hi I'm Laura palabra and I am the founder of workplace well-being organization stress matters I left the events agency that I ran in 2016 to set up a coaching and development well-being company it was really important to me to create an organization that made work as well-being easy everything we do is built cross three core pillars insights accountability and support these drive everything that we do and we believe they strive that everything you guys do in terms of your well-being plans we work with business leaders to gather insights into the business work with team leaders to understand their team Bella and we even go down to that individual level to really understand each person's well-being every person is an individual and we believe it's really important to treat everybody as an individual when it comes to their well-being particularly with everything that's going on at the moment I think we can probably all agree that our people are the most important things and one of the things that's causing a lot of managers and leaders stress at the moment is whether or not they're able to look after their people in the best way possible all the programs that we run work across business team and individual level there are four main areas of well-being physical mental emotional and spiritual and what we find is quite often companies will be relatively strong in one area but they may be weaker in another so quite often we'll see a company they might have put on online yoga classes for example well they might even have mental health first aiders in their business now these things are both great but they should be part of a wider strategy and we need to have different things in place in that strategy to help with the physical mental emotional and spiritual sides of well-being when we think about strategy we know it's really important to understand where you are currently and where you want to go so it's only by understand where we are currently and where we're intending on going we can actually build the plan for each stage in between I've had enough time with finance directors to know that actually quite rightly they want to know what the return on investment is going to be but workplace well-being is one of those areas that you really do get out more than what you put in a study by Deloitte found that for every pound you spend on workplace well-being you get five pounds back and what we mean by that is they're actually the savings and cost that can be attributed to stress now I appreciate it's easy for me to sit here and say that actually we need a strategy when it comes to well-being and strategies we like to think they are obviously gonna be proactive now we're in a time at the moment where we are going to have to be reactive and if you haven't got a workplace well-being strategy it doesn't mean you can't put one in what I urge you to do is think about how you can do that in a long-term way now the needs of our individuals are going to be very very short-term they're going to change day by day week by week the way we approach well-being is hopefully something could be true to our culture and our values think really carefully about what your culture and your values look like do you have the kind of culture that actually people could be open and honest about how they're feeling and their mental health and if they don't how can we make them feel more comfortable with that and you guys need to decide how comfortable you want them to be would you like an environment where you think people can openly say how they feel or is that a bit too far away from where you are at the moment and actually there might need to be a step change in between now and then think about your values other things that you can take from your values and build them into your well-being plan so they really feel part of you as an organization and they make sense to your business they make sense to your business they'll make sense to your teams and to the individuals that work with you you may well have had your fair share of online social event try and think about how you can involve your team in well being is that that you can actually host a session with members of the team to try and establish what your strategy should look like and have you considered that different teams might require slightly different approaches to well-being depending on where you work if you've got people that do have to go back to an office or back to a venue on-site even actually how can we look after their well-being compared to people that can continue working from home so we have a situation where there are a number of people who are working additional hours and also a number of people that are furloughed and there is of course a mixture amongst that as well so think carefully about your return to work strategy in terms of actually how might you deal with those different groups separately you're going to have a physical return to work for some individuals you're going to have a return to online working for others and actually it might be worth paying particular attention to those that are still in the business that have been working for a period of time stress matters do lots of Industry research and in our 2020 pulse check during the Cova pandemic we found that those that was still working or working 22% more hours how can you support and reward those different subcultures and teams can be really influenced by the line manager find out whether or not your line managers feel prepared to deal with return to work scenarios do they feel comfortable talking about people's well-being and mental health they're potentially the first port of call for any of their team members if they do feel they are in distress consider training your line managers in mental health and well-being to make sure they have the skills they need to be able to support the rest of the team as a mental health first aider those individuals have the skills to be able to spot signs of distress understand what depression and anxiety might look like in the workplace build to help those team members that they're concerned about and signpost them in to the relevant supports for some people returning to work is going to be really exciting they're going to potentially missed their colleagues they don't have missed the pressure and the excitement of work and they're going to miss having new routine so for some people returning to work some a really positive experience for others however it could be a particularly daunting experience that could be creating quite a bang xiety in their world right now maybe those that have been on furlough the idea of returning to work actually is a huge amount of additional pressure the likelihood is there's potentially can be some restructuring needing to happen over the next few months we've found ourselves in a strange time and there will be some companies that can get through this in a really positive way and there will be others that unfortunately it's going to be a little bit more of a struggle so when thinking about restructuring and potential redundancies as one of the leaders and one of the managers in the organization try and ensure your self care is being preserved you're going to probably take on quite a lot of personal burden as - everybody's emotional and current situation try and do what is best for their overall business that overall community that you're working within it's quite a small industry in many respects is big in terms of number of businesses but actually we all seem to come across each other multiple times so try and think about how your process of restructuring and potential redundancies it's going to have on their individual and how they're going to see you going forward every person is gonna have their own individual experience of this Cova pandemic those people that are home schooling depending on the age of their children whether not they have very young children that can't self study independently whether or not they have that older children that they have got to support but maybe aren't used to being at home I've got individuals who have spent a long long period of time on their own they might be shielding they might be vulnerable they may live on their own so we've got lots of people who are coming from very unique experiences and we need to be really conscious when we're thinking about the individuals in our business about how we can support each individual as an individual everyone responds to pressure differently and one of the things we encourage people to do is think about what their stress signature looks like and we call it a stress signature because everybody has a unique approach to the way they handle stress and it's not something we necessarily know and think about but actually the more we understand it the better we can equip ourselves with increased resilience well it also helps us to do is to understand other people in our teams and those people that work with us the more we can understand that each of us react to stress in a different way the more we can support people on their journey to overcoming stress is there something you can offer them to make that transition a little bit easier for them for example outplacement coaching the cost of a few sessions actually it might help that individual set them on a new path and not feel quite so alone many individuals have been on a period of self-discovery over the last few months my urgell business is to do the same so to recap think about your well-being approach strategically it might be in a reactionary phase but there's no reason we can't have a strategy think about it on a business team and individual level don't forget to consider well-being in terms of the four different areas of well-being physical mental emotional and spiritual we know that increase in well-being improves productivity and improves profitability and create sustainable businesses everyone has their own unique experiences of covert and we need to understand that everybody's going to have their own unique experience of coming back to work I'm Norah palabra thank you very much for listening this video and for those of you that would like to know a little bit more about the current insights in terms of your business we are offering free well-being audits to all aircon members at the moment