150. Understanding Employee Wellness with Danielle Dinkelman

Love it.

So for anyone who doesn't know, what is employee wellness?

Oh, man.

I do not pretend to be the authority on giving that definition, but I'll give you my best shot.

My understanding what it, what employee wellness means, I could give you the history lesson.

I have studied that a bit, and there's some great work out there that, that kind of lays that out.

But it's the idea that as an employer, you are working with human beings that are not robots.

[chuckles] They have very human, very physiological as well as mental and emotional needs in order to be able to perform the work that they want to perform, right? And so as an employer, it may behoove you to consider, are we creating an environment in which these human beings can and do take good care of themselves so that they can bring their best to not only this work, but also the, the things in their larger life that are important to them, like their family and their community.

That might be a little bit of a long-winded definition, but that, that's how I think of it.

It's kind of that, it's a social responsibility of an employer, and I very much think of it as a symbiotic relationship between employer and employee.

There's, of course, there's an exchange of time and work and money, right? And I really believe that we should be functioning under this, this assumption of do no harm.

At the very least, a, a job and employment should do no harm.

And, gosh, we could have a whole conversation just about that, right? Yeah.

I'll pause there.

there.Oh, I love you bringing up the symbiotic relationship between the employee and the employer.

I think that's so important for people to think about.

We've discussed employee wellbeing on the podcast before, back in episode 32, and we talked about the importance of discussing employee wellbeing in the workplace.

So from your perspective, why is employee wellbeing and employee wellness important?

Anecdotally, seeing my husband go through his corporate experience, there wasn't a discussion, there wasn't a conversation, there were not values around employee wellbeing that were being communicated.

And what that does, the silence sometimes speaks louder [laughs] than words.

It can speak volumes.

And in that silence, what an employee is hearing is what's expected of them, what's being asked of them, and there's always a back pressure.

There's always a backlog of w- deadlines and projects and things that need doing, and there's a constant question in employee's mind, and it shouldn't be this way, [laughs] but it often is, of how important is this? How should I prioritize this compared to the all, all the other things on my plate? What is the actual deadline of this? How urgent is it? Does this trump me sitting down to a healthy dinner tonight with my family? Does this take higher priority than me taking a break and taking a walk and resetting? There's...

There...

That constant back pressure can cause a really poor relationship with a person and their work where they feel like they... there's a loss of agency and autonomy, and they're constantly burdened by the next thing on their to-do list.