Mental Health and Wellness at FitPink
Mental Health and wellness at FitPink
This week's Darkness into Light event got me thinking about the mental health and wellbeing of our team here in FitPink and if we are doing enough to ensure we support our team in their mental health and wellbeing.
Aside from the obvious benefits to the employee, research shows there is a strong business case for organisations to promote good physical and good mental health for all staff. Actively promoting staff well-being leads to greater staff productivity, morale and retention, and reduced sickness absence and presenteeism.
When FitPink was founded, we believed we had a good opportunity to start a culture we could be proud of. A culture that enabled our team to reach their full potential in an authentic and relaxed environment. We are focussed on delivering excellence, meeting and exceeding targets and we are always busy. But we don’t believe this needs to be under a cloud of pressure and stress. We are approaching our third birthday and have had time to experience the ups and downs of eCommerce and brand building, but we haven’t had any truly horrible days at work so far!
Flexible Working
We believe that to do our best work, the working day should where possible suit the needs of the employee. Experience has proved to us that this increases productivity. It removes some of the day-to-day stresses we all experience when trying to juggle family life and a fulltime job.
So for one of the team that means starting work a little later to enable her to drop her daughter to school. If someone needs to be at home for a sick family member, they can work from home for the day (hangovers not included!!)
When one of the team’s teenagers had a summer job in a hotel she was on the 8am -4pm shift. As we are in an area where public transport is very limited, someone needed to drop her to work. And so the 8 - 4 shift at FitPink was born. This actually benefited the company as the team member reported increased productivity due to getting an hour's work in with no interruptions before the rest of the team arrived!
Promoting Work/Life Balance
All businesses have weeks where the team need to put in extra hours and FitPink is no different. Whether its exhibiting at an expo at the weekend or staying late during peak times it’s just necessary to grow a business and ensure an excellent customer experience. But we do our best to minimise extra hours and of course time off in lieu is taken.
Generally, we don’t work weekends or evenings and best of all we work a shorter week, finishing at 1pm on a Friday. This makes a BIG difference to our weekends! We can get the weekly tasks like grocery shopping and cleaning done BEFORE the actual weekend. Saturdays and Sundays are free for family and leisure.
Summer is short and sporadic here in Ireland so on those rare days when the weather is in the late 20’s, we have been known to close up and head for the beach at 3pm for a few afternoons whilst the weather lasts!
Benefits for the Business
FitPink strives to help our employees achieve greater work-life balance, leading to increased employee satisfaction and improved morale. That in turn means employee turnover is reduced, as is the cost to recruit and train new hires.
Loyalty, engagement, and retention is improved, which helps our productivity and builds a team of people who have mutual respect for each other.
A culture has been born from the flexibility that FitPink has given us, which in turn has led to a team willing to do whatever is necessary to get the task accomplished, whether that means taking on more responsibilities or doing/learning different tasks outside of our job descriptions. We do whatever is needed to get an excellent product to our customers with an exceptional customer service experience