How to Update Your Wellbeing Strategy with Virtual Wellbeing
"Leadership is the ability to facilitate movement in the needed direction and have people feel good about it."
- Tom Smith
In the current climate where working from home is the new norm, we’ve recently had an influx of our clients come to us for help with transitioning and adapting their wellbeing strategy to suit a more virtual workplace. Given the frequency of this request, we thought it would be worth it to share some thoughts around virtual wellbeing leadership in this article.
Act Quickly
In this current environment, collective anxiety levels are high. With so many organisations and industries affected by the virus, if you are in the fortunate place to be able to continue to operate, and to continue to support your staff, the likelihood is that their stress levels will be high too, and that the time to bring in extra support to continue to put their health and wellbeing first is now.
Look for ways to add simple activities that are sustainable over time and that you feel would still add value long into the future.
Elect a committed internal virtual wellbeing community leader
Great wellbeing initiatives require great wellbeing leadership. With many organisations having to pivot to virtual strategy for all business processes so quickly, it can be easy to overlook wellbeing leadership.
A great virtual wellbeing leader is part communication specialist, part motivator, part wellbeing expert. Of course, that’s not too dissimilar to in-person wellbeing, but the virtual leader needs higher levels of agility and great access to virtual communication channels.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Make it fun
In many of our recent consultations with clients, lower levels of participation from staff could be linked to higher workload from working from home, staff still adapting to the change of environment, but nearly all program participants agreed that injecting more fun in virtual wellbeing activities would be highly beneficial.
Keep it Simple, and Make Access Easy
If opting in to wellbeing activities is difficult for your staff, you can appreciate that participant will be affected negatively. Look for ways to simplify access to your virtual sessions. You can do this by keeping to your preferred platform, keeping sessions short, and holding a number of them weekly so they are accessible to all. All these points are important aspects for us to respect at In Bloom. In a previous article, we detailed the very simple the requirements to set up virtual sessions.
In summary, as organisations make working from home and flexible working arrangements the norm, it’s likely that virtual wellbeing will need to become a critical part of every organisation’s wellbeing strategy.
Making the transition to virtual is not easy, and we’ve been helping clients continue to make the most out of their transition. We would love to help you if we can, simply email us and we discuss.