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Perk Up: How To Recognise And Reward Your Employees

All details were correct at the time of publication but may have changed since.

Truly great employers know there’s more to workplace satisfaction than just a good salary. And it’s those businesses that end up recruiting and retaining top talent. Here are eight approaches to recognise and reward your employees that don’t involve paying them more.

1. Say thanks more often

Give employees an opportunity to upvote their colleagues when they go the extra mile, and recognise them publicly. This could be as low-fi as a notice board, or an email to your staff publicly thanking the person in question for their hard work. Or you could mention it at a staff meeting and provide a physical reward, such as a bottle of wine, a box of chocolates, or a voucher for shopping or a day out somewhere indulgent.

2. Offer breakfast

Most offices provide free tea and coffee for staff, but what other small gestures can you make to help your employees feel at home? Providing free toast, or cereal gives people an incentive to avoid traffic and start work a little earlier. Eating breakfast also improves cognitive performance, giving your employees a little extra edge at the start of every day. GSK offers staff free breakfast if they walk, cycle or run on their commute. This is great for personal health and the environment, too.

3. Provide healthy snacks

Does your office have a vending machine stuffed full of crisps and chocolate? Stressed, time-poor people will grab whatever they can to keep going during that mid-morning or afternoon slump. Sugary snacks give people a temporary boost, but can leave people snappy or struggling to concentrate once their sugar levels dip back down. Couple bad snacking habits with largely sedentary jobs and you’re looking at creeping weight gain. It’s not the role of employers to police waistlines, but there’s no doubt obesity is linked to poor health and time off work sick. Head this off at the pass by providing free fruit, and rethink your vending machine selection to reduce opportunities to make poor choices.

3. Encourage good health and wellbeing

The NHS recently released data that suggested back problems cost UK companies 31 million sick days each year. The majority of us now work in offices and sit at desks all day long staring at computers. Long term, this leads to backaches and pains. Counteract this risk while helping your employees feel rewarded by arranging for a massage therapist (I know the name of a good one if you’re interested) to attend a day or two each week. A 25-minute massage weekly can improve posture, reduce headaches and stress, which help your employees concentrate on their day job.

Other holistic corporate services to consider are meditation, pilates, yoga, nutritional health, acupuncture and theta healing.  According to budgets, sessions can be funded by the company or individuals; either way, your employees will be grateful for an opportunity to spend a few minutes relaxing. Organise easy three-day taster events to gauge uptake and see what services get your employees excited and engaged.

5. Negotiate local discounts

Negotiating discounts with other businesses your employees are likely to use can pay dividends, especially if discounts apply for employees at both firms. You could look at local restaurants to see if they’d offer discounts to your employees on certain days (team lunches are another great way to help encourage bonding), or contact nearby attractions for your employees to enjoy on the weekends. In particular, family days out are expensive, and parents will appreciate a little extra help managing their outgoings.

6. Facilitate happy families

Parents, especially those with young children, will greatly value a company that makes life easier when it comes to childcare arrangements. Could you offer them flexible working hours, letting them start and finish a little later so they can breeze through the school run? The average cost for full-time (50 hours) childcare in London is over £300 a week per child; could you help parents cut these costs by letting them work their hours over four days, instead of five? Do you offer a private pumping room with a fridge for mums who are still breastfeeding? Better parking spaces for pregnant members of staff? Would you even consider investing in onsite childcare, or negotiating discounts with a local nursery, to help hard-working parents out? These are the kind of perks that can become deal-breakers for parents when it comes to employee retention.

7. Organise employee volunteering days

You can spend a fortune on team-building corporate away days, or you can give your employees the chance to bond while doing something great for your local community. Volunteering team days are favoured by companies like Amazon, who give staff a certain number of days out each year to give back locally. Not only does this help your employees to feel they work for an ethical employer, but it also has the added benefit of improving perceptions of your brand within your local community.

8. Develop them

As employees progress in their careers, their sense of responsibility and pressure increases. Add in feelings of increased visibility, and you’ve got the potential for stress-related absence, negative management styles, lack of focus and ultimately, burnout. An executive leadership coaching and development programme to help employees in their journey up the ladder gives employees something to aspire towards, as well as protecting them from failure. A robust programme will upskill your managers in commonly-feared tasks like public speaking as well as train them in strategy development, navigating complex problems, and organisational growth. It’s the employee perk that really gives back to your business.

