A Holistic Workplace Wellness Approach

Workplace wellness. What comes to mind when you hear these words? Screenings? Weight loss challenges? Smoking cessation? While those might have been the most common ways companies addressed wellness in the past, COVID and our current societal realities have essentially demanded that businesses address more than just the physical health of their employees.

Workplace wellness has clearly shifted to a more holistic approach that better encompasses all of the aspects that contribute to individual health. Generally, this holistic approach is made up of the following five pillars:

• Physical Wellness: Your ability to maintain a quality of life that allows you to get the most out of your daily activities without undue fatigue or physical stress. Recognizing the need for proper nutrition, physical activity and sleep
• Mental Wellness: Your ability to realize your current situation, handle life’s stresses and adapt to change and difficult times
• Financial Wellness: Your ability to effectively manage your economic life
• Social Wellness: Your ability to develop and maintain positive relationships with family, friends and coworkers
• Spiritual Wellness: Your sense of purpose, meaning in life and your ability to have peace and harmony

Now, why does Saxum give a damn about workplace wellness? And what are we doing to provide resources to our people? If we’re truly an agency obsessed for good, we must support the Saxum employees who are working on the issues that matter most in our world. Our work demands a lot, so we pour a lot into our people, because we know they are our most important investment.

We’ve launched several workplace wellness initiatives in the last 18 months, some more formal than others, to provide specific support to our team:

• Daily Wellness Slack channel: Within the first week of our entire team working remotely in March 2020, we created the Daily Wellness Slack channel to easily communicate wellness-related information agency-wide. It was originally a space to share out daily movement tips and challenges with the entire team. It didn’t take long for team members to realize working from home in the middle of a pandemic leads to a pretty sedentary life. We began to see extremely high levels of engagement and the daily posts started to go from a focus on physical health to mental health and then overall wellness.
• My Time: We recently rolled out our philosophy on My Time. This includes flexibility to work from wherever, unlimited PTO, and space in our weekly rhythms for appointments, exercise, spiritual care, and other things each of us needs to stay physically and mentally healthy. Saxum encourages our team to manage their time in a way that provides value to our company, our clients and our colleagues. Just as importantly, we protect time for our personal relationships, interests and whole selves. The two go hand in hand.
• Multi-Option Insurance Benefits: Saxum has also gone from offering one health insurance plan to now offering a variety of health plans. This allows individuals to select the plan that provides the right amount of coverage at the right cost to remain healthy and productive. In addition to the added health benefits, we have also enhanced our emotional and mental benefits offerings through our Employee Assistance Program. This program provides many easy-to-use services to help with everyday challenges of life, such as financial services, legal services and counseling services.

Workplace wellness isn’t just a trendy topic we’re latching onto at Saxum, it’s so much more. It’s about the lives of our team members, how they take care of themselves, and how Saxum can support that in any way possible. We provide resources connected to each of the five pillars of workplace wellness, no matter where our team is on their wellness journey.

Our people deserve to be at their best, so they can be there for themselves and ultimately achieve the best possible results for our clients.