Investing Time Toward a Healthy Workplace Strategy in 2020

In today’s environment of compressed time and high demands, important goals are often overshadowed by urgent matters, and before you know it, it’s 2021!

If you already understand the towering importance of employee well-being to the success of your organization, then Excellence Canada recommends an uncomplicated strategy to help you achieve major milestones in 2020. We have removed “guesswork” and added “acting with confidence”.

Great Employers are created through serious intent. What will your organization be celebrating during Canada’s Healthy Workplace Month this October?

To survive and thrive in the competition for top talent, it’s not a matter of “if” but rather “when” you will adopt the requirements of the Healthy Workplace Standard, in one form or another. You can’t afford not to! The expertise, engagement, and productivity of your employees determines your culture, quality of goods and services, and customer satisfaction. Set your people up for success, and your organization will follow.

Five things to put yourself above your competitors

Have you done the following?

1. Assessment – Measured your organization against a proven checklist for employee health, well-being, and engagement to capitalize on strengths and reveal vital opportunities for improvement?
2. Survey – Asked your employees for their perception of engagement, satisfaction, and health?
3. Plan – Created an action plan to improve your workplace, with the involvement of your employees, and widely shared it?
4. Monitor Change – Established key performance indicators, so you can periodically measure and feed back outcomes into your improvement plan?
5. Support – Established which senior leader is responsible for championing the success of the plan?

Getting these initiatives done takes less than six months on average and lays the foundation for success in everything that follows. All the other great initiatives you are already doing will align under the Healthy Workplace framework and will rapidly become more effective and easier to manage.

Wouldn’t that be something worth celebrating in October 2020?

Creating a vibrant and healthy organization is a journey that never ends. Successful employers are constantly improving by reviewing practices, refining programs, continually monitoring, learning, teaching, and communicating. New hires need orientation. Existing staff need reinforcing. Every individual’s needs change over time and resources must be there to meet them.

There is no start point or end point, so the time to begin is always “Now”!

Check out Canada’s Healthy Workplace Month website for tools to aid your planning and for group activities and ideas that can be implemented at work. It is important to ensure initiatives are not only aligned to your organization’s key strategic priorities, but embedded in current operational planning processes, like human resources strategic plans, and that employees are involved and kept aware of progress each step of the way.

A productive workplace culture of health, happiness, and well-being is a shared responsibility

The heavy lifting to transform organizational culture is at the beginning, but once the employer gets the flywheel turning, employees will rally to the cause and maintain momentum. The many paybacks of a Healthy Workplace are not fully represented by only measuring key performance indicators. Paybacks are just as tangible through improvements in morale, trust in leadership, hope, and positive attitudes. These are the vital elements that contribute to great psychological and physical health.

It is also important there be a ‘fun’ element to this work. Creating healthy workplaces is not only about providing resources, tools, and skills that enable employees to manage and improve their own personal health, but also about creating a culture that values wellness. Healthy lifestyle programs, social activities, mental health awareness programs, and supports that are open and inclusive for everyone will yield many benefits to the organization while being engaging and fun for employees.

For advice on which programs and tools are the best fit for your size, industry, and current state, please contact Excellence Canada, an independent not-for-profit dedicated to helping organizations become the best they can be, through education and the progressive implementation of globally-benchmarked standards of excellence. See the list of Canada Awards for Excellence Recipients that have reaped the rewards of becoming a Healthy Workplace.