Although having a wellness culture is influenced by both employees and employers, without supportive leadership it is hard to support workplace wellness.

How you communicate with your employees contributes to the workplace culture. This includes one-on-one and organization-wide communication. Communication is both impacted by, and impacts, the culture.

Employees and employers respect everyone’s need for work/life balance. This is reinforced by leadership demonstrating and supporting work/life balance.

Good relationships mean employees are comfortable approaching management, talking about their health with management, and talking to management about how to start the process to ask for an accommodation even if they don’t know what the process is. When employees have good working relationships with their colleagues, people tend to show empathy and understanding towards employees with arthritis, joint pain, and back pain rather than confusion, resentment, or mistrust.

A wellness culture is supported when leadership has considered what wellness looks like in the workplace, included employees in developing that vision, and taken steps to support their employees (and themselves – it’s important to lead by example) to be healthy. This could mean having employee-assisted programs or providing a wellness space to stretch, meditate, or nap.

Having a clear process for requesting an accommodation, as well as general awareness and acceptance of flexibility and accommodations in the workplace, ensure that having an accommodation is not viewed as special treatment.

The Director of Wellness & Human Services acts as liaison between the school jurisdiction employees and their wellness.

Ensure that people in charge of health and wellness supports are visible and accessible. In the school jurisdictions, HR and administration staff are often in a central office. One school encourages their central office staff to visit the schools so that employees recognize who they are and know who they can go to if they have questions or need support.

Encourage managers, leaders, and wellness champions to engage with employees so they can tell if an employee seems to be struggling and needs some extra support.

Send out a monthly newsletter letter that shares information about a specific condition or concern, highlights wellness resources available (e.g., how to maximize using their Employee Assistance Plan), and promotes wellness events being offered.

As a part of the onboarding process, provide information about the wellness resources available, processes they may need to know, and contacts if they need support. Revisit this information periodically so that if someone needs it, they know where to go.

This includes providing professional development related to wellness, but also incorporating wellness into professional development in general. For example, start sessions by checking in with people or have a standing item where people can share “what’s going well.”