need to ensure you personalize your programs based on your employee profiles. After all, each of your employees has a unique personality with needs and motivations specific to them. To ensure your program witnesses maximum revenue, customizing your offers is critical to really be of value to your team. Did we say that your marketing team can be a huge asset in doing this right?
1. Foster a positive work culture
One of the primary benefits that employee wellness initiatives deliver is building the right culture. This may come out straight as a surprise but is true for all organizations.
Look at it this way. Your company runs on efficient teams and teams run on emotions. This means if you cannot satisfy their human emotions, chances are their expertise and skills will always stay under-optimized. They will start losing motivation.
Deploying a wellness program reinforces that their motivation and agileness towards work is constant in your workflow. But if you thought that your wellness programs are limited to perks and benefits, then think again.
You need to drill deeper into the psychographics of your employee.
Understand what motivates them, what their goals are, what they care about. On the basis of this information create a dynamic, transparent, and open culture that could nourish free thinking. This will only add to the growth for both your employee on the personal level and your organization.
2. Establish a mental wellness program
If there is one thing that lies at the foundations of an unproductive employee, it is more than often their mental health.
This may occur due to many reasons, many of which are completely outside the control of your organization. But, as an employer, deploying a program to curb this issue can benefit immensely on the overall performance of your employee, both individually and as a team player.
The best part is there are multiple high-performance tools that you can use to do this.
Start with deploying a counseling program. Your employees can feel anxious and frustrated due to multiple reasons, be it peer pressure, culture adaptation, or performance pressure. Having a setup which enables counseling for employees helps to navigate and resolve such acute problems for your team to get the best out of themselves.
Employee wellbeing programs are the perfect tool to demonstrate this. This program can improve the overall health of your employees with more productive hours, lowering sick leaves, which translates into reduced employee insurance costs.
However, you need to align your employee wellness initiatives with your company’s vision. Following are a few well-being initiatives that you should consider today.
You can even go on investing some resources for sponsoring personal growth programs to streamline their lifestyle and well-being. Mindvalley is a great platform for this.
3. Improves engagement and retention
Strong employee engagement is one of the most challenging tasks to achieve for any HR team. But, deploying a wellness initiative can successfully overcome this challenge. It is the very first point of employee-brand interaction where you can foster a long-term relationship. You need to make sure your employees know that you care.
Act instead of saying.
Setting the right expectations is an incredibly critical task here. Fortunately, there are numerous ways to do so. Employee volunteers programs appear to be one of the best ways to do so. But that is not all. You can initiate health insurance and family assistance programs to create a sense of security and bond with your employee. The best part? You will better engage them and retain them for longer periods of time.
To drive employee wellness and inspire more productivity, plug in an employee wellness software that can be integrated into your system. This gives employees a platfform to express themselves, innovate, and collaborate. Sorry, I was on Mute offers one such integrated platform that can be used to acknowledge and reward excellent work or contributions at an individual or team level across your organization. Make accurate data-driven decisions based on the in-depth reports and analytical information that this software provides to create customized rewards and recognitions. You can then take it one step further and align these with your company mission and value system to create a dynamic performance recognition centre.
4. Creates a healthy work-life balance
Your working floor is more than often vulnerable to attract pressure. And with pressure comes burnout.
No matter how skilled or talented your employee is, staying at peak performance all the time is impossible. If you see something contrary, chances are that the performance comes at the cost of work-life balance which eats up the long-term potential of the employee.
You may end up losing them after a few years.
But deploying a wellness program can ensure your employee churn rate stays the lowest possible at all times. But if you thought that this program is just about paid leaves and holidays, then rethink again.
There is much work to do for getting the true results of a wellness program. Start with tracking daily work hours. This will give you deeper insights into how your employees invest their average day. The best part? Your optimization programs and policies can be designed on the basis of these rich insights. There are so many tools that you can use. Rescuetime is one of them.
One other method would be to cut down the hours of meetings by keeping it short, to the point, and relevant to real-time needs. Yet again you can deploy a single, centralized communication channel for frictionless and redundancy-proof communications between team members. All this residue time can be utilized for deep work and building stronger relationships. You can conduct team activities instead of meetings.
5. Improve productivity and creative energy
It does not matter how many hours your employees put in a day if there is no real progress in your business operations. There is a huge difference between being busy and productive. Your employees can work for 8 hours yet come out more productive than being worked up for 12 hours yet produce nothing. This makes tracking productivity such a critical task for employee performance.
The fun part is there is so much you can do in this space starting from wellness programs to decluttering workspace.
Wellness programs right away can measure the areas causing the damping of productivity in your teams. Understanding the physical and cognitive circumstances and aiding it is the first step that you can take here.
Remember, your office floor is not only the hotbed of serious work but intimate stories of the lives of your team members. Deploying social programs for team building and relations can certainly prove to be effective for their mental health. The best part? They can cope up with pressure easier.
As they say, 'the team who eats together, beats together'.
Further, you can invest in fostering a centralized learning culture in your teams. Investing to equip your teams to learn coding and automation tools training can successfully declutter your workspace for more productive work.
5. Improve job satisfaction
Ever had a nightmare where your best employees resign from your organization? If you did, chances are it can take the shape of reality if you do not take effective measures against it.
One of the critical reasons why employees leave an organization is job satisfaction. If your employees feel neglected and not fulfilled at their jobs, chances are they would leave you. An employee wellness initiative is one of the best ways to ensure that your employees know that you care about them.
But in order to understand what kind of program would suit their respective needs, talking directly about their frustrations, personal goals and motivations are what will bring you clarity.
There are so many programs that you can initiate here. From perks and programs like gift cards to on-the-house services, you can experiment with many.
Again, quarterly arrears for performance is a great way to ensure that you value their hard work. Also, ensuring you have proper pay hygiene is a great way to keep their mental frustrations at bay. This can easily be done by deploying automated payroll service tools like Gusto. This way you do not need to think of missing a payment date for your employees.
Conclusion
By now, the above benefits must have convinced you of the potential perks that a counseling and wellness initiative holds for your employees. But, your performance optimization journey does not end here.
In fact, it is just the beginning.
To ensure sustainable health for your employees you need to keep reiterating your offers to meet their needs of today. This can be easily done if you keep your feedback loop open. Remember, your employees are humans and thus come with all human merits and flaws.
Even your best employee cannot be at the top of their game every day even when you deploy these programs. What these programs really do is ensure the percentage of fitness and agility is favorable for maximum days.
Supporting your team, especially during these difficult Covid times, and empathizing with them is the least you can do to help them.
If your employees feel that you care about them, that care definitely reflects in your long-term success.
