If you are an entrepreneur and have just started a new business, there are many things to consider, such as establishing your company’s finances and promoting your services. While tending to these matters, it is easy to overlook the importance of wellbeing for both yourself and your staff, even though it is one of the most significant factors that play a role in your business' success.
By ensuring both you and your team are at your best while working, you can maximise productivity, improve work quality, and boost your overall business outcomes. In fact, Elite Business Magazine reported that small businesses who invested more than £1,000 in mental health experienced improved revenue growth and employee retention between 2020 and 2022.
This week, guest writer Megan Lance shares her top tips on how to start building a workplace culture of wellbeing in your new business.
Start from the top
You may have heard the saying that in order to change the world you must first change yourself; the same logic applies to how you handle your new business.
To begin establishing a culture of wellbeing, it is important to prioritise your own personal growth first. By sharpening vital entrepreneurial capabilities, such as your intrapersonal skills, time management, and goal and value formation, you can better empathise with any struggles your employee's encounter, and be in a better position to formulate and implement wellbeing strategies from the top down.
Participating in leadership development programmes can help you to get started on your personal growth journey. These provide effective, personalised education to help you develop deeper human connections with your team and manage them better, even amid challenging situations. With employees today demanding more from their employers through movements like the Great Resignation, workplace wellbeing training can help you cultivate the characteristics needed to meet these demands and create a workplace environment conducive to employee wellbeing.
Design a workplace that promotes holistic wellbeing
New business owners can underestimate the impact of the physical workplace on job satisfaction, productivity, work quality, and overall employee wellbeing. A study found that over 60% of the employees surveyed had difficulty concentrating because of their work environment. If you’re still designing your office space, it will help to take wellness into consideration and if you work remotely, consider what kind of environment will nurture a healthy, happy and productive setup for you.
For office-based work, if your business operations involve a lot of desk work, invest in ergonomic furniture like screen height adjusters or standing desks; through these investments you can lower the risks of work-related injuries, like back and shoulder pain, even if your team has to sit down for long periods of time. You can also allocate breakout spaces where employees can take quick breaks away from their desks, work alone for better concentration, or brainstorm with colleagues.
Considerations for remote working include using alarm clocks to signal breaks to encourage you to move and stretch, and investing in items in your surroundings that support a healthy environment, such as plants that offer wellness benefits and vibrant imagery that evokes positive energy.
Offer relevant benefits
Working at a new business may pose a bigger risk for your employees than seeking employment at a more established company. Your workers could be passionate about your mission and your products, yet that might not lessen any anxiety they may have about how to provide for themselves and their dependents. To alleviate this, you can offer benefits packages that directly alleviate their most pressing concerns.
For example, you can offer additional leave to single parents, health insurance and access to an employee assistance programme. Consider including Calmer’s free 10-week burnout prevention ecourse to round off your benefits packages, as well as access to self-paced learning tools like their Mindfulness Guides and Ecourses. This can help your employees to understand the science behind de-motivation at work, how to manage any struggles with self-kindness and compassion, and how to build resilience.
Gather feedback on your wellness strategies
Gathering feedback will do more than just help you improve the wellness strategies you have implemented thus far.
For example, Virgin Experience Days saw a 40% increase in annual revenue after enacting an employee engagement initiative centred around gathering feedback. The business credits this initiative as crucial in helping it secure the gold award at the UK Employee Experience Awards.
With this in mind, cultivating employee happiness in your new business relies on consistently providing workplace wellbeing initiatives and creating multiple avenues of communication to share constructive feedback. Consider asking your team how they think your wellbeing initiatives can be improved, allowing them the option to respond anonymously for better honesty — and, most importantly, act on the feedback they provide.
Make wellbeing a long-term priority
After accumulating data and information about the wellbeing strategies that work for your company, you need a way to measure their progress and success over the long term. For this, you can use the SMART model — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
For example, you may want to reduce the number of sick days and mental health-related leaves your team takes by 25% in the next 6 months. Based on your progress towards these goals, you can determine which wellbeing initiatives are most beneficial to your new business.
From here, you can pioneer more wellbeing projects as your business grows. One area you can focus on can include understanding diversity and promoting this within your company. You can start by raising awareness of the importance of inclusive behaviour and continually seeking out the views of your employees. Promoting diversity and inclusion in this manner won't just enhance wellbeing across your team — it will also improve your company's chances of becoming an innovation leader in your industry. Implementing long-running initiatives in your company like this can lead to a lasting and innovative culture of wellbeing, as well as giving you a competitive edge.
A culture of wellbeing is key to maintaining motivated employees and, by extension, a successful company. By prioritising wellness as soon as you establish your business, you have a better guarantee of its long-term growth.
Megan Lance is a freelance writer specialising in topics related to community health and positive work cultures. She writes pieces with the strong belief that cultivating a transparent and robust workplace is key to helping people thrive. When she’s not researching and writing, she can usually be found spelunking in the mountains with her siblings.