The modern WFH culture is bad for work/life balance. How are your teams taking it?
There’s no question about it. The last year has taken a serious toll on the working world. Whether it be because businesses have closed, or whether it be because staff are on-edge – working through a pandemic isn’t easy on anyone.
Fortunately, there are ways that you can promote staff well-being, thereby avoiding sick days and excessive mental health burden in these troubling times. We researched the best 5 ways you can keep your staff happy during the pandemic… so all you have to do is keep reading.
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The 5 Best Tips to Promote Staff Well-Being
If you want to promote a better office culture for yourself and your employees, then follow these 5 tips for better workplace well-being.
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1 – Don’t Forget to Train your Staff
Just like any other skill, the self-care aspects of employee well-being sometimes need to be taught. Remote staff team training should always incorporate some kind of self-soothing training, because they are often left on their own for long periods of time.
Lengthy periods out of the office can result in isolation, loneliness, and a disconnect from office life. Integrating self care routines into their typical training will help them stay involved in office affairs.
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2 – Reward Activity
Rewarding and encouraging your staff when they get outside, can help them to boost concentration and focus better. As well as being good for your health, research has shown that there is correlation between taking a walk on your lunch break and having better concentration. In fact, the benefits of getting away from the screen for some exercise time have been widely touted by the CDC as an affective way to monitor and improve employee health.
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3 – Credit where Credit is Due
Your employees need to want to get up and come to work in the morning, something which is easier said than done. If you want to encourage them to have this feeling, then creating an environment where staff are rewarded and appreciated is the surest path to success.
Rewarding the best work encourages others to seek out that praise… but it can be a slippery path. Be careful that you reward those that don’t work as well, too. Just because they aren’t outstanding, doesn’t mean they are not trying hard.
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4 – Create a Virtual Water Cooler
Now that we all work from home, we have lost the normal meeting places around the office. The coffee machine, the water cooler, the vending machines – all are beyond our reach. How do we create something to fill the void left by the absence of colleague camaraderie? We create an online platform where our employees can talk.
Preferably, you will want two virtual meeting rooms or group chats. You will require a single one for staff only, and another, where you can be seen and are reachable. This opens up the channels of communication while simultaneously providing employees with a manager free ‘safe-space’.
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5 – Engage with Virtual Team Building
Team building exercises should come to a halt just because we aren’t all face to face. Instead, we should be finding new ways to do them. This might mean taking a delve into the world of online games, browser games, or even online mystery solving games. Just like the world of work, the world of escape games has gone online. Have a browse and see if you can’t find something to boost your team’s morale.
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Better Well-Being, Means Better Productivity.
Finally, let us end on a reminder of why we need to keep staff morale high. If we can keep our remote team members happy during this difficult time, we are likely to have the loyalty of them, their families, and their friends, for the rest of their natural lifetimes… and that’s the sort of brand loyalty money can’t buy.
