Wellness Kickoff
What is Wellness Kickoff?
The past decade has been characterized by changes in the business environment that have fundamentally undermined the foundation on which organizations and companies were created. This earthquake resulted in a change in the rules of the game and subsequently to dramatic internal changes in the corporate framework, which was now required to everything necessary to survive in an environment characterized by frequent changes and strong uncertainty. The problem lies in the fact that the ones most hurt by the changed rules were employees, otherwise known as the human capital employed in every organization and company.
A revealing statistic on the scale and impact of the change is the dramatic decline in employee job security. A 2005 study that examined the impact of the numerous changes in the business environment found that between the mid-1980s and 2005, the level of employee job security sharply declined in several European countries, e.g. from 70% to 48% in England, from 83% to 55% in Germany and from 64% to 50% in France.
Furthermore, the tremendous stress on employees was revealed in a 2006 British study disclosing the cost of illness caused by employees' mental stress in England, which was revealed to total a stunning 3.8 billion Sterling pounds!!!
In light of this as well as other data, a new school developed in organizational research that strove to develop an optimal work environment designed to minimize employee stress while increasing employee involvement in the work environment. This school supports the creation of positive emotions among employees in the belief that a happy employee will also be a more productive and contributing employee in the workplace.
I am among the researchers in this new school who are trying to facilitate a breakthrough and restore to employees the ability and tools that had characterized them in the past. We are trying to create a new work environment that is based on greater employee cooperation and involvement. Knowing full well that the road will be neither easy or simple, I developed a new intervention tool that can reinvigorate the workplace and increase the level of organizational happiness.
Many years of working with organizations taught us that one of the main problems in coping with changes in organizational culture could be attributed to the lengthy process involved in this activity. As such, in my dissertation, I developed a new tool designed to resolve this problem through quick action (several months in length) during which focus is placed on balancing and assimilating three core values that were found to directly impact organizational results:
Spirituality in the workplace – one of the new issues that stormed into organizational culture at the end of the 1990s represents the employee's desire to be at his best, to help others be at their best and to be connected to their workplace as well as colleagues. Many studies proved this to affect creativity that people demonstrate in the workplace, the employee's emotional connection to his workplace, employee commitment to his workplace, etc.
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Innovation – in a world in which products and services are becoming increasingly similar as a result of globalization, alongside the fact that they are unable to exhaust the product life span, innovation is one of the only factors that can provide companies with the competitive edge, even if only short-term. Only a company that can encourage its employees to create innovation during their work can safely cope with the demanding business environment.
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Trust – one of the markers of today's business environment is the reliance on teamwork, particularly as a result of organizations' desire to remove layers in order to enable a quicker response to needs in the field. As a result, trust between employees and colleagues becomes tremendously important. Furthermore, trust demonstrated by employees to managers becomes equally as important. Studies found that trust positively impacts employee commitment, reduces employee intent to leave, lowers absenteeism and increases the efforts made by employees to facilitate company success.
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