What makes a workplace a good place to work? According to all the surveys I have seen a number of common themes keep recurring when it comes to how they handle their employees. These characteristics include having policies that promote a balance between work and the rest of their lives, flexibility in work scheduling, environmentally responsible policies, good communications systems that value employee input, and a wide range of employee benefits. Not surprisingly these are also some of the all basic elements of an employee wellness program.
It’s also evident from both research and informal networking that successful small and medium organizations are always looking to improve. So if your small business has some elements of an employee wellness plan already in place, why not take the few extra steps to make it better? Here are a few tips courtesy of “Healthy Alberta”:
- Start an online “wellness” newsletter that offers weekly or monthly tips on healthy living
- Participate in on-going activities and programs like Healthy Workplace Week.
- Get pedometers for employees and track their steps.
- Rent a nearby school or community gym and offer exercise classes.
- Hire a local fitness instructor to give classes or lead stretch breaks
- Install more bike parking.
- Serve healthy alternatives at company meetings and lunches.
- Hire an ergonomics specialist to assess workstations.
- Provide a wellness subsidy for a variety of health and leadership activities and courses.
- Offer wellness incentives as rewards and recognition for a job well done.
- Spread the workload by establishing an employee wellness committee.
If you haven’t yet established a formal employee wellness program it’s not too late to start. One of the best places to begin is by gathering information about what types of wellness programs your employees would like to see and ones that they are most likely to participate in. There’s no point in setting up smoking cessation programs if only one of your employees is a smoker or building bicycle racks if most employees already take public transit to work.
After you determine your needs you can about putting these ideas into action. It is often best to begin slowly by setting up a couple of activities that you know you will have the financial and human resources to support. If your priority is physical fitness and your employees will participate you can have a once a week yoga class in your boardroom. If you have a number of smokers there are lots of free smoking cessation programs out there that you can supplement with a small bonus that rewards extended periods of smoking cessation.
You should also take the opportunity to review all of your company or organizational policies and procedures with an employee wellness lens. Is there a way to help reduce the stress on employees who are working a lot of overtime by rescheduling or reorganizing the workload? Do you have the ability to offer flexible working hours or assist with child or elder care? Do people have healthy eating choices in the cafeteria, in vending machines, or at corporate meetings? It’s not that expensive to have a bowl of fruit at a breakfast meeting along with the muffins and croissants.
Communications are the key as you begin your employee wellness program and it is one of the major reasons why some programs peter out or die. If you have a wellness committee you can task them with providing a communications feedback loop that ensures that employees know about activities and can offer their suggestions to improve them as you go along. You shouldn’t be afraid to drop the yoga class if attendance dwindles but you need to know why it wasn’t successful and what you can replace it with that might encourage greater participation.
There is no one size fits all approach that will work in every small workplace but over time you will find one that works for you and more importantly helps your employees become healthier and happier at work and in the rest of their lives.
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant. He is the author of “Change the Things You Can” (Dealing with Difficult People)
Mental health issues and mental illnesses are a cause of great concern in our society and in our workplaces. Yet no one seems to want to talk about them. It’s time to bring these issues out into the open so that people and our workplaces can get the help they need. Here are a few things you should know about anxiety, one of the major mental issues facing Canadians at home and at work.
Anxiety can affect everyone
Almost everyone has experienced anxiety at one point in their life. It could be nervousness before a job interview or being anxious in a new workplace situation. But when this anxiety creates a significant distress in your life or you have any one of a number of serious symptoms as a result of anxiety then you may be suffering from an anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders range from general or social anxiety to panic disorders and obsessive compulsive disorders. If you think you have an anxiety disorder you are not alone. About 12% of all Canadians are affected by an anxiety disorder every year.
Anxiety is a big problem for young people
Statistics Canada’s 2006 Community Health Survey of Mental Health and Well-being revealed that people aged 15 to 24 are most likely to experience anxiety disorders and studies in Canada and the U.S. have also shown that about 30 per cent of post-secondary students suffer from a mental health or substance abuse issue, compared to 18 per cent of the general population. There are also few resources or services to assist young people who experience higher stress or anxiety.
Your workplace can cause anxiety
Statistics Canada has reported that 38.8% of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 75 are slightly stressed at work, 25% are relatively stressed at work, while 5.4% are extremely stressed at work. Stress, anxiety and depression are rampant in many workplaces and the reasons for the added pressure could come from a myriad of factors including longer hours and more work after the downsizing in the mid 1990’s or lack of personal control over an individual’s work and work priorities.
