Three Tools to Nurture a Healthy Work Culture

When we think about what makes a company work, the first thing we consider is capital, resources, labor, and business strategy. This reasoning is correct; these are the elements that we need to start a company, but to maintain it and grow it, we require something else: work culture.

Work culture is the set of notions, processes, and attitudes of employees, which constitute the ideologies and principles of the organization. It is the work culture that dictates how workers interact with each other and how a company functions based on the work of its human capital. Work culture is instrumental in building the mentality, disposition, and well-being of those who work in a given company. A company with a strong work culture not only has clear regulations and rules to which employees can easily adhere, but following these policies provide them a positive experience and benefits them at a professional and personal level.

There are many ways to create a healthy work culture, such as generating team building dynamics, having a suggestion box, or a way to measure the level of employee stress. Here are some tools that allow you to do this.

1. Team Building methodology and the companies that dominate it

Teamwork is crucial both to ensure the functioning of operations and the creation of an excellent working culture. Having an efficient method that presents the dynamics of team building as something fun and spontaneous is very useful to ensure employee participation and engagement.

The Go Game is one of the companies that is dedicated to doing this; they use motivational exercises, gamification, and celebrations to promote the coexistence, communication, and cooperation necessary to form strong and well-coordinated teams. The company advises business leaders on how to make their ideas of integrated dynamics happen or help them find the right approach if they don’t have one. Experts in integration argue that dedication and creativity are the keys to developing and executing effective, integrated dynamics.

Every team has different needs, so it is important to consider the profiles and needs of its members before hiring any team building experts. Multi-day conferences, assemblies, self-awareness activities, and more can be used to foster communication and cooperation in a team. Still, it is necessary to make choices aligned with the profile of the staff to be effective.

2. Optimizing leadership via apps

Exercising and managing leadership in a team involves many tasks such as knowing the team members, their strengths and weaknesses, taking advantage of the former to navigate through the latter, communicating effectively and assertively, and keeping track of progress as well as areas of improvement.

Applications like Heelix help keep track of the well-being and disposition of team members, who provide information about themselves through personalized surveys. This is not itself a performance meter but a way of quantifying what motivates and drives this performance. The analysis of the strengths and personal areas of opportunity for each team member is vital to understanding why their performance is outstanding, average, or below average.

A high level of motivation results in more satisfied employees; this satisfaction strongly influences their performance, and the time they remain in a given company, argues Prachi Juneja in his study, “The Role of Motivation in the Relationship of Employees.” The relationship of managers and directors with their teams has a significant weight in the motivation of employees and their performance, so it is important to make use of tools with instances of emotional intelligence that allow recognition of work well done, in addition to offering timely and sensitive feedback that focuses on the intention of improvement and empathy instead of criticism and correction.

3. Generating well-being as the basis of work culture

Depending on the line of work, the number of hours worked, the workload, the set of responsibilities, the environment in the office, among other factors, a team may have high levels of stress that will affect the quality of their work. Measuring stress levels and finding a way to control or channel it positively can significantly influence a team’s level of well-being and ability to work together. Problems like excessive turnover or low productivity can be reduced when the level of negative stress and its consequences on team members are measured.

With this in mind, a Tec de Monterrey’s alumni developed a system that measures a little more than stress and provide tracking services to work from the information provided by these measurements and metrics. The system is called Sati Health. It has a primary objective, namely, to reduce turnover levels, absenteeism, presenteeism, and human capital-related costs, as well as to increase the productivity and long-term performance of staff through the implementation of a maintenance system for employee well-being within the company.

“We market to companies that really want to take care of their employees,” says Fernando Alanís Espinos, Engineer in Innovation and Development from Tecnológico de Monterrey and CEO of Sati Health.

The project, which is currently being applied as a pilot at Softek, combines skills of experts in innovation, development, biomedical physics, industrial design, computational technologies and systems, organizational psychology, and mechatronics to create a comprehensive program that monitors and maintains the physical, emotional, and mental health of employees.

Mexico is in the first place in labor stress, explains Alanís. This statistic also implies a personal cost to the CEO of the company, who commented that he was hospitalized twice for an excess of negative stress. “From that emerged the idea for this program,” Alanís comments. The Tec graduate argues that a work culture that does not consider the well-being of its employees can generate unnecessary costs in businesses. According to a report by LifeWorks through Morneau Shepell and the International Employee Assistance Professionals Association, the lack of concentration of an employee who has low indicators of physical, mental, and emotional health costs eight days of work per month. Taking ca
re of human capital is not only the best decision from an ethical point of view but also an economic point of view.

Sati Health’s system consists of three elements to take care of the integral personal well-being of employees and the reduction of costs related to human capital through constant monitoring and a program customized to the needs of the company in question. The monitoring dashboard includes records and measurements of values such as stress level, performance, heart rate, the quality and patterns of sleep, as well as age and cardiovascular health. From these records, an image begins to form of the physical, mental, and emotional health of the employee.

The app uses the report on these patterns to suggest solutions on how to deal with problems such as stress or lack of sleep and provides the user with tools to deal with their situation, for example. From the recommendations, techniques, and measures come suggestions to improve the areas of personal opportunity or, perhaps, to redirect the user to certified specialists in the cases of chronic stress or fatigue or any other problems that harm the well-being of the employee.

The dashboard that summarizes the aggregate information about the departments in each company is managed at the enterprise level. The tool sends notifications about any critical event that positively or negatively affects the global well-being of the company, such as a peak of stress in a given season or a very high level of performance during a determined period.

Predictions can also be made with this information, based on monthly reports, about the future of a company’s integral well-being. In Mexico’s case, the service also includes advice to fulfill the requirements of the Mexican Official Standard (NOM) 035, which makes the leaders of a company responsible for taking care of the stress level of their employees.

Taking care of the integral well-being of employees plus maintaining effective organizational communication, strong team interactions, ethical leadership, a high level of motivation, and social and emotional intelligence are the foundations for building and maintaining a healthy work culture that maximizes staff performance and their lengths of stay in a company. If the company is a good place to work, its human capital will reach its potential and help the company grow. Using tools like these is just one way to achieve the goal of creating a work climate that speaks in terms of positivity, results, and consistent development.

Sofía García-Bullé

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0