Continued Workplace Culture: Reducing the Costs of an Unhealthy Workplace
The first step to addressing the impact of ill health is to recognize the importance
of a supportive culture and identify how your organization could be more supportive. Some of the ingredients required for a healthy culture include:
Employees who feel they can open up to their managers or even a CEO are going to feel respected and appreciated. Positive feedback and support for personal growth can act as a great motivator. Whether it be through regular update meetings or performance appraisals, one-to-one communication between employees and their superiors is important.
Employees who do not feel rewarded will not perform to their full potential, experience less job satisfaction and become demoralized and disengaged. It is a reasonable expectation among employers to have staff stay late or take on additional tasks occasionally. However when this becomes a permanent characteristic of job design without fair rewards these issues become detrimental. Rewarding employees for the quantity of work rather than the quality of work gives the impression that to succeed a life outside of work isn’t in the cards, or that to be valued as an employee, long hours are a must. What does this insinuate about the employee that succeeds at a project within work hours?
Flexible work hours, telework arrangements, child care, fair vacation policies, opportunities for leave and sabbaticals: there are many opportunities to show employees that their personal lives are important. These protocols can win over a potential employee and keep an existing one. How employees feel about their workplace can ultimately determine the extent of their productivity, creativity and overall contributions to the goals of the organization.
There are many factors that play a part in achieving a healthy workplace. This type
of environment can be achieved by CEOs and managers taking a hard look at their current practices and making the needed changes. It’s important, however to
understand that a disconnect may exist between what management perceives as supportive and what employees perceive as supportive. Therefore, a key element
for success is to not only solicit ongoing feedback from employees but also to make
use of it. If employees aren’t happy and performing to their full potential, maybe it’s time to look inward for a solution.
It may be the first step in a transformation that
will benefit all involved.
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This article was written by Sarah Abdelnour, a Senior Wellness Consultant at
Buffett & Company
and is the property of
Buffett & Company Worksite Wellness Inc.
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