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How much do you think about mental health in the workplace? The benefits of centering mental wellbeing amongst your employees are huge. Not only in terms of their personal interest but also in terms of your company overall. There are a number of ways to get creative about how you can increase employee wellness.
Creative wellness is the practice of using creative arts – like painting, music or dance – to promote psychological, physical and emotional good health. By connecting with these activities we are able to find ways to express the everyday stresses or worries that so many of us face. Our growing struggles with work life balance coupled with how increasingly hard it is to switch off from the digital world means that stress, burnout and mental health issues have been steadily on the increase for years.
A lot of the rhetoric around self-care and mental wellbeing has tended to focus on things such as exercise and diet, but creative activities and the arts offer a unique way to tackle emotional issues both personally and in collaboration with others.
The benefits of different creative activities are diverse; writing is an excellent way to work through pain or difficult emotions; drumming has been shown to release stress, and visual arts have been shown to increase positive emotions.
The shift in consciousness that creative wellness opportunities and activities provide allows us to shift our perspective and re-engage with the world around us afresh.
There are a huge number of reasons why it’s worth putting employee wellbeing and welfare at the center of your organization and its culture. An employer who offers wellbeing support sees the benefits. Your staff are at the center of what you do, without the right people your organization just won’t run. And whilst there’s a lot of talk about wellness it’s worth reflecting on how much you actually promote it. Do your employees take proper breaks? Is it acceptable to talk openly about wellbeing and mental health?
So what are the exact benefits of promoting an employee wellbeing program?
Start your day right by holding an employee wellbeing breakfast. A change from the office or usual working environment, fresh air and the outdoors are all a great way to kick off a day at work. So an outdoor event complete with a range of healthy foods, drinks and conversation can all serve to create a calm and engaging way to begin a working day.
Sometimes it’s the simple things. Breathing may not sound like much to focus on but the benefits of good breathing techniques are well documented. Organizing a breathing workshop can teach employees how to challenge things like stress and anxiety, improve concentration and outlook, or restore energy. All of which benefit mental health and physical wellbeing.
Online workshops are a great way to connect your team; creative workshops allow them to express their own personal challenges whilst opening up and therefore building relationships with colleagues. Scribl offers a wide range of creative activities across a number of creative expressions including workshops focusing on drawing, crafting and poetry such as Mandala Poetry; visual art workshops like Dual Emotions, which focus on dealing with different feelings, and transformational workshops like Transformation Collage which tackle difficult change. Our workshops are run online, meaning anyone can attend them anywhere and at any time. This is perfect as we all continue to shift into a post Covid world, your team can all attend safely even if they’re not all in the same place.
Explore our range of creative online workshops to find ways to promote wellbeing.
Officially designated fitness days – such as National Fitness Day or World Fitness Day – offer a great opportunity to celebrate physical activity in the workplace. Offering on-site activities helps employees experience new ways to stay fit. Pilates, yoga, kickboxing, cycling or Zumba all make excellent options that can take place on-site or even virtually in some cases.
Setting up an art or pottery class for your employees is beneficial not only in terms of the restorative and stress relieving properties artistic activities bring but also because it has social value. Interacting with colleagues in an artistic class environment can help build new relationships and strengthen working ones.
Setting up a cooking class has both social and wellness benefits. Perhaps bring in an expert chef or a registered dietician, center it around a theme or particular type of cuisine. Use superfoods – things like kale, kimchi, chai tea and quinoa – and explain the key benefits of eating well for mental wellness. Once you’ve cooked up your feast you have the added benefit of the social time spent eating together.
How creative are you when it comes to your team’s wellness?
As you can see, bringing creative ideas about wellbeing into the workplace has lots of benefits. Share these ideas with your managers or colleagues and try out the ones that work best for your organization.
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