Udaiyan Jatar is the cofounder and President of Tecton.
Employee productivity is an increasingly thorny problem approaching crisis proportions—it’s falling at the fastest rate in 40 years. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report, only 21% of employees are engaged, and just 33% are thriving in their overall well-being. The same study shows that employee stress is at an all-time high, with 44% saying they experienced high stress the previous day. To make matters worse, employers’ healthcare costs are rising, creating more stress.
Instead of playing defense, transform your approach by thinking about employees, including senior executives, as elite athletes. This might seem a bit extreme, but think about it for a moment: If someone is using all their faculties to solve problems and manage complex relationships and projects, they are clearly undertaking significant mental and physical strain to execute with excellence. A typical workday is around eight hours—nearly four times the winning time at the Boston Marathon—so it’s not a stretch to see why an athlete’s mentality and endurance are necessary in the workplace.
To help employees achieve high levels of mental, physical and emotional stamina, we must take a holistic approach to inspire them and support their health. Here are three fundamental approaches to help you build an effective program that achieves elite performance in the workplace.
Purpose And Alignment
You not only need to have a company purpose that’s clear and measurable, but it’s critical for each employee to understand their role in achieving it. Too many organizations use purpose and mission statements like ornaments to adorn their walls and annual reports. They sound great, but ask the average employee, or sadly, even a senior executive, and they will likely not remember what it is or tell you their day-to-day job has no connection to it. Fix this first.
Time And Stress Management
Employees that feel stressed and burned out are more likely to struggle with mental health. According to McKinsey, a whopping 59% of people report at least one mental health challenge, and of those people, they are twice as likely not to feel engaged at work and three times more likely to report low job satisfaction.
Forward-thinking employers can help by creating a flexible environment so employees can prioritize their mental health by engaging in time with family and extracurricular hobbies.
Empowering employees to work when it’s most convenient for them allows them to be in the right state of mind when tackling business challenges. The work gets done, and employees don’t feel tethered to their desks or devices.
This can be scary to employers. They worry that employees may take advantage of this and slack off. On the contrary, when a company’s purpose is clear and translates to a clarity of roles at the individual level, employees often need to be encouraged to take a vacation and reminded to turn off email notifications!
Nutrition
Access to food and beverages has long been an office “perk” employers use to motivate their workforce. However, these “perks” can backfire. Take the midday slump, for instance, a frequent reaction to stress. Many people reach for coffee or candy bars. Caffeine is a stimulant that temporarily increases focus while also increasing heart rate and blood pressure. Then there’s the crash. What’s worse, it can reduce the amount of deep and regenerative sleep, even for people who claim caffeine doesn’t affect them, causing them to be tired the next day.
Candy and carbohydrate-loaded snacks are worse. These may get someone through a particular lull, but this too will be followed by a crash and several unproductive hours. Sugar also causes weight gain and can lead to type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and other diseases, contributing to escalating health costs and diminishing productivity.
Giving employees food and beverages shouldn’t just be about checking a box. Put more thought into what an employee wellness program looks like. Invest in your employees and treat them the same way a sports team would its MVPs. According to Dr. Rick Bloomer, the Dean of the College of Health Sciences at the University of Memphis, many companies are searching for nutrition sources that increase the well-being of their employees so they can be more focused, control hunger pangs and improve their sleep.
By giving your employees clarity of purpose, a trusting environment and the right tools to do their jobs, you’re improving not just their productivity and value to your company but also their overall quality of life.
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