Workplace Wellbeing

Stress and mental health issues are the fastest growing category of disability costs for Canadian employers. It affects performance and sustainable growth. Organizations are increasingly promoting wellbeing and developing resilience to support teams and their leaders in this increasingly complex and fast-paced environment. Learning tools to manage our busy minds, building flexibility, resilience and effective coping skills is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage.

Relationships in the workplace can foster harmony and resilience, drive performances and creativity and unlock a team’s potential and commitment. They can also generate stress, hinder performance and lead to disengagement. Building authentic, compassionate and meaningful connections while communicating mindfully are shown to foster well-being, engagement and create value

With increased pressure to perform and keep up to life’s ever-increasing pace, our brains and bodies tend to fall into survival mode, focusing on short-term imperatives, thus limiting the expression of our, and our teams’ full potential. Identifying one’s sense of purpose, values, priorities and contributions become a strong catalyst to wellbeing and engagement, for individuals and teams.

The highly competitive, global environment in which businesses operate makes creativity crucial. Creativity and innovative problem solving require a focused and open mind, not the survival response or the busy and unfocused mind associated with stress. Developing mindsets and skillsets to promote creativity and innovation provides a clear competitive edge.

In today’s busy environment, attention is increasingly diluted and biases often cloud our decisions. No matter what we believe, most of the decisions we make are driven by emotions, bringing us to automatically react. A mindful leader is able to observe and manage thoughts and emotions, which can often hijack rational behaviour and thus better manage decisions based on facts and present moment realities.

The new norm in organizations is on-going change, with accelerating pace, new organizational models, emerging generational gaps, increasing communication channels, and highly competitive environments among others. Developing an organization with increased resilience is becoming a new competitive advantage to best cope with change and on-going demands linked to transformation.