5 Tips: How to Increase Employee Engagement with Workplace Wellness Programs

The key to a successful workplace wellness program is employee engagement. The reverse is also true. That is, one way to increase employee engagement is a successful wellness program.

Yesterday we were in a client’s break room, waiting for a meeting room to open up , and I noticed several flyers on the bulletin board about various wellness offerings. I was surprised by my initial reaction, which was, “Who would sign up for those?”

Why did they strike me as loser offerings? Because they seemed preachy and goody-goody and completely devoid of anything fun. One sounded like the school nurse was going to take you through a lecture on the five food groups. I’m not suggesting that wellness should be a barrel of laughs, but a good program creates energy and involvement. The more employees you can get to participate, the stronger your program will be.

An effective wellness program will do more than just increase productivity because people feel better and have more energy. It also gives co-workers a chance to do something together that’s unrelated to their usual work roles. It equals the playing field, so to speak, in a way that lets junior employees spend some time on an equal footing with those who rank above them in the company hieirarchy. It will also build relationships between people in different departments, which helps smooth the way to better teamwork and increased collaboration.

So how do you create a wellness program with plenty of employee engagement? Here are five tips:

1. Ask the employees what they want. Particularly in a small company, you can solicit input from the group. You can do a survey, if you want, but it might be easier just to ask people about their wellness concerns. Are they looking for ways to find time for exercise? Do they really wish they could quit smoking? Are they trying to eat healthier?

2. Get their help in constructing the program. Give some influential employees ownership of developing the program. If the group wants a yoga class at lunch, let an employee track down a good yoga instructor willing to do a class in the conference room. If they’re interested in a buddy-system diet, let an employee research South Beach vs. The Zone vs. WeightWatchers.

3. Make sure management joins in. The top level people in the company need to suit up and show up. If you give the impression that the boss is too busy for exercise, for example, employees might interpret the fitness program as something meant only for those who aren’t as serious about their work. Besides making it clear that you’re committed to wellness, it adds extra motivation for participation, at least by those employees who want more chances to rub shoulders with the boss.

4. Add an element of competition. Put together a contest with some level of cash prize, or a free day off, or something employees will see as worth their while. Look for a way to compete that doesn’t automatically give an advantage to the fittest among the group. For instance, instead of a contest to see who can bench press the most weight, compete on who can complete three workouts a week for the most weeks.

5. Create a collaborative goal. If your group tends to get a little too competitive, choose a goal they work towards together. Maybe after the employees collectively walk or run 10,000 miles, the company donates $1,000 to a worthy cause. Or let the collaborative goal benefit the employees more directly. After they lose so many pounds as a group, you’ll hire a massage therapist to give chair massages on Friday afternoon.

Building a good place to work. Not Utopia.

In a market where good jobs are at a premium, it’s been surprising that so many of our recent job applicants have been strikingly unprofessional. Actually, self-focused might be a better description. Confused, maybe, about the way business works.

My small company is in the process of interviewing for a new staff accountant. At Tribe, as in most ad agencies, that’s the position that truly requires a buttoned-up personality.  The writers and art directors and other creative types here can get away with being a little flaky or free spirits, but not the person we’re trusting to add up the money and pay the bills.

We had one highly recommended applicant decline a phone interview because she was “busy running errands all day.” Another spent much of her interview explaining how she really needed a company that understood where she was in her life and “what she needed in terms of life balance.”

It’s true; Tribe does support work-life balance. Our company purpose is To Make Life Better, and part of that is supporting our employees in enjoying better lives. We generally don’t work long hours or weekends, we bring in a company-paid healthy lunch several days a week and we have a meditation room that gets a good bit of use. We host an annual company fitness competition and allow employees to use up to five work hours a week for exercise. In the spirit of balance, we also keep wine and beer cooling in the fridge and will often share a late afternoon sip of something as we’re finishing up work.

But that often seems to be misinterpreted by outsiders to mean that work comes second. It doesn’t. Tribe is a business. The first obligation of any business is to make money. If a company doesn’t make money, it won’t be in business for long. If it goes out of business, all those employees have to go, too. (And having a job remains a pretty important part of that coveted work-life balance thing.)

We make money by doing good work for our clients, over and over again, consistently. We do good work by hiring people who are very, very good at what they do. There is not one person at Tribe who doesn’t perform at an extremely high level. To do that, day after day after day, requires a level of professionalism that doesn’t put business obligations or opportunities second in line to running personal errands.

I hope Tribe is a great place to work. I believe it’s smart business to support our employees in living good lives as well as in doing good work. But Tribe would be a much less satisfying place to work without the passion and dedication that makes us all proud of what we do.

How does a small ad agency manage to launch an iPhone app?

Back in April, I read an article in the New York Times titled “The iPhone Gold Rush” and came into the office the next morning mumbling about how we should try making an iPhone app. Yesterday, Tribe‘s first iPhone application launched in the App Store and on iTunes.

This is a perfect example of how quickly a small company can do something that would take a large corporation months of meetings before they even got going. A small team of talented and capable people can move mountains — or in this case, launch an iPhone app in something under six months.

Here’s how it happened: We took it one step at a time. First, we kicked around ideas for the app and decided to start with a mini-version of a printed product we’d recently developed for entrepreneurs. The Start Your Own Company deck, from our Starter Cards division, is a stack of 52 cards that breaks down the process of launching and building a business into manageable steps.

Second, we started poking around for partners who could supply the programming skills we don’t have in-house. Through a friend, we found a team of developers who wanted to try their hand at an iPhone app. (Extra kudos and love to those programmers: Stephanie Baird and Ladd Usher.)

Next, we went through the process to be approved as a registered member of the Apple  iPhone Developer Program. It’s a somewhat daunting application, but between our designer, our accountant and our programmers, we managed to fill in all the blanks.

Then our creative team worked to design and format all the screen shots required and the programmers did their thing. We went back and forth on whether the screens would flip or slide and if the type should be a point size larger or smaller, and eventually arrived at a design that pleased us all.

We submitted the Start Your Own Company app, and sat back to wait. In less than a week, we received word that it was approved and ready to be launched in the App Store on September 10. In the past few days, we’ve whipped out press releases and shot a demo video for YouTube and figured out how to submit the app to reviewers.

Like many projects in a small company, this one was touched by every hand in the house. I tossed the idea out there on the table, but the team took over from there. Here are what I consider to be some interesting lessons in this process.

1: There is great momentum in making a decision. We didn’t hem and haw about whether to do it or not, and we didn’t overthink what that first app would be. Sometimes there are many right answers, and there’s power in picking one and moving on.

2: A good size for a team is the number of people you can get in a room right now. If you’ve got to coordinate several departments and calendars, you can spin wheels for a long while. A smaller team is less cumbersome and more efficient.

3: It  helps to have a range of skill sets on the team. This particular team included a writer, an art director, two programmers, an account manager, a traffic manager, an accountant, a president and a CEO. That covers a wide range of strengths.

4: If you need outside help, create a win-win situation. We couldn’t have done this without Stephanie and Ladd. We needed people who could program, and they were interested in adding an iPhone app to their resumes, so the partnership worked for all of us.

The wisdom of the water cooler: Why it pays to let your employees socialize

As a business owner, do you get impatient when you see employees standing around chewing the fat? Try thinking about it another way. By establishing close social connections, your employees are doing something very positive for the company.

Giving your employees a chance to develop personal friendships means they’ll be better able to work as a team. Blake Ashforth, a management professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, agrees that building these social ties can be good for business. “When you come to know people on a personal level,” he says, “you’re far more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt and to have goodwill in your dealings. And that’s a tremendous buffer against the itches and pains of everyday life in organizations.”

Small companies have an advantage over large ones here. The most cost-effective (and probably the  most powerful) way to promote this feeling of belonging and connection is to allow room for it to happen organically. In large corporations, these sorts of social ties — beyond those with immediate co-workers — have to be created artificially, through team-building exercises or other initiatives that employees are likely to find sort of hokey. Small companies generally have their people all under one roof, and few enough employees that they all bump up against each other every day. 

These relationships are built one water cooler conversation at a time. Try not to begrudge your team the time to socialize. It will pay off down the road when they’re better able to problem solve together or to work as a tight team to meet a challenging deadline. At Tribe, our people spend a lot of the day laughing and teasing and telling stories. But I think that’s part of why we’re such an incredibly productive company, despite our small staff. 

Personal connections among your staff members — and with you — can also build loyalty to your company. When people feel like they belong, that they’re cared about, that they’re appreciated for who they are as people as well as employees, they’re far less likely to be looking around for other opportunities.

Small Business Strategies: Creating workplace wellness programs

You know that your employees will be more productive if they’re well, but how do you put that into action? If you’re not a huge corporation, you may think you can’t afford a wellness program, but there are plenty of things you can do to create an environment that supports healthy living.

Wellness programs are also great for your office culture. Not only does such a program reinforce the idea that your company is somewhere people live healthy, balanced lives, it also can be powerful for building relationships among your staff. Doing something together that’s not work related, like a yoga class or a fitness contest, takes the corporate  hierarchy out of the equation and lets employees relate to each other outside their job functions.

As the boss, it’s important for you to participate as well. Not only does that speak volumes about your commitment to wellness, it also allows your staff to interact with you in ways that don’t involve you being the top dog. So put on those running shorts and put your ego aside. And remember, it’s okay if some of your employees can run faster than you. 

Here are some ways you can promote wellness in your company, at a range of price points:

1. Keep fresh fruit in the break room. Or any sort of healthy snacks. When employees feel a little blood sugar slump, it will be easy for them to grab something that won’t make them crash again later.

2. Start a lunchtime walking group. Or an after work running group. This can be a casual employee-led group. You don’t need to hire an instructor. (Although you may want employees to sign a waiver acknowledging responsibility for any potential injuries.)

3. Give wellness hours. Allow employees to take an extended lunch once or twice a week for exercise. Or to take an hour during the day, whenever their schedules allow. At Tribe, we allow everyone to put up to 5 hours a week of wellness hours on their timesheet. This gives them the idea that it’s okay to work out during the workday, but they very rarely use more than an hour or so of wellness time a week.

4. Set aside a meditation room. This can be an empty office, or you could let the conference room be used for meditation, when it’s  not needed for meetings. At Tribe, we  have a small office containing nothing but a couch and a CD player. Two or three people will often do a short meditation after lunch. I once asked a friend to come in and lead a lunchtime meditation lesson, but Tribe folks also use a lot of guided meditations on CDs.

5. Sponsor a yoga class. We used to do Yoga Fridays at lunch, which meant anybody who had time piled in a car and drove to the nearest yoga studio. Occasionally, I’d treat everyone to a company-paid class, but most times we all paid our own way. The important thing is that they didn’t have to feel guilty about that company-sanctioned two-hour lunch.

6. Spring for a massage. This is especially appreciated in the midst of a busy season. You can offer a gift certificate for a massage to one employee who deserves it, like after pulling off a particularly challenging project, or you could have a massage therapist come in and do 10-minute chair massages for the whole group. 

7. Establish a company fitness competition. We do this every year at Tribe, and it’s created some significant changes in a few employee’s lives. Our fitness competition lasts for 12 weeks and starts in February, right about when we’ve all abandoned our New Year’s resolutions. If you’re interested in setting up a similar plan, you might find some helpful ideas in my blog titled “How to launch a workplace fitness competition.”

Small Business Strategies: Ever thought of writing a book?

Writing a book can be a great way to promote your business. If you are truly knowledgeable about your industry, or a certain niche in your industry, then you have expertise you can share. If you are willing to go out and interview a bunch of people about some area related to your business, you will have interesting material to share. Even if you just devote some time to researching a specific topic, you can become an authority on that subject and have information to share.

Authoring a book positions you as an expert. There’s something about a book that impresses us, even in this age of blogs and texts and Kindles. The assumption is that if you wrote a book on the subject, you must know what you’re talking about.

Clients like working with experts. It makes the purchase decision much easier for them, because you’ve already been validated by the publication of this book. 

Here are a few things to know, before you start writing:

1. You will probably not make money on your book. In fact, it’s very unlikely. It’s more probable that you will spend money on your book, especially if you decide to aggressively promote it. Think of the book as visibility for your company, and not as a moneymaker. 

2. Don’t plug your business in the book. This is not an advertisement. This is about informing and educating and maybe even entertaining. Stay focused on what the reader wants to know about the subject matter as opposed to what you want them to know about your company. That’s not to say you can’t mention your company. Examples from your own experience can be useful in the text. Just make sure you’re not beating them over the head with a sales message.

3.  A book doesn’t have to be that long. I’ve spoken with some business owners who are intimidated by the idea of writing an entire book, but a book might be shorter than you think. In fact, shorter is sometimes better. Your audience may not be interested in reading a business book the length of “War and Peace.” Maybe you should shoot for more like 60,000 words or so. 

4. You might spend more time promoting your book than writing it. For my book on women entrepreneurs, I backed myself into a tight deadline with the initial manuscript and completing it on time became a Herculean task. I had the idea that finishing the manuscript meant reaching the finish line. But oh no,that was just the beginning! I spent the next year and more promoting the book, even after the lengthy edit process that followed the initial manuscript. I hired a book publicist from a big firm in New York, and still the promotion ate up hours and hours of my business day for months on end. 

5. If you don’t promote your book, no one will know it’s there. Of course, you can still use it as a door opener to potential clients, but it’s much more effective if they’ve heard about the book somewhere else. It’s a tree in the forest sort of thing. If no one is there to hear it fall, does it make an impact?

6. There’s a difference in a publisher and self-publishing. The traditional route is to offer your book, or a proposal of your book, to a number of publishers, usually through an agent. If a publisher bites, you’ll get a contract and an advance on royalties. That advance is often the only money you’ll ever see from the book, unless it goes into a second printing and becomes backlisted in the publisher’s catalog. This process will often take a year or more, from proposal to publication. If you choose to self-publish, you are essentially paying a company to print your book and taking on the job of distribution yourself. This is faster, and is becoming a more respected way to go than it was years ago, when a vanity press was not something to brag about. You can put your book on Amazon, sell it through your own website, or set up a card table at speaking engagements. Once in awhile, a self-published book becomes such a hit that a publisher makes an offer to do another printing. 

7. Get clear on why you’re writing the book. If you see the book as a way to create visibility for your business, then this process is very manageable. Start with the end in mind and work backwards to create a book that will be relevant to your target market. But if you just want to write a book, then go ahead and write it. If your dream is to be an author, you don’t need a business reason. Just know your expectations before going into the project.

Small Business Strategies: Managing employee performance — with a criticism sandwich

If you’re a boss, you have to occasionally give some negative feedback to employees. But plenty of people react to criticism defensively, and either begin offering excuses or get so upset they shut down completely. So how do you say it so they can hear? 

I’ve found one of the best ways is to offer a criticism sandwich. First, you talk about something they’re doing well. Then you offer the criticism. And finally, you top it off with another compliment. 

This sandwich approach is based on the assumption that you hired this employee for a reason and that he or she offers many strengths. The criticism is regarding only one small part of your employee’s performance, and is not by any means your entire experience of this person’s work. Often the very thing you’re criticizing is in fact the flip side of a strength. Perhaps this employee is not so good at catching details. But the flip side is that he or she shows a strong ability to see the big picture. 

So you might first talk about this strength, and how valuable it is to the company. Then, calmly and unemotionally, discuss the issue you need the employee to correct, such as a growing tendency to let errors in the work slip past. Finish up by once again praising this employee’s strengths and your confidence that he or she can overcome this one issue. 

Everything you say must be true, however. If you praise your employees for things you don’t believe they’re really much good at, you’ll undermine their ability to trust your feedback, whether negative or positive.

