What is the Value of Wellness in the Workforce

What is the Value of Wellness in the Workforce There is nothing better than a happy workforce because lets face it, nobody wants employees who dont want to work for your company. And whilst you cant guarantee happiness, many companies are going over and above to ensure their employees mental and physical wellbeing is taken care of which can go a long way in helping them be happy. In fact, we have ten of the best corporate wellness experts in the world who will be giving us their best tips and advice to ensure you can look after your employees. In our first corporate wellness panel piece, weve asked our experts what the value of wellness can be in your workforce. Nick Patel The concept of value on investment (VOI) is slowing replacing return on investment (ROI) in the employee wellness industry. This means the value employers look for and realize from employee wellness programs is moving from a strictly financial return on reduced medical costs to one that includes the financial and non-financial benefits from healthy and engaged employees, including higher retention, satisfaction, and productivity. For many organizations, the areas they are realizing value from employee health are expanding, delivering unanticipated benefits. For example, Metro Nashville Public Schools saw their wellness program improve student achievement. Nick Patel, CEO of Wellable. Liz Walker Wellbeing isn’t just a ‘nice to have.’ It’s the key to keeping your employees motivated, engaged and productive â€" all of which directly impact a business’s bottom line. A proactive approach to wellbeing can improve your chances of preventing problems which might otherwise lead to long-term absence from work. Companies have noticed wellness programmes can improve customer service levels. By showing employees you care about their wellbeing, they’re more likely to look after your company and your customers. Liz Walker, HR Director at Unum UK. Sammy Courtright Modern technology has given us plenty of benefits and conveniences, but with one major drawback: Most of us sit at a desk for forty (or more) hours a week, most weeks of the year. In effect, the very thing can make us productive, profitable employees can also harm our healthâ€"perhaps permanently. A sedentary lifestyle raises the risk of chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, as well as a loss of muscle and bone strength and weight gain. As a result, the value of wellness in the workplace is two-fold. First, it helps your employees improve their health and feel better, which builds a more productive workforce, boosts camaraderie, and more efficient work. Secondly, it benefits your company’s bottom line: Wellness programs have been proven to lower health insurance rates, lower attrition rates, and work as a great recruitment strategy to attract qualified talent to your organization. Sammy Courtright, Founder and CEO of Fitspot Wellness. Lucy Tallick When talking about the value of wellness, this depends on the needs of both an individual employee and the business itself. There is without doubt always value to be gained when implementing any wellness strategy into an organisation, the specific value it brings depends on the key objective of the strategy and the success of the programme. Wellbeing is no longer a nice to have, it is an essential part of any employee engagement strategy. Lucy Tallick, Head of Wellbeing at Reward Gateway. Alaana Linney 1.3 million people suffer from work-related ill-health each year, which according to the Thriving at Work review, costs UK employers between £33 billion and £42 billion. Creating a working environment which allows employees to flourish and achieve their full potential benefits everyone. Measurable benefits include improved productivity, a stronger competitive advantage, lower absenteeism and presenteeism, as well as higher staff morale which means fewer people leaving your organisation. Alaana Linney, Director of Business Development at Nuffield Health. Joe Gaunt All great leaders will tell you that its people are at the heart of any successful business and whether a business thrives or survives will come down to that most precious asset. The average person will spend approximately 90,000 hours of their life working and with added pressures, stresses and strains, poor health and well-being is costing the UK economy up to £57 billion a year in lost productivity. A direct correlation is now seen between strong employee engagement, wellbeing and a company’s bottom line. Historically the success of any employee programme has been typically measured in ROI but as the sector and indeed businesses shift into an era of wellbeing, aspirations turn beyond monetary values and forward-thinking businesses look at introducing a whole new set of KPIs, also known as value on investment (VOI). VOI helps a business to understand how employee health and wellbeing can interact and affect business outcomes. In time I believe we will see a mix of both these ind icators within company reports. Joe Gaunt, CEO of Hero Wellbeing. Shaun Bradley We hear the words people are our competitive advantage from just about every company. In a world where there is a talent shortage for many roles it is important that prospective and existing employees feel that the company sees their wellbeing as being important. Well thought out wellbeing programmes benefit employees on a practical level in that they lead to lower levels of stress, improved physical and mental health and improved self-image. Similarly, the business benefits of these programmes include a competitive edge during recruitment, retention of employees, decreased rates of illness, improved employee relations and engagement all leading to increased productivity. Shaun Bradley, Director of People at  Perkbox. Ruth Tongue Its a no-brainer that staff who are healthy and feel good are more productive, motivated and perform better. Traditional wellbeing benefits include a subsidised gym membership and dental care, but we now know that wellbeing is about far more than just physical fitness. Employers need to take a holistic approach to their wellbeing strategy and look at all areas of health including physical, mental and emotional wellbeing and consider the importance of how theyre all interconnected. Ruth Tongue, Co-founder of Elevate. Sam Fromson Its two-fold.   For a company’s people it’s all about empowering them to be their best selves, mentally and physically, giving them the resilience and energy, they need for work and home.   For companies it’s about attracting and keeping the best people and creating a solid foundation for success. The best people tend to be drawn to companies who truly demonstrate they care for their people’s wellbeing.   In turn they’re likely to me more productive and engaged and less likely to take time off due to ill-health which has to be a win-win all round!! Sam Fromson, C0-founder of Yulife. Jill King For a wellbeing program to be successful, it’s important to include a measurement strategy that can tie wellbeing efforts directly to business outcomes. Organisations that measure their efforts have been successful at making a business case for wellbeing programs improving employee engagement and becoming an employer of choice. By providing stakeholders with return on investment analytics, you’re able to prove that when you invest in the wellbeing of your employees, you’re investing in the success of your business. This results in a great company culture and an empowered workforce full of happier, healthier and more productive employees. Jill King,  Director of International Markets at VirginPulse.

