Let Your People Flourish
As I grew as a life coach, came the calling to help people at scale. I was aware of the obstacles I faced when working in the corporate world and continuously reminded of these by my individual clients who would bring different stories but the same complaints:
· Stress
· Anxiety
· Lack of motivation
· Low performance
· Lack of direction
· Little sense of purpose and fulfillment
· Deep questioning about life
These might seem like different problems but really, they are strongly interconnected. At its root, most of these employee complaints are created by a company culture that does not take into account the wellbeing of its workforce. These days, overlooking employee wellbeing is sure to result in an unsustainable business. It is only a matter of time until the costs of presenteeism, absenteeism, medical leaves, low retention and bad reputation come back to bite you in the *.
So, how can you regear your business so you start fostering a positive workplace? Well, that’s easy! Let YOUR people flourish!!
Humans and companies are complex systems that are linked in many ways. They feed on each other and this is why a business that wants to succeed needs to promote an environment for their people to grow, be healthy, happy and inspired. There are a number of initiatives that you can do to achieve this: offering personal development workshops, training your leaders on positive leadership, providing coaching to your employees for both personal and professional issues that might be impacting their productivity, offering mindfulness sessions at work, amongst many others.
The right mix will depend on the “pains” of your company and its availability to make employee wellbeing a priority. A Happiness Consultant will help you define which are the most suitable initiatives for your company, deliver them and of course measure their success over time. At Food for Soul, we work with companies at different levels. For those of you who checked our Corporate Services page and are looking to know a bit more about how we can help, keep on reading 👇🏼.
At this point, I want use an analogy to help you understand how each of our corporate services can help your company.
Let’s picture your company as a garden. A garden is a complex system in which different elements play a part for it to thrive. Now, just like people are every company’s number one asset, let’s assume people are the plants in this garden and our goal is to help them grow strongly, beautifully and ultimately flourish! So, here’s how each of the services we offer to companies will help reach exactly this goal:
Inspiring Talks: just like turning and loosening the soil, makes it easy for air and water to reach the roots of the plant and to allow its roots to penetrate deeper into the soil so that it can hold the plant firmly; motivational and personal development talks create the necessary conditions for employees to firmly grow. They lay the right foundations, values and self-awareness for growth and success.
Workshops: are the nutrients we add to the existing soil in the form of compost or extra soil for example, in order to make it richer. In gardening, you want a healthy and diversified soil, full of nutrients. This will allow the plants to grow better and stronger in the future. In a company’s case, think of it like powering the ground for employees’ growth.
The Coach turns out to be the gardener. The one who weeds, prunes, waters and supports the healthy growth of the plant (aka. The employees). Offering coaching services to your employees serves as a preventative measure to common problems such as employee burnout, toxic work environment or bad managers that have a big weight on the company’s success.
Training is the fertilizer you will apply to your plants to boost and accelerate their growth. Offering training to your employees will have the same effect.
And finally, our Consulting process is the gardening process in its entirety which takes into account the entire garden (aka. organization or department). It demands studying and planning which plants to grow when and how. What resources and tools will we use? Just like building a company happiness plan does.
I hope you get the picture. But if it is still unclear maybe this design will help:
This goes to show that there are many roads and layers to employee happiness. A company that wants to put their employees first just has to be open to explore these different initiatives and be patient enough for them to lead to results. It is a matter of prioritization and mindset rather than money because no matter how much you invest in employee happiness the financial gains you get from a happy culture will most certainly make up for that investment.
And if all of the above is not convincing enough for you to start investing in your employee wellbeing than think of all of your stakeholders, their families and their networks. You wouldn’t just be bringing positive change to your employees but to your stakeholders at large. Change CAN start with you.
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