Luncheon offers wellness tips for the workplace

NEWBERRY — For about eight out of the 24 hours in the day, our time is spent in the workplace. And with everyone’s unique careers comes stress, burnout and for some toxic work environments. Dr. Rachel Setzler Brown, Midlands Region Medical Director of the state Department of Public Health, has seen and heard it all before.

As the owner of Thriving Workplace Solutions, Brown, a former Newberrian, works with businesses, organizations and institutions to provide resources and tools to help create happy, healthy and productive work environments.

Brown served as the guest speaker during a Workplace Wellness Luncheon hosted by Live Healthy Newberry County and offered insight and advice to folks in Newberry on how to prioritize their employees (and their own) well-being.

Brown said the impact on employees and businesses can come in a number of forms including, but not limited to:

• More frequent disruptive behavior, less professionalism, imposter syndrome and decreased system-wide morale.

• Decreased job satisfaction and higher turnover rates, higher cost (50-200% of salary) to replace or retrain staff.

• Stress related physical health concerns, higher healthcare costs ($125-190 billion average loss).

• Increased rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders (30-50% chance if burned out).

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when a workplace is productive and healthy, families can remain together and the more successful the business is, the more impactful on the community.

So what is the solution if you’re an employee on the brink of burnout or a manager trying to improve the work environment? Resilience. Brown said resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties using awareness, healthy limit setting and constructive engagement – a function of the ability to cope and grow via healthy patterns and access to health and well-being approaches.

The following are external resilience drivers Brown shared with attendee:

• Meaning in work.

• Job control.

• Balanced workload.

• Optimized teams and roles.

• Adequate resources.

• Leadership engagement.

• Psychological safety, decreased stigma.

Brown left the group with an exercise that they themselves can use as well as anyone in the community, using a tool called Wellness Dimensions. Those wellness dimensions include: financial, social, spiritual, occupational, physical, intellectual, environmental and emotional. How are you doing financially? Are you where you would like to be spiritually, physically, emotionally? The exercise is simple. Write down all of the dimensions and put a check mark next to the dimension you feel you are doing well in. Then, later on, pick two of the areas that you want to make a small goal/change in. Brown recommends doing this exercise twice a year.

For more information or resources, contact Brown at [email protected].