As the job market becomes more competitive, attracting talent is about more than just a decent payslip. It’s thoughtful, employer-focused brands that have longevity, generate employee loyalty and create an environment that’s a genuine pleasure to work in. And after all, we spend on average nine hours a day in the office, so why wouldn’t you want it to be an amazing place to be?

Read more about employer brands in:

4 Reasons Employer Brands Smash Consumer Brands, Hands Down

Corporate Parties: The Ghost Of Christmas Past?

All details were correct at the time of publication but may have changed since.

It’s that time of year again… we’ve hit peak Christmas party season. A 2018 survey by consultancy Shine Workplace Wellbeing showed that a massive 75% of employees would prefer their employers to invest in regular wellbeing initiatives over throwing a Christmas party… which begs the question, does December 2018 mark the death of the corporate Christmas party?

Employee demographics and industries

The survey, undertaken in November, found that 80% of women advocated an employer-invested wellbeing programme over an office Christmas party. But well over half of the men surveyed (67%) also preferred this idea, demonstrating that it’s not just a gendered choice. It’s not an age-specific preference either; while the largest group of respondents in favour of a party were those aged 18–24, they still only represented 30% of their demographic.

It’s an employee trend which spans industry sectors, with 70% of those in marketing, and 60% of respondents in IT stating they’d prefer employers to invest in their emotional, physical and mental wellbeing, over throwing a big bash.

The cons of Christmas parties

For employers, ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ usually means a huge financial outlay, logistic olympics, and potential HR nightmares. Not to mention tax implications if your team bill back additional expenses and exceed the £150 per employee annual tax threshold for events. If it’s held on a weekday evening, there’s a good chance any over-imbibers will be less than productive (if they even show up) the following day. And, no matter how hard you try to foresee all eventualities, you’re always going to have people complain about some relatively minor issue that leaves you tearing your hair out in frustration.Could this employee trend be the excuse we’ve all been waiting for to move away from the Christmas party once and for all?

In place of parties

You don’t need to waste energy, time, and cash on one booze-fuelled night out for your staff. While I’m not suggesting you cancel this year’s event at the eleventh hour, smart employer brands will capitalise on this trend by thinking about ways to improve their employee wellbeing for 2019.

Bespoke wellbeing programmes can be implemented swiftly and efficiently onsite, which can be employer-funded or subsidised, or paid for by employees. The simplest way to kick-start a considered programme that works hard for your brand is to give your employees a taste, and see what really gets them engaged.

Body Mechanics three-day wellbeing taster events can be a series of physical treatments and classes, such as massage, yoga, and acupuncture, helping people relax and recharge.  You can also offer sessions to help your employees grow professionally, like one-to-one coaching or consultancy sessions. We also run events that help your team avoid burnout and stay focused, such as nutritional advice, meditation, or psychotherapy. Or you can choose to offer a combination of events that target the emotional, mental and physical needs of your employees.

Taster events take place onsite, meaning they fit in easily around the working day, giving your team members a chance to nip off and treat themselves in manageable sessions between meetings. You’ll soon be able to gauge whether a long-term integrated wellbeing programme would work for your business, based on engagement, feedback, and uptake.

Booking a taster session is easy, simply get in touch with me, Nikki Roy here.

If you need a little more convincing on how wellbeing programmes benefit businesses as much as employees, check out these articles:

Perk up: how to recognise and reward your employees

4 Reasons Employer Brands Smash Consumer Brands, Hands Down

Stress At Work: Try These Simple Relaxation Techniques From Yoga

This article was written by: Bene Spoelders, Yoga Instructor at Body Mechanics

When you feel stressed with work pressure, you feel in a constant state of alertness: your mind is focused on your job even after work hours and you wake up during the night worrying about your colleagues or deadlines. You know that you have managed similar and even worse pressures in the past, but you can’t stop your mind from racing and worrying. In this article, I briefly talk about stress at work and how it can impact your productivity and happiness, and why clever companies offer wellness programmes to their employees. I finish by giving you 3 simple practices that you can do right now to combat stress.

