How Weekly10 check-in tools for feedback and visibility can help employee wellbeing

Employee wellbeing has taken a bit of a battering of late, and it's really starting to show. Stress levels have risen. Sick days taken for mental health issues have spiked. And people are citing poor wellbeing as a growing reason for why they’re leaving jobs.

So managers and leaders should be doing all they can to stem the tide of poor workplace wellbeing. In steps Weekly10…

Gallups’ ‘State of the Global Workplace Report’ in 2021 made for pretty grim reading. Not least due to the state of employee wellbeing. Global stress levels had risen 5% between 2019 and 2020. The biggest year-on-year rise since 2014 and the second biggest on record .

On top of this Gallup also found that employees felt more worried, angry, and sad. 41% of all respondents had experienced worry to a significant degree on any given day.  

SHRM research on supporting mental health in the post-pandemic workplace found that sick days due to mental health rose 12% in 2020 – the biggest one-year jump since records begun.

Why worry about wellbeing?

Poor employee wellbeing costs UK businesses £45 billion a year, and over £1 trillion globally.

Financial benefits aren't the only reasons for looking after your people. There are also a host of business benefits for improving employee wellbeing:

• Increased productivity
• Reduced absenteeism
• Decreased presenteeism
• Lowered rates of leaveism
• Increased employee engagement
• Improved staff retention
• Attract top talent
• Improved employee morale
• Reduced organisational stress
• Improved health behaviours of staff

How a Weekly10 check-in helps improve the wellbeing of your people  

Improving employee wellbeing is a multifaceted and complex task, because groups of individual employees can have a wide variety of different needs. Your most ambitious employees need career progression and a sense of personal development to feel content. On the other hand, people have lives outside of work, and employees also need the flexibility to deal with things like family situations. But that's hardly the extent of it.

Employees with physical disabilities require you to consider workplace accessibility in its most literal forms. And then there are the issues of stress and poor mental health that can affect literally any employee in your business. There is no quick-fix or sure-fire solution.

Many organisations spend considerable amounts of money on gym memberships, free lunches, surprise presents and social events. For some of these businesses, that may work for some of their people. For most, it works for very few of their people, particularly when it comes to long-term wellbeing improvements.

As we recently discussed, wellbeing needs to be tackled from the roots up. That's because the roots almost always point to something wrong culturally within an organisation. Typically, that’s an issue with the way leaders (fail to) communicate with their people.

Weekly10 gives you the tools and the process to fix the way communication works within any business, for all employees. The idea of feedback being one-way and top-down, like a teacher leading a class, is horribly outdated. That's because it blinds management to the very real problems in their workplace culture.

The Weekly10 check-in gives employees a voice. It enables them to share their thoughts, experiences and opinions with their managers and leaders quickly and directly. Most importantly it helps them to do this regularly and in a structured way.

Why does employee feedback and visibility improve wellbeing?

Our tools empower both employees and their managers to build good habits around sharing feedback. The little-and-often approach of the check-in makes giving and receiving feedback super simple.

Feedback is really important, especially when it’s open and honest. Studies show that a good line of communication between managers and employees has a significant impact on wellbeing.

Getting employees into a habit of sharing feedback about their work and experiences helps them to get more comfortable talking about previously off-limits topics. With the stigma surrounding mental wellbeing specifically, encouraging your people to share is critical to their and your success.

By getting into the habit of sharing feedback – positive and negative –  employees will ask for help sooner before potential issues escalate.  

Weekly10 is built around giving and getting transparent, honest feedback regularly so your people can grow and thrive. This gives managers early visibility about what’s going on around them so that they can respond quickly. This in turn builds trust and helps open up potential wellbeing concerns and topics for more general discussion.

If you’d like to see how a Weekly10 check-in could help your employees put their wellbeing centre stage, book a demo with one of the team today.