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If you own a small business, you know that employee wellbeing plays a crucial role in employee engagement and retention.
It's easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of running a business, but it's important not to neglect your own health and wellbeing needs.
Putting the business first over your health may seem like the right thing to do in the short term, but it can have negative consequences in the long run.
Umbrella, the workplace wellbeing and psychology services provider, has just released an online wellbeing package designed to target mental, physical, social, and spiritual wellbeing.
Umbrella CEO, Dr Dougal Sutherland, says the resource is something all organisations, including SME owners and sole traders, can use.
Why should you look after your wellbeing as a leader?
“If you’re leading by example, you’re sending your staff a clear message that looking after your wellbeing is important. Circularly, