A crucial part of your corporate HR strategy should be to take care of your employees’ well-being. As we have already analyzed in previous articles, many factors favor the psychological well-being of team members at work. Similarly, there are also many reasons which explain the absence of said well-being.
Of course, this cannot happen if the employees do not feel good about themselves and work together. To enhance and diminish the former, we will analyze four necessary conditions to take care of your employees’ well-being. Let’s take a closer look at these conditions.
How can companies take care of their employees?
The best way of taking care of employees is by taking care of their emotional well-being. This can be done by implementing an emotional well-being program where employees have accessible and personalized help for their individual needs, such as the one ifeel offers to employees worldwide.
What role does HR play?
If those who are responsible for the care of employees aren’t being taken care of, how to companies expect to have a healthy work environment?
The HR department needs professional advice to make sure they tackle problems properly and ensure a safe and healthy environment. This should be done through data-driven advice with a structured mental health program.
How will the company benefit from taking care of its employees?
If you take care of your employees’ well-being, you will have a happier and more productive workforce. This means that employees will be driven to perform better as they will work in a place where they know they are being taken care of. This is will lead to employees having a sense of belonging in their company (commitment) and the company will provide better results overall.
Tips to take care of your employees’ well-being
One of the key responsibilities within an organization’s human capital care is to protect its people’s physical and psychological vulnerability.
This enhances their perception of the company as a safe place, strengthens their commitment, and increases the likelihood that employees will be fully involved in the projects they fulfill.
Below we will examine in more detail four of the fundamental elements to take care of your employees’ well-being.
1. The Power of Confidence
As you know, peer relationships within the same hierarchical level and boss-subordinate relationships are crucial in understanding people’s psychological health in the workplace.
One of the factors that directly influence the health of interpersonal relationships is trust. This umbrella of confidence, familiarity, and reassurance is vital in making relationships work. We often hear that building trust between two people takes a long time and very little time to destroy it. This is sometimes true, but not always: human relationships are much more complex than a simple build/destroy binomial in the work environment.
In any case, the important thing is that there are conditions for people to trust each other honestly and not blindly in the work environment. For this, it is essential that people behave consistently and that there are no lies (also known as deliberate inconsistencies between language and actions or expectations created and never fulfilled). Of course, employees need to perceive absolute transparency about the issues that affect them rather than a hidden agenda that influences what happens to them without them realizing it.
2. Security vs. Fear
Security is one of the most primal needs of all human beings. To understand what it consists of, we must think of safety as basically what we feel when not we are not afraid.
As we mentioned earlier, under normal conditions, it is crucial that the company employees feel that the workplace does not put their health at serious risk. If the health hazards are too significant, adequate measures are implemented to minimize the risks. In an era like the current one, marked by the threat of the coronavirus, this factor takes on particular relevance when it comes to focusing on how to take care of your employees’ well-being.
Moreover, at a more organizational level, they need to feel at ease and secure in their job. How? By perceiving the probability of being fired is low, there is an emotional climate marked by order and predictability. Levels of uncertainty are handled with maturity by those in charge, as they assume what they do not know and convey a sense that things are under control, whether they go well or badly.
3. Good Working Conditions
Another factor to consider when you take care of your employees’ well-being is the perception that they are treated adequately in their workplace. This is commonly known as having good conditions: a salary appropriate to the difficulty of the task and the level of responsibility assumed, reasonable working hours, and comfortable and healthy physical and material resources for the performance of functions.
In other words, it is not so much a question of whether a person has to work long or short hours at something very easy or challenging or do it for a lot or a little money. These three circumstances are critical but also highly relative: they depend on the subjective perception of the person who suffers or enjoys them.
Taking care of the team’s emotional well-being is about how the employee does not perceive that the job “takes their life away” because the conditions are inadequate. If this is the case, their physical and psychological health will decline.
4. Motivation and Meaning
Finally, we cannot talk about the conditions that most influence the improvement of psychological health in the work environment without mentioning motivation, i.e., the emotional energy that drives us, that sets us in motion towards a specific goal, in this case, a professional plan. Protecting employees’ well-being is also achieved from this point of view.
We have just explained that the salary received, the time spent, or the task’s difficulty are relevant but relative aspects. This also has to do with the motivation factor, i.e., the desire to perform their job and the emotional attachment they establish concerning their tasks and the company where they work.
Motivation at work strengthens commitment but also employee involvement. If motivation is high, their mood will be more positive. Then earning less than you could, putting in long hours, or working harder than required will be well compensated.
The question is: when does motivation appear? It depends on many things, but mainly when people feel that they are working on a reasonably exciting project, that it has a meaning, that it is moving forward thanks to their contribution, and that it is moving in a direction that they can perceive not just imagine.
What we have described so far are just some of the main factors that affect the protection of people’s psychological well-being in the corporate environment and should therefore be part of any organization’s human capital care strategy. Regardless of the position held by an employee, it is essential to maximize these axes to promote the team’s health.
If you have a problem with one or more of them, perhaps the time has come to consult a professional who can help fix this. Many employees already do this through the emotional well-being program for companies that ifeel has provided. Give importance to your occupational health and seek advice from a specialized psychologist: we are here to help you.
Emotional well-being program for companies
At ifeel, we know that work should not disrupt people’s well-being. That is why our team of psychologists, experts in well-being at work, has created an emotional well-being program for companies that positively impacts talent retention, reduces absenteeism, and combats employee stress.
You will find helpful material in our Resources section, such as podcasts, HR guides, or interviews with HR managers. In addition, we have a Psychosocial Risk Factors Template, which you can use to comply with the requirements of the Labor Inspection.
Thanks to our emotional well-being program, your company’s HR managers can receive personalized, data-driven advice on improving the psychological well-being of their teams. In addition, this program offers employees a 360° mental health care service structured at different levels according to their needs. Try our program today to see how it could help you.
We hope you found this post about how to take care of your employees’ well-being interesting. If you would like more information about our emotional well-being program for companies, request it, and we will contact your team as soon as possible.
