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Let’s be real, it’s been a tough couple of years. Covid-19 rocked all our worlds and took a major toll on our mental health in ways that most of us have never experienced before.
Wellness has always been an essential part of our company culture. During our Covid-driven office closure, we tried to keep our team’s spirits up with Covid-safe charitable work and our virtual holiday party.
We also understand that wellness is a journey, and as our lives return to (kind of) normal, we’re ready to take our next steps forward.
“One of the big wellness initiatives we’ve undertaken in the last six months was to really try to gauge our employees’ level of satisfaction and to recognize what the biggest issues our team is dealing with,” says Human Resource Manager Dee C.
“One of the main comments we saw come up, again and again, is our employees needing help managing stress and handling their own mental wellness and so we knew we had to make that a priority moving forward.”
In response to our employee surveys, Advertise Purple is rolling out a number of new wellness initiatives including:
- Every employee receiving a personal account on the Calm app
- Our new flex-time policy allows employees to work three days a week from home and two in the office.
- The addition of mental wellness PTO
- Increased automation of tasks and the addition of coordinators to help manage workloads.
“No one in our office was really a wellness expert,” adds Dee. “So, we relied on a number of outside vendors to help us develop these programs.”
Initially, the plan was for Advertise Purple to focus an entire hour of work time on wellness once a week, but after learning about best practices from other companies, we realized that shorter but more frequent sessions would produce better results for our employees.
“Now we’re offering fifteen-minute wellness sessions through the Calm app at the start of the day every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.”
Of course like all things Advertise Purple, our new program was built on the best available data.
Research performed by Dr. Monica Worline and Dr. Jane Dutton, show that employees see a measured improvement in both performance and their personal mental health when they can work in an environment where they have more control over their time and a flexible schedule.
“These environments allow employees to adapt to their circumstances — whether around mental health or any other challenges happening in their lives,” Dr. Dutton says in the Harvard Business Review.
That’s why our new policies reflect these studies.
“After surveying our employees we quickly understood that our initial expectations that everyone would come back to the office Monday through Friday wasn’t what people wanted. So we created a more flexible and balanced policy that everyone is much happier with.”
And to be sure, while these are our first steps towards developing a stronger mental wellness policy, they definitely won’t be our last. We’ll continue to listen to our employees and deliver on the kinds of programs they need to succeed.
