The Benefits of Establishing a Wellness Center in Your Workplace
Are you willing to give your contact center agents a daily reminder to join a meditation class? Will you provide your on-site team time to join a yoga room? Is your company ready to take employee experience to the next level? If you answered yes to all these questions, your contact center might be ready for a wellness program that considers yoga or meditation for your employees.
Inspired by the International Day of Yoga (IDY), celebrated worldwide in June, we explore how corporate yoga becomes an excellent opportunity to provide a space for tranquility, relaxation, and disconnection amid work routines. As an ancient practice, yoga is considered a philosophical system, a set of physical exercises, and a spiritual discipline. Diverse science-based studies state that yoga significantly benefits its practitioners. Its constant practice combines awareness, self-consciousness, and movement, strengthening fulfillment and mind and body control. It enhances quality of life, reinforces a greater sense of purpose, and improves mood and interactions with people and the environment.
If you are looking for alternatives to creating well-being activities for your team, managing idle time, incorporating best practices to handle stress or fatigue, and improving multigenerational team engagement, explore the benefits of implementing yoga in the contact center!
The Importance of Creating a Wellness Space in the Workplace
Think for a moment about the daily routine of your remote contact center agents. For agents who are looking for new alternatives to stay active or prepare themselves for demanding contact centers, practicing virtual yoga could be a great alternative.
As part of a positive organizational culture, companies today provide various benefits that consider employee well-being. A committee dedicated to wellness activities allows several areas to align with your team’s needs, discuss topics essential for workplace audits, or even encourage a sense of belonging in hybrid work environments.
You can launch a pilot program, schedule recurring spaces, and allow your employees to see the benefits of this practice over time. You can also create a small focus group and sign up for free lessons, explore diverse disciplines, or search for free videos and educational resources to determine whether this discipline is appropriate for your contact center.
Angela Matiz has been a Yoga practitioner for 17 years. Being an instructor at EvolationYoga, one of Colombia’s most recognized yoga centers, Angela considers that Yoga profoundly benefits employees’ mental health and well-being. “We should all practice Yoga and meditation. This complete practice brings many physical, mental, and emotional benefits. In any job environment, employees might face stress, anxiety, or challenges, and breathing techniques, meditation, and physical postures could help relieve and manage workplace situations”, she adds when asked about the benefits for companies seeking to invest in wellness and workplace happiness strategies.
Creating a wellness space where people can disconnect and dedicate time to this practice encourages employees to invest time in work breaks and learn techniques essential for stress management and burnout prevention. “Consider giving your people a space to disconnect, take breaks, and become aware of each team member’s current state. We live in highly demanding environments without realizing what happens in our internal world. The first thing you should do is think about your well-being, and then, from that starting point, everything improves”, explains Angela, who has seen the benefits in students and practitioners while teaching Hatha Yoga and Vinyasa Flow for the past ten years.
10 Ways to Help Inspire the Next Yoga Space for Your Contact Center
If you plan to launch your yoga space on-site, it is an excellent opportunity to encourage camaraderie with other work colleagues. For remote workplaces, engaging in a virtual yoga club can allow your contact center agents to engage in an everyday activity that will bring them together in a remote space designed to stop, breathe, and recharge.
Depending on the technique used in Yoga, participants can learn to improve their posture, engage in relaxation and breathing techniques, or improve their strength or mindfulness skills. By incorporating personal time into your agents’ agendas, they will also invest time in self-care.
If you are planning to launch a corporate yoga space and are looking for ideas to implement in your contact center, consider these ten ideas to spark wellness and employee engagement in your workplace.
1. Build a Culture that Recognizes the Importance of Your People
Identify your organization’s needs for culture audits, pulse survey insights, or team-building activities. Encourage your employees to drive your internal engagement activities. Identify who would be interested in joining the program, create surveys to analyze idle time and agent availability, and review a convenient schedule for the team, considering their daily responsibilities.
2. Design an Internal Engagement Plan
Yoga could be an excellent idea for a team-building activity or a virtual wellness summit celebrated during health week in your workplace. Your agents can access healthy food workshops, smoothies, and lectures on the importance of mindfulness. Participants could receive a yoga mat, a bottle of water, and a t-shirt identifying them as yoga club members. You can also choose a topic for every session, play relaxing music, set an intention for the on-site or virtual wellness space, or celebrate International Yoga Day together.
3. Create Virtual Sessions with Yoga Instructors or Volunteers
Identify yoga ambassadors, wellness enthusiasts, and employees who have been implementing these disciplines and are willing to share their experiences and best practices. These ambassadors also work as internal influencers, encouraging attendance and engagement.
4. Communicate the Benefits of Yoga, meditation, and Other Best Practices
Do you work with colleagues from countries where yoga is a recognized discipline? You can set up cultural fairs or virtual experiences to learn about your colleagues’ traditions or share tips for yoga routines and how they benefit your mind and body. Yoga practitioners would love to know more about the science behind it, its benefits, and the theory or history of the foundations of yoga.
5. Define your Wellness Support Team and Incentivize Your Company to Engage
Based on your budget, you can design a bonus and incentive program for contact center agents to attend on-site or virtual activities. You can also create a wellness leaderboard, allowing your wellness ambassadors to redeem new wellness activities. By creating a loyalty program, your people engage throughout the year, benefiting from the rewards and encouraging others to attend.
6. Book Sessions in Advance and Share Reminders with Your Team
You can start blocking 15 minutes in your team’s agenda, and then you can pick a suitable time to engage in yoga practice. Ensure your team knows planned activities and review if your wellness calendar might conflict with aspects like shrinkage or schedule adherence affecting agent availability. This practice can also help you engage in a creative campaign for your customer service center to boost agent performance and productivity in monthly campaigns designed to achieve KPIs, where your team can block time to recharge and energize for the next customer interaction.
7. Analyze Daily Routines and your Office Workstations
An instructor specialized in active breaks and ergonomics can lead dynamic stretches, allowing on-site and hybrid help desk employees to engage in an activity that is good for their physical and mental health.
8. Make An Impact In Your Community
This activity could benefit your customers if you work in the health, personal care, or beauty industry. It can also be an excellent opportunity to give back to your local community or launch an open house event for your employees’ families.
9. Launch the Wellness Space Considering Your Workforce and Local Regulations
Following your country’s workplace safety and occupational health regulations, you can also find recommendations from diverse associations for remote, hybrid, and on-site contact center agents, enabling digital wellness and recreational activities during the year to promote healthy habits, an active lifestyle, and work-life balance.
10. Look for a Plan B that Could Work for Your Organization
Try art lessons, origami activities, stretching, spas on office days, promoting taking the stairs, or incorporating active break services for remote workers. You can also try meditation or progress to physical activity sessions, which are helpful for your staff.
Explore the benefits of implementing diverse disciplines with a holistic approach to well-being beyond yoga or meditation in the workplace. Best practices designed to improve your agent experience will allow your team to create a fun and positive working environment where flexible work arrangements, gamification, and agent experience help build the next generation of leaders in the contact center space.
Employee well-being will also build the foundations of your customer experience. If you are still wondering where to start improving scheduling and forecasting in your contact center, our solutions will help you enable time for productivity and wellness, and transform your agent experience. Learn more about how to improve your team experience with our webinars or book a demo with our team today!
