Wellness Wednesday-Making Workplace Wellness Accessible
Take Aways
Wellness encompasses the whole self—the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of the individual.
Accessible Wellness does not have to cost you a $.
Costco Pizza is Amazing, but it does little to boost employee morale.
Hello hello hello and welcome back to What’s Coming up For You. It’s Wednesday and I think a wellness Wednesdays should be a thing. Why not if you are just joining me and you’ve clicked on the link to my Substack, does I Reketta P licensed professional counselor in Alaska and Georgia and today I just wanted to touch on workplace wellness and accessibility accessibility is a really key factor because I think wellness has become, well, we already know, um a one billion dollar industry, right? A billion dollars spent to work on, you know, diet culture and fitness, but the actual idea of wellness, wellness being a whole concept of like your mental health, emotional, well-being, as well as your physical health, all of those are important. And I would like to add on like relational health. You know, I’ve been talking about that for the last couple of weeks with these little mini pods about relational burnout well relational well-being is a part of wellness and relational encompasses your intimate partner relationships, familial relationships, relationships with your coworkers, colleagues, relationships with your neighbors, you know? It’s all encompassing. And the focus for today with wellness Wednesday is how can a company make wellness more accessible to their employees? I found a couple of articles. One is peer- reviewed from the AMA Journal of Ethics And what it names, it’s from Dr. Ivonne Guenther workplace Weldons programs and accessibility for all. I’ll link this in the notes. What it does say is many wellness programs have popped up in the last decade or so, but these well-ness programs are in businesses with 200 or more employees so if you are a smaller business, a micro business, you may be working where a wellness program does not exist. What we want to do is talk about how we could possibly expand that the access to wellness to other companies, smaller businesses in micro businesses alike and some things are pretty simple that you can do. I think at no cost and there’s another article from Fit on Health and I will also link that where they talk about what factors contribute to successful wellness initiatives and one thing it mentions, number one is clear communication. I honestly think that is free. We can communicate you know, within a realm of respect and dignity and intentionality and it’s clear and transparent you know so I named a few things clear and transparent with respect and dignity and a level of intentionality all of those things are free next thing that they list for accessibility within a company is having strong employee engagement in participation and I think I wanted to name that one and it’s very key. It’s like if we morale is low within a company or an organization, we will not have full participation and I remember working in community mental health and my coworkers would talk about uh we’re getting another pizza party no I love Costco pizza down. I really do. favorite $9.98 pizza please do not change the price. However pizza is not enough to boost morale. I think we all know this and in order for us to have buy-in, we’re going to have to do a few things get employee surveys out, maybe have a few focus groups and honestly get the opinions and feedback from staff members and that’s something that I as an EAP provider can help you with if you are in leadership at your organization and additionally, we wanna get evidence-based strategies out to see what we are actually going to start with before we just start throwing spaghetti noodles at the wall and I really like that saying you know throwing spaghetti noodles at the wall because we hope something will stick, but instead of wasting money on things that we hope will stick, we want to start off with more evidence-based strategies that have been proven time and time again that they actually work and what we are talking about when it comes to, you know, the strategies and the participation, yes, I did name the surveys and the focus groups and thereafter we want to implement like workshops and this can be quarterly quarterly workshops on reducing overwhelming stress. And that word that we all come to know as burnout we can also provide mental health, therapy sessions, which I provide to small and microbuses so that it does not feel like they have to skip on wellness for their staff and I want to kind of end because where do we at? Oh, we’re at seven minutes now pretty good if I don’t say so myself. I like to have micro-podcasts, mini podcasts because it’s a wealth information and we get overwhelmed and all the things. So I want to kind of sum this up and we can continue with the wellness Wednesday aspect of things when another Wednesday rolls around we wanna focus on accessibility for all and a part of that is taken a bit of an audit of your wellness program or lack thereof within your organization and recognizing hmm well, we might not have a wellness program. How do we get one started also, what do our staff say? What do they need as we build this thing and if any of that sounds interesting sounds like something that you would like to take a deeper dive into contact me. I am available. I am in EAP wellness provider. I provide workshops as well as therapy sessions for your staff, who might be in the states of Alaska, Georgia currently. Let’s see if we can continue to build that and if you are interested, you can go on the website at arisecounselingllc.com or you can email me admin@arisecounselingllc.com and all of that will be in the show notes. And again, my name is Reketta. I appreciate your time today. Hope this many podcast brought on some thoughts and I want to know what came up for you when you think about workplace wellness and wellness in general, did you think that wellness was something that involves the whole self or were you thinking about the physical aspects of wellness and health? I want to know your thoughts and I will see you. Actually, I keep saying I will see you, but I won’t right? I hope that you will find me again in the next one and have a wonderful day.