How to Implement A Wellbeing Strategy at... Work That Works - Video Transcript
Hi, it's Mike here from Better Happy. And what I want to take you through today is how to implement a powerful wellbeing strategy into your organisation, no matter what size, that works. (buzzing) So if you want to go from constantly worrying about your own health, and the health of your people, feeling that work has to come at the expense of health, and not knowing where to start with improving it in the longterm, to getting to a position where you feel really in control of your health and the health of your people. You feel that work actively contributes towards health or the jobs that you're providing to people contribute towards their health, and you know exactly what to do.
This is going to be a great video for you. Imagine if every time somebody joined your organisation they had a health coach as a part of their onboarding, and then throughout their time with you they got continued support from that health coach to help them thrive in the different areas of their life. Imagine how that would impact how they feel about you as an employer. So how long they stuck around, how their performance would increase, and generally how well as a team everybody would perform if that was a standard process. Well, when you get the right wellbeing strategy in place, that's exactly what it's like. And what I'm going to show you is it doesn't actually need to be that complicated or expensive.
To really powerfully solve a problem we need to understand what the root cause of that problem is. In my opinion, this is where a lot of wellbeing strategies fall short, because they don't actually address the root cause of the problem, they address the symptoms. Something I'll cover shortly. When we understand what the root causes are of our wellbeing problem that we've got throughout the nation, if we've got people that work for us that puts us in a really powerful position to start positively impacting on those people, just by understanding what the problems are. And as we'll go through these problems now, you'll also see actually how much of an opportunity these problems create with an employer. So the three problems.
First of all, we've got the environment in which we live. If the environment in which we live encourages bad health, we're more likely to be unhealthy. Think about where we live now, and how we live our modern lives. If you went back a thousand years things were completely different. We only had access to whole natural foods, we had to sleep when the sun went down, and wake up when the sun came up, we had to sleep with good sleeping patterns, and we had to be physically active as well as being socially connected. Things are completely different now for a variety of reasons.
The support network that we have around us, if the people and the culture that we have around us supports good health, we're much more likely to be healthy. If the support that we have around us and the culture that we have around us is unhealthy, we're more likely to be unhealthy. We become the five people we spend most of our time with. Where do most people spend a lot of their time? At work with their colleagues, or interacting with their colleagues. So very important for a business owner again, to understand.
And then at the top we've got our knowledge around being healthy. Now, we need to know how to be healthy, that is obvious. We need to know how to look after ourselves. If we want to be healthy and we don't know how to go about it, we're going to struggle. Now, what's important to understand here is that the choices that we get to make every day have increased exponentially. So again, if I go back a thousand years I only had the choice of free, natural, healthy food from the ground. Now I have so much choice, actually having the knowledge is more important than ever before. But there's also choice of knowledge as well, which can be very complicated. So as an employer, we want to make sure that we're providing our people with the basic levels of knowledge that they need to be healthy from a reputable source that isn't confusing, or overwhelming.
So when we understand these three things we know that there's an opportunity for us as employers to have a really positive impact on the lives of our people. We can provide them with the basic knowledge that they need to be healthy. Okay, there's a world of information overload. You as their employer, they're going to look to you, they're going to trust you. So we can reduce that information overload and give them the information that they need to be healthy without overload. We need to create an environment that encourages good health, even if your jobs that you provide to people are office based and sedentary you can still create an environment that creates amazing health, that offsets the negatives of sitting down with less than 10 minutes of effort a day. And we need to make sure that our organisation has a culture of encouraging good health. It has to do that because if your people are unhealthy it's going to negatively impact on your organisation. So it's a no brainer, you have to create a culture that encourages good health.
Now, this doesn't mean that you all need to get road bikes and be training for the Tour de France, or running for marathons. It just means we need to address the basics, we need to make sure that these things are ticked. Okay, so it doesn't need to be complicated, it doesn't require us to completely reshuffle our organisation, it just requires the basics. Okay, Mike, that all makes great sense. How do I implement this into my organisation in a way that is impactful, in a way that isn't overwhelming, and in a way that contributes toward my organisation as well as my people? Obviously the next question.
What I'm not going to touch on now, support and environment. This is something that we help people with in our program, but that's almost pretty obvious. We need to have some basic things in place to make sure that our people are actually being supported to be healthy, and that the environment encourages it. What I am going to touch on now is knowledge. 'Cause that makes sense that that's where we start. If my people don't know how to be healthy, how can they be healthy? If I don't know how to be healthy, how can I lead the way in being healthy?
