Employee wellness starts with feeling secure
Wayne Deeth, People & Culture
The COVID pandemic has shone a spotlight on the wellbeing of all employees. That’s not to say it didn’t matter before, but for businesses like Icon Visual Marketing, whose staff are now primarily working from home, the pandemic has brought new challenges.
For Icon, wellness is about a positive mindset for our people.
It starts with working with our people to ensure they are clear about success in their job. Once that’s established, we work with them to track their progress and celebrate their successes. The manager’s role is to support employees to be successful as they track their achievements, rather than waiting for managers to tell them they are doing well.
Feelings of wellbeing are fundamental to the overall health of an individual, enabling them to successfully overcome difficulties and achieve what they want out of life. Past experiences, attitudes and outlook can all impact wellbeing.
At Icon we consciously and proactively build for wellbeing as part of good practice. It benefits each individual and it also benefits the company.
Late last year, and early this year we held a series of workshops with all staff in the room, which is rare for a medium-sized firm like Icon. We asked our people what we needed to do in the future to grow and prosper, and we’re now implementing some of what we learnt.
"For Icon, wellbeing is just good business practice to ensure optimum performance."
In establishing our wellbeing program we’ve learnt a few things that are worth sharing:
Personal leadership coaching
Each employee has personal leadership coaching with a coach or manager. This includes a monthly one-on-one session that focuses on the individual and how they can improve. The focus is on support and how they can take control, rather than what the company wants from them. It is a safe place where they can be vulnerable and receive guidance on great success at work and beyond. It benefits everyone.
Wellness leave
At Icon we’ve recently introduced extra leave for each staff member to take every month to focus on wellness. In some ways, it’s just reframing because they may have taken leave before but for less positive reasons. It’s an acknowledgment that “I’m okay and I want to stay okay”.
Vibe committee – the fun stuff
Our committee of enthusiastic staff works behind the scenes to organise fun stuff like fun virtual meetings, birthday cakes (when we’re in the office), care packages, nice little extras like moisturiser and fresh flowers in the office bathrooms, and more.
Flexible work arrangements
Before the pandemic we offered flexible work arrangements for many of our staff – part-time roles, working from home, starting early/finishing early, and more. The pandemic has taught us that a lot more of our people can successfully work from home so no doubt there’ll be more flexibility in the future.
Incorporating wellness at work for all our people is an investment in the future and reflects our corporate values. It’s a long-term strategy, and we hope that our people will enjoy success at Icon and beyond.
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