Anxiety can be treated
The good news is that most anxiety disorders can be successfully treated. The first step is to get a proper diagnosis from a specialist in anxiety disorders and then follow their recommendations. For most people this means a combination of drug therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). The most common drugs prescribed are anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs and it is important to inquire about possible side effects of any medication. CBT involves helping people turn their anxious thoughts and feelings into more rational ones.
If you think you have an anxiety disorder then talk to someone who might be able to help. If you know someone with an anxiety problem talk to them and tell them there’s help out there. It’s time to talk about mental health issues.
This article first appeared on my blog at www.jobs.ca
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and a workplace wellness consultant.
First of all you can tell all your friends where you work and watch their wordless OMG responses. Then you go to work in a place that’s been described as more of a summer camp than a workplace. You can wear whatever you want, although the team uniform is jeans and t-shirts and when you are bored from work you can try out the rock climbing wall, the indoor putting green or the outdoor Frisbee golf course. Hungry? No prob. Just amble over to the gourmet café where you can get free eats all day.
The question is not really why you wouldn’t want to work here. It’s how does any work ever get done. Yet despite all the glitz and glam You Tube, which is part of the gigantic Google empire, gets a lot of work done, and makes googles of money for its shareholders. That’s because You Tube and Google have discovered the magical elixir for motivating employees.
Now your company may not have the moolah for a 200 foot waterslide that cascades into an Olympic sized swimming pool, but you can add some of the basic elements that make You Tube a desirable place to work. Google has figured out that if they don’t care what people wear people think that they trust them to make their own choices. They know that some of the younger generations like to play hard so they have a foosball table waiting for people who need a break or have finished their work.
But You Tube is not some fairyland workplace where people only party all the time. Work is very serious business and their standards and expectations are very high. They don’t mind people who party hard, they just people who can work hard as well. And they value and measure performance. A lot. They have intense quarterly performance appraisals where you are not judged by your supervisors but your peers as well.
They also place a premium on work-life balance at You Tube. Something that many companies would do well to emulate. They believe and expect their managers to model the belief to leave work at work during the weekends. That means turning off all the electronic gadgets that tie you to work and spend time with your family and friends. Then come back to work, whatever time you get there, on Monday re-energized and ready to go.
So underneath the fun and games there’s a serious side to You Tube. One that features a nurturing of individual freedoms, a very serious work ethic, and lots of toys to play with when you’re done. Who wouldn’t want to work there?
This post originally appeared on my blog at www.jobs.ca
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant.
Sorry for the longish post but I wanted to think about the latest Federal Budget before I started talking too much about it. Now that my head really hurts I offer my one cents worth before it is too late.
There was no real economic reason to bring in an austerity budget. And no matter how much the Conservatives keep saying that this is a “moderate” budget it can only be considered that if you choose to compare it to the Paul Martin/Jean Chretien budget of the 1990’s. Any budget that slashes five and a half billion dollars and results in the direct loss of twenty thousand jobs is austere, harsh, and draconian. And it doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, Jimmy, there are alternatives.
Mario Seccaraccia, an economics professor at the University of Ottawa whom I have no reason to believe is anything but impartial told the Ottawa Citizen that this federal budget “is more ideologically driven”. He went on to say that our fiscal position is the envy of the world. “Our debt-to-GDP ratio is around 30 per cent. Japan’s is 230 per cent. The United States is over 100 per cent.”
The fact is that we are in a deficit position, not because of an overspending problem, except on the war in Afghanistanand gazebos in Huntsville for Tony Clement’s G-20 garden parties. We have a public revenue problem brought about by “reckless” (I love describing the Tories as reckless) tax cuts to the rich and powerful like the neverending corporate tax cuts and an ill-thought out cut to the GST which saved all of us a few pennies on purchases but drove the treasury into debt.
So that’s how we got there. How do we get out? The solution proposed by the Conservatives is outlined in their budget which promises more cuts to jobs and the unemployed and an increase in the retirement age. It is a reverse Robin Hood approach to public finances: make the poor and working class pay for the rich. It also proposes an unfettered approach, way beyond laissez-faire to business by removing taxes, regulations, and environmental rules and guidelines. So we will not just get poorer but our environment will go down the toilet faster too.
The good news is that there are many, many smart people in Canada who have had a look at this situation and have other ideas to propose. Here are just some of them.
Pull the Band-Aid Off Slowly
There’s no real reason to have massive spending cuts or to lay off thousands of people. Our deficit is quite reasonable in comparison to any other country in the world and instead of trying to pay our bills off over three years we could take six years and reduce and maybe even eliminate the pain. Or we could just yank it off right now. Which would you prefer?
Invest in Public Infrastructure
Our crumbling roads and bridges and municipal water and sewage systems need a lot of work and neither provinces nor cities have this money. The federal government could have used the budget to announce a major, multi-year, public investment program that could have included roads, sewers, and basic municipal infrastructure; health and educational facilities; mass transit; passenger rail and affordable housing. Yes this would have cost money but almost everyone (even the Department of Finance) accepts that these kinds of investments create five times as many jobs per dollar spent as corporate tax cuts. So we could have had more jobs and get our infrastructure repaired too.
Invest in the Environment
This budget goes in almost completely the wrong direction to protect our environment. So the first step would be to end subsidies for non-renewable energy sources and focus on fiscal policies that actually support the environment. One of these policies will have to be some form of carbon pricing. There really is no other way to keep our planet sustainable. So unless you are planning to join Richard Branson’s trip to the moon we will need a carbon tax. It can be revenue neutral and shared amongst provinces and municipalities but there must be one. And without taking up too much carbon in talking about it there are hundreds of good ecologically sound ideas that not only cost little but actually generate more green jobs and “green” money. Check out your favourite eco organization for more info and vocally support the ones you like.
Focus on Tax Fairness
Our taxation systems at every levels are basically f*&$ed. There really is no other way to talk about it. The good news is that we can have a fair and equitable tax system inCanadathat still encourages sustainable economic growth and individual and collective advancement. I will not go through the reasons and rationale. Rather for those of you who are interested I direct your attention to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives website and the Alternative Federal Budget in particular. You can and should read the whole thing but if you only have time for one section then read the Fair Taxation section beginning on Page 23.
Look at the Revenue Side of the Ledger
To balance any budget we need to reduce expenditures and increase revenues. The latest budget does a lot of one but none of the other. To rectify that they could have reversed recent corporate tax cuts, ensured that the wealthiest Canadians pay their fair share, close tax loopholes and introduce a financial transactions tax. All of these measures are practical, reasonable and doable. Why don’t we have them? Because we have a government that believes in the power of business and protects their interests against ours. Their approach is at the molasses slow end of the trickle down economic model. These modest changes on the revenue side could wipe out our deficit and have the government thinking about lowering and not raising the retirement age!!
Thanks to the CCPA, the CLC and NUPGE for some of the info contained in this post.
If you want to quit your job then make it an Adidas moment and just do it. But unless you want it to be remembered for all the wrong reasons then think twice before you decide to make it a YouTube event. Here are a few don’t that you might want to consider before you quit your job.
Don’t be Dramatic
We all remember the flight attendant who got all the attention a few years ago by telling off rude passengers over the intercom and then sliding down the emergency chute. And there’s a new You Tube hero who quit his job at a hotel along with a full brass brand to protest poor working conditions. Both events were funny and probably well-intentioned, if not well thought out. Unless you never want to work in any of those industries again or think you can get a job in the entertainment business then don’t be too dramatic when you resign your position.
Don’t Phone it in
You can do a lot of things with your smart phone these days but quitting your job is not one of them. Step up, be the man or woman you want to be, and tell your boss in person that you are going to quit. Unless you are seriously worried about violence then this is not a matter to be dealt with by e-mail or left in their voice mail box after they have gone home for the day. The process is that you give the appropriate notice period and yes you tell them why you are leaving. If it’s personal then tell them it’s personal. You may be able to break up on Facebook, but don’t quit your job there.
Don’t Burn Bridges
When you finally get to the point that you just have to quit your job you may think that you would never, ever want to work for this company or in this business again. You may be right. Then again you may be wrong. Lots of us have thought that once only to realize months or years later that it really wasn’t that bad after all. Especially if a few key people change and you find that where you are now sucks more than where you were before. That’s why you try and not burn too many bridges on the way out. You may need to cross back over them to get back in. Or to get a reference from them for that dream job in the future.
