Employee wellness is a topic that has become increasingly relevant in all industries. From the pandemic to the great resignation, companies across the nation are realizing it is time to step up and take care of their employees – not just financially – but their whole being to include physical, mental, emotional (and more) wellness. Today’s Power Panels webinar, featuring amazing panelists: Barbara Savona from Sprout Marketing, Kaitlyn Melvin from Trinity Property Consultants, and David Lynd from The Lynd Companies, featured tons of ways that companies can and are shifting their cultures to provide a holistic approach to wellness for both their employees and their residents. We strongly recommend watching (or re-watching if you attended) this free educational webinar that touched on taking care of yourself in all aspects of your life. However, there were so many ideas (and even some we couldn’t get to) that we are also providing additional details on a few key takeaways that our attendees requested more details about, and some ideas that we didn’t have time for but wanted to make sure to add to your toolkit.
General Takeaways:
- Call it what it is: work-life integration. As our panelist David Lynd mentioned – most of us (especially in multifamily) spend as much time at work as we do at home. Our employees and co-workers are our friends and mentors. Our personal life and work life merge together and affect each other. It is so critical to make sure that you, as an individual, are taking care of yourself FIRST. As your flight attendant will tell you: “put your oxygen mask on first” – you can’t be the best version for others until you take care of yourself first. This rule applies to EVERYONE!
- Providing wellness for employees and residents is part of building a sense of community, the #1 value driver for renters in 2022 (you can learn more about that from our February 2022 Value Drivers Power Panels Webinar). A statistic discussed in the webinar from McKinsey & Company’s Great Attrition Survey found that 51% of employees who quit lacked a sense of belonging. Providing virtual and/or in person wellness amenities, events, challenges, and more strongly attribute to that sense of belonging and community and not only improve a person’s overall wellness but also increase retention for both residents and employees!
- Don’t forget to smile and start your day with the energy of 2,000 chocolate bars (& good news, it’s contagious!)!
Details from Webinar Examples:
Several attendees inquired about the details of Wellness BINGO that panelist Kaitlyn Melvin from Trinity Property Consultants, spoke about. Below are some ways to incorporate Wellness BINGO at the company or community level.
- Create your BINGO card based on healthy habits that can be done by anyone. Examples include: eat a meal of vegetables, walk for 20 minutes, drink 64oz of water in a day, write a thank you note, pay it forward, etc.
- Print for team members or send out via email or other online forum for larger groups for each team member to mark their challenges as they complete them.
- Use an online forum like Slack, Facebook, or other chat platform for team members to share when they have a BINGO, or they can take a picture of their BINGO card and email it.
- Make the “winner” a drawing, so it’s not the first person to complete BINGO gets a prize, but rather everyone who completes their version of BINGO (or 5 challenges) in 5 days (or whatever your challenge is), gets entered into the drawing for a wellness prize.
- This can be an ongoing challenge until whole cards are filled (blackout), with people getting entered into a new drawing each week – to continue to encourage employees or team members to continue taking small steps towards a healthy lifestyle.
Additionally, panelist Barbara Savona from Sprout Marketing, discussed some great tips that can anyone can utilize for their own personal wellness techniques as well as two amazing tools that any team leader can utilize for their teams (maintenance supervisor, property manager, regional manager, CEO, etc). Several attendees asked for these details in addition to asking about how teams can communicate their wellness activities, virtual team building, etc. Barbara provided resources for us to share in the links below:
- VIA Character Strengths Assessment: A free assessment that teams can do together to help with team building and improving performance.
- Wellness Map: Wellness wheel to assess your own personal fulfillment
- Barbara mentioned Slack and Kaitlyn suggested that Trinity uses a private internal employee Facebook group as options for teams to share their wellness activities and challenges, as well as using Zoom (or other virtual video platform) to host virtual team building events.
- Social media is a great place to share all the wellness activities happening at your company/community as well. This offers residents and prospects another way to feel connected.
Resident Wellness:
Company culture often starts at the top and can sometimes feel like it won’t work outside of a corporate office or specific office, but our panelist David Lynd with The Lynd Companies is breaking the mold and has slowly begun to roll out the fantastic wellness initiatives he built for his corporate office to the Lynd community residents as well. Below are some ways to incorporate wellness initiatives into marketing, community events, and education for residents.
- Meal prep classes for families on-the-go
- Yoga and/or bootcamp exercise classes (can use outdoor lawn space in place of indoor fitness center)
- Virtual or in-person guest speakers for health & wellness classes
- Exercise challenges that can be done at work or home and shared virtually (via a resident Facebook group or other internal communication where residents can share their goals and challenges with each other – can use step trackers)
- Grab-N-Go meals or snacks that are healthy (Barbara offered some good examples in the webinar)
- Hydration stations
- Community garden or plant giveaways
- Calm app – this is a great tool to use in your personal life as well as provide to residents as move-in or renewal gifts
- Charity Miles – this is a free app that you and your residents/co-workers can all download and all of you physical exercise can be tracked but also contribute to charities. They offer Empower, an Employee Empowerment Program so your team can be well and do good!
Melissa mentioned briefly at the end of the webinar, steps to starting a wellness program. One important first step is providing surveys to employees and residents to gauge happiness, find out what their wellness needs are, and create an action plan for creating and/or improving satisfaction. SatisFacts offers all of these tools and more. If your company is interested in the next step to building a wellness program, contact us.