We've got three main areas that contribute towards our physical health, exercise, nutrition, and sleep. Obviously our mental health is a big part of our health as well. But, again addressing symptoms as well as root problems of a cause, if our physical health is good we're much less likely to suffer with poor mental health. I'm not saying it's just that straightforward, but that's something we need to seriously consider. Lots of people have got poor mental health it's become an increasing problem, but lots of people have got poor physical health that's contributing towards that mental health. So it's almost like it sits below it in the pyramid, and we need to make sure that that's being addressed as well, even though the symptoms might not be quite as prevalent.
So exercise, nutrition, and sleep. How do I make sure that my people have got the basics that they need to thrive in that area? If you look at the pyramid of effort, at the bottom of the pyramid, that's how much reward we get. So the stuff at the bottom, we get more reward for what's going on there. If you look over here, this is how much effort we need to put in. So it makes sense for me to provide my people with the knowledge they need down here, that is the least effort with the maximum reward. If I start giving 'em knowledge, and information, and activities, and incentives around here when they haven't got through here yet, it's going to be wasted money. So a great example of that is going to be giving people a gym membership. So that's going to take quite a bit of effort because obviously they need to go to the gym, and the reward is in the middle here because the only people that can benefit from a gym is people that are already in quite good shape, and know what to do in a gym. Put your hand in the air if you know exactly what you should be doing in the gym, very, very few people. So they have to go and then invest in a personal trainer, and find programs, they need to make sure they're moving properly so they don't hurt themselves. Most people don't want to go to a gym, they just want to be healthy.
They want to be pain free and they want to move better. So actually, when it comes to fitness before we're even thinking about gyms, we should be providing our people with basic movement training. And a movement routine, mobility routine, that we do within work. And we've got separate posts on showing you how to do this. Imagine if when people join my organisation as a standard they get taught how to movement assess themselves, which sounds complicated, but it's not. And then they get taught how to do a mobility routine that's implemented into our environment that we do that on a daily basis. That would stop our backs, that would stop sciatica, or significantly reduce the likelihood of sciatica. That would stop people getting shoulder pain and neck pain. But nobody's doing this. So what I'm showing you there is that this has got a massive payout, and take very little effort. This costs money, requires effort, and doesn't have such a bigger payout. So this is ticking a box a lot of the time. And obviously it's got its benefits, it attracts new employees, it's a good thing to have, but without this in place, we are going to struggle to measurably, and actively, and ongoingly increase the health of our people.
The same with nutrition. So if I think about if I translate nutrition onto this, if people are provided with apps that teach them how to count the calories in their food, that can teach them how to balance everything out. That's up here again, that's leading right up here. But actually what most people need is basic training in what are the different basic macronutrients of food? How do I implement this into a daily routine that actually supports me to be healthy? So it doesn't need to be that complicated. Again, it needs to be a basic training, and then at work we can have a healthy lunch option. If we're in a physical location we can have food challenges where we're teaching our people how to create a healthy breakfast quickly, and a healthy lunch quickly. That again, sounds complicated, very easy to implement, very low cost, very big reward.
And then again, sleep. So sleep isn't something that we can tend to get too complicated with. It tends to be something that we completely ignore as an organisation. So every person within the planet has got what we call a sleeping genetic chronotype. That is, that dictates when that person wants to sleep and how their energy ebbs and flows throughout the day. When we know what that is, which is a very simple process, again, when we know what that is we can tell when a person should be going to sleep, when they should be waking up, when they're at their most creative during the day, when they're at their most productive during the day, when they might be the most useful in the meeting. So if we made sure that as a standard onboarding process our people got taught how to move, our people got taught the basics of nutrition, and our people establish their sleep and chronotype, you've just had a hugely positive impact on that person's health for the rest of their life because you've worked them up in the knowledge area. And then we make sure that with the three basic simple implementations, we encourage this as a part of our environment and our culture supports this on an ongoing basis. If that sounds really complicated and difficult to you it really isn't, it couldn't be any more straightforward.
And we work it in with our nine step process that you can see on the screen now. As you can see, the middle tier of our process is focused on wellbeing, the top tier of our process is focused on systems that includes mental health, and the bottom tier is focused on identity of the business and identity of the individuals within our business. Ironically, this whole process is what contributes towards people being well, the owner as well. When we know who we are, and what we're good at, and what we're working towards as a team, when we know how to be healthy, and our environment supports that, and when the systems are in place to make sure that happens on autopilot, the organisation thrives, the owner thrives, and the employees thrive as well. So if this is something that you would like to look a little bit more into and have a conversation with us about, I invite you to click the link below and have a conversation with us about your organisation, and your unique challenges. Thanks for listening, I hope you found this useful, Mike.
Author - Mike Jones
Mike served 5 years in the British Military then backpacked for 3 living in monasteries and studying cultures. His passion is helping individuals and organisations unlock their potential.
2018 - co-founded Better Happy.
2016 - Opened Metta Box Functional Training Facility
Want help with your organisation and your people? Let's see if we're a good fit:
