Working Well: Kristin LeeAnn On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness
An Interview with Karen Mangia
Offer flexible working schedules: There are absolutely non-negotiable needs within companies but offering employees flexibility with their schedules will ensure that employees can maneuver around their work schedules and not have to stress as much over figuring out how to force their work schedule into their family life. Flexibility allows employees to prioritize their personal lives, and family, over their work lives.
The pandemic pause brought us to a moment of collective reckoning about what it means to live well and to work well. As a result, employees are sending employers an urgent signal that they are no longer willing to choose one — life or work — at the cost of the other. Working from home brought life literally into our work. And as the world now goes hybrid, employees are drawing firmer boundaries about how much of their work comes into their life. Where does this leave employers? And which perspectives and programs contribute most to progress? In our newest interview series, Working Well: How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness, we are talking to successful executives, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, and thought leaders across all industries to share ideas about how to shift company cultures in light of this new expectation. We’re discovering strategies and steps employers and employees can take together to live well and to work well.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Kristin LeeAnn.
Kristin LeeAnn is a single mother of two, Prosperity Alignment Coach, CEO, Entrepreneur, Speaker, and Mental Health Advocate. In her coaching business, Kristin LeeAnn, LLC, Kristin empowers ambitious women to unlock a life filled with passion and alignment. Prior to becoming a Certified Life Coach and Entrepreneur, Kristin spent almost a decade establishing herself as a professional in mental health and public service to empower those she served, to transform their lives and push past their limiting beliefs.
Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you better. Tell us about a formative experience that prompted you to change your relationship with work and how work shows up in your life.
I’ve had multiple experiences throughout my career that made me want to improve my relationship with work. It was my overall career experiences with not being able to spend quality time with my children, struggling financially while working full-time, not being able to tap into my creativity, and not feeling like I had much control over my life left me feeling like there had to be another way to enjoy a fulfilling work life. I was always experiencing burnout and my emotional and mental health would take a plunge. I knew there had to be a better way to make a living, and I chose to prioritize my purpose and doing work that I enjoyed.
Harvard Business Review predicts that wellness will become the newest metric employers will use to analyze and to assess their employees’ mental, physical and financial health. How does your organization define wellness, and how does your organization measure wellness?
My company defines wellness as a mind, body, and soul connection. I believe that when you practice healthy habits daily, your overall wellness can be achieved and measured. There are so many ways that wellness can be achieved, but the most important thing is that steps are encouraged daily towards each area of wellness, even if they are bite sized steps, so that employees are not constantly struggling. As far as measuring wellness, my company measures wellness by ranking individuals’ satisfaction in spirituality, finances, personal development, physical environment, fun/creativity, support systems, and career goals. If these things are in some sort of alignment, employees are more likely than not to excel in their job performance.
Based on your experience or research, how do you correlate and quantify the impact of a well workforce on your organization’s productivity and profitability?
Based on my experience and research, a well workforce increases productivity and profitability greatly. When employers pour into the wellbeing of their employees, the company is more than likely to thrive. When employees are healthy in their mind, body, and soul they can have more positive energy, focus, and the ability to complete tasks at work more efficiently.
On the other hand, when employees are not in an environment considered a well workforce, more mistakes are made, more employees are unhappy, and the work environment can become toxic. As you can assume, this impacts any organization’s productivity and profitability negatively.
Even though most leaders have good intentions when it comes to employee wellness, programs that require funding are beholden to business cases like any other initiative. The World Health Organization estimates for every $1 invested into treatment for common mental health disorders, there is a return of $4 in improved health and productivity. That sounds like a great ROI. And, yet many employers struggle to fund wellness programs that seem to come “at the cost of the business.” What advice do you have to offer to other organizations and leaders who feel stuck between intention and impact?
Previously, I touched on how employees who are healthy in their mind, body, and soul are better performing employees. When employees are struggling in any area of their wellness, it will likely show up by poor performance at work. As a leader, it is important to take a moment to find out which area(s) of an employee’s life is falling short and either provide them with the needed resources or point them in the right direction to correct their shortcomings. Areas that employees could be struggling with are their spirituality, finances, personal development, physical environment, fun/creativity, support system, and career goals. If these things are addressed, employees will absolutely improve in their work performance.
Speaking of money matters, a recent Gallup study reveals employees of all generations rank wellbeing as one of their top three employer search criteria. How are you incorporating wellness programs into your talent recruitment and hiring processes?
Organizations that prioritize wellbeing will be sure to attract quality applicants and retain quality employees. During the recruitment and hiring process, it is important to learn what potential employees are honestly looking for in a company’s wellness resources. Even if those resources are not readily available, it is important to consider what potential employees are expecting from your organization. Organizations should then start to take into consideration what prospective employees are asking for when choosing an employer. With the Great Resignation and more people prioritizing their wellbeing, employers will be able to attract, and hire, more qualified candidates if they promote what they are doing to support their employees in their organization.
We’ve all heard of the four-day work week, unlimited PTO, mental health days, and on demand mental health services. What innovative new programs and pilots are you launching to address employee wellness? And, what are you discovering? We would benefit from an example in each of these areas.
- Mental Wellness: A lack of work-life balance is a big part of why employees can struggle with their mental health. From unrealistic deadlines to impossible workloads, supporting employees with their mental health should include asking people for honest feedback about their work abilities to help reduce high levels of stress. Deadlines and workloads should be assigned to employees based on their individual strengths and weaknesses to help prevent employees from reaching the point of a mental burnout. Another way that organizations can help employees decrease stress is by contracting with personal development coaches to host workshops, or group coaching, to help balance their mental wellness.
- Emotional Wellness: Simply checking in on employees and their emotional health is an underrated practice in organizations. Employees are expected to leave their emotions at home, but that is not realistic, no matter how hard we try. When managers notice a change in the emotional health of an employee, meeting them where they’re at can be beneficial. Creating a safe space for employees to feel comfortable enough to express their feelings to leadership is very important in creating a healthy work environment.
- Social Wellness: Finding ways for employees to engage with each other in a way that doesn’t involve work related stress creates a space where employees can really get to know each other, and bond over shared interests. Employee picnics, retreats, and other social events during, or after, work hours are an amazing way to encourage employees to practice social wellness. Company vacations are also a great way to increase social wellness if your type of company permits extended time away from work.
- Physical Wellness: Encouraging employees to prioritize their physical health shows that organizations care about their employees on a personal level. Providing employees with free gym memberships outside of work, or within their work location, will encourage employees to have more encouragement to exercise. If they don’t have to travel far for a gym, or pay out of pocket for memberships, going to the gym can become more of the stress relief time that it’s created to be.
- Financial Wellness: Extra financial support to those who have a hard time managing, or earning enough money, is a great way to encourage employees to achieve financial wellness. Employees can experience unfulfillment and high levels of stress when they feel like they are not making enough money to get by. Financial coaches, or monthly financial literacy workshops from a local bank, will promote employees to have healthier relationships with money. If they are truly struggling with making enough money, financial coaches and literacy workshops can help employees discover ways to create passive income to increase their overall financial wellness.
Can you please tell us more about a couple of specific ways workplaces would benefit from investing in your ideas above to improve employee wellness?
Companies can benefit from these ideas are the productivity they will see in their employees and their organization. Employees are the glue that keeps organizations running smoothly, and if they are happy and whole, they thrive and so does the company. With a thriving company, the ROI will be worth every penny that the organization puts into their employees. This will also change the dynamic of how we associate the workforce, which in a lot of cases, has become an uninspiring necessity rather than a place that employees truly enjoy.
How are you reskilling leaders in your organization to support a “Work Well” culture?
The most important thing to support a “Work Well” culture is to hire people who can support others and sincerely care about the wellbeing of their co-workers. This means that a “Work Well” culture starts with hiring in terms of hiring the best people for the organization. When there is a threat of a toxic work culture, I believe that it’s important to educate employees on relationship building, and not allowing intimidation in the workplace to go unresolved.
Ideas take time to implement. What is one small step every individual, team or organization can take to get started on these ideas — to get well?
A small way to start implementing these ideas, is to genuinely start asking for feedback, and really working with employees to make sure they are not feeling undervalued and overworked. This is a small, but huge step in the right direction. When unattainable goals and expectations are removed from the workplace, employees will feel more accomplished, and it will show in the quality work they will produce. Over time, they will also start achieving the goals that once seemed impossible when they felt overwhelmed with their workload.
What are your “Top 5 Trends To Track In the Future of Workplace Wellness?”
- Quarterly relationship/leadership training: There is so much more to leading a team than holding employees accountable for producing quality work and working behind the scenes to keep an organization running smoothly. Leaders should continue to learn what is needed to connect with their team and gain their trust. The more connected and trustworthy a leader is, the more productivity they will see in their team. If employees are struggling with their wellbeing, they should feel more comfortable coming to the leaders within their organization to ask for help. Leadership should be evaluated quarterly, or at least twice a year, to ensure that employees feel like their wellbeing is prioritized.
- Offer flexible working schedules: There are absolutely non-negotiable needs within companies but offering employees flexibility with their schedules will ensure that employees can maneuver around their work schedules and not have to stress as much over figuring out how to force their work schedule into their family life. Flexibility allows employees to prioritize their personal lives, and family, over their work lives.
- Offer remote options: In addition to flexibility, remote options are a lifesaver to lots of employees. Remote options reduce the amount of hustle and bustle that employees go through before they even make it to work. The workforce, and the needs of employees, have continued to evolve for generations, but the demands of work have not changed to match the times we are living in. which has created a workforce that doesn’t match the very different lives of today’s employees.
- Prioritize employee relationships: Individuals that do choose to work full-time, outside of their home, spend most of their awake time at work. Healthy relationships create a work environment that is enjoyable to come to, especially if you spend more time with the people you work with than you spend with your own family. Intimate team meetings, and evaluations, regarding team satisfaction will help leadership understand where the relationship gaps. Knowing where the relationship gaps are, helps leaders understand where they need to shift their focus to improve working relationships to create a healthy work environment.
- Practice mindfulness: Quieting the mind can be super beneficial, especially in the workplace, where our minds are working non-stop. When life gets busy at work, employers should encourage employees to step away from their desk and take a moment to quiet their mind. This will help employees regain their focus and get back to their workday in a more peaceful state. In order to really encourage mindfulness, employers can occasionally bring in mindfulness coaches to lead transformational sessions for their employees.
What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of workplace wellness?
Since the beginning of the world-wide pandemic, many organizations have seen the impact it has had on their employees. Through research and experience, organizations have been more receptive to making changes to maintain their employees’ overall health: mentally, physically, and emotionally. With organization leaders, and mental health advocates continuing to shine light on the benefits of employees’ wellness, I am optimistic that more and more organizations will strive to incorporate work cultures that are healthy and favorable for their employees.
Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?
I absolutely love connecting! You can stay updated on my work by following me on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also learn more about me and what I do at www.kristinleeann.com.
Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and wellness.
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Working Well: Kristin LeeAnn On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.