How to kick-start a well-being initiative in your office
Listen to the full show here.
Why are businesses hesitant to build out well-being programs?
- “It’s always difficult to start something and to change something in large businesses. Also, people often fear the uncertainty of change. You don’t know if your initiative will work and have a positive effect on your business. But, well-beings important because regardless of company KPI’s there are productivity benefits to a well-being initiative which are harder to measure. Sometimes I think that businesses are hesitant to do things that are harder to measure.”
- “I definitely think businesses are apprehensive about what they should be focusing on. There’s physical health and mental health and there’s still a little bit of stigma around mental health specifically. I think this makes companies wary of engaging on the topic as they don’t want to accidentally offend someone or make someone feel uncomfortable. So instead, they just decide to ignore the issues around well-being at work but I think that can be even more dangerous.”
How do you kick start a well-being initiative in your office?
“It’s all about taking that first step to try something, even if it’s really small. Once you see that a focus on well-being at work isn’t that scary you can start actively making changes to implement it.
Some of the best companies for well-being initiatives started with really small changes. They didn’t start with huge, disruptive, company-wide changes that involved everybody’s time, money and resources. Do whatever you can to ‘snowball’ your well-being strategy and you’ll see it return dividend for your people and company in the future.”
Listen to the full show here.
Avery Kiesling is HR & Talent Manager at Ampersand Commerce
Kiesling is responsible for all elements of the employee lifecycle. This includes developing an excellent recruitment experience for all applicants, delivering an engagement plan that is valuable company-wide, managing the professional and personal development of Ampersand’s team, attending industry events to increase company exposure, leading the onboarding and induction process for all new employees and maintaining HR policies in line with employment legislation.
