Employee wellness coaching is the practice of helping a client achieve personal goals and improve their well-being. These goals can include everything from losing weight, reducing stress levels, and improving posture to learning better nutrition or increasing physical fitness.
Healthy employees are more productive and less likely to miss work due to illness. Employers are increasingly recognizing that supporting wellbeing is essential to their bottom line.
- Work-Life Balance
Workplaces are becoming more aware of the importance of employee wellbeing, yet too many employees continue to live burnt out and unbalanced lives. Unhealthy work-life balance leads to mental health problems, which in turn affects workplace performance.
Coaching participants to develop a healthy, sustainable work-life balance that satisfies their basic needs will improve their life satisfaction and reduce stress. It will also help them focus on the job at hand, resulting in higher productivity and performance.
Ensure your people feel supported by providing activities that allow them to take their minds off the office, such as games rooms and walking meetings. Encourage them to take breaks throughout the day, drink water and eat healthy foods.
- Financial Wellbeing
Financial stress and anxiety are a key contributor to mental health issues, so it’s important that employers address money-related worries. Providing employee wellness coaching is one way to do this.
Providing employees with access to budgeting tips, pensions information, debt advice services, and discounts is another. These help workers save money, which can be invested in local businesses and boost productive parts of the economy.
For many workers, coping with inflation and debt is more urgent than planning for retirement. Providing them with financial wellness support can reduce their stress levels and help them feel more capable and focused at work. As a result, they’re more likely to be engaged and contribute positively to the business.
- Autonomy
Autonomy is about choice, particularly choice that is aligned with internal values. People are most autonomous when they can make the choices that they believe are best for them.
For employees, autonomy is a big deal. In fact, a recent study by Jabra found that most employees say flexibility is more important than salary or benefits.
Procedural theories of individual autonomy are sometimes criticised for being incompatible with such communitarian virtues as empathy, loyalty and care and respect for tradition and ritual. However, these criticisms are flawed. They confuse the distinction between procedural and substantive aspects of individual autonomy. They also overlook the complexity of contrasting stances.
- Volunteering
As COVID-19 social distancing and work from home policies have increased feelings of isolation and loneliness, volunteerism can offer a sense of belonging and purpose for employees. In addition, volunteering provides the opportunity to meet new people with similar interests, values, and outlooks, thereby expanding one’s support network.
Employees with communal orientation tend to have a greater interest in helping others, and are more concerned with achieving their social well-being than their own (Rodell, 2016). A company’s volunteering climate can help satisfy this desire and reduce perceived role overload by increasing the availability of resources for satisfying work-life balance. This, in turn, promotes employees’ mental health and wellbeing.
- Flexible Working Hours
Workplace flexibility is a powerful tool to help employees find balance and satisfaction in their lives. It may involve flexible working hours, remote work, or a combination of both.
Flexible working hours allow individuals to tailor their workday to fit with other commitments such as caring for children or elderly parents. This is particularly important for those struggling with mental health issues.
A natural experiment found that allowing employees to change their working location and schedules reduced emotional exhaustion and psychological distress, and increased positive work-home spillover. It’s also thought that reducing the length of the workday can improve sleep duration and quality, which may reduce stress and anxiety.
- Remote Work
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have allowed their employees to work from home for all or part of the week. While working from home may help people maintain their daily routine and avoid stress caused by commuting, it also can cause isolation and a blurring of the lines between work and life.
Providing virtual wellness challenges that encourage social interaction and teamwork can be an effective way to keep remote workers connected. Creating a Slack channel or team chat for remote employees to share their wellness tips is a great start. Incorporating telehealth sessions with dietitians, mental health coaches or health coaches can also be beneficial.