Increase Business Productivity through Wellness Strategies
01st Aug , 2018
Over the past two to three decades, there has been enormous growth in ‘wellness’ businesses. These businesses offer solutions in order to have a healthy and fulfilling life, resulting in physical, mental and social wellbeing that enables you to reach your full potential. The global wellness market is booming, currently outstripping the worldwide pharmaceutical industry and generating trillions of dollars.
This industry category covers all manner of health-related products, services and functions, including:
- Alternative medicines and practices
- Meditation
- Healthy eating with nutrition and weight loss
- Preventative and personalised health
- Complementary and alternative medicine
- Beauty and anti-aging
- The spa industry
- Wellness tourism
- The thermal and mineral springs sector
The wellness industry is about maintaining and improving health in order to stave off disease, stress, and negative health impacts from environmental degradation, age and illness.
There are many market offerings in wellness solutions for maintaining a healthy lifestyle, ranging from individual consultants to studios and shops, books, magazines, guru presentations, television series and even apps – and any business coach will advise you that incorporating these solutions into your life can vastly help to improve productivity and life fulfilment.
The Eight Dimensions of Wellness
From a technical perspective, wellness is said to have eight dimensions: occupational, emotional, spiritual, environmental, financial, physical, social, and intellectual. Each dimension of wellness is dynamically interrelated with all of the others, with each being equally vital and important in the pursuit of overall optimum health. One can only aspire to a more optimal level of wellness by understanding how to maintain and optimise each of the eight dimensions impacting wellness.
The Benefits of Wellness for Businesses
The worldwide interest in wellness is not just from special interest groups and individuals, but businesses and other organisations globally. Many are now adopting this methodology in their workplace strategy, as a healthy and happy workforce is a productive one. Business growth strategies are now beginning to see wellness implemented as a positive reinforcement for a happy life and good business practice.
Further, in 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in order to improve the lot of humanity on the planet. It includes 17 goals, of which ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’ is a prominent objective.
Healthy and happy employees who believe management truly considers their needs and wellbeing tend to work harder and go that extra mile. They are more productive and take fewer sick leave days than unhealthy employees. That means you have an engaged workforce that delivers far better results. In HR terms, this is known as discretionary effort. However, implementing wellness into the workplace needs a strategic focus to become a core value of the business.
How to Implement Wellness in the Workplace
A business mentor or business coach can help you create or refine your vision and strategic plan to incorporate wellness as one of the foundations for setting your business culture. Your shared business vision needs to be adopted throughout the organisation irrespective of size or composition.
At International Business Mentors, our business coaching professionals have deep business experience and understand the importance of creating an ethical, safe and responsible workplace that truly cares and respects its employees while still competing and delivering results. Once implemented and adopted, your rewards – as a business owner, CEO or leader – will be what your employees do beyond their job descriptions. This can include increased productivity and contribution to the business in their own areas, thereby benefitting your business as a whole.
However, embedding wellness and getting its benefits is not just the role of business owners, CEOs or leaders. Wellbeing needs to be understood throughout the organisation and then monitored and measured against the four pillars of wellbeing – mind, body, purpose and place – as well as the strategy and the performance requirements of all employees.
How a Business Coach Can Help
Some of the areas in which a suitably matched business coach or business mentor can assist are:
- Developing vision and strategy
- Setting the target culture to support the strategy from the top and leading by example
- Transforming your organisation into one in which your employees want to work more
- Developing a culture that maintains trust, morale, loyalty and productivity
- Identifying which ‘well-being’ programme(s) are right for your businesses
A business coach or mentor can also help you consider the input from wider stakeholders into strategy and wellbeing and the target culture setting, e.g. from shareholders, funders, management, staff, families, community, suppliers and customers, as appropriate.
An independent and experienced business coaching professional can help you cast a critical eye across the entirety of your business and identify areas for improvement, acting as a support and independent sounding board in a confidential relationship. Contact International Business Mentors today to learn more.