The Most Attractive Incentive: A Culture of Emotional Employee Wellness

According to Forbes, employees are clocking an average of nine hours of unpaid overtime a week. Even worse, one in ten employees in America report working as much as 20 extra hours because they feel that they are expected to. This number has doubled in the last year alone.

For anyone who has worked remotely during the past year, chances are that these figures aren’t much of a surprise. Unfortunately, the pandemic has allowed negative work behaviors to become widespread across all work hierarchies and the added pressure to perform has resulted in a new Covid work culture.

Overwork Culture is Impacting Employee Wellness

Habitually working long hours and overcoming constant exhaustion, AKA overwork culture, is still seen as a badge of honor within the workplace. While there’s something to be said about an employee who is willing to divest themselves fully into their work, the World Health Organization has revealed the negative long-term implications of overwork culture.

Some of these long-term implications include burnout, exhaustion and the deterioration of mental health and employee morale. In short, promoting a work culture that is defined by constant overwork is detrimental to the long-term success of companies and the people who work there.

Providing Emotional Employee Wellness Incentives

Employees who report feeling that their emotional wellbeing is negatively impacted by their work are 33% more likely to seek new employment elsewhere. However, when employees report feeling that their emotional wellbeing is positively impacted by their work, this figure drops to just 8%. For obvious reasons, employees value a workplace that promotes healthy emotional wellbeing.

But, in order to promote better emotional wellness within your team, you must secure buy-in from leadership. Overworking is typically a top-down issue. Therefore, leadership must recognize the significance of burnout on a remote workforce. Leaders who refuse to acknowledge these issues may model unhealthy behaviors across their teams, which creates a trickle-down effect of negative behavior which can result in massive turnover.

Tips for Improving Employee Emotional Wellness:

Delineate time where employees are expected to work and when they are not. While there may be times where a manager needs to send emails later than what is typically ideal, it’s important for everyone to feel a clear and distinct sense of expected work routine.
Encourage frequent breaks. Remind your remote team that it’s okay to get up from the computer for 15 minutes, to walk around the neighborhood or to even watch a little bit of their favorite shows. As long as it’s not serving as a distraction, frequent breaks are important for productivity.
Get a temperature check. Send out anonymous forms and have your team report on how they are feeling about work. Ask about workloads, meetings, stress levels, etc. Get a pulse for how everyone is feeling and why they feel the way that they do and find solutions to address the common issues.
Provide emotional wellness benefits like remote therapy, wellness days where employees can take off early, and opportunities for employees to feel appreciated by leadership.

Finding Good, Motivated Talent

Of course, incentives are great for attracting top-quality talent to your team, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle. If you want to find highly-motivated employees, you need to invest in recruitment practices that allow you to locate talent and engage with them in a meaningful way while also showcasing your company’s focus on providing adequate employee wellness incentives.
Fortunately, Wavely is the perfect hiring platform for doing all of those things and is shown to save hiring managers and recruiters time and money. Learn more here.