Time ripe to refresh your workplace policy

The beginning of a new financial year brings an opportune time for business leaders to take a hard look at their workplace policies.

This is a perfect time to rethink employee wellbeing, as the right cultural changes could help to give organisations an edge over the competition by improving productivity, attraction, and retention.

“When you are talking to people about workplace culture, what it says is they value trying to do things for their employees that go beyond the expectations of a normal role,” said the chief executive of Ari Recruitment, Aimee Baker.

“I’m not saying every workplace now needs a day spa, and I’m not saying that you need to be giving out free yoga classes and all of that. What I am saying is you do need to start thinking [about] what’s on the market. How do we make ourselves stand out? How do we genuinely take care of our team and our employees?”

Part of introducing an effective wellbeing policy is to be proactive rather than reactive. That means actually sitting down and planning a strategy that will keep workers around. If employee satisfaction is lagging behind the introduction of wellness initiatives, they can fall short and damage morale.

“When you have people who love coming to work, I promise you they’re going to do a better job, and they’re going to want to stay in that role. And when they realise, I’m not getting this anywhere else, this is different, they genuinely care,” Ms Baker explained.

“There’s no point doing that massage and then yelling at them the next two days, hoping that the half-hour massage made up for it. So, it needs to align. It can’t just be the bean bags, the free breakfast, and a massage. You do also need to show it.”

Catering to your workforce is important, as applying policy needs to be reflective of those who are going to be taking advantage of it.

Ms Baker commented: “You can get creative. You can look at who’s your target market that’s working for you, what do they enjoy? It’s not always a one size fits all, but there’s definitely some really cool things I see some businesses doing out there. Those that aren’t willing to make working for them be any more attractive, I feel like they are the ones that eventually do suffer again with the attracting and retaining talent.”

Ms baker discussed one of the wellness initiatives, which is the introduction of a four-day week. This flexibility is a great way to help employees manage their work/life balance.

“In our business, we are starting to transition to a four-day work week. So longer days on your Monday through to Thursday, and then some people would do a half day. So, by 11:00am on a Friday, there’s no one else left in the office,” Ms Baker said.

“We made it an option, and it was one that most people ran with. So, a lot of my team were doing nine and a half hour days on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, [and] Thursday.”

Flexibility in work schedules can also be another great addition that allows employees to better manage their time.

“We let people choose their hours … So sometimes that might be at 10 o’clock at night, they log on to do two hours of admin. If it’s not client-facing, and you don’t have to be available in that 8:30 to 6:30 kind of window when our clients are,” she said.

Ms Baker concluded: “On outside of that, you can pick when you’re going to do your times outside of really important meetings that are set up in advance. But we do no meetings on a Friday. We try and have no deliverables so that people can structure their week.”