Incorporating Emotional Wellbeing in your Employee Wellness Workshops
Author: Mr. Ravindra Dabiru, Founder, Wesyncsense
What is the best ways to keep fit?
Eating better, working out, and getting more sleep… taking care of our physical self is relatively simple. Isn’t It?
Achieving good emotional health may be a bit more complicated—but it’s just as important as achieving good physical health. And yet, emotional wellness often lands squarely on the back burner, particularly in the workplace.
Why isn’t emotional health more of a priority for overall employee wellness?
What’s more, the workplace is often an individual’s main source of stress in the first place and a leading cause of being emotionally unwell. In fact, a recent survey says that one in five employees say that work is a source of anxiety.
Companies who ignore emotional health do more than put their employees’ mental well-being at risk. If stressed, unhappy employees spread negativity throughout the organization; companies may find their fulfillment over their employees’ emotional health also puts their business at risk.
Employees need to hear a clear and consistent message that you care about their emotional health.
What is the good news? You’ve probably already started to address mental health via employee assistance programs, flexible work schedules, work breaks, and more.
But now’s the time to make a conscious push toward emotional wellness. Making emotional and mental health a pillar of your wellness program can result in happier, healthier employees, who also happen to be more engaged, productive, creative, and loyal.
Let’s explore five ways Emotional Wellness Workshop can help employees thrive in the workplace, and how employers can help make it a priority:
Flexibility
Sometimes, things don’t turn out the way people expect, and it’s not uncommon to take these failures personally. When this happens in the workplace, it’s critical for employees to have the coping skills in place to manage the missteps, learn from the experience, and move on. What if they don’t have these skills? They can feel helpless and frustrated—especially if they feel they’ve given 110%. And that sets up a “Why bother?” defeatist attitude that decreases future performance.
How Employee Wellness Workshop Can Help?
Emotional spirit, or the capacity to calm your mind after a negative experience, is a major factor in emotional health and job satisfaction. A wellness program that helps develop emotional resilience will equip employees to deal with disappointment, failure, or crisis, learn from it, and continue to move forward. This skill is not only valuable at the workplace, it also helps staffers cope with personal crises or challenges.
Problem-Solving
Who hasn’t woken up in the morning after a good night’s sleep with the perfect solution to a problem they’ve been brooding about all week?
Often, taking a break lets employees relax and rest their brains, which gives their subconscious the chance to see past preconceived solutions and objectively evaluate the task at hand.
But some employees are incapable of giving themselves that kind of breathing room during work hours, and that’s when trouble can brew. The more they over think a task, the more their performance and outcomes also worsen.
This fretting is not only unproductive; it can also damage the employee’s emotional health, potentially leading to sleeplessness, panic attacks, and even depression.
How Employee Wellness Workshop Can Help?
A wellness program can provide strategies for stopping the cycle of negative, obsessive thoughts. One effective method is distraction: When negative thoughts take over, have employees engage in a new task that requires complete concentration. This could be a completely unrelated work task, or it could be a simple brain-resetting trick, like saying the ABCs backwards. Simply redirecting the focus for just two to three minutes can often be enough to unclench the psyche, so that creativity and problem-solving skills can resume.
Sense of Self-Worth
Many people don’t realize that the brain recognizes rejections and failures the same way it recognizes physical pain. While most people know to take care of themselves when physically ill, they don’t always think to give themselves the same level of care when they’ve taken a hit to their self-esteem. In fact, as self-esteem decreases, we tend to be even harder on ourselves, creating a vicious cycle that makes us even more vulnerable to it.
How Employee Wellness Workshop Can Help?
When employees experience low self-esteem, they become more vulnerable to feelings of stress, rejection, and failure. Emotionally healthy individuals, however, know how to be gentle, kind, and loving with the way they view themselves. Teaching self- compassion and giving employees the tools to help their self-esteem recover can provide a big boost to their emotional health, which in turn makes them more productive employees.
Stress Management
Even in the most positive workplaces, a certain amount of stress is inevitable — but many employees just aren’t very successful at managing it. Instead, they become overwhelmed, unproductive, and anxious. When left unaddressed, this workplace stress can quickly lead to burnout and create health issues.
Employees might love their workplace and their role, but even the most dedicated staffer will burn out if overworked by long hours, poorly-scheduled shifts, or constantly recurring “crunch” times. Companies might pride themselves on their hard-driving environment, not realizing that overwork tends to come with rapidly diminishing returns on actual productivity.
How Employee Wellness Workshop Can Help?
Corporate wellness programs should teach employees effective ways for dealing with everyday stress, for example, by taking regular breaks, meditating in the morning or at the end of the day, or practicing a daily stretching routine. Any one of these strategies can help employees maintain a work-life balance, reduce negative thoughts, and calm frazzled nerves.
Employers also need to walk the walk, implementing humane work schedules and workloads so that their people can recharge their batteries and come back to work fresh and focused.
Workplace Support
Successful, loyal employees want to feel supported and valued, “emotional flaws” and all.
But emotional health can be a sensitive topic. Employees may be reluctant to share their struggles, as they may be concerned their supervisors will see them as weak, unstable, or incapable.
Instead, they may cope by disengaging, doing only the bare minimum and interacting with coworkers and managers as little as possible. Other employees may cope with their emotional health struggles in unhealthy ways, turning to drugs or alcohol as an escape. In these circumstances, what appears to be a performance issue may in fact be an emotional health crisis in disguise?
How Employee Wellness Workshop Can Help?
Management should promote a company culture that encourages openness and acceptance. Employees who feel safe and supported will be more engaged and more likely to seek out the support they need.
Employers can also add emotional health screenings to their wellness program. For employees concerned about privacy, encourage them to use the company’s Employee Wellness Workshop (EWW). These programs have access to a large network of mental health professionals and adhere to strict confidentiality standards.
