Your mental health matters. It impacts your relationships with your team members, your decision-making abilities, and how you show up at work, setting the groundwork for your future and your team's success. Mental health problems are increasingly common; one in four of your colleagues lives with mental illness, and roughly 85% of employees' mental health conditions are undiagnosed or untreated. Knowing how to identify mental health problems, creating a psychologically safe culture where mental health is discussed openly, and understanding how to address mental health problems are essential for bringing out the best in your people.
Boost Your Company Health
Progressive Fitness Omaha is committed to bringing health and wellness to the workplace. We’ve created and implemented fitness plans inside the workplace for 15 years and have now created a wellness programming app that can help employees virtually—anywhere – no gym or equipment required.
As The Wellbeing Partners, we serve many roles within the community - bridge builders, conveners, systems architects…any way you put it, we realize that, as Aristotle once said,, “together we are greater than the sum of our parts.” In order to effectively improve our systems, we have to collectively address our systems.
A few ways we do this are:
-Convening our health departments and health systems towards shared goals
-Educating the workplace through our Wellbeing Forums and ever-expanding Member Portal
-Delivering curriculum to cultivate wellbeing in our youth and caregivers of young children
-Fostering collective impact to reduce mental health stigma, especially for our BIPOC communities
Over 3,500 community members and organizations were involved in the first-ever Metro Region Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) process to prioritize mental health, released last April. That CHIP report, which can be accessed here, outlined a commitment to improve mental health across the region using these shared strategies:
On March 22, we published the March 2022 Update of the Metro Region CHIP to share new information and progress made toward these priorities, as new data became available via the 2021 Community Health Assessment (CHA) and upon formal evaluation of the Region's Mental Health Stigma Reduction Campaign.
Having a child is one of the biggest periods of change in a new parent’s life. Your whole world, including your work life, changes. It is vital to support parents, as key contributors to the workforce, to recruit and retain top talent. Parents are less likely to be burned out in a work culture that supports them as they adjust to their new role. This in turn can decrease healthcare spending and support overall employee wellbeing. Coupled with new challenges from the pandemic, parents need support from their workplace more than ever before.
So how can organizations go above and beyond the bare minimum and create a family friendly culture? Here are some of the best ways organizations can support new and expecting parents.
Over the past two years, The Wellbeing Partners have been working to fight stigma surrounding mental health challenges. We do this by encouraging people to talk about their own challenges and the way they support others who are experiencing mental health challenges. Our work and The What Makes Us campaign focuses on adults, but we also recognize that these are vital conversations to have with children as well—helping them to grow up knowing that all emotions are valid and acceptable, and that there is support for their emotional needs.
Books are excellent tools to help these conversations happen in ways that are natural and comfortable for both children and adults. Check out these suggestions for titles to share with the children in your own life.
What Makes Us
Mental health advocacy remains in the front seat of our vehicle, driving towards a world where every person thrives. After hearing from our communities in Douglas, Sarpy, Cass, and Pottawattamie Counties in the 2018 and 2021 Community Health Needs Assessment, it was beyond a whisper, more of a shout, that mental health needed our undivided attention. Deeper still, is addressing the stigma surrounding mental health and recognizing that stigma is one of the top reasons why individuals avoid or abandon treatment.
It is not surprising that the song ‘Surface Pressure,” from the movie Encanto, has become a Billboard 100 top 10 hit. Beyond the catchy tune, after almost 2 years of a global pandemic it is easy to relate to “…pressure like a drip, drip, drip, that will never stop…”
This constant pressure has resulted in a record-shattering year, with 47.4 million people voluntarily leaving their jobs in 2021. As of December, there were 58 unemployed workers for every 100 job openings — that’s nearly two jobs for every person looking for one.
Omaha & Council Bluffs Employers: Join the Next Round of ConnectGO Getting To Work Surveys
Do you know how your employees get to work? Do you know how they would like to?
Recruitment is underway for employers in Omaha and Council Bluffs to participate in the next round of ConnectGO Getting to Work Surveys to answer these questions and more.
More than 4,000 employees in the Omaha metro area participated in the first round of surveys between November 2020 to June 2021. A series of nine surveys, representing an employee population of nearly 16,000 people from more than 20 organizations, showed an exciting opportunity to shift 17% of pre-pandemic drive-alone trips to active commuting and working from home with supportive programming.
It is with mixed emotions that I say goodbye as the CEO of The Wellbeing Partners. After seven years of not-for-profit leadership, I am leaving in early March to pursue new adventures. I am grateful for the time I have had to serve as founding CEO of the organization. I will miss working with partners, members, and the Board directly and I plan to remain in the community and always advocate for The Wellbeing Partners.
I am now excited to announce that Melinda Sorenson, MS, current Director of Workplace Wellbeing, will serve as the Interim CEO beginning March 4, 2022. Melinda is trained in organizational psychology and worked with the Greater Omaha Chamber. Her experience in change management, organizational health, and business development is just what the organization needs to navigate through this next phased of growth. The Board has launched a search committee and is partnering with Mission Matters to conduct a CEO search.