Don’t Leave Before You Leave
As hard as it is to not daydream about your new job, try and stay on your old job after you give your notice to quit. Now is a time when you can give a little back by helping to organize your files, clean up old projects, and if possible to train your replacement. These small acts of goodwill help leave a positive and lasting impression at your old workplace and cement your good reputation. And that’s worth a lot more than giving your friends a few laughs on YouTube.
This article first appeared on my blog at www.jobs.ca
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant. He is the author of Change the Things You Can: Dealing with Difficult People.
Do you want to have more time in your life to do the things you really want to do? It’s easy, just stop managing your time. Throw away your micro-minute planner, your must do, have to, would like to list managers and your stop watch, especially that stop watch. (I had a manager once who would put it on his desk before every meeting with me and set it for 15 minutes. I spent the first five minutes gob smacked that he would do that and the last five frantically trying to get my request made.)
Stop wasting your time trying to keep track of it. That’s one of the real secrets to effective time management. Forget what the experts say about priorizing tasks. As if you wouldn’t do that on your own. You do that every minute of every day at work by simply choosing which tasks you are going to work on. You don’t need expert advice or a plan to decide on which call to return or e-mail to answer. Let’s see. I have one from my boss and a hot sales prospect and three from people who want to sell me stuff. Like a time management training program. That’s a no brainer.
Forget about spending your day organizing and reorganizing the piles on your desk. Decluttering, whatever that means, is highly over-rated in my book. I’m not saying that you should live and work like someone from Hoarders Anonymous but you can skip the fifteen minutes spent each morning and afternoon shuffling papers. That’s half an hour that you could be spending doing the work that they are actually paying you for. Or better yet if it’s a nice day you can get out early and beat the rush.
Other oft mentioned time management techniques like multi-tasking and delegating responsibilities are things you have probably already tried and have stopped doing. Because they take too much time in the long run. What’s the point of doing a lot of things quickly but none of them well? Or delegating a task only to have it return to your desk for a do-over. And postponing items or delaying them until tomorrow is not really a strategy. It’s more likely a good way to get yelled at and still have to do the job.
So stop grumbling about how little time you have and instead of trying to artificially stretch it, make the most of it. You may just find that you have more to work with than you think.
This article first appeared on my blog at www.jobs.ca
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant. He can be reached at mike54martin@sympatico.ca
One of the most interesting questions I have heard asked about budgets and government spending and that great Satan, “the deficit’, was ‘Where did all the money go?” It was a person on the street who was asked for their commentary about the latest federal budget and simply asked that question and followed up with ‘We once had money to pay for all these things before, like scientists who monitor the environment or the CBC’.
So where did that money go?
I don’t really know. I suspect that some of it got swallowed up in the war in Afghanistan and lots of it got given to corporations in the form of tax cuts. Some of it got lost in government revenue when the Tories reduced the GST and there are millions of it sprinkled all over Tony Clement’s riding in fake swimming pools and gazebos. But I don’t really know.
Do You? If you do please let me know at mike54martin@sympatico.ca
For my part I am going to contact a number of really smart people, pointy-head economist types to see what they know and I’ll share it here and on Facebook.
The Canadian Federal Budget does a lot of bad things but its biggest flaw is that it takes us backwards to the days before there were liberals or social democrats. It takes us back to the glory days of conservatism. Most of us are too young to remember them but they featured hard work for little pay, no benefits and certainly no pensions. There was no unemployment insurance if you got laid off and there was no public health care system if you got sick. Ah, the good old days.
Unions were limited to a few major industries and there were no unions or even collective bargaining in the public sector. There were no environmental laws or anything like an environmental impact review to impede a business opportunity. There were no aboriginal land claims, no need to respect any of those old treaties, and no need to worry about building on or near a reserve or putting up a mine just about any damned place you want. There was no red tape for business to worry about, no regulations to follow, and no taxes on corporations.
University education was only for the children of the very rich, those who could afford it. Everyone else was expected to fish, farm, work in the mines or the forests or go to the big city to work in the factories. Women could work before they got married but only as teachers or in the banks or shops. Forget about equal wages. They were lucky to have a job.
If you think I am being overly dramatic I urge you to read the Budget document, yes all 498 pages, or as many as you can. You will note that there are 445 references to helping business in the document which might suggest both the focus of and the audience for this business. There are also 33 references to the unemployed which is encouraging except for the fact that this budget does nothing to improve employment insurance except to “remove disincentives to work”. And that’s despite the fact that less than 40% of Canadian workers can currently access employment insurance.
