Organizational Wellness and Optimal Performance

Do you know how to figure out if your team is in a state of health and balance? Or whether it is out of health and balance? Would it matter if you did?

There is a direct relationship between organizational wellness and optimal performance. Yet, a quick google search of “organizational wellness and optimal performance” yields results that focus almost exclusively on employee wellness programs like health benefits or in-house opportunities to attend to personal health and fitness. Organizational wellness goes well beyond the personal health of individual employees.  It is about the health of the organization itself.

Understanding Organizational Health and Balance through Individual Experience

Just think of your own ability to get through life, working from the best version of yourself. You know that if you are tired, worn out, run down, not nourished appropriately, lacking exercise, not having enough joy, you cannot give your best to your life. You need to be healthy and balanced to be that best version of yourself, to give your best.

As a person who performs well, you have your chosen habits to keep you healthy. Some of these habits are universally understood like getting enough sleep, being well hydrated, and healthy food choices. Other habits are more personal – for example, a preference for exercising outdoors on your own with a hike in the woods or a high-intensity workout with a personal trainer in a gym. Over your lifetime, you’ve figured out what works best for you – your own blueprint for optimal health and balance.

Sometimes those habits fall to the wayside. You get busy and skip out on exercise. Feeling a bit tired, you skip the healthy foods and opt for take-out a little too often. You begin to notice that your wellbeing suffers. Knowing what it takes to regenerate that sense of health and balance, you return to those chosen habits to get back to that optimal health and balance again.

What about the Organization?

Like your experiences of your personal health and balance, organizations also have chosen habits that lead to the current state of health and balance. Like sleep, hydration, and good nutrition for people, there are common healthy habits for organizations too:

• Attending to the spirit of the organization – what is the felt sense of the spirit of the organization for both employees and customers/clients?
• Having a clearly articulated and well understood purpose and vision that the organization’s energy and activity are aligned to achieve.
• Intentionally fostering a life-nurturing culture where people enjoy coming to work and understand their contributions matter
• Offering a clear framework within which work gets done so everyone knows what the boundaries are, where the freedom is to be creative, and who can make what decisions to move things forward

All of this is part of what can make up a framework for organizational health and balance. And I cannot stress enough how important paying attention to an organization’s health and balance is to sustaining top performance.

Where to Start?

As with people, organizations also make choices that support optimal health and balance…and choices that don’t. Like people, organizations make the best choices possible given what the organization knows. And like people, sometimes

As you sort out various strategies for top performance, I encourage you to include a strategy for optimizing health and balance as an essential resource for that performance. To get started, consider the following questions for your organization or team:

• Is the health and balance of your team a regular topic in your team meetings?
• If it is on your agenda, do you know how to diagnose the state of your team’s health and balance? Simply? Do you do this regularly so that you can rebalance if you have faltered?
• If health and balance of the team is not on your agenda, do you think it ought to be?
• If you don’t know how to diagnose the health and balance of your team or organization, would you find value in learning how to do so?

Organizational Health and Balance Learning Opportunity

Achieving and Regenerating Organizational Health and Balance is the foundational module in our Genuine Contact program that provides the knowledge, tools and skills for teams and organizations to diagnose their own health and balance. It also supports you to develop a regeneration plan to regain health and balance from wherever you are at now. A plan that is based on your organization’s unique blueprint. This work is founded on the five beliefs of the Genuine Contact way of working including the belief that the blueprint for its own optimal health and balance is in every organism…including every organization.

Learning how to do this simple diagnosis and how to develop a regeneration plan is also valuable for consultants, coaches, managers and leaders.

We offer this workshop in a real-time online format as well as a self-study in combination with 1;1 and/or group mentoring.