Addressing emotional wellness in the workplace

When it comes to employee wellness, a lot of the discussion centers on physical wellness: encouraging employees to increase their physical activity levels, develop healthier eating habits, getting more sleep, etc. In addition to being easier to relate to, these kinds of wellness initiatives produce results that are not only easier to see and quantify (weight loss, lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, etc.), but also easier to link to business outcomes, such as reducing insurance costs and absenteeism. But physical wellness is just one of many dimensions of wellness that influence a person’s overall well-being.

What is emotional wellness?

If physical wellness is the one employers and employees find the easiest to talk about, emotional wellness is perhaps the most difficult. Loosely defined, “emotional wellness” is concerned with an individual’s ability to emotionally cope with challenges in a healthy, productive way, and encompasses self-care, self-esteem and stress management. And while some might feel that the highly personal, internal nature of emotional wellness would make it a taboo to discuss at work, the truth is that work is often one of the top sources of stress that leads to a person becoming “emotionally unwell.”

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Ignoring emotional health – both on a personal level and on an organizational level – can have consequences that are much more concerning than a few moments of awkwardness, such as higher rates of employee burnout, interpersonal conflicts, and decreased productivity. “Emotionally unwell” employees can also spread their personal feelings of stress or unhappiness to other members of the organization, even those they don’t directly interact with, infecting the overall company culture.

Organizations that build cultures that promote emotional wellness, however, experience higher retention rates, and increased employee engagement. “Emotionally well” employees tend to be more productive, work better in teams and are more likely to feel positively about their work and employer.

The fact that emotional wellness is seen as harder to quantify than physical wellness is a key reason why employers tend to shy away from making it part of their employee wellness strategies. Emotional wellness is not “unquantifiable,” however, health risk assessments (HRAs), screening tools that help individuals recognize and understand their personal health risks, often include questions related to emotional wellness. If administered on a company-wide scale, employers could use the data from their employees’ HRAs to gauge the emotional health of their entire workforce and identify areas of improvement, and then benchmark that data to measure the success of their program year over year.

Incorporating emotional wellness into the broader strategy

Employers looking to incorporate emotional wellness into their corporate wellness programs don’t have to reinvent the wheel to do so. In fact, many companies that don’t have a formalized wellness program may already be addressing emotional health without realizing it, such as an Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

EAPs are employee benefit programs that provide workers with resources and tools to help them deal with personal problems (addiction, debt, family issues, etc.) that may be affecting their work performance. More actively promoting the EAP to employees, both on a global scale and individually to those managers are concerned about, is a simple but effective way to enhance emotional wellness with very little additional expense. Other initiatives or policies employers might already have in place that can help improve their workforce’s emotional health include flexible schedules, offering paid time off, allowing employees to take regular breaks to stretch or take a quick walk through the office, and encouraging employees to eat lunch away from their desks.

When it comes to more directly addressing emotional wellness, companies should aim to create initiatives that both educate employees on whatever factor of emotional wellness the company wants to address and empower them to make choices that can help improve their emotional health. In addition to running any challenges related to emotional well-being, employers should attempt to provide resources that inform employees about why emotional health is so important and where they can turn if they need additional help.

G&A Partners has seen the impact of promoting emotional health on its own workforce. In 2017, G&A decided to increase its focus on emotional wellness by incorporating challenges designed to address health risk factors like stress and self-care. The impact was apparent in the HRAs: Compared to the previous year, G&A employees were about 10 percent less likely to be at a high risk of insomnia, about 5 percent less likely to be at a high risk for depression and were about 5 percent more likely to be at a lower risk for anxiety.

Examples of emotional wellness challenges that G&A Partners found successful included:

• A meditation challenge that encouraged employees to meditate for 150 minutes over the course of one month.
• A gratitude challenge that tasked employees with writing down what they were thankful for every day of that month.
• A positivity challenge that asked employees to give three compliments every day.

These types of challenges are particularly effective in addressing emotional wellness because they give employees multiple tools they can use to improve their personal emotional health, as well as the emotional health of those around them.

The inherent interconnected nature of each of the dimensions of wellness – physical, emotional, social, spiritual, intellectual, occupational, environmental and financial – means that virtually any wellness initiatives an employer implements will ultimately impact more than one aspect of its employees’ overall health. Employers shouldn’t limit themselves to just addressing emotional wellness indirectly because they or their employees might feel uncomfortable, however, because making emotional health a priority in their wellness program can provide much more ROI than one that fails to address its employees’ emotional well-being.

Olivia Curtis is a certified personal trainer, fitness nutritionist and wellness expert. In her current role as wellness specialist for G&A Partners, a national professional employer organization (PEO) and HR outsourcing firm, she manages G&A’s award-winning, full- service EVOLVE wellness program, both internally and for many of G&A’s clients.