Fight or flight

Stress at work, financial worries, and emotional unrest can all be sources of stress that send your body into the ‘fight or flight’ mode. This is a useful state of mind sometimes, when you have to perform under pressure, but not when it becomes chronic. Chronic stress leads to a permanently increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, digestive problems, shallow breathing, a scattered mind, and anxiety. The problem is that we are often unaware of being in this heightened state of worry and alertness.  

Relaxation response 

Chronic stress is the cause of many health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, back pain, digestive disorders, a weakened immune system, etc. It is important to include activities in our daily lives that will counteract this chronic state of alertness. Dr. Herbert Benson used the term “relaxation response” to describe the state of recuperation after the fight or flight mode. To promote the relaxation response, he says we only need “10 to 20 minutes in a calm environment, a focus for the mind, and a passive (non-judgmental) attitude”.   

Interestingly, doing yoga fulfils these criteria: it happens in a calm environment, focuses the mind and the aim is not to judge or compare one’s performance. Doing physical postures with awareness, concentrating on the body and the breath, allows the “fight or flight mode” to change into the “relaxation response”. As yoga students, we often start a yoga session with a racing and troubled mind, sometimes without even realising the tensions. Amazingly, we leave the class feeling calmer, content and more clear-headed. It is not that we have tackled the problems head-on; on the contrary, the only thing we have done is paid attention to our body.  

Yoga for the workplace 

It is no surprise that offering yoga classes at the workplace is increasingly popular.  Research has repeatedly proven that yoga classes can be an efficient and cost-effective part of a company’s corporate wellness programme. The University of Michigan Research Centre found in 2010 that for every $1 invested in workplace wellness, a company can expect at least double in cost savings.   

The benefits of doing yoga for employees include not only physical ones such as improved back health, reduced neck, and shoulder tension, and optimized breathing but also mental benefits such as reduced anxiety and stress, greater focus and concentration, and reduced fatigue. All these lead to increased efficiency at work and greater job satisfaction. 

The gains for employers are an enriched corporate culture, reduced sickness and absenteeism, increased productivity, and increased employee retention. 

Try this… 

Maybe your workplace does not offer yoga classes yet, so today I would like to share 3 exercises that can promote your body’s relaxation response. I purposely chose practices that don’t require a lot of time and that you can incorporate in daily activities: one simple movement, one way of mindful walking, and one breathing exercise. You will get the best results if you practise these every day.   

1. Feet, breath, and focus:

Do this preferably in bare feet, but you can also do it in shoes when you are alone in a lift or waiting for the bus. 

  • Inhale and lift your heels so you come to stand on the balls of your feet.
  • Exhale and slowly bring the heels down. 
  • Repeat for about a minute, paying attention to the coordination of breath and movement. This means that you use the whole inhalation to lift the heels and the heels only touch the ground again at the very end of the exhalation.
  • Make sure you keep the weight behind all the toes, and not only behind the big toe or little toe, which can be detrimental to the strength and stability of your ankles. 
  • Once you have mastered the weight distribution and slow coordination of movement and breath, add the arm movement: bring your arms to the side and up to shoulder height as you rise onto the toes, lower them with the exhalation. This movement promotes calm, expands the chest, and strengthens the feet.  

As always with yoga: don’t do it if it hurts.   

2. Mindful walking:

While walking, consciously observe your surroundings: sounds, smell, colours, shapes, light, and shade. As soon as you catch yourself thinking of other things, bring your attention back to your surroundings. Try to practise this every time you walk. This is an interesting practice: it demonstrates how little we normally notice in our surroundings and how entertaining they usually are.   

3. Breathing to promote the relaxation response:

At your desk and need a little pause? 

  • Close your eyes or gaze at something non-specific and breathe in for 4 counts, out for 6 counts. It does not matter how fast or slow the counting is, just keep the ratio between the in- and out-breath.  
  • While breathing like this, feel your body relax on the chair, keeping the front and back of the body long and broad.
  • Continue for at least a minute.  

This breathing exercise is not only relaxing, but it will also allow you to take a step back from what you were just doing, giving you greater peace and clarity.