Employee well-being programmes: Is the investment worth it?

When it comes to deciding how to motivate your employees, how do you spend your HR/Well-being budget?

Free staff perks

Maybe you invest in gym memberships, free tea, coffee and fruit or perhaps you have redesigned your offices to have bright furniture, ball pits and ping pong tables? It is a challenge choosing the right solution and can prove even more challenging to measure the success of the investment.

Things should be better

So here’s the thing, human beings are amazing. We can develop our skills through education and we can get fitter by going to the gym, but how can we learn to be happier?

A brighter office environment may raise spirits temporarily but after the initial interest has worn off, the same old sense of discontentment sets in again. This is because we all have an innate feeling that things should be better.

A constant journey of striving

We spend our lives trying to achieve the next thing; school, university, job, marriage and so on, thinking at some point we are going to “arrive” at the happy place.

Trouble is, we never do.

Why? Because we try to approach improving our internal state in the same way we would approach a project. And it doesn’t work.

Is it possible to motivate staff?

So translating this into the workplace how can you ever hope to motivate staff if internally they are destined never to feel satisfied?

Well there is a different way.

Instead of traditional solutions that are aimed at satisfying the external world of the employees, Mindfulness-based approaches work at a neural level to change internal states; how we relate to thoughts and emotions, change our inbuilt patterns of stress reactivity, improve the ability to regulate emotions as well as fostering feelings and compassion.

A real investment

An investment in training someone from the inside means that the changes are real, they are part of the person not the office.

And when someone loses their sense of “unsatisfactoriness” and learns to accept their whole experience, they can make better decisions, are more focused and the benefits will show up both inside and outside of the office.