Cisco's Sheila Champion-Smeeth on the importance of wellbeing in a highly connected world
With the pace continuing to accelerate, it is hugely important to empower people to make healthy choices, and create communities that inspire and motivate each other to make small but sustainable changes to improve their personal and professional life.
Research shows that people are:
- Continuously connected to technology devices and attending meetings back-to-back with few breaks throughout the day
- Working remotely from team leaders and teams, which contributes to a feeling of isolation
- Working in teams with colleagues and customers in different time zones, which means working late into the evenings, affecting family time
- Stationary for long periods of time and, as a result, suffering muscular issues
- Dealing with a fast-paced and changing work environment that is increasing stress and anxiety
- Showing signs of poor resilience due to lack of quality sleep and increased stress levels, which affects morale and engagement and leads to sick leave and presenteeism challenges.
At Cisco, we focus on a holistic and inclusive approach to wellbeing, recognising our different cultures and individual needs. A wellbeing movement should aim to support personal growth and foster a culture of high performance, as individuals and as teams.
Through our unique collaboration with wellbeing expert, Jessie Pavelka, we are helping employees and families embrace healthier lifestyles and equipping them with tools to sustain this lifestyle using our Cisco technologies.
Jessie’s philosophy focuses on ‘The four Elements of health’. These are food (eat), movement (sweat), mind power (think) and family (connect). Cisco employees, their friends and family, have access to recipes, exercise videos, articles and forums in an online technology portal called the Pavelka House for Cisco.
They can have live and virtual sessions with Jessie himself or be part of an interactive online community to plan, track and connect with others to support individual or team wellbeing journeys.
Organisations have the opportunity to offer cost-effective but relevant products, services and solutions that excite people on their wellbeing journey so they can become resilient, innovative, creative and energised in everything they do at work, at home and at play.
Sheila Champion-Smeeth is EMEAR total rewards consultant at Cisco.
Download a copy of the 88 page Employee Wellbeing Research 2018 (free to REBA Professional Members and all those working for REBA Associate Members).
If you would like to learn more about employee wellbeing, register here to attend the Third Annual Employee Wellbeing Congress on 5 July 2018.
Cisco won the inaugral REBA Pinnacle Award for Employee Wellbeing 2018.