Some will also catch on to your technique. I once told a friend about the criticism sandwich, which he then used successfully with many employees. Until one woman stopped at the door to his office after such a discussion and said, “You know,  you say f**** you nicer than anybody I’ve ever known.”

Small Business Strategies: Simple Feng Shui for your office

Maybe it will increase your financial success and maybe it will just make your office a more pleasant place to work, but a little Feng Shui certainly can’t hurt. At Tribe, we hired a Feng Shui expert to help with our new office when we were in the middle of its design. She nixed a few things I’d planned, like putting the accountant in a tiny office with no windows and cool blue paint in the lobby and common areas. (We made the windowless office a meditation room instead and chose a warm adobe clay color of the lobby walls.) I can’t say if it’s had an impact on Tribe’s success, but I know that when I’m there, I generally feel both relaxed and productive.

Here a few things you can do to add a little Feng Shui to your workplace, whether you work at home or in office space:

1. Make sure your desk is positioned for power. That means you don’t want your back to the door or a hallway. You should be able to see people coming, so that symbolically, you can’t be attacked unawares. You also don’t want your back to a window, which is too exposed and doesn’t offer strong backing behind you.

2. Activate your wealth corner: The far left corner, as viewed from the entrance to your office, is considered your area of wealth, symbolically. Put something green and growing there, like a tall potted plant, or maybe wind chimes, to create movement. Same goes for the far left corner of your desk. Place something there that means financial success to you. In that corner on my desk at home, I keep a paperweight that used to sit on the desk of a friend of mine, who not only enjoyed great wealth, but also used her financial resources to benefit many people. 

3. Activate your helpful friends: The near right corner of your desk, and of your office, symbolizes helpful friends. That’s a great corner of your desk for the phone. If cords and phone jacks make that problematic, try your Rolodex or your Blackberry or a stack of business cards for key contacts. 

4. Choose the power seat in meetings: For a client presentation or any meeting where you’ll want as much power as possible, choose a seat about midway along the side of the conference table, facing the door. Many people assume the head of the table is the power spot, but trust me, the middle of the table puts you in a more powerful position. 

5. Get rid of the clutter: This one is perhaps less interesting than the preceding tips, but it’s hugely important. Do whatever you have to do to keep your surfaces clear of clutter, especially old, inactive clutter. If you’ve got stacks of paper on your credenza for a project you’re actively working on, that’s one thing. Piles of old mail or unread reports or other inactive clutter are surprisingly draining. Get rid of them, and you’ll feel a surge of new energy.

Small Business Strategies: How to launch a workplace fitness competition

You don’t have to be a big corporation to have a company wellness program. A fitness competition is a great way to bring wellness to life in your office, and it’s not particularly expensive or cumbersome to pull off. At Tribe, our fitness competition is an annual event, starting sometime just after the new year and having us all buffed out just in time for swimsuit season. (You can see some of our top contestants in the photo at above.) Here’s how we do it:

Rules of the game: Everyone is eligible to play, but no one has to. (For instance, our accountant Lauren never plays because she says, “I already look good in a bikini and that’s all that matters.”) The duration of the contest is 12 weeks.

The prize: A cash prize is good. We offer $500 cash to the winner, but I think our folks would participate with just as much zeal if the prize were only twenty bucks. After a few weeks, the contest becomes about much more than money. Whatever you offer as the prize is potentially the only expense of the competition.

Individual entries: Each player comes up with their own fitness plan and sets a goal to complete so many workouts or hours of exercise weekly. That goal cannot be altered once the contest begins. We’ve had people do everything from early-morning outdoor boot camp to late night hockey games to training for a marathon. Players are urged to set a goal that’s not too ambitious to pull off week after week, but not so modest a goal that the rest of the group will make fun of it.

Wellness hours: We also allow everyone to put up to five hours a week on their time sheets for wellness hours. That means they can take a long lunch to do a yoga class down the street or take a mid-afternoon break to work out in our office building’s tiny gym downstairs. Many days we’re too busy in the office for them to take advantage of that, but they seem to really like this option, when there’s time for it.

