The 'sickie' – you might want to sit down CFOs…
A Frost & Sullivan 2022 study found that absenteeism cost an eye watering 24 million to Australian businesses in 2022 with Gen Z twice as likely as the Boomers to call in sick.
The health and wellbeing of your staff is however much more complex than the quantitative figures around sick leave, workers’ compensation, and turnover.
Unfortunately, staff can’t come into the office and leave the rest of their lives at the door… so the question becomes, how can you implement strategies to support your staff to reach their potential and by extension of that have your business reach its?
In 2017 I had my own experience with burnout, I lost my father suddenly and tragically to depression in 2016. I was the sole executor of his estate (I have five siblings – you can read between the lines there about that experience) and continued to run my own precedent development and training business and study in my spare time. I had been eating on the run for years, fuelling my body with poor quality convenience food and I was also self-medicating with alcohol. In 2017 something had to give and that was my health and by extension of that, my performance at work suffered. I let people down during that period and I also let myself down. I had to take some time to reframe my relationship with my work, my personal life and wellbeing.
The primary things that got me through my burnout were yoga, breath, meditation and addressing my nutrition. These tools helped me to rebalance the expectations on myself (reforming perfectionist) and get more realistic about the work I could take on and perform to a high standard.
My experiences with my Dad during his depression had left me disillusioned with the biomedical system in terms of preventative care so at the same time, I began my first studies into nutrition. I cleaned up the way I was eating and what I was drinking, which affected all aspects of my wellbeing, from my energy to my mental clarity, my productivity and my ability to cope with stress.
I now split my time between nutrition, yoga and a little precedent consulting and I’m passionate about educating employees (and people at a personal level!) to view their health from a preventative lens rather than (like I did) waiting for the wheels to fall off before they do anything about it.
Your body is an incredibly complex, intelligent being that seeks balance in its systems. It communicates in real time with micro messages about your level of wellbeing however our ‘busi-ness’ means that these are often pushed aside and ignored.
I believe the organisation of the future will provide preventive and proactive staff programs for wellness, working to enhance the emotional, mental and general psychological wellbeing of all employees. A thriving employee, equals a thriving business.
Share your thoughts... How does your organisation support its employees? What programs would you like to see them implement or have they implemented?
