In the past few years it's been wonderful to see personal wellbeing identified as a vital factor in the workplace.

For leaders, it can feel like an uphill battle to invest in the personal wellbeing of your employees.

It doesn't have to be though. Here are some questions to get you started:

1. How do my employees like to be rewarded?

Start by looking at how you celebrate, reward and recognize your employees. But go a step further and actually ask them!

Too often leaders focus on money or on trinkety ideas for rewards. Instead, just by digging a little bit deeper or being more thoughtful, we can come up with great solutions.

For example, dig a bit deeper to find out what really gets your employees out of bed in the morning. When someone embodies your organization's values or achieves a significant goal, send them to a conference focused on an area they're passionate about or contribute to a movement they love or give them time off and help them to find something to do on that time off with their family that ticks a bucket list item.

A thoughtful and simple way to invest in personal wellbeing is to focus on writing thoughtful handwritten letters. These don't need to be long and they shouldn't be about random things.

They should be focused on those values you're most passionate about. Do you really want to see your people take initiative? Well, when one of your team takes initiative, take the time to write a handwritten note to them expressing how thankful you are for the initiative they've taken.

2. What can I do to invest in my employees' physical health?

So much of personal wellbeing has nothing to do with work. Of course there are things we can do like finding out how stressful the deadlines are we're creating or looking at the culture in the office and how it's affecting people.

But I want to encourage you to ask your people how you can contribute to their physical health. Think outside the box. Physical health can include getting light in the morning to help with sleep, getting a good amount of zone 2 cardio and focusing on our sleep.

You might be wondering how on earth you can contribute to those things? Well this is where we need to think outside the box. Working with your employees to invest in their personal health can look like remote work options so they can sleep more, changing start or finish times to help with commute and their preference for physical activity.

Your people could love the idea of having a float membership as part of their salary where they can go nearby on lunch breaks and just have a cave float. Or bringing a massage therapist in and making it part of the workplace culture that people can have a massage whenever they like.

Or it might mean paying to send any employees to a sleep clinic who struggle with sleep. Some of these things are expensive and others are fairly inexpensive, but regardless if your people know you actually really truly want to invest in their personal health however you can so they feel great beyond the work they're doing for you, people will appreciate it.

3. How can we provide investment for employees' mental health?

Some of the things mentioned above also go for mental health, but I think it's worth asking yourself this question with a focus on mental health.

I believe we'll one day see mental health viewed exactly the same as physical health. Sore tummy? Stay home. Feeling anxious day? Stay home. See how we don't yet really see them the same?

Once again, start by engaging your people and find out their views on mental health. It's not about trinkety ideas to provide a phone number people can call if they're feeling depressed.

See what they'd like to see. You could bring in a psychologist for people to talk to as part of the office or you could invest significant money in mental health classes available for your people for free if they're interested so they can learn about their mental health.

Seriously though, if we just made a proper deal of giving people mental health days and encouraging it and celebrating it (privately with them) when they take them, and probably taking them ourselves and communicating that to our people to build this culture, we'd have a massive step forward in this area of leadership.

Are you questioning how to increase employee wellbeing and you want to think of creative ways to invest in your employees' wellbeing, then get in contact and we can work with you to run employee wellbeing surveys and create working groups in your organization to seriously invest in the personall wellbeing of your people.

Book a call to discuss how we can help you invest in the personal wellbeing of your employees