#007 – Fuelling Greatness at Work – Part 2 of 2

 

Podcast Transcript

 

Welcome to the Working Well Podcast. I’m Tim Borys CEO of FRESH! Wellness Group. This show explores the diverse aspects of workplace health and personal performance. On the Working Well Podcast we dive into the foundations of what makes wellness work in workplaces around the world. We connect with corporate leaders, executives, and industry experts who are helping make life more awesome at work and home.

Join us to learn workplace wellness, best practices, personal performance tips, and access resources to jumpstart your personal and corporate programs.

 

Welcome back to the Working Well Podcast. Today, we’re wrapping up our discussion about how to fuel greatness in your people and company. And this is episode two of two. If you missed the first episode, definitely check it out. Before we dive into the final strategies for success. Let’s do a quick recap of the first episode.

Last time we talked about why strategically empowering the health wellbeing and vitality of people is important in every organization. It’s a fact that healthy, happy fit and engaged employees perform better. They cost less and they produce more value over the long-term. And that’s compared to people who aren’t happy, healthy, fit, and engaged to fuel greatness in our people.

We must move beyond merely providing self-serve resources. Success requires a comprehensive understanding of the value that healthy, happy active employees provide. And how to strategically create a plan and programming to support the creation of that value. There are seven strategies to feel greatness in your people and profitability.

Last episode we dove into the first three. Those are shifting mindset to shift results, understanding the scope of wellness and which components are most important to your organization and employees. And having skin in the game for all levels of an organization, particularly the company executives let’s dive into the final four of our seven strategies.

Strategy number four is custom is the key to success. This is where many well-meaning wellness programs fall flat put simply plain vanilla programs are a recipe for failure. One size doesn’t fit all. Your culture, employee, demographics, organization, and goals are unique. That means a successful program must create a vision for the future that specifically addresses and meets the needs of your organization at this point in time, in order to move it towards your future vision.

At the high level, virtually every company has a long-term strategic plan. Yet these plans, rarely if ever involve specific details on how to develop the long-term health, happiness, passion, performance, and wellbeing of its people merging the needs of your organization with people’s performance and wellbeing involves careful customization.

Now this doesn’t mean blindly listening to employees, but employee needs and desires are a key component. Not all whims need to be catered to, particularly when it’s a vocal minority seeking pet projects, smart organizations, aim to balance these less strategic requests with important organizational needs, business interests and the financial reality of the company.

Now, this doesn’t mean that pet projects and more specialty programs can’t be implemented. Of course they can. That can be unique to each organization. However, When we have the strategic plan in place, we know what the highest priorities are and what the most important programs are to meet the needs of the organization and the employees.

Our strategy allows you to determine where the best investments in education programming and resources can be made. Here’s a great example. Imagine someone asks you what’s the best car to buy. It would make sense to find out their needs and desires before making a recommendation. Now, a top end Ferrari may be an awesome car, but if that person has five kids, they want to drive to soccer practice, drive to school and maybe do some weekend camping with their trailer.

It’s probably not the best option despite how much the driver would love to be driving a sports car at my company, fresh wellness group. We love helping companies customize their program and optimize results. Our goal is to help you save time, money, effort, and resources. If you’re interested, just reach out for a free strategy session.

All right, let’s move on to strategy. Number five, that’s maximizing the workplace wellness pyramid. Well, each workplace wellness program should be customized to the organization. Every effective plan shares important key elements at fresh. We call this the workplace wellness pyramid. The foundations are education and activity, regardless of the focus of the program, ongoing employee education and engagement programs are essential to success.

These components are ideally mapped out into an annual wellness calendar, however, without a comprehensive strategy, education and inactivity are random shots in the dark. Finally knowing what’s working requires tracking key program based and organizational metrics strategy includes what’s important.

What metrics will be tracked the implementation plan and schedule along with regular evaluations of the program and metrics companies, commonly claim. They have a quote wellness program. When in fact all they have is a random collection of services. These services, aren’t connected to an organizational strategy and the results are not tracked after consulting with many companies.

I can say that while doing random things may produce some short-term results. The results are inconsistent, they’re unfocused, and they rarely produced the desired outcome. A great example, are the random perks such as onsite massage for an employee appreciation day or events like a January fitness challenge programs.

Like these can be viable parts of a strategic plan, but done on their own. They often lead to confusion and further disengagement since people are unclear of the motives behind them. For example, I’ve heard employees say, well, are they trying to butter us up for a bad announcement by running this program?

Or maybe they’re tracking what we do so they can fire people who are doctors are sticking with the plan. So I encourage you to think about, do your wellness programs speak to each component of the workplace wellness, pyramid and that’s activity, education, strategy, and metrics on that note, I encourage you reach out, let me know what’s working in your company and what’s not.

I love to hear what companies are doing and love to help people. Implement new strategies. And that takes us to strategy. Number six, embrace the journey. Whether for people or companies creating lasting change is not an overnight process. It takes time to learn, grow transform mindsets, implement plans, and make adjustments to keep improving the larger the organization.

And the more established the habits, the more momentum and inertia must be overcome to create meaningful change. The great news is this chain sets the stage for incredible long-term results. A wellness program is a living, breathing and evolving plan that will never be perfect. The key is to embrace the journey and understand that continual evaluation and strategic updates will happen based on your ongoing learnings and insights.

Getting started can seem daunting, but we found that when people and organizations approach workplace wellness with a positive, proactive mindset from the beginning, their investment of time, energy and resources pays off in spades. In fact, properly implemented workplace wellness programs are consistently shown to produce an ROI of three to $8 for every single dollar invested.

If you can find me a CFO that would turn down this type of investment, I’ll be shocked. And the important thing is to realize that it can take two to three years of consistent work and investment to see substantial returns. This is exactly why so many programs fail. They lack vision strategy, accountability, and consistency over time.

This has made tougher by the fact that so few companies have true executive support buy-in and accountability to make these programs happen. This brings us to strategy number seven, invest in speed. Now each of the previous strategies are essential to creating a high performing wellness program and healthy workplace culture.

This last step helps you bypass many of the challenges, struggles, frustrations, and delays that come with creating and launching an amazing wellness program by quote, investing in speed. We mean leveraging existing knowledge, expert guidance, and support to avoid doing everything from scratch. When you partner with people, who’ve successfully done it before it frees up your internal teams and resources to do what they do best, which likely isn’t workplace wellness.

Tools resources and expertise are available to accelerate the creation, implementation, and results you generate from employee health and wellbeing. Smart companies utilize these experts. Keep in mind, this does not mean abrogating responsibility to a third party. Experts and consultants should assist you in the creation and implementation of targeted programs, reporting, and program delivery, but they must be neat uniquely your programs and customized to your specific needs and goals.

Third-party assistance can be a great way to overcome internal politics, hierarchies, and roadblocks to implementation that often hamper internal efforts. This has done in corporate reorgs software and program improvement implementations, but rarely wellness, a huge reason behind this is because wellness is rarely seen as a strategic advantage in business.

It’s so common to hire consultants for many areas of the organization. Yet employee and people performance gets left to the wayside and things try to get done internally. Now we might get a consultant to come in and work on a specific part of leadership development or something like that, which is great.

All those things are valuable. And so is managing the health, happiness, vitality, and performance of your people. Okay. Let’s do a quick recap of the seven strategies for feeling greatness in your people and profitability. Number one shift mindsets to shift results. Number two, understand the scope of wellness and which components are most important to your organization and employees.

Number three, have skin in the game at all levels of the organization, particularly the company executives, number four, customized for the needs of your organization. Number five, maximize the workplace wellness pyramid. That is. Education activity, strategy and metrics. Number six, embrace the journey.

Number seven by speed. Now, at this point, we’ve covered a lot of great information that will have tremendous value to your people in organization. If it’s properly utilized, your mind must be spinning with excitement about all the possibilities available to you. That’s great, but this is where things often fall off the rails.

The tendency for well-meaning and enthusiastic people like you is to focus on a quick win, do a launch initiative and get your wellness program out there. You’re excited about diving in and making it happen. I get it. I encourage you to take a breath step back and answer the following questions.

First is there is executive buy-in support and a budget for an expanded employee wellness program. The large majority of companies don’t have those simple things. Now, if you’re someone who does have the authority to do that, you are in the executive team. Awesome. Things will happen much faster if you’re not, I encourage you to think about how you’re going to accomplish getting those things, support buy-in and budget are critical for long-term success.

Next question I encourage you to ask is, do you have a defined vision strategy and a plan for organizational health and wellbeing, and this follows on the executive support and buy-in a lot of times people get support and then they say, great. I’m just going to Willy nilly, throw things out there that doesn’t work at least over the longterm.

The next question is, is there an executive who’s ultimately accountable for wellness in your company? You can have support, you can have a vision, but if no one has KPIs or accountability tied to that program, it will rarely have the impact that it could have. Next question is how many of the seven strategies do you already have in place?

Create a little checklist. Check them off. See which ones are there, which ones you need to work on. If not, what do you need to do to put those pieces in place? Only once you know, the answers to these questions, will you be able to determine where to best invest your time, effort, and budget? This is where my team and I can help reach out book a free 60 minute strategy session as all value, no sales pitch.

We genuinely want to help. Or if you’re looking for more details, hire us to do a wellness performance, potential evaluation, where you learn the best opportunities to ignite the potential of your people in the organization. Until next time I’m Tim Borys CEO of FRESH! Wellness Group. Be well, stay safe, keep active.

 

Thank you for listening to the Working Well Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, don’t forget to rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love to hear your experiences and how you’ve applied tips from the show to your daily life.

So please keep us posted on your progress. To stay up to date with new episode releases, make sure to subscribe to a mailing list by emailing podcast@freshgroup.ca and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, thank you everyone for tuning in. And once again, I’m Tim Borys with FRESH! Wellness Group.

We’ll see you on the next episode.

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