[00:00:00] INTRO: Welcome to Financial Snickens, your bite-sized information for entrepreneurs.
[00:00:12] Alisa McCabe: Today we're going to be talking about workplace self-care, and you as the business owner, this needs to be one of the priorities for your team. There are so many discussions out there about self-care and you know you need to practice it and encourage it in your employees, but you also know that it comes in different forms and is unique to each individual.
[00:00:38] So how do you figure out how to provide or encourage self-care? You might be surprised, but this is a conversation that we have often with our clients. Our clients are always looking for ways to improve the lives of their employees as we are too at First Steps Financial. So this is a process that we've gone through internally to find out how each one of our team defines self-care. One of the first steps you can do is send out a survey to your team and ask what's important to them. From there, you can provide what they want and show them that you believe that they are important and you care about them as a whole person and not just their work side. So what you do is ask the survey?
[00:01:30] You could ask them, what does self-care mean to you? What does a self-care routine look like? What do you do now to make sure that you are taking care of yourself? What do you wish that you did to take care of yourself? What activities bring you joy in your life around that? You can put examples like volunteering, being outside, being with friends or family.
[00:01:53] Where do you feel most re-energized at home outside at the office, the gym, social settings? Any one of these questions. Once you find out what your team needs, you'll be in a much better position to help them by providing opportunities for them to make time for self-care. You also need to make self-care actionable.
[00:02:18] You may find that some of your employees are looking to. If volunteering is what they are looking for, you can pull the team to find out what their favorite charities are, so that as a group you can plan a way to support a charity that is important to them. At first, OFS Financial, we asked our team to tell us their favorite charity.
[00:02:41] Then we found a way to volunteer together. One of the charities that we picked was called Project Blindness, which supplies children in unstable situations with blankets. We sent out blanket kits to our team and we offered to send out as many kits as they wanted. Our team is a hundred percent remote, so doing this required a little bit of creative thinking.
[00:03:05] We sent out these blanket kits to everyone on the team and their family members, as many as they wanted, and then we asked them to take pictures of doing this together, and then we all got together, and the feedback we got from everybody was how good they felt about doing this and how much more connected they felt to us as a community.
[00:03:29] So the people that felt self-care was related to volunteering got fed, and people who felt like being part of a community really helped their self-care. We were able to check off two things off the list. If someone's self-care routine includes listening to music or podcasts, you could offer a Spotify premium subscription to your team for free.
[00:03:54] Part of the perks of working for you, but also, hey, helping them feel better. You can email Spotify to find out more information about it, and I'll put the link in the show. The link is Spotify for
[email protected]. We took self-care a step further and we offer a program called Marketplace Chaplain. And what they do is they provide personalized employee care.
[00:04:24] Well, they are therapists. They are a great resource for helping my teen get better mentally. And discuss any issues under the sun. Our team and myself have used them many times for ourselves and our families. Make sure you help your team set boundaries, especially when it comes to working remotely. It can be easy to work all the time when your computer is always with you, and that may sound nice as an employer.
[00:05:00] It really isn't because your employees get burned out. Provide them with training on how to turn off at the end of the day. It can be as simple as telling your team. Okay, when you're ready to be done with your day, get out a notepad and write down the first thing you need to do tomorrow morning. Close out all the tabs on your computer, empty the trash on your computer, and then shut down your computer.
[00:05:26] Creating a ritual will signal that the workday has ended and you are able to shift your focus to something else. Maybe something else that brings you joy and fulfillment, your family, art, reading, exercising. The bottom line is that you need a team and a leader who are mentally and physically healthy in order to reach their potential and be happy.
[00:05:51] It's worth the effort to find out what you can do to support your team, practice self-care. If you love what we're talking about, head over to our website, first steps financial.com. Click on the Let's Chat button and let's talk more about this and anything else that you feel is of interest to you.