Dont Look Desperate During The Job Search - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Dont Look Desperate During The Job Search - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career When youre desperately looking for work, that desperation screams to hiring managers during your interview. Youre eager in your answers. You stress that no problem is too big for you to handle, no request too crazy. You even try the occasional Jedi mind trick, just in case. It can be a little off-putting. So do the follow-up phone calls, emails, and repeated requests for updates, and sending additional information. Believe me, I know its tough. You have a family to take care of, bills to pay, and your self-esteem is going down the toilet every day the phone doesnt ring. Let me tell you a secret: the employers dont care. They dont care that youre desperate or that you have to take care of your family. Theyre looking for the best fit for the company, and dont take anyones circumstances into consideration. You cant blame them â€" they need to find the best person to do the best job for the company, thus ensuring its long-term success, and they cant make a bad hiring decision based on personal feelings. (Of course, that does not include the heartless jerks who will automatically and purposely exclude people who have been unemployed long-term because they think theres something wrong with them.) What that means for you is that youre not going to get them to change their minds by appearing eager, by continually following up, or by being so persistent that you stand out from the other candidates based on sheer volume of phone calls and emails. You dont want to stand out that way. This blog post, along with all the other blog posts and articles on the subject, are telling you the same thing: Be patient. Be calm. Just trust that it will happen in its time. And youre saying, You dont understand. You dont know how bad it is. Except I do. The six months I was unemployed were the worst six months of my life. And it was only through a stroke of good fortune that I found the job that ultimately led me down the path to owning my own agency. But I made the very same mistakes Im urging you not to make. And I made them again and again, no matter how many times people told me, Be patient. Be calm. Just trust that it will happen in its time. Here are the two things you need to do during your job search to avoid appearing desperate: Stop calling and emailing employers. They havent forgotten about you, and they wont decide to hire you just because you sent an email or five. Theyre going to pick the best person they think theyve found, and an extra email or phone call wont make them think youre competent. They will hire you based on other factors though; focus on those. This blog is filled with posts about those factors. Become a freelancer or start your own business. Ive said this many, many times. There are too many cold, heartless employers out there who see long-term unemployment as a sign that youre not employable, and not that were still in an economic recovery. But there are also a lot of employers out there who will see your initiative and work, and think that youre probably better than the other candidates because youre still working, even when you dont work for a company. And, as a freelancer, you can meet with the decision makers who are also the hiring managers, and you get to bypass the HR circuit completely. Do good work for them, and they just may decide to hire you full-time. Persistence is a noble virtue, until you bug the bejeezus out of people. Its a fine line between dogged determination and being a pain in the ass. Dont cross that line. Send a thank you note after the interview (hand written, of course), and then let it go. If you didnt persuade them in the interview, youre not going to. It doesnt matter how much you want it to happen, if they dont, thats it. You cant force the issue. After the interview, get back to your freelance work, and make your next phone call to your next prospective client. Who knows? They may end up being your next job anyway. Author: Erik Deckers is the co-owner of Professional Blog Service, and the co-author of Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself and No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing. He is also a travel writer and theater reviewer in his spare time.

A quiet environment is a sign of success

A quiet environment is a sign of success When I was looking at apartments I didn’t notice the incredibly noisy construction right outside our windows. I attribute this oversight to the same phenomena that happens in the video where you count basketball passes  â€" if you have never seen the video stop everything and go watch it. Quiet = money Vox did a video on how quiet has become a sign of quality.   And people sell quiet. Bose has become a noise reduction company, and so has Miele. And CEOs establish themselves as quality leaders by disconnecting their phones to have quiet time. We know a lot about the negative impact of noise, because rich people fund studies to squelch developers. Environmental noise effects not only our hearing, but our sleep, social skills, and cardiovascular health. Too much noise is a sign of poverty. So people paint their houses with noise-reducing paint,  and companies are trying to reduce their noise footprint as a way to attract top-flight employees. I find myself constantly hoping for ice storms at night so the construction is delayed and I wake up to quiet. Quiet = focus Im working with a group of writers, editing everything they write for a year. Theres one guy, Graham, who is a psychologist, and sometimes I feel like reading his stories is when Im quiet and still and its a daily meditation. Other days his stories stream like endless noise. One day, after ten rewrites, I told him I will kill myself if I have to read another version of this story. The next day, maybe to save my life, he sent a story about how there is no benefit to delaying a bad feeling. I told him to throw out the whole piece. Its too broad an idea, I told him, in case he was thinking of delaying the delete button. But now I will steal the best paragraph of his story and tell you that our instinct is to delay terribleness â€" like construction â€" but that delay doesnt help us and instead becomes emotional noise in the back of our minds. I would add a link to Grahams piece here, but of course, its in the garbage. I think we look for people who can help us find quiet. Amelia is my new friend. (That link requires $1 to read. But you know shes really my friend because the only other person Ive charged you to read about is Melissa.) Amelia creates quiet in my life by telling me what I should be worrying about. I cant stop worrying, but at least I can have a prioritized list. For me, focus means quiet. Quiet = good noise Specktral Quartet  commissioned 45 composers to write ringtones.  You can upload the ringtones to your phone  and then you turn your annoying, repetitive factory ringtones into something interesting and surprising. John Cage is a composer whose name is associated with quiet. His piece 433 is a solo for the piano, but the  pianist doesnt have any notes. So the audience sits in silence and has no choice but to notice there never really is silence. The composition encourages us to hear  all the noise around us as music. Quiet is mental. The best financial advice tells you that feeling financially secure is a state of mind; you can think yourself rich. I see how you can change your experience of noise so that it feels like quiet. Quiet is sometimes just better than whatever there was before. And just like we never really feel like we have enough money, we never really feel like we have enough quiet. Thats why they are both so special: you want more.

How Informational Interviews Can Help You Land the Top Jobs

How Informational Interviews Can Help You Land the Top Jobs Are you feeling stuck in your career, because you are still trying to figure out what your next move should be? It’s easy to sit behind your computer passively as the days go on while you “figure it out.” Many people try to search within themselves for the clarity they need in their career, but it is much more effective to go external for that clarity. You’re always hearing that you need to network to advance your career, but unless you are skilled at professional networking, then you probably don’t know where to start. Trust me, I’ve attended tons of career fairs and networking events only to feel depleted and no further along than I was before those events. I learned that I needed to go directly to the people in a position to help me. Informational interviews are the best ways of doing just that and are one of the most underrated strategies out there when it comes to advancing your career. What is an informational interview? An informational interview is an informal conversation with an expert where you are seeking advice and information about a potential career path. These meetings can be held over the phone, in person or even through online chat. You may think it sounds simple, but this process can be very powerful in bringing clarity and building your professional network. Why do informational interviews work? We tend to forget that people are the ones who fill jobs, not software. We get so comfortable submitting our resumes on websites and letting go of all the control of our career development. Think about this from a hiring manager’s perspective. There is a lot of risk in hiring someone based on a one hour interview, where people are putting their best face forward. When you take the time to build relationships, you are humanizing the process again and people want to work with people they like and trust. By taking the time to really understand a job and company, you are already separating yourself from 90% of your competition. Resistance to informational interviews: There are a lot of people who know in their mind that this process works and have bought in, but still they fail to reach out to people. They are uncomfortable putting themselves out there and it feels easier to continue to apply online, even if isnt working and the jobs arent that desirable. This is psychological resistance at work. We want to continue to do what we have always done, because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” You need to challenge this conventional mindset,  because the best jobs are filled before they are even advertised. The jobs that make it to the job boards are usually not as desirable. Common examples of resistance are: “I don’t have a professional network.” “No one is going to want to network with me.” “What if they say no.” These are all common fears that people have when it comes to reaching out to people and asking for help or advice. First, remember that everyone has a network  and that will become more clear once you start to think more broadly about your network. Think about your parents friends, your extended family, neighbors, people at church, and people at the gym. The list goes on and on. You will be surprised how many people that you dont really  know that well, who will be excited to help you out. Successful people love to meet and speak with other professionals who take that kind of initiative. Finally, it’s natural to fear rejection and not everyone will respond to your appeal  for help, but the majority will be willing to spend time with you. You will be surprised how much value and information you get from these conversations and will learn much more than you ever would from a job description. How do I go about asking for an informational interview? The best approach to getting an informational interview is through introduction. You will want to have an idea of specific job titles you want to learn more about. This is where most people get stuck. They refuse to get specific about a job title before the meeting. Force yourself to write down 5 job titles that sound interesting and start with the first one. It is important to have focus in your meeting. No one wants to meet with someone who has no clue what they want to achieve from the conversation. You don’t want to show up to this meeting and say, “Well, I think I kind of want to do sales, marketing, or customer service.” You can’t expect this person to be your career coach. They are there to tell you about their career path and give you advice on what they have learned so far. The job title you pick does not have to be the one you stick with; this is a discovery meeting. The meeting will bring clarity and build your network at the same time, so you will be killing two birds with one stone! When you are asking for an introduction, make sure you explain to your contact why you want to meet with this person. Offer to even write the email introduction for them, so they can just simply forward it to the person to save them time. If you don’t have someone to introduce you, then don’t worry you can contact people cold. This works as well because people love to give advice. When asking for a meeting cold (without introduction), express that you are interested in learning more about their role, to find out if it might be a good fit for your next career move. Only ask for a small amount of time (15-20 minutes) and make sure you offer a location that is convenient to them, since you are the one asking for help. Finally, always come prepared with questions. You don’t want to waste their time and you will be ready to follow up with questions, which will help to avoid any awkward silences. This process works and it has worked for me, to identify opportunities before they were ever posted online! This will even work for you if you are looking for jobs in another state because you can schedule meetings by phone. The success of this process all boils down to the relationship. The more you make it about building relevant relationships with people who have been in your shoes, the faster your career progress will be! Author: Olivia Gamber is the founder of occupationalolivia.com, where she helps underutilized, Gen-Y professionals advance their career.

Format For Writing a Resume and CV

Format For Writing a Resume and CVThe format for writing a resume/cv is a very important aspect of your job search. With a very limited amount of time and resources, it may be difficult to get all of the details in the application together. A resume needs to be customized to your specific skills and experience to make it more personal. Here are some suggestions.The first thing you should do is to decide what type of resume you will be using. Take some time to consider what the expectations of the company are. If you are applying for a permanent position, then they are likely to be very specific about the format. If you are applying for a job that will be temporary, then they might not be as concerned with this. However, if you are trying to get into the sales field, then a format for writing a resume/cv is very important.If you are looking for a position that requires an applicant to be very organized, you should put in a format for writing a resume/cv that is very rigid. Some exampl es include format that includes three columns of information. In this format, there are two columns for educational history and one column for relevant work experience. There are other formats that use this format but these are the most common.An additional standard format for writing a resume/cv is a unique one called headers. This helps to give the outline of the resume. It should include your name and contact information. Any other information can go in the relevant columns.Tables are also very important when formatting a resume. You should ensure that the table has a header that includes a title. It should then follow that by including the name of the employer and the position that you are applying for. When you have completed the headers, you will need to write down the format for writing a resume/cv at the top of the page. After you have completed this, you should write down in a column what you believe is a summary of your accomplishments.You should then write down in another column, what the key points of your resume are. You should also write down the paragraph of information that summarizes your credentials and experience. Then you should add the bullet points that you will use to make your resume concise.The format for writing a resume is a very important element of your resume. It is one of the things that helps to distinguish your resume from the other resumes. So, make sure that it is very clear and concise, so that the employer can easily read it.Formatting a resume can be very complicated, but it is a very important element of your resume. You should make sure that you are keeping it simple. If you are going to hire someone to do a resume, it will make a big difference in the ability of the employer to quickly see what you are good at.

Preparing for a telephone interview - Sterling Career Concepts

Preparing for a telephone interview Preparing for a telephone interview Telephone interviews have their pros and cons. One of the pros is that you can control your environment, setting yourself up for success.The single biggest piece of advice I offer clients is to treat it as if you are attending a face-to-face interview. Take the call in a private, quiet setting and dress in either professional or business casual attire. Some people will be more comfortable sitting at a desk or table while others might prefer standing and the chance to walk around the room a bit as they answer. Do what makes you feelmore confident. Your voice and your choice of words are how you will convey yourself to the interviewer. Avoid the temptation to conduct the interview lounging on the couch in a t-shirt and sweats. If you dress and “play” the part, your voice and intonation will benefit greatly. It’s a subtle difference, but one that will work to your advantage. Preparing for a telephone interview Preparing for a telephone interview Telephone interviews have their pros and cons. One of the pros is that you can control your environment, setting yourself up for success.The single biggest piece of advice I offer clients is to treat it as if you are attending a face-to-face interview. Take the call in a private, quiet setting and dress in either professional or business casual attire. Some people will be more comfortable sitting at a desk or table while others might prefer standing and the chance to walk around the room a bit as they answer. Do what makes you feelmore confident. Your voice and your choice of words are how you will convey yourself to the interviewer. Avoid the temptation to conduct the interview lounging on the couch in a t-shirt and sweats. If you dress and “play” the part, your voice and intonation will benefit greatly. It’s a subtle difference, but one that will work to your advantage.

Questions at the Job Lounge - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Questions at the Job Lounge - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Recently Ive been serving as an expert at The Job Lounge, answering career related questions. If youd like to see some of the sage advice I and others are dishing out, go check it out. Here are my answers so far: What to Study to Make Money and Be Happy Do you choose your studies based on money or on happiness? Do you even need to choose? Bad Boss, Bad Reference What if your boss is a horrible person but quitting will mean that she will give you a bad reference? Susan Ireland (author The Complete Idiots Guide to the Perfect Resume) who runs the site has been getting together a lot of great answers everything from explaining a gap in your resume to handling a job that ends badly to how to become a dealer in Vegas(!) Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related