“It’s much more important to spend your money on culture than yoga and bananas,” Investors in People CEO, Paul Devoy told corporate wellbeing experts at the CIPD’s Festival of Work.
As a corporate workaholic, that turned to yoga to decompress from work stress, I get this. In my experience, the weekly office fruit delivery was claimed by 9.05 am on Monday morning and corporate yoga isn’t intended to be a band-aid to ease the bruises and strain of a week at work.
Much as I love my yoga, and am passionate about sharing its benefits to the body and mind, shouldn’t we be addressing the root cause of the stress we’re experiencing? For sure, yoga can ease us out of the physical and mental knots that can mount up within us when we’re engrossed in doing a good job at work. But what is making us so stressed nowadays and is it anything that can be avoided? Out of all the challenges, difficult encounters, deadlines and requests that mount up, is there a sense of which are reasonable, and which might be considered unreasonable? And how easy do you find it to say ‘No, that’s not possible, right now?”
It's not bananas to stop and look at your organisation’s culture and consider whether it’s creating a holistically supportive environment for employees to bring their best self to work and perform to the highest standards. Corporate Yoga isn’t intended to paper over the cracks or tick the wellbeing box. It won’t solve a problematic work culture in its own right. But as part of a wider, culture first collaborative initiative, it can help employees figure out what works for them and allow them time to develop and commit to their own wellbeing and resilience plan.
Of course, the reality is that many of us are striving for excellence, covering many bases, with limited resources, where time is a diminishing commodity, met with a need to keep a pace of change and innovation. We all deserve the space for a little self-care, a few moments of calm, and a chance to recharge the metaphorical batteries. We might all have different ways of doing that, and enjoying the things that make our hearts sing and restore a sense of peace and calm. The key is finding what works for you, making time for it and find as much pleasure as possible from learning your methods of choice.
“With the weekly yoga on a Saturday, what I found was no matter how awful a week, I’d had, the yoga on Saturday morning allowed me to decompress from my work week,” one of my students, a dynamic business development expert, told me. “I could press the reset button so that I could switch off both my mind and my body and leave the working week behind and focus on the weekend. And just have a real break. It meant that I then got the benefit of my weekend before going back to work and being able to leave work until the working week began again.”
So do I agree that it’s more important to spend money on corporate culture than yoga and bananas? Of course I do. Self-study, awareness and kindness at the heart of yoga, so when we practise those, it can support our relationship with ourselves and others, helping to build a caring and supportive community. However, for that to be sustainable and to support meaningful change, the real drive starts with a culture that has people at its heart.
If you would like to chat about finding out what your employees want out of your organisation’s wellbeing support or discuss ideas and activities to implement, let’s get on a call. Use this link to book your free no obligation Discovery Call and let’s talk about more than yoga and bananas.