Ensure Your Employees’ Are Being Taken Care of.
A list of some of the most effective strategies.
Employee well-being has gained momentum since the Covid-19 pandemic forced us to adapt our daily routines to work from home. Since the onset of the pandemic, HRs started noticing a pattern in their employees – they were getting restless as most of them were unable to maintain a work-life balance. It was clear that the employees will require some kind of training or counselling to cope with the additional stress of working from home. Hence, HRs and companies started giving more importance to employee welfare than ever before.
Hence, let us take a look at some of the most effective strategies to ensure that your employees’ well-being is being taken care of:
1. Develop Recognition as a part of Company Culture
Rewards and recognition used to be something wherein the rewarded employees would receive a medal or certificate and a congratulatory email. However, when everyone is working remotely, such a system won’t have any effect on employee morale. What one requires is to adapt recognition as a part of the core company culture. It will promote instant gratification as the performing employee will be rewarded instantly either with a simple ‘Great Job’ or with some form of physical reward. For the employee, recognition among peers and one’s boss ranks higher than materialistic rewards. This has even led to multiple HRMS systems enabling group chats in their ESS portals, where one’s peers and colleagues can encourage one another by congratulating on a job well done.
2. Gamify Fitness Challenges
The ‘Work-From-Home’ system has also contributed to many employees becoming fatter as they stopped doing the one physical activity which they have been doing daily – commuting to and from work. This is where ‘Fitness Challenges’ comes into the picture; they are a fun and friendly way to create competition among colleagues to ensure that they stay fit even while being at home. Fitness challenges have already become a craze since peer pressure ensures that everyone participates and enables your team to push themselves physically. Gamifying this trend will surely help motivate this trend among your employees, thus ensuring you have a healthy workforce.
3. Incentivize Gratitude
Multiple studies have concluded that ‘gratitude’ is related to mental positivity. Gratitude makes both the one expressing gratitude as well as the person receiving it feel good about themselves. Hence, incentivizing it is a clear winner in the books of HR. Saying a simple ‘Thank You’ goes a long way in gaining someone’s trust and building strong relationships. Although it begins with a thank you, one can easily understand the impact it has on their employees’ minds. Before you realize it, a mindset change would have occurred and the entire team will have a winner's attitude towards everything, which is a definite recipe for success!
4. Establish Flexible Work Hours
As mentioned earlier, working from home has become the new normal and it has had positive as well as negative impacts on employee health and welfare. While some enjoy the flexibility of working from home, others are not so pleased that they need to work from a place which was meant for fun. Hence, HRs must provide their employees with flexible working hours to ensure that they remain efficient and productive. It also helps them maintain a work-life balance.
5. Encourage Preventative Healthcare
Preventive healthcare is a boon of modern medicine and it is one of the best things a company can endorse considering its impact on the health of its employees. Simple cold and flu have traditionally been the culprits which tarnish the well-being of the employees in the office. Hence, given the current circumstances, companies have already started implementing Covid vaccine programs for their employees and with the addition of the vaccine information in the ESS portal, the companies can also understand how much of their workforce is vaccinated and healthy, right from their HRMS.
6. Organize Volunteer Programs
Volunteering is something that people generally reserve for after-work. However, its benefits permeate the human mind in such a way that it makes us feel good about ourselves. Volunteering for any good cause helps the mind feel good, while also giving the employees a chance to give back to society as well as encouraging and motivating the team to work as a whole. Hence, encouraging and organizing volunteering programs will definitely have a positive impact on everyone who participates in it, while also collecting brownie points for everyone.
7. Create awareness about Mental Health
Mental health needs to be a part of the employee well-being practices of any company as 2021 has been a very stressful year for everyone. Hence, the companies need to assure them about their job security while also providing mental and financial support to employees who have lost their relatives and friends to the pandemic. Regular mental health check-ups need to be conducted to ensure that everyone is on board the program. This would eventually lead to a happier workforce thus benefitting everyone concerned.
In conclusion, one can understand that ‘mental well-being’ is the need of the hour and companies are actively participating in taking care of their most valuable resource – their employees. Employee well-being is no longer an added advantage for employers, but a necessity as the pandemic has wreaked havoc throughout the world. In such a scenario, it is upon the HR personnel to support the employees in overcoming this obstacle together as a team.