Guest article written by Chris Pinner, founder of Innerfit
PAs and EAs are often given responsibility for organising activities and events. How many of these activities are aimed at improving the wellbeing of your personnel? Of everyone in the organisation, PAs understand the impact of poor health. How proactive is your organisation at supporting healthy mind and body in the workplace? What if you want to get proactive? What if, you developed a solid, effective strategy?
To lead you must first know where you are going. Setting a clear wellbeing strategy is an essential step to getting the best possible outcome.
If you have been tasked with designing a wellbeing strategy for your company, this article will help. If you haven’t, this article will help you to present the case for why you should. The psychological impact for your team just knowing they are cared about is invaluable but as with most things, you’ll need actual data.
All Innerfit wellbeing consulting projects are structured around a GROW framework: Goals, Reality, Options and Will:
Goals
66% of private sector companies in the UK act flexibly on an ad hoc basis according to individual needs. According to the CIPD’s 2019 Health and Wellbeing at Work. The same research shows 55% of companies agree that their senior leaders have employee wellbeing on their agenda but that 48% believe they are much more reactive than proactive.
● Setting the strategic direction may involve answering some tough questions:
● What business performance goals do you want to impact with wellbeing?
● What wellbeing goals do you want to achieve?
● How will you measure wellbeing goals over time and prove your strategy is working?
Every individual is unique, as is every company. Some will aspire to winning wellbeing awards, others might aim to reduce sickness, increase productivity, develop loyalty or simply to make the whole team feel happier.
Setting concrete objectives is the first step to making your goals a reality.
Reality
Understanding what wellbeing (or lack of) is costing your business can be a powerful motivator. Begin by understanding what the team actually want (versus what they get) through focus groups, questionnaires etc to generate cost-saving insights on where wellbeing investment should be made.
Do you actually know what your colleagues want?
How do you score today for wellbeing versus where you want to be?
Once you understand the gap between reality and target, you can assess the different options. You might want to try answering the question:
To what extent does our company promote health & wellbeing through:
movement (e.g. daytime activity, musculoskeletal conditions)?
nutrition (e.g. advice on healthy eating, canteen)?
mindset (e.g. resilience training, counselling)?
An honest and accurate appraisal enables you to precisely tailor a programme that answers needs and achieves results.
Options
What wellbeing options exist, and how do they compare in terms of return on investment?
Once you’ve set some clear goals and understand your reality, this is when you start weighing up the different options to find the right fit for your team.
Depending on what existing wellbeing activities you offer, you might need to add, subtract or change.
Will
Do you have the willpower and drive to make it happen?
What do you do next?
With knowledge of the different options available to you, you can now design and implement your strategy.
Measure and evaluate the impact of each activity against your goals, learn and refine over time, be bold, try different things.
The cycle begins…
BIO
Chris is the founder of Innerfit. Before becoming a Personal Trainer and wellbeing coach, Chris worked at a top US investment bank, Strategy Consultancy and Sports Marketing agency. Innerfit supports companies to have a positive impact on wellbeing & performance.