Scoring: We make a giant chart with everyone’s name and squares for each of the 12 weeks. On Monday mornings, we all stand in front of the chart and report on whether or not we’ve met our goal for the previous week. If you did, you get a star. If you didn’t, nothing. There are no partial points. If you only did four of the five workouts that comprise your goal, no star. Honor system prevails. 

The winner: The person with the most stars at the end of 12 weeks wins the prize. But along the way, the competition gets fierce. At Tribe, we frequently have ad hoc teams spring up, despite the fact that it’s an individual score. One year Team Studio was the big rival for Team Breezeway (which was composed of everyone with a desk sort of in the hallway because they don’t have a real office.) One year we had several finalists tied at the end of 12 weeks and had to go into sudden death, which stretched out for a couple of months and was painful to watch. This year we agreed to settle any ties with a vote, for which aggressive campaigning is allowed.

The benefits: At the end of 12 weeks, everyone is more fit. A few of our people have made dramatic changes in their bodies and lives through the fitness competition. It’s also a healthy change to have us all competing on the same level playing field, so the intern is as likely to rise to the top as the CEO. (Maybe more so.) Maybe most importantly,  it elevates the sense of camaraderie and fun at work. You can feel a  heightened level of energy in the office, and that probably impacts our work as well.

Small Business Strategies: Inspire employee loyalty now, before the economy gets better

When you sell talent, your inventory goes down in the elevator every night. If your business depends on your employees coming up with great ideas, maintaining strong client relationships or possessing the sort of odd knowledge that not just anyone would have a handle on, then now’s the time to cement those bonds between your people and your company. 

Sure, you get calls and emails every day from people looking for jobs. But they might not be the right people. And even if they were, you’d have to train them, give them time to settle into your company culture, help your clients feel comfortable with new names and faces. It’s much better business to keep the team you have. I realize that at the moment they’re all unbelievably grateful for their jobs. However, when the economy turns around, which it eventually will, you don’t want to lose them because some other offer comes their way. Here are a few things you can do to reduce your chances of the grass is greener scenario:

1. What’s good for the employees is good for the company. Whether you’re talking faster computers or better coffee or good music or letting people bring their dogs to work, whatever you can do to help your employees enjoy their time at the office will repay you in morale, productivity and loyalty. 

2. Let everybody be the boss of something. Teamwork is great, but we all like a chance to be in charge. Give people their own projects to run, and then back off and let them do it. Your number two person can probably run a sizable piece of business without your interference. Your admin can make reasonable decisions on what restaurant to choose when ordering lunch to be delivered for a client meeting. Even the intern can handle something without being second guessed by you. What the heck, let him order whichever brand of copier paper he thinks best. 

3. Give them the flexibility to deal with what’s going on in their lives. The people in your employ are human beings, which means that although they may be professional and dedicated workers, they also have kids who break their arms, aging parents who begin to lose their minds, dogs that need surgery and water heaters that burst. Assume that all your employees will need time out of the office to deal with this kind of stuff, and let them know it’s okay. They’ll make up in gratitude what you lose in a few hours of their productivity. 

4. Help them with their career goals. Every employee wants to know they have a future with the company, and it means a great deal if they know the boss has given some thought to his or her career path. Talk with your people about what they see themselves doing down the road and how they think they could contribute to the company’s growth. One caveat here: I always stress with employees, particularly the young, entitled ones, that my company is not a school with an obligation to provide them with an education in whatever area they wish. The onus is on them to figure out what they can contribute  that happens to be something the company actually needs. 

5. Offer ways to help them stay healthy. This could be as large as offering to spring for gym memberships or as small as keeping fresh fruit in the break room, but anything you can do to help your people improve their wellness is a good investment in your relationship. Encourage the ladies in accounting to form a walking group at lunch, or sponsor the marathoners in the group who are running to raise money for leukemia, but make wellness a priority in your culture.