Today’s post continues with our 2019 series of video tips on employee development – specific practical things you can do as a leader to help your employees learn and grow into the future leaders of your organization. Today’s strategy: promote and support mental and physical health initiatives for your people.
Promote and support mental and physical health
At first glance, you might think this is an unusual piece of advice. But it actually makes a great deal of sense. Let’s take a closer look. Employee development is about creating highly-engaged employees. But significant research has shown us that highly-engaged employees are not always healthy – physically and mentally – which means that their effectiveness is only short-term. Think about it – a high-potential, highly-engaged staff member who works long, demanding hours but doesn’t know how to cope or take care of his health is someone whose productivity will only last until he burns out. So if you want to your employee development efforts to be successful, you need to help and support your people in managing their daily stress loads.
So make a conscious decision to promote and support mental and physical health initiatives in your company. Make fitness and positive stress management part of your organization’s culture. Offer resources to employees to become more mentally and physically fit. Some ideas are a company fitness centre, discounts or reimbursement for physical activities, support for daily mindfulness sessions, access to mental health professionals, reasonable working hours, I think you get the idea. My point is that when you help your employees take care of their mental and physical health, you are actually setting them up to develop and grow into accomplished professionals and the future leaders of your organization.
What are some of the things you are doing?
So what are some of the things you are doing in your organization to promote and support mental and physical health. Please share, so that we can all learn. Add your comments below.
Employee development has been the focus of the video blogs I have been doing periodically all year. If you’re interested in some of the others, they’re linked below:
- 22: Another powerful strategy for developing your employees
- 23: Acknowledgement and praise are powerful tools to develop your employees
- Or just access the whole series in our Video Archives