There is so much to consider when looking at wellbeing and all its connected elements. It can be overwhelming but we need to find a way to break it down and work through each element. For McIntyre Dick, this includes engaging our team to better understand what wellness means for them, our clients and our business.

We do this by regularly asking our team what is and isn’t working (we use OfficeVibe surveys) and our team give us really honest feedback. We’ve tried a number of things over recent times to support our team and their wellness. In doing this, we ensure that we can continue to deliver great outcomes for our clients and our business. It’s not easy and we haven’t always got this right. But what we are focusing on is how we learn from each situation and make it better moving forward.

The following is an example of how we are learning. Earlier this year, most of our team worked from home, with some not being in the office at all for three months. While this helped us get through massive “year-end” workload, what it didn’t help us with was our connectedness with each other. Our team also told us that a mix of “permanently in the office” and “rotating through the office” team members didn’t work for them. This mixed approach meant that we weren’t giving everyone the same opportunity to connect, learn from each other and make it easy to do their best work. Our team’s feedback has been critical to how we focus on wellness and connectedness moving forward.

One of our core values is “People Focussed – we care for each other at work and at home”. Along with our other values of Driven and Inspire, we work really hard to ensure any decision we make supports these values and our purpose. So based on our purpose, values, the feedback and our learnings from our hybrid work from home/office model, we’ve made some changes.

Earlier this month, I was really pleased to announce to our team, the first phase of our updated Wellness Approach. Some of the key changes are:

• Access to sick leave is now available to all new and recently joined team members from their first day of working at McIntyre Dick;
• We are changing our “sick leave” language to “wellness leave”. Our intention is to:
  • normalise taking time off to look after both physical and mental health;
  • refocus our language to be more positive (reframing sickness to wellness);
  • support our team to be more open in discussing both physical and mental wellness.
• Ensuring our employee assistance programme is well understood and meeting the needs of our team;
• Continued support for social connection in a business as usual, office rotation or full WFH environment.

This is just the start of strengthening our focus on wellness. We are working through a number of ideas from our team as well as learning from other businesses. Our priority is looking after our team so that they, in turn, can look after our clients.

The following Maori proverb captures the essence of why we are strengthening our wellness focus:

He aha te mea nui o te ao
What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
It is the people, it is the people, it is the people

As employers, we all have a responsibility, both morally and legislatively, to provide a safe and healthy workplace for our team. When our team is well, we know they can focus on delivering great service and quality outcomes for our clients. Without this, we cannot have a sustainable and successful business.