U.S. Professional Wellness Month is celebrated throughout June, providing an ideal opportunity for employers to review and enhance their existing wellness programs and/or adopt proactive strategies to improve employee health at work.
Home care providers that emphasize the well-being of their caregivers and office staff, ensure their employees feel supported and valued at work, reducing workplace stress and burnout.
This, in turn, helps providers to attract top talent, experience higher productivity, and drive employee retention.
Maintaining a healthy work environment is a significant factor in building a resilient home care workforce in 2022 and ensuring your business’s overall growth and success.
In this blog, we will cover five pillars of employee health and wellbeing, including tips on how home care providers can offer support to keep their employees happy, healthy, and engaged.
Mental and emotional health
Working remotely and in isolation can be detrimental to your caregivers’ mental and emotional wellbeing.
Therefore, it’s essential to ensure you have open lines of regular communication so they feel connected to your agency and each other.
Tips
Check-in with your caregivers and staff frequently to see how they are doing and if they have any issues that need attention. Whether by phone, text, or email, communication is key to your staff feeling valued and supported.
Hold weekly/monthly meetings (in person or via video conference), where caregivers and staff can check in, connect and provide moral support for each other.
Consider setting up a coaching or mentorship program so your employees have a dedicated person they can always turn to for advice and support.
Open a Channel Check-in, where you can post regular check-in questions in a team or company-wide channel (for example, Slack). Ask questions to gauge how your caregivers and staff currently feel about work – while also sending the message that you’re listening and genuinely care about their wellbeing.
Plan a series of learning events that destigmatize mental health and encourage your employees to take care of their minds as well as their bodies. For example, time management, stress management, and mindfulness training.
Invest in tech tools, like Smartcare software, to ensure that communications with your caregivers and office staff are always fast and fluid, mobile-friendly, and HIPAA compliant.
Physical health
A recent survey revealed that approximately 69 million employees reported taking time off work due to illness last year – that’s 407 million days of lost work time.
Caregiving is strenuous work and can take its toll on your employees’ physical health, so it’s important to take steps to ensure their physical wellbeing – and protect your bottom line.
Tips
Make sure your caregivers have the proper training and tools to perform their roles safely, e.g., for lifting patients/clients.
Encourage daily exercise, for example, lunchtime walks, bike rides, or gym sessions. In addition, when booking shifts, schedulers should be mindful of leaving adequate time between visits so caregivers have the opportunity to exercise – to reduce stress hormones and stimulate endorphins that combat anxiety and depression.
Set up an online fitness challenge that your remote workers can take on together. Setting fitness goals, logging progress, and celebrating wins together can be a great motivator and mood-lifter for those working in isolation.
Promote a healthy diet, including healthy snacking. Caregivers are often racing between shifts and focusing on caring for others. Make sure they have proper break times and carry healthy snacks with them, to avoid turning to sugary foods/drinks for a quick energy boost.
Include physical health as part of any reward/recognition programs you currently run. For example, offering a Healthy Living Credits allowance that can be put towards products and services that promote a healthy lifestyle (like gym memberships, yoga classes, and healthy food deliveries).
Social wellbeing
In the context of work, social wellbeing refers to a sense of inclusivity and belonging, being in alignment with company culture, regular social interaction, and strong relationships built with peers.
Social wellbeing is a crucial indicator of your employees’ ability to be productive and satisfied at work, so you need to pay attention to it.
Without your company’s help and support, employees will likely struggle with social wellness.
Tips
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, home care providers have had to work harder to maintain a valuable source of social support for their teams. This has been achieved through online meet-ups, remote walks and talks, virtual tea parties, and more. Encourage feedback from your team on remote social events they’d enjoy participating in and set them up!
Consider setting up Social Wellness Team Challenges – weekly, monthly, or quarterly – that give your employees a chance to get together, build stronger interpersonal connections, and support each other. These can include fitness challenges, learning a new hobby/skill, volunteer days, and sustainability challenges.
Revisit your company culture to ensure you’re including sufficient ‘social benefits/initiatives’ to promote employee wellbeing. Think about what employees are already doing, how you can provide company support to any organic social activities, and gather input from your team on the kinds of gatherings and events they’d like more of.
Set social well-being goals as a company and consider an Employee Social Wellness Program. Remember to publicize any initiatives through regular text, email, newsletter, and staff meetings to raise awareness and encourage more employee engagement.
Depending on the size of your company, consider implementing a tech solution to track social benefit uptake by demographic and/or location. Data-driven insights can help you understand which benefits are valued most by which employees, in addition to hearing directly from employees about the types of social support they value most.
Financial wellbeing
Finances are a constant source of stress for most people, especially with job losses and financial constraints affecting many families during the pandemic.
Financial health is an important factor in overall health, as it can significantly affect other pillars of health, such as mental and physical well-being – and impact employee performance.
As an employer, there are plenty of opportunities to enhance the financial well-being of your caregivers and staff, even if company-wide pay rises are not on the cards!
Tips
Offer financial workshops designed to help employees develop better money management skills. Ask for input from your staff beforehand so that you structure these workshops to best suit their needs.
Provide individual coaching on financial education that your employees would find helpful, for example, setting a budget, avoiding scams, creating a savings program, and taking advantage of state/federal benefits.
Make sure your employees have easy, self-service access to financial education and guidance, which could include financial products and services (e.g., payroll services), grants, cost reduction schemes (e.g., discounted memberships), etc.
Consider what benefits you can offer to ease the financial strain, such as paying a share of employee insurance premiums, payment for caregiver referrals, cash bonuses as an incentive for meeting performance criteria, paid certification training, and discounts/vouchers from local businesses.
Consider investing in payroll software to guarantee your employees are paid accurately, transparently, and on time.
With the right payroll tech solution in place, your employees will also benefit from full access to their payment history, hours worked, etc., to help them budget.
Professional wellbeing
Professional wellbeing provides employees with a sense of purpose and satisfaction in their work.
It also increases engagement and creates optimism about future opportunities. As a result, it is a powerful tool in recruitment and retention and can help your home care business grow.
Tips
Develop training programs that offer appealing career and personal growth opportunities for your caregivers and back-office staff.
Work with your caregivers and office staff to set and achieve SMART goals to enhance engagement and motivation, and help them align with the bigger purpose of your business.
Provide opportunities for upskilling in a range of clinical and non-clinical skills to expand your employees’ abilities, and help them develop within your business.
Set up a coaching program to support your caregivers and office staff to continuously improve their skills, experience, and productivity.
While Professional Wellness Month is the perfect opportunity for home care providers to review their current efforts toward workplace wellness, employee wellness is an ongoing process and must be repeatedly evaluated and refined.
It is undoubtedly worth the time and investment, considering the multiple business benefits it offers, including:
