Too often we hear stories of wildly successful entrepreneurs in our networks who have 80-hour workweeks and only emerge to post about their achievements. Today burnout is all too common, and work-life balance takes its toll. While the vast majority of companies with more than fifty employees have a wellness program in place, small businesses are still lagging in this area. The pressure to constantly grind and maintain this facade of success is slowly starting to crumble as innovators are opening up about the benefits of initiating company wellness programs.
Why are they worth it? According to Harvard Business School, employee absenteeism expenses fell by $2.73 for every dollar invested in workplace wellness programs, and medical expenses were slashed by $3.27 for each dollar spent. If you don’t have a program in place now, maybe the results from ours will compel you to start.
In 2016, our agency entered a period of growth, and with it, a renewed emphasis on cultivating a company culture that ensures employees make their well being a priority. While we meet deadlines, handle last-minute problems, and cope with the stress of being a growing company in an innovative industry, we started to integrate meditation, healthy food, and physical activity into our day-to-day operations.
It’s one thing to make a commitment to yourself to improve your health, and it’s another completely when your company provides the programming to facilitate that lifestyle. I can remember working at a corporate job, hour-long lunches were frowned upon and multitasking was the norm. Of course, multitasking has been debunked, and brief diversions actually enhance the average employee’s workday. Because of this, we implemented policies that encouraged employees to:
- Take outdoor walking meetings & pre-meeting meditation
- Utilize the in-office treadmill and elliptical machine
- Get physical with exercises like Egoscue and yogic stretching
- Grab a snack from the company-subsidized bottomless fruit bowl or the free protein shakes and Wheat Grass Shots
Aside from these daily practices, we also wanted to give employees options in pursuing healthier lifestyles. This includes:
- An available bike that employees could ride in the area surrounding the office building
- Educational seminars conducted by wellness experts
- Optional early departure on Fridays to provide a way for employees who work longer hours to spend more time with their families
Of course, all of these perks come with a cost, and when you’re a growing business with a close eye on profitability, it can be tempting to slash a wellness budget to beat a benchmark you were working toward. What we may have spent in cash we made up in other important KPIs.
We immediately saw a boost in productivity which we measure as billable utilization. Since all employees log time for each of the clients they work on in comparison to non-client related overhead, we were able to see how much more we were getting out of our people over time. In fact, overall productivity was up over 15%.
Another valuable outcome of our company wellness program was company staff attrition, which fell like a rock. In 2016 we were coming off a trend of over 15% yearly staff attrition, which was something we wanted to address for the long-term health of the company. We were happy to see that between 2016 and 2019 when our wellness program took off, attrition went down to zero. Not one employee left the company for a period of almost three years! This meant huge savings in the recruiting and interviewing process, which freed up more time for us to build out a robust internship program and dedicate top-tier customer service to our clients. We even won a wellness award in the process.
