A big organisation can have a programme that seems impressive but if overwork, bullying and harassment are rife, who’s going to go to that yoga class?
As any high-performance sports coach will tell you, getting results means taking a holistic view of mental and physical health. Likewise in the workplace, successful teams are led by people who understand the correlation between wellness and the workplace; they understand that when their staff are thriving, they are best placed to succeed professionally and stay with the company.
Workplace wellbeing has become hugely important over the past number of years, particularly to help navigate the vagaries of remote and hybrid working, and the collective trauma of the pandemic.
Global companies seem to have led the way and set the trends, but while indigenous SMEs may not have the budgets or the HR departments to instigate workplace wellbeing programmes in the same way bigger companies do, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Experts who spoke to the The Irish Times all seem to be in agreement: it’s about listening to staff and leading from the top down to embed a culture of wellness.
Brian Crooke is course director of the postgraduate certificate in workplace wellness at Trinity College Dublin and founder of the Workplace Wellbeing Ireland community. He believes that smaller companies can have an edge when it comes to embedding a culture of health, as it’s easier to establish with fewer employees and more direct contact with leadership.
“If I went into a large organisation with an existing culture, that is incredibly challenging to change. But in a small organisation everybody knows the chief executive or their main manager on the leadership team, so it’s much easier to make connections and for leaders to lead by example, which is really what the foundation of a culture is.”
Crooke points to behaviours and actions on a daily basis being the starting point of cultural change. That could be something as simple as senior leaders using their annual leave allowance or not sending emails after working hours, to model behaviours for the rest of the staff.
