When to Prioritize Self-Care
I will give you a few words and I want you to envision an employee: stress, burnout, bitterness, stagnation, apathy. To me what comes to mind is the stereotype of an overworked employee struggling to get through each day. Now try this again with a different set of words: resilience, balance, prioritization, fulfillment, pride. I want the employee I envision to work for me because regardless of industry or expertise, this employee will push the needle forward for my company. While this was definitely a leading exercise, my goal is to get you to think about what a “great” company citizen looks like.
When should companies also prioritize self-care?
I am not going to say that company citizens shouldn’t push hard, pull extra hours, and prioritize work. However, company citizens shouldn’t be in that mindset all of the time. Specifically, when company citizens start embodying the negative traits in my first list, it is time to prioritize self-care. So as an employer, when is it the right time to help employees prioritize their self-care? Put simply, employers should be comfortable prioritizing self-care for their employees when negative attitudes jeopardize the long-term health of the organization.
Self-care benefits employees AND companies
For employees, self-care decreases stress, increases engagement, and decreases absenteeism due to health. All three of these items directly affect companies positively by increasing organization-wide performance and cutting costs caused by absent employees and high turnover rates. This article from P5 Performance provides some great metrics on the value add for companies when promoting self-care for their employees. With these performance and financial positives for companies, it should be a no-brainer to not only support employee self-care when the going gets tough, but also proactively provide self-care support for employees as a part of company culture.
Should employees get help from companies?
Is it really the place of employers to support self-care for employees. With careers and jobs being a massive part of an employee’s identity, the stress associated caring deeply about an identity factor is inevitable. Because of this, I argue that it is absolutely the responsibility of the organization to safeguard the identity-based stress that employees place in their companies. I would go further to say that this identity-based stress is good stress that turns sour when abused by the culture of an organization that doesn’t promote self-care. Good stress turned sour negatively affects more than just psychological well-being and mood, the same stress can lead to physical ailments including high blood pressure, headaches and more.
Are you either an employee or employer looking for ways to integrate self-care in your workplace? Here are a few articles that I especially enjoyed that have great recommendations for self-care methods: 7 Strategies for Better Self-Care at Work from Psychology Today, How Leadership Can Reap Big Rewards By Creating A “Self-Care Culture”, and 6 Ways to Weave Self-Care into Your Workday from the Harvard Business Review. Thanks for reading and to learn more about topics related to Nevada’s Innovation Ecosystem, I encourage you to subscribe to my blog or reach out to me directly via Linked LinkedIn or Twitter.
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