How You Can Create a Healthy Workplace
In my recent blogs, I’ve discussed why you should focus on workplace well-being and the common mistakes leaders make on their journey to healthy workplaces.
Now, let’s discuss how you can go from unhealthy to healthy.
Like all goals, it’s essential to have a plan with actionable, scalable, and measurable steps along the way.
Below are eight critical pieces of the path to a healthy workplace.
Committed and aligned leadership
Leaders who walk the talk regarding workplace health are essential to success. With a C-suite that believes well-being is critical to individual, team, and organizational longevity, most efforts will succeed.
Start by creating organization-wide goals that specifically focus on health. Reference the framework provided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which outlines two objectives related to health: good health and well-being and decent work and economic growth.
Once you’ve defined your organizational targets, you know what you’re striving for.
Create a holistic definition of “healthy”
Healthy individuals are those who can flourish at work and beyond. They have energy, feel empowered, and have a sense of purpose. Healthy organizations enable their people to sustainably contribute to their objectives and provide opportunities for meaningful contributions.
Once your definition is clear and shared with your leadership, communicate it to everyone in your organization, which brings us to our next step.
Create a culture of health
Work with your employee experience, communications, human resources, and all business leaders to ensure health is part of your organization’s ecosystem. Take every opportunity to get the word out about your commitment to workplace well-being and share how everyone in your organization can get involved.
The most important aspects of your efforts are intentionality, consistency, and discipline. You must repeatedly show your commitment to health in all your words and deeds. It will take time, especially if this is a new journey for your company.
Don’t quit when the going gets tough. Remember, this effort is a marathon, not a sprint.
Measure your baseline
As with all goals, knowing where your starting point is will help you plot out the best path to where you’re going. The same is true for whether you want to get more exercise or if you want to create a shift in your culture.
When determining your baseline for workplace well-being, it’s helpful to look at it through three lenses:
Individual health: Look at indicators such as energy, physical fitness, diet, work control, relationships, gratitude, and more
Workforce health: Look at the same indicators you measured at the individual level and analyze them in the aggregate to get a picture of your workforce overall
Organizational health: Look at indicators like wellness culture, corporate values, manager support, work demands, and others to determine how supportive your current environment is to a culture of health
Analyze your current health
Now, you have all this great data you’ve collected from surveys, focus groups, and interviews. What’s next?
Synthesize your findings and analyze the results. This will give you a very clear snapshot of your organization. Think of it as your organizational health record. Look at your data by demographics to see if there are gaps or strengths across groups related to health.
Use it to inform your path forward.
Share your results
Before you jump into action mode, share the results of your data gathering with your entire workforce. It creates a sense of accountability for leadership to deliver and instills trust by showing that you’ve heard your people and are taking their feedback seriously.
As you go through your organizational change, it will make your people more likely to share their thoughts when you ask because you’ve shown you took action on their input from the beginning.
Activate your workplace well-being plan
At this stage, you’re ready to put pen to paper and create a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound plan.
While you might see a host of issues you need to address, you should also keep sight of any glimmers of strength you already have in your organization. Prioritize the actions you want to take based on the strengths and weaknesses that came out in your analysis. It’s not possible or advisable to focus on everything all at once. As the saying goes, “If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.”
Break down your plan by time. What do you want to accomplish in six months, a year, three years, and five years? Map it out so you have a mix of short-term and long-term goals.
Establish the team responsible for leading these efforts and ensure you create checkpoints regularly to report on results and any changes you might need to make. And, of course, keep your people informed about it all.
Celebrate your successes
Along with continuous evaluation and improvement, remember to celebrate your successes, big and small.
Have your workplace health indicators ticked up since last quarter? Make sure it’s part of your all-hands agenda to take a moment to recognize the collective effort of everyone at your company in making it happen. Do people find their work more meaningful, see their part in your overall success, and feel a sense of belonging? Celebrate it.
It’s all part of the ongoing journey to creating and sustaining a healthy workplace.
To learn more about how you can transform your organization from unhealthy to healthy, check out Make Work Healthy or schedule a call with me to learn how I can help you with workplace culture change.