After a stressful, disruptive and challenging year for everyone, it’s time to fill ourselves and our team with hope, strength and resilience in order to pick up the pieces of 2020 and build something positive with it.
This mindset will support your team to thrive and experience a workplace full of connection, collaboration and good results.
In this article we will give you some ideas and good practices to help you and your team build new healthy habits, and really stick to them, for an incredible 2021.
Help your team be successful by setting up healthy and positive habits!
To bring the best out of your people, increase resilience and give them the right tools for a balanced life, take time in the first weeks of this new year to create new mindfulness habits, build strong and reliable relationships across your teams and learn to practice gratitude. Investing in your co-workers wellbeing with these methods will be also helpful as we are set to continue with experiencing isolation while working remotely during 2021.
Choose at least one new habit and start putting it into practice.
Mindfulness Minds:
Mindfulness is the capability to be fully aware and connected with the present moment. This includes not only what is happening around us, but also and especially inside us, with our emotions, thoughts and sensations. A lot of scientific research has shown the several benefits of this practice including in our health, productivity and well-being.
Here’s some exercises that you can start doing with your team right away:
Group Meditation Break’s: During your work day make a daily 10 minute break to gather all your team for a group guided meditation. You can use some of the available apps in the market, search for it on Youtube or go one step further and request a colleague to guide it. Making this a habit will do a lot for you and your team.
PIES Check-in: This is also a good exercise to do with your team in order to bring more consciousness and empathy. Before starting your daily duties, ask each member of your team to stop for a minute, take a deep breath and score from 0 to 5 or write it down in just a couple of words how they are feeling Physically, Intellectually, Emotionally, and Socially. You can choose to ask each one to do this exercise privately or sharing with the team, accordingly how comfortable they are with the idea of being vulnerable.
Time to breathe: Breathing is something that we are always doing, however there’s a big difference with breathing to survive and conscious breathing. If you feel stressed, anxious or even if you have to have a hard conversation with someone on your team, just stop for a minute and during this time, inhale while slowly counting to four and exhale while slowly counting to four. After this you will see how much calmer and focused you are.
Positive Relationships:
We all know that the time we spend at our work with our coworkers is much more than the time spent with our family. So it’s important to make sure that this time will add value to us and will let us feel joy most of the time. When people experience more positive emotions, and work in an environment with collaborative and trustful relationships, they are more likely to perform better, feel more engaged and experience higher sense of well-being.
How can you create this kind of culture and team?
Ask meaningful questions: Go beyond a meaningless “how are you?” to a meaningful “How really are you today?” and foster emotional connection and support;
Get curious: Tune in by listening deeply what others have to say and ask more about it;
Give emotional support: We are not always fine and there’s nothing wrong with that. Cultivate empathy across the team and think how you would enjoy it if they do the same.
Make time for breaks: Spend quality time with your coworkers and really get to know them. An easy and funny way to do it is by using the
Wellbeing Warrior’s Remote Coffee Break. If you need some help on how to start the conversation, use one of the
Random Tips available as an ice breaker and improve the connection even more.
More Gratitude:
When you feel grateful for what you already have and are, you are more likely to feel happiness and the right energy to thrive. When you practice gratitude and set it as a habit across your team, teamwork and results will be easily accomplished and superated.
These exercises will help you implement gratitude habits into your team:
Weekly Gratitude Overview: At the end of the week gather everyone and let them point out 3 things that happened during the week for which they are grateful about. This habit will help your team build a growing mindset and improve happiness and well-being.
Keep a smile file: Create a board where people can leave positive feedback and a smile to someone of the team. This will leverage up connection and recognition between coworkers, improving teamwork, communication, performance and results.
Starting is easy. But consistency is key for results. How will you stick to your new habits?
To overcome the challenge of implementing and sticking with your desired new habits it will help to consciously build a system that ensures you will apply them. This is already a challenge for us as individuals, it becomes even more difficult in groups. Your chances of seeing real impact will increase by minding four things.
Update the inventory:
Since “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets” it needs care to change things. To do this take an inventory of the current habits you have. As someone who wants to promote new habits in a team gather your team and ask them:
- Which existing habits are serving us well, which are not?
- What are the ones that we would like to change right now?
- Why is it important to change them?
- What will we gain, if we change these habits?
- Which new habit(s) will allow making a change for the better?
- How important is it for us to accomplish these results?
Smartly stack habits:
Build your new habits by stacking them on existing habits with new specific actions. This approach increases the likelihood by tying it to existing behavior and forming specific, tangible actions to support the desired new habit. Connect your habit with a consistent cue that triggers you to repeat the newly desired behavior.
Commence small and commit fully:
Set a realistically achievable goal for how often and when you want to do the new practice. Next, rather commit to one thing fully instead of trying to stick to multiple things.
Celebrate visibly:
Make a mural where you track your rate of sticking to the habit and keep it in a visible place. This will help you to keep the focus and necessary resilience.
Now, that you already have some insights on how to build habits that will empower you and your team and what you can do to strongly stick to them, we challenge you to start right away with at least one of the suggestions and see by yourself your team improving collaboration and results.
If you are looking for an automated solution to help you with that, take a look at
Wellbeing Warrior services and start your free trial now.
Final notes: Because in Wellbeing Warrior we do believe that collaborative workplaces and teams play an important role for great results, this article was made by Tania and Max. If you enjoyed the final result share and leave your comments.