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Key points
- While employers can help promote employee well-being, it’s ultimately up to each of us to prioritize and advocate for what we need to stay well.
- Well-being consists of mental, physical, and financial dimensions.
- Some daily actions that put your well-being first are setting clear work hours, standing up to move every hour, and monitoring your finances.
As we close out 2021 and head into a new year, it’s a good time to reflect on our well-being at work, both in terms of support from our employers as well as how we prioritize our own mental, physical and financial well-being.
As a result of the pandemic, employee well-being has become a top consideration for employers in the last one to two years. Whether COVID-19 has boosted or harmed business, employee well-being has been affected.
Many companies are now re-examining how they define well-being. I’ve observed a slow consensus that well-being consists of mental, physical, and financial dimensions.
The interesting part of this conversation is the question around who owns the responsibility for employees’ well-being.
Companies focus on providing more well-being benefits than I’ve ever seen before. Common examples are:
- “Rest days” or periodic shutdown days for the whole company
- Yoga classes
- “No meeting” days, where focus time is encouraged.
However, an argument I’ve seen leveled against these benefits is that they are treatments of the symptoms that employees incur (burnout, anxiety, physical latency) rather than of the problem.
That is if your employees are exhausted, and you need to prescribe a rest day, is the real issue that workloads required to meet company objectives are too heavy?
If you need days that are meeting free, are too many meetings being scheduled?
These are very fair questions to ask. But I am also of the belief that we, as employees, don’t give ourselves enough permission to put our own well-being first, ahead of work priorities.
It is a chicken-and-egg scenario. If companies are able to meet stretch objectives that require a high amount of work from employees, they will continue to set those types of objectives. If they get used to getting work done through inefficient meetings, they will continue to have inefficient meetings.
Now, I completely acknowledge that there will be some company cultures that don’t support this—for example, making a habit of not working after hours in order to prioritise personal well-being activities could result in lower promotion or growth prospects in some companies.
However, I would argue that there’s only one way to normalise what being “a committed employee who deserves promotion and growth prospects” looks like, and that is to set boundaries. If you don’t set your own boundaries, the company growth objectives will set them for you.
In the age of hybrid work, setting boundaries is one of the most critical steps employees can take to collectively change work culture.
And so, as we head into 2022, here are a few recommendations on how to prioritize (and stand up for!) your well-being.
Mental Well-Being:
- Break the habit of checking work messages outside work hours. Notifications off!
- Create an auto-filing system to prioritise important messages and filter out unimportant ones. Most email systems have sophisticated tools for this.
- Set (and respect!) clear working and non-working hours on your calendar and messaging tools.
- When you’re asked to do a new task, always ask when it’s needed by.
- Prioritise tasks often, daily if needed. If you and your manager agree on tasks and priority order, it frees you up to just work your way down the list, which can be a relief in busy periods.
Physical Well-Being:
- Invest in home office ergonomics (e.g., screens at eye-level, a proper desk chair).
- Don’t be afraid to ask that workplace distancing or mask rules are respected.
- Go for a 30-minute walk every day (walking meetings are a great option).
- Get specific on your travel boundaries (e.g., five days a month, trips no more than two days each).
- Stand up for one minute every hour.
Financial Well-Being:
- Aim to have at least three months' salary in ready cash as an emergency buffer.
- Know how much you spend every month.
- Define an amount that you would like to save each month and respect your spending limit.
- Take an audit of all the financial benefits your employer provides and ensure you’re using them.
Ultimately, we are all responsible for our own well-being, and by taking care of ourselves, we’ll become better employees and teammates.
I hope we can head into 2022 feeling more empowered to first define for ourselves what we need to stay well and then advocate for that within our working lives.
