A newly established business in Jersey, ErgoFit, has set its mission to lead the way in providing organisations with the ability to support and optimize the mental health, physical health and social wellbeing within their workforce.
It is well recognized that a healthy workforce is a prerequisite for sustainable development and innovation, which can promote productivity, solidarity and profit whilst reducing negative impacts of absenteeism and presenteeism.
Aaron Masefield (pictured) has developed an innovative and unique health and wellbeing model in order to harness and target organisational wellbeing and positive culture. This is inclusive of mental and physical health, as well as other areas including resilience and engagement – which have been recently highlighted as key areas that could be improved across many professional services in the first Channel Islands Wellbeing report by Marbral Advisory.
Mental health has long been a domain that has been publicised as requiring attention and support within the workforce to promote productivity, engagement, resilience and job satisfaction within an organisation. Achieving organisational success is very much related to optimising the health and wellbeing of your workforce.
Aaron explained that addressing and accommodating key areas of health and wellbeing within your organisation will strengthen the capability of your workforce to promote and take ownership of their personal mental and physical health, whilst also being able to support others.
“An integrated and collaborative approach is a key factor towards optimising organisational wellbeing. The ErgoFit health and wellbeing model has been developed in order to combat the pressures and impacts of mental health and wellbeing at work.
“The first Channel Islands Wellbeing report indicated that ‘43% of respondents did not believe that their senior leadership teams reinforced the importance of taking regular breaks and ensuring a healthy work-life balance’. ErgoFit has created a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that focuses on enabling access to all staff within a workforce, that can assist and direct users to promote their own health and wellbeing and positively impact many areas within their organisation.”
It is acknowledged that people have many different roles in life and work/non-work domains, and an employee’s work and personal lives may not be such separate entities but, instead, interrelated and intertwined domains that have reciprocal effects on each other.
We spend about one-third of our waking hours at work, and work-related stress combined with the stress from everyday life can lead to detrimental physical and emotional outcomes related to potential excess physical, social, cognitive and emotional demands.
Aaron said that at ErgoFit the focus is towards delivering an effective and innovative approach to supporting individuals, organisations and communities within Jersey to steer a positive impact towards both mental and physical health, economic and social outcomes.
“Employees can significantly benefit from a combined and integrated approach to their health and wellbeing at work which can lead to improved confidence, satisfaction, self-esteem, career development, engagement, sustainability and innovation which in turn fosters a joint commitment to organisational success.
“Evidence indicates that poor mental health and stress contribute to the main causes of long term absence, and a positive, supportive, consistent and structured approach to wellbeing at work can not only benefit productivity and success for the organisation, but can also contribute to promoting each employee’s individual health.”
As an ageing workforce, there are many other age-related health conditions that may also impact on our performance within the workplace and our health and wellbeing should be holistically addressed within each organisation and workplace.
Effective leadership has been indicated as one of the most helpful factors in ensuring best performance from employees. Positive organisational culture, communication and employee engagement are also indicated as being effective in ensuring best performance from employees. Aaron highlighted that a key focus should be alignment between individual and organisational values as a key factor in promoting wellbeing at work.
Research indicates that with effective investments in workplace approaches to optimizing health and wellbeing within an organisation, cost savings can be made within both medical expenditure and reduction in costs of absenteeism.
To create a healthy workplace, Aaron emphasizes that an organisation needs to consider the avenues or areas of influence where actions can best take place and the most effective processes by which employers and workers can take action.
Making health and wellbeing a core priority for the management as well as employees of your organisation, whilst valuing the strategic importance and benefits of a healthy workplace, will enable achievement of organisational success across all areas of operation, management and leadership.
