How To Energise Your Workplace

Workplace Wellbeing programmes are becoming a lot more popular in the UK, driven by a desire by many employers to create a healthy workplace environment where their staff can do their best work and contribute to the success of the business; and there’s plenty of data coming out showing the link between authentic wellbeing programmes and improvements in retention, engagement and productivity.

Together with Kirsten Samuel who runs Kamwell, I’ve been championing The RBI Living Well Programme at RBI, the global information company where I’m also Marketing Director, and wanted to share with you some learnings from the recent Living Well Fair that we ran for our team in Central London last month.

The focus of the event was very much on physical and psychological wellbeing; and it brought the whole company together creating a really positive buzz. There is a lot of work required in the background to make something like this happen, but having done it a few times now, there’s nothing quite like a high energy event to communicate the authentic wellbeing message widely and deeply across the business.

If you want to energise your workplace and give it a dose of wellness, then here’s a flavour of the RBI Living Well Fair to get you started. The event included:

Plenty of fitness activities: a 5K run led by Runner’s Need; spinning at Boom Cycle

Healthy food: delicious salads and smoothies supplied by POD

Inspiring and practical talks including:

Heart-wrenching personal stories
The dispel of myths and facts by Linda Geddes
A great talk on Sleep by Dr Guy Meadows
A very useful talk on Mindfulness by Jamie Bristow (a key focus for me right now).
On top of that, people had the opportunity to have one-to-one appointments to:

Gain insight into their blood-glucose levels and blood pressure
Get their weight and BMI measured
Have any moles or skin lessons checked
Speak to a health coach which was really popular
Speak to a physio

And finally, we launched the RBI 50 Days of Wellbeing; a campaign designed to encourage people to pledge to do something everyday to enhance their wellbeing. The bar was set very low as getting started is often the hardest part; and there’s a strong social media element to it, given the fact that RBI has 50 offices located around the world. 30% of the 2k employees made a pledge, and the private Facebook Group is still buzzing on Day 21 (today).

Success without Stress:

How to Prevent Burnout and Build Resilience for Optimal Health and Performance

You can order your copy here or download a free sample chapter here.

One big issue that many companies face is how to create more resilient individuals and teams. Stress is a big problem. For instance, in 2013, 131 million days were lost to sickness and about 40% of these were due to stress. In addition, according to research by MetLife in 2015, 37% of employees cite stress as a reason to quit their jobs.

As this is such a big problem, over the last year and a half, I have been researching and writing a new book to better understand what stress is; what’s causing it, both in and out of the workplace; how we can spot stress in others and most importantly what can be done to protect ourselves and build our resilience.

The good news is that it is FINISHED and includes more than 50 techniques that people can integrate into their lives to help them boost resilience and thrive.