Francesca Kelly: Beyond the Buzzwords – The Benefits of Prioritising Workplace Wellbeing

Written by Francesca Kelly, newly appointed Managing Director NZ of DARKHORSE, a consumer brand experience, PR and social agency with offices in Auckland, Sydney and Singapore.

The phrase ‘Workplace Wellbeing’ can be divisive. We’re all familiar with the seasoned agency exec who hears it and rolls their eyes, wearing their years spent working crazy hours in a thankless environment like a badge of honour, pinned to their fading flannel shirt. They’re the Gen X or millennial version of “in my day, we had to walk barefoot in the snow for five miles to get to school.”

But what they need to recognise is that times have changed. Life is more expensive than ever before, pressures are high and people are stressed. And the truth is, these stresses can be compounded by the nature of our service-orientated businesses: sometimes providing the best solution means working unexpected hours, locations, or tasks for the clients who pay our bills.

A question we’ve asked ourselves since our founding in 2012 is: how do we consistently go the extra mile for our clients while never compromising the wellbeing of our team?

Though we don’t claim to have all the answers, what we have discovered through 13 years of DARKHORSE is that we get the best out of our stable of staff – and by proxy our clients get the best out of us – when we create a workplace that prioritises mental and physical health.

In the last few years we have formalised this idea by introducing the DARKHORSE Wellness & Social Programme. The overarching goal of this initiative is to “provide an energised, safe, healthy and respectful working environment to support highly motivated and engaged employees.”

At the beginning of each year we survey all of our staff and tailor the programme’s offering to the results. The survey also provides the metrics for us to measure how effectively the programme is working, and since its implementation we have consistently achieved our goal of improving staff retention and happiness Year on Year.

A key tenant of the DARKHORSE Wellness & Social Programme is a comprehensive Flexi Policy, available to all staff. This includes Wellness Wednesdays, where the team work from home; Flexi Fridays, an opportunity to beat weekend traffic and work from the beach on Fridays; Birthday Leave, gifted on top of annual leave; and Summer Fridays, where the office closes at 3pm in the warm weather.

Another important element is the Employee Assistance Program, a completely free and confidential service which encourages a proactive approach to wellbeing. In addition, each team member receives complimentary access to Headspace and a mid-year reset with wellness coaching. In recognition that mental health is just as important as physical health, we recently renamed our sick days ‘wellness days’. The stable is encouraged to take these days as they need, without judgement.

As a working parent, I’m particularly proud of the programme’s supportive maternity policy. This starts with 12 weeks full pay and additional support the longer you stay with us. We also offer paid leave for secondary carers.

Through the survey we have learned that many of our team find exercise an important antidote to stress. This has led us to offer credits that can be used towards fitness classes, and we regularly cover the cost of optional group sessions too. When we can, we particularly love having these led by our talented team, like our Head of Finance, Hayley, who is a pilates instructor or PR exec Beau, who teaches yoga.

The survey results consistently support our longheld belief that social connection is critical to a happy and productive workplace. Our Social Club plans a robust calendar of events, the anchor of which is DH Camp. This is not a cheap exercise (earlier this year we flew our entire stable to Queenstown for three unforgettable days during the working week), but the return – morale, relationships, commitment, confidence, energy, purpose – is well worth the investment.

External research further proves the economic benefits of prioritising workplace wellbeing. In ‘Statistics on Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing’, the New Zealand Mental Health Foundation reports that organisations who implement a mentally healthy workplace can expect a positive return of at least $2.30 for every dollar spent. A 2020 Deloitte report takes this even further, stating that in the UK employers get an average of £5 back for every £1 invested in the wellbeing of their employees, while research from the University of Oxford analysed one million workers across 1782 listed US companies and found a “strong positive relationship between employee wellbeing and the firm’s performance”.

Our parent company, Project, shares our belief in the fiscal and cultural benefits of workplace wellbeing. Project has supported DARKHORSE as we’ve invested in proving that doing the best for our clients means doing the best for our team. Far from being mutually exclusive, our results show that these goals are most effectively realised when considered in simpatico.

As for the flannel shirt wearing eye roller? There will always be one, but offer them wellness Wednesdays and they might just change their tune.