workplace
Now more than ever, employee well-being is really important and crucial to getting through this situation where many staff are working from home. For some, our usual morning commute has been swapped with a walk downstairs or to our desk and for others, we’re juggling the day’s professional work with trying to teach our kids that are no longer attending school.
All of us are making big adjustments as a result of the surreal situation we find ourselves in. At Athene, we really value our team culture and want to make sure that everyone is okay and feels as positive as possible about working from home. But how can we achieve this when we’re not with each other?
On Workplace Wellbeing Day, we want to share what we’ve been up to, to help other companies engage with their staff remotely. So, here’s what we have been doing:
Regular Zoom/Teams Chats
We’re people-people. We’re all missing seeing everyone around the office and being able to talk about things, from work to homelife. So we’ve started to hold regular team catch-ups through the wonderful technologies available to us, meaning we don’t have to miss out on our usual meetings and opportunities to work together. Many of these are business focused while others are more social, like our monthly Book Club that took place virtually for the first time last week!
Making an Athene playlist
When there isn’t the background noise of your colleagues buzzing around the office, what better way to fill the silence than music. The team have created a shared Spotify playlist where we can add our top 10 favourite songs and enjoy each other’s suggestions.
Getting to know each other through Guess Who and photos
Another fun suggestion was to use Teams to play Guess Who throughout the day to boost well-being across our home workplaces. It took us four out of five questions the other day to get the answer, so maybe we need some more practice!
We’re also going to quiz each other by sharing abstract photos of our homes or something that captures our personality and see if we can guess who has shared it.
We’re expecting to hear a lot of “how did you not get that one”!
Sharing the things we enjoy
Each morning, we’ve been sending our internal Teams channel the content that has boosted our mood or has helped us to see the positive in this confusing time. Ranging from good news stories, such as the Venice canals clearing from pollution, to amusing campaigns, such as Innocent’s daily updates.
It can really help knowing we’re all in the same position, and we all need a little bit of good (or random) news to cheer us up on a Monday morning!
Fitness in the front room
We’re thinking of running a 20-minute fitness session to stretch ours legs and ensure that we’re up and moving at some point in the day. It’s important that the fresh air and exercise that we would normally get from commuting or going on a lunch break isn’t missed out now we’re working from home.
If you’ve moved to home working in light of COVID-19, don’t let the wellbeing of your employees fall out of sight just because you aren’t physically together.
If you’re unsure about how to communicate with your staff during this time, check out our recent blogs about internal comms and how to manage your comms in a crisis.