The 7 keys to well-being at work
Well-being is multidimensional and holistic: it touches our professional life as much as our personal one. Here is an overview of its seven essential dimensions, along with some off-the-beaten-path avenues to try to fill each of them.
When it comes to this important notion of individual well-being, you can often read and hear the same advice everywhere: eat healthily, move more, meditate, get enough sleep and other phrases of the same kind. It is a start, but it is far from the whole story!
Well-being is multidimensional and holistic, and it touches our professional life as much as our personal one. Here we will take an overview of the seven essential dimensions that make up this field, and we will explore together some off-the-beaten-path avenues to try to fill each of them.
A good hot coffee in hand? Enjoy the read!
The physical dimension
This first dimension covers everything to do with caring for our body and our physical health in general: good nutrition, regular exercise, good sleep quality, weight management. In short, taking care of our body as a whole and finding a lifestyle that lets us feel good physically.
In our professional life, whether at the office, in a hybrid setup or working from home, there are many ways to look after our body.
At work
- Eat well and practise yoga
- Walk during breaks, alternate between standing and sitting
- Walk or bike to the office when you can
- Allow yourself a power nap of less than 20 minutes over the lunch hour
On your own
- Put the screens away at least an hour before bed: blue light harms the retina and disrupts sleep
- Combine healthy eating with regular exercise
- Lean on white light and light therapy
On a personal level, one of the best recommendations is to stop, at least an hour before bed, all exposure to computers, tablets, mobile phones and televisions. The blue light these devices emit is harmful to the retina of our eyes, while disrupting the rhythm of our sleep as well as its quality.
As opposed to blue light, we recommend opting for white light through light therapy. This type of light is picked up by the retina and passed on to our brain: it helps raise our energy level and our mood by acting on our endocrine system. In fact, the benefits of light therapy are many: combining it with healthy eating and regular physical exercise gives us an excellent foundation for ensuring good physical health.
And for those bouts of fatigue, we suggest power naps over the lunch hour, lasting less than 20 minutes. Just enough to stay fresh and ready, rather than sluggish, for the rest of the day.
The emotional dimension
When we speak of the emotional dimension, we are also speaking of individuals' mental well-being. It covers everything to do with the way we identify and manage, among other things, our anxiety, our sadness, our anger, our fears: essentially, all of our moods.
Companies can help their employees on this front of emotional well-being by offering them mental health days, stress management workshops as well as psychological services.
As for our personal life, to help us reach a better emotional balance, we can turn to positive psychology. Here, we are not talking about positive wishful thinking, but rather the science that studies the flourishing and optimal functioning of the human being. To that end, we recommend Tal Ben-Shahar's book, Happier. A master on the subject.
We can also take up mindfulness meditation and its many benefits. To do so, we invite you to look at everything François Lemay does, an expert in the field, and in particular his book Tout est toujours parfait.
And in order to identify and manage our emotions and those of others, we suggest the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. A must-read.
The spiritual dimension
This dimension, closely tied to the emotional dimension, concerns our beliefs, our principles and our values. In fact, everything that gives our life a meaning and a direction, whether or not we follow a religion.
To help their employees fill this spiritual dimension, companies can encourage them toward yoga and meditation by providing rooms for that purpose. By clearly communicating their mission, their vision as well as their values, they can also give meaning to their work.
On a personal level, we recommend two excellent books: Start With Why by Simon Sinek, to find a meaning and a purpose in life; and, to succeed at everything we want to undertake, The One Thing written by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.
And to go further in reaching ambitious goals, we suggest experimenting with the reticular activating system (RAS). The RAS is a part of our brain, in the brainstem, that serves as a filter between our conscious mind and our subconscious. To put it simply, it is like a huge filter that identifies what is truly important to us: it sets aside all the useless information to keep only what really matters in our eyes.
An example? You have decided to buy a specific car model and, in the days that follow, that model is all you see on the streets. Another example? You have just learned a new word and, in the days that follow, you hear it everywhere. That is the reticular activating system in full swing!
Indeed, if we want to reach our big life goals, and even our smallest ones, we must clearly define our intentions and focus on them. The RAS will then take care of placing on our path the people and opportunities that will let us reach them. How do you activate it? One of the best ways is to write our goals on our phone's wallpaper, on our computer's wallpaper and on the walls of our office. In short, anywhere we can see them very often. Our phone screen remains the best spot, since we check it on average more than 200 times a day.
The intellectual dimension
This dimension is about our ability to learn, to acquire knowledge and skills, as well as about the growth of our brain.
Professionally, this can take the form of specific training or professional development courses covered by the employer. Or of encouraging situations of collaboration and brainstorming within work teams.
On a personal level, we invite you to look into the neuroplasticity of the human brain, which is defined notably by its rewiring following the acquisition of new knowledge. When our brain acquires new notions, it creates new connections between our neurons.
We can encourage this neuroplasticity, notably, by reading fiction, travelling, dancing, creating works of art, broadening our vocabulary, or even practising intermittent fasting. In short, every new piece of knowledge we acquire has the potential to connect new neurons together in our brain and to change the way it works.
For more information on neuroplasticity and its benefits, we invite you to read Neuroplasticity by Moheb Costandi, or Switch On Your Brain by Dr. Caroline Leaf.
The social dimension
This dimension concerns every aspect of our social well-being, including the ties we build with our community as well as our personal expression.
At work
- Set up break rooms and dining areas
- Provide collaborative work rooms
- Encourage interaction between colleagues and a sense of belonging
On your own
- Stay open to new experiences and encounters
- Be curious and observe others and their culture
- Keep a balance between social life and personal life
In companies, break rooms, dining areas as well as collaborative work rooms encourage interaction between colleagues and spark a sense of belonging. In our personal life, we can encourage our social well-being by always being open to new experiences and encounters, by being curious and observing others and their culture, all while keeping a balance between our social life and our personal life.
We would also like to introduce you to the notion of serendipity. It is defined as the phenomenon, or the art, of discovering by pure chance pleasant or valuable things or concepts. In fact, it is the art of finding what we were not looking for in the first place. Some examples? Christopher Columbus, who was seeking a new route to China and stumbles by accident onto the American continent. Viagra, Coca-Cola, the microwave oven, aspartame and Nutella are all the fruit of serendipity too.
The occupational dimension
Beyond the career we decide to pursue, this dimension refers to our balance between work and personal life. But it is also doing work that has meaning for us, work that provides a genuine sense of fulfilling our full potential.
For companies, this dimension translates notably into encouraging training, self-directed learning as well as good relationships between colleagues. But also into flexible schedules, volunteering and social contributions.
On a personal level, we strongly invite you to discover your ikigai, which translates from Japanese as "joy of living" or "reason for being." The Japanese philosophy of ikigai is originally centred on the pursuit of happiness and also applies to the search for our ideal job: it suggests seeking a job that brings together four elements, namely something we are passionate about, work we are good at, work we can be paid for and that the world needs.
The financial dimension
This last dimension of well-being translates into our knowledge of financial planning over the short, medium and long term, of spending management as well as of emergency prevention.
It is not only having a good salary that counts. Companies can help fill this dimension by offering their employees training on sound financial management as well as courses on retirement planning.
To go further on the subject of financial literacy, we strongly recommend the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki. A must-have in your library: you will learn, among other things, that a house is a liability and not an asset, and that the rich do not work for money; instead, money works for them. And to learn more about finances and the best decisions to make in that regard, check out the Hardbacon website, an excellent source of information on the vast subject of personal finance.
A factor of engagement
As you have seen, it is important to find meaning in our professional life as much as in our personal one. The whole thing is only a matter of balance and choices.
To help your employees in their quest for well-being at work, Amélio gives you the ability to survey them regularly so you can learn their views, their ideas, their wishes and their state of well-being in their work. Well-being is, in fact, an integral part of Amélio's 12 engagement factors, which measure the work climate of an organization.
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