Easing Workplace Stress: Cultivating a Culture of Care and Wellness

American workplaces have a problem: their employees are more stressed than ever. An estimated 83% of American workers are currently experiencing mental health problems, and 40% don’t believe their employer cares about their mental health. Long hours, heavy workloads, monotonous tasks, and an uncertain pandemic have all led to U.S. workers being some of the most stressed in the world, according to a report by Gallup.

As a Human Resources professional with over 30 years of experience across multiple industries, these numbers are not only disheartening but also incredibly frustrating. The alarming disconnect between employers and employees on mental health is anything but invisible. Companies know they have a wellness problem, but seemingly few take the necessary action to fix it. When the average person spends a third of their life at work, failure to address toxic environments, poor work-life balance, and other workplace stressors will only amplify stress levels, not to mention diminish performance and productivity.

Passionate about not only empowering our people but providing practical and actionable ideas to drive engagement and retainment for HR professionals nationwide, I am sharing what I’ve learned over my career in hopes of inspiring like-minded leaders in their journeys to implementing effective employee engagement and wellness programs for their companies.

What Works in Wellness

The best way to start and the most effective thing you can do is also the simplest: listen. I’ve spent most of my career building people-centered cultures where employees feel safe, seen, heard, and supported. At each company, I strive to create a work environment that fits employees’ needs by sourcing feedback from pulse surveys, evaluating current policies and how they might impact wellness, and hiring outside help when necessary. More specifically, I’ve had success when implementing and creating robust wellness programs that enhanced physical, mental, and emotional well-being to ultimately improve job satisfaction.

Programming Ideas: Wellness Coach + Health Fairs

There are countless ideas you can begin to implement by first listening to your people and doing what’s right for your culture, but I’d like to share two high-impact initiatives that brought great value to my team in the past: wellness coaching and annual health fairs.

We invited a diverse lineup of wellness coaches to our office — each with their own expertise, be it fitness, mental health, sound healing, or aroma therapy — with whom employees could meet with one-on-one to set specific wellness goals. The coaches also held monthly seminars on various topics along with individual and team challenges tied to these topics, such as a water-drinking challenge with the chance to win a prize. Many of our employees had never had a wellness coach or participated in monthly challenges before with their colleagues before, and we thought it was important to introduce them to new ways of promoting health.

We also held annual health fairs to give our employees a holistic view of their health. Right before our benefits renewal timeframe, employees could get a biometric screening at the health fair to compare their numbers year after year. Under strict confidentiality between the employee and the attending nurse, these screenings provided baseline measures of blood pressure, weight, waist circumference, cholesterol, and more, so employees could track their yearly progress and set goals with a wellness coach accordingly.

My Plans for Wellness at evolvedMD

I joined evolvedMD as its Director of People back in June 2021. The company, a leader in the integration of behavioral health services in modern primary care, prides itself on promoting work-life balance and self-care for all its employees. We reward our employees with quarterly self-care bonuses for completing self-care activities and regularly facilitate check-ins to understand how they’re feeling and what the company can do to better support them. We’ve worked hard to build and maintain this culture as we firmly believe it not only benefits our employees but also benefits our patients; happy, healthy employees result in greater patient care. As a young company that’s rapidly growing, we want to do more than just say “Self-care is engrained in our culture.” We strive to practice what we preach, so we’re always working on new ways to expand our wellness offerings.

To deliver on our people-focused ambition, in 2022, it is our intention as a leadership team to pilot an employee-led wellness committee. Our goal? Representation from every level of the company with ideas and ownership coming directly from both those individuals doing the day-to-day work and those overseeing initiatives company-wide.

We will work to listen, to offer authentic solutions, to iterate, and to ultimately support our people the best way we can and will keep our progress front and center as we showcase our culture on social media.

Launching workplace wellness programs can truly change the trajectory of an organization: from increased engagement, to decreased attrition, to additional champions to carry the culture forward.

If you are an HR leader in charge of the wellness, engagement, and culture of your organization, I’ve curated a few simple tips to launch effective programs:

Actionable Tips for Leaders Looking to Implement Wellness Initiatives in Their Organizations

1. Leadership Must Set the Tone
   Many organizations rely on Human Resources departments to lead wellness initiatives and, in some sense, serve as in-house therapists. I would argue that leadership teams must intentionally lead by example, or employees will never buy into the culture. evolvedMD emphasizes having a work-life balance. If our employees see the leadership team regularly working past 5pm, they will inevitably feel guilty about leaving before their managers and bosses do. It’s counterproductive to the organization’s mission and can negatively impact our employees’ well-being if they feel they can’t log off and spend time with their families or pursue their passions outside of work.
2. Engage From the Top-Down
   Employees must feel seen, heard, and supported. Members of leadership teams often have jam-packed schedules filled with prior obligations, but not taking time to practice wellness or engage with employees will have the opposite effect and render wellness initiatives ineffective. Just like my first tip implies, leadership teams must serve as role models for the entire organization. That means participating in monthly wellness challenges, practicing self-care, and attending group activities. It also means being present and actively listening to your employees. Neglecting to do any of these things, whether intentional or not, will make employees feel unheard and send the message that wellness isn’t a true priority.
3. Build Wellness into the Company Culture
   Improving and sustaining well-being across the organization must not be seen as an extracurricular that checks off a box. Instead, leadership teams must champion it as a key element of their culture. Not only is this good for your employees, but it’s good for business, too. This philosophy is central to evolvedMD’s growth and its ability to retain talent in the long-term. Success may mean something different for every organization, but building wellness into your culture will only help you meet and exceed your organization’s expectations, whatever that may look like for you.

Workplace stress is counterproductive no matter the organization. Although stress levels have reportedly increased over the past three decades, cultivating a culture of care and wellness with leadership teams at the helm is instrumental to addressing the disconnect between employers and their teams. Engagement and wellness go hand and hand, and the key to having a successful wellness program in the workplace is encouraging overall well-being while keeping it fun, simple, and inviting.

If you belong to a leadership team eager for solutions, I encourage you to learn from my experiences so that you, too, can enjoy a healthy and productive experience at your organization.