Managing well-being at work
How do you ensure well-being and productivity in times of changes?
We’ve brought together four simple ways for people to ensure their teams can thrive through periods of change and uncertainty, such as digital transformation, high growth, or going remote.
If you are interested in learning more about how to embed these tips via Levell’s product, here is a link to our request form. Feel free to reach out.
1.Check in with your team
Make sure everyone, daily, feels seen. This is particularly important when it comes to how staff are feeling.
This concept of checking in - you may have heard it before. But it’s not corporate speak. It’s actually simple, easy, real, personal, and relevant.
Check-ins are typically done face to face. But today, you can use Zoom, Teams, Skype, or even Whatsapp video.
When working remote, our CEO is personally checking in with every team member between 1-3x daily. This is great, in terms of connection and engagement. It's perfect! But it's also time consuming, and has the potential to be draining.
Do you have a way of capturing aggregate insights about what was said about how people are feeling in check-ins?
Look at how to complement 121s and standups with a digital toolkit, enabling you to capture those check-in results, safely, so you can monitor averages and spot trends.
2. Let your team share what should change
This is about facilitating open and honest communication between teams, peers and managers.
With the COVID-19 pandemic underway, business expectations have changed. But staff also have new needs, more time (or less), have experienced changes in emotional support, and changes in calm and headspace. So staff experiences and expectations are also changing.
With changes in work and uncertain times your staff need MORE voice. This means changing your communications style: taking an open, honest approach. It means opening up more opportunities to feed back, explicitly requesting input from staff in all meetings.
Typically, we operate with annual or quarterly staff surveys. Or we do a weekly pulse. But today, work is changing daily.
This also means looking at your feedback toolkit.
Do you have the tools to immediately understand, daily, how things are changing and what your staff need?
Instead of directing top-down, source information that enables you to embrace every staff member’s needs. Find out what is stopping their best work, whether it is an imbalance of demands, or feeling in ill health, or their child interrupting a new home work environment.
By providing staff with an always-on way to collect meaningful, open-ended feedback, you can ensure you know immediately what staff need.
3. Implement a well-being management process for teams, with clear leadership
The next port of call is your overall management approach.
Staff need to know who to go to regarding issues with their well-being in work.
We also know that well-being is at the heart - of productivity and mental health. So if you cannot manage well-being you're running blind trying to manage these two problems.
Like all good management, well-being management should be data driven.
But who takes charge of the well-being management day to day?
It won’t be tech, as they specialise in issues related to IT. It might be HR, but HR teams can get swamped handling administrative tasks, or hiring rapidly.
In our view, responsibility for well-being management is both bottom-up and top down. It's every individual in your team, but it's also the CEO or at least a highly influential member of senior leadership.
That person is then responsible for measuring well-being, managing well-being, and finding good ways to benchmark.
Changes in work and uncertain times are actually a blessing, because you have more physical, mental, emotional and motivational triggers day to day, from changes in work. You can better understand what drives and what drains, and what blockers there are to thriving.
Use times of uncertainty to capture how staff are responding to changes, so you can apply that data to optimise their experience when you are through.
4. Focus on resilience: less on perks, more on retraining and growth
We're experiencing a shift in how we manage our time day to day. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed staff levels of emotional support, introduced uncertainty, and changed access to networks.
Some individuals are now highly emotionally and financially stretched. But others will have fewer demands, and have killed the commute, and are now over-resourced and under-utilised.
This is the perfect time to consider streamlining perks, in favour of self-management training, and personal development benefits.
Take the time to check: how important are issues in personal life to well-being, vs. issues in work? And within personal themes, are the issues? Are they primarily finance, or diet?
Now is the time to you meet every employee with the right level of support to help with adaptation, or level of challenges to help them stay challenged and continue to thrive.
Parting thoughts
Adapting to high levels of uncertainty and changing work requires acute awareness of ourselves and our needs, and open fluid communication.
The individuals in your teams drive the productivity and bottom line of your business.
Make sure you can gain a well-being pulse, understand what’s going wrong, find out why, and when things change that you can and monitor the impacts.
Finally, pair always-on voice with bottom-up feedback on solutions. Your staff know the issues, and they also know what needs to change.
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The sooner staff can use Levell to check-in on their well-being, the faster you will be able to become aware of how the well-being levels of staff are changing, and be well on your way to triaging issues, and then empowering your staff with the capabilities they need to thrive.
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