From the CEO: Cultivating a Healthy Work Culture in the New Year

Entering the new year, many of us are considering our New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps you’re taking a “new year, new me” approach or simply continuing to work toward your existing goals.

Unsurprisingly, many of our resolutions tend to center on health and wellness. Like most of us, I keep up with my goals better—and for longer—when I have access to the necessary resources and support. How can we provide the same for our employees and create a supportive culture that enables them to be their best selves—and, in turn, build a stronger organization?

Well-being can take many different forms—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual—each of them contributing to holistic health. When employees are healthy and feel good, they’re more productive and produce higher-quality work. Organizations play a big role in their employees’ well-being, too—after all, many employees spend 40 or more hours a week doing their jobs.

So, when a company partners with its employees to help them reach their goals, they both reap the benefits. Supporting workers can lead to lower turnover, higher job satisfaction, and stronger overall performance.

I challenge you to look at the benefits you currently offer employees and—equally important—what else you should offer them. How can you best help them achieve their own resolutions for better health and wellness? Options include paid time off, flexible work arrangements, employee assistance programs, financial advisory services, and well-being initiatives. It’s also critical to ensure employees are aware of these benefits and to eliminate any hurdles to using them.

It’s worth noting that sometimes, you can have all the right policies and benefits in place and still find something is missing.

You see that your employees are unproductive, unmotivated, and, quite frankly, unhappy. If this is the case, my friends, I urge you to take a look in the mirror. Beyond policies and benefits, there’s one more critical piece to employee well-being: culture.

In today’s world, a place where you enjoy working can be hard to find. What excites one employee may bore another. That’s precisely why organizations must define their culture upfront and then be clear to employees about what the organization stands for. From the very first interview, potential employees should get a clear sense of the workplace culture so they can make an informed decision about whether it’s the best work environment for them. Employees who knowingly and willingly commit to an organization’s culture are more likely to be happy and stay longer. 

For this reason, it’s the responsibility of employers to work with HR to make sure we stay true to our culture. We must also act as the safeguards of our culture—fighting against incivility, toxicity, and anything that threatens a healthy work environment.

By doing these two things well—supporting our employees with critical benefits and establishing a clear and healthy work culture—we set our employees and, consequentially, our organizations up for success in creating better workplaces for a better world.