In addition this budget will raise unemployment and the retirement age, lower the quality of health care and dramatically increase the inequality gap that exists today. If you are very rich, a banker, a corporate executive or just a person who wishes we could go back to those good old conservative days you must be a very happy person today. For all of the rest of us, the 99%, that light at the end of the tunnel is not “Jobs, Growth and Long Term Prosperity”. It is a runaway train that is planning to roll over us and the society that we have built together in the last sixty years.
And many of us, most of us really, will not even know that it’s happened until it’s too late.
Next post… on the Alternatives
I am starting to wonder why we bother having elections if we keep ending up with politicians and governments that look and act as if they want to get rid of governments. If I had a company that manufactured widgets I would hire managers and employees who would continue to make widgets, in fact I would look for people who wanted to make the best widgets possible, not people who hate widgets and want all widgets to disappear. That would be weird. And yet we don’t think it’s weird when people get elected who want to dismantle all of the public services that we have all worked so hard to build up. I don’t get it.
I also don’t understand the political theory of creating scapegoats or pitting groups of people against each other. Really, what is that about? And once again, why would the people we elect do this on a fairly consistent basis. TheOntariobudget which came out yesterday is a prime example. The message I got from the budget was that doctors, teachers, public sector workers, people on social assistance and disability, seniors, and students are the problem. If not then why have they been singled out in the budget for cuts, freezes and rate increases?
If we have a public debt problem, then wouldn’t a better approach be to talk to everybody and see if you could get some cooperation so that together we could make a plan to reduce our collective debt? Did they miss something in the kindergarten lesson about trying to get along or is it more politically viable to have people blame each other than to have them point the finger at the people who really caused the problem? Just askin?
Well, they can try all they want but I like my doctor and I don’t think that he caused the deficit. And I know some people on social assistance and disability payments and as far as I can see they are just trying to get by. In fact most of them make regular trips to the food bank to feed themselves and their kids. And I have a kid in school who’s living on a pittance and racking up a massive debt and I will be a senior sooner than I want so I can’t see where students and seniors are the big bad guys that the government is trying to convince me of.
The politics of division and ignorance have led us to this place where a reasonable response is apathy and withdrawal. And sadly many people have taken this approach. I don’t blame them but I will never go there. Because at the end I think that’s what those small-minded politicians really want. The antidote to the petty politics that are unfolding right now is action, small, large and in-between. Doing nothing is not an option.
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant.
Mental illness is one of the few stigmas left in our tell-all, tell-everybody via Facebook world. It is one of the few things that we don’t share with anybody, especially at work. We can talk openly about our enlarged prostate, that lump in our breast or even our leaky heart. But when it comes to anxiety, stress or depression, not a word escapes our lips.
Too many Canadians suffer in silence or do not get treatment because they are afraid that other people will see them as defective, or weak, or god forbid, mentally ill. Some of these people, our family, friends and co-workers get really sick and have to be hospitalized. Some don’t make it to the doctor and self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Some die, suddenly and without needing to. They have chosen a permanent solution for an often temporary problem, their mental illness.
Without being too preachy, I hope, I think it’s time we pulled mental illness out of the closet and put it on live, in prime time. So for anyone wanting to be part of the solution here are a few stats. 21% of all Canadians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime and 10% of the adult population is experiencing a mental illness at any point in time. Like right now.
Mental illness also costs a lot of time and money. The top causes for absenteeism in the workplace continue to be “depression/anxiety and other mental health disorders” (66%) and “stress” (60%). In 2006 the total resource burden of mental illness inCanadaamounted to $31.3 billion. This included $7.7 billion of direct government expenditures (our taxes) and $23.6 billion of indirect productivity losses due to mental illness. Some estimates put it over $50 billion today. In 2005 alone one major benefits company reported that there was a 27 percent increase in long term disability costs that they attributed to an aging workforce, increasing productivity demands, and rising mental health claims.
So what can we do about it? We think we can’t do much as individuals because we are not mental health professionals. That’s true but we are expert friends and expert colleagues. We know how to ask someone if they are feeling okay or if they want to talk. We know when someone might be suffering from some sort of mental illness or issue. We don’t have to diagnose it. We just have to be strong enough to discuss it.
Together, once again trying not be preachy, we can make a difference on mental illness. Stick your neck out of your shell and take someone who’s obviously in distress for coffee. It won’t kill you and it just may save their life.
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant. This article first appeared o my blog at www.jobs.ca
