Is Your Workforce Future-Ready?
The Importance of Self-Management for a Healthy & Productive Workforce.
Helping employees adapt their skills to post-pandemic ways of working is essential for operational resilience and business growth. The most successful companies will be businesses who know who they are, what they stand for, when to act with speed and simplicity and how to be human and connected.
Being human and connected means that employees are treated with kindness and thoughtfulness and that everyone acts in everyone else’s best interest. Doing so requires an ethos of:
Reliability: with promises followed through
Time management: with tasks being prioritised accurately and achieved on time
Stress management: a calm collected approach to solving challenges, and
Adaptability: where new situations are embraced positively.
Evidence suggests that employees who have sound self-management skills are more able to meet the above criteria.
Self-management is our innate ability to take responsibility for our own behaviour and well-being and may incorporate the use of many strategies, including goal setting, exercise, breathing, and relaxation techniques. People who are good at self-management are more accurate in their goal setting, more able to regulate their thoughts and feelings, take smarter action and achieve their targets. Self-management can thus enhance workforce productivity and resilience.
Like all habits, forming and embedding self-management strategies can be hard for individuals and businesses to achieve. We are all familiar with the feelings of enthusiasm and energy that can arise during corporate learning events only for potential change to fall by the wayside as the day job takes over again. This is particularly true in the post-pandemic world where high pressure work environments, unprecedented staff and resource constraints, shifting corporate, political and legal landscapes and the requirement for companies to make changes at breakneck speed have become “the norm”.
Courses that promote self-agency – the feeling of control over your actions and their consequences - and highlight ways for individuals to “hook” positive new habits onto existing work practices have the potential to empower corporate integration of self-management practices. Some examples of how this might be achieved include:
Building 5 minutes into the beginning or end of meetings to enable colleagues to connect with one another, debrief or have a laugh to release stress and tension;
Actively supporting staff to take their allocated lunch or tea breaks so they can recharge through rest, exercise or eating a healthy meal;
Implementing a moment of collective mindfulness or deep breathing before presentations or meetings to reduce stress, foster calmness, enhance concentration and promote clear thinking; or
Providing employees with easy access to water and healthy snacks to reduce dehydration, maintain energy levels, enhance bodily function and boost mood and concentration.
Contact us for more information about the self-management courses that Energise Health offers to individuals and businesses across the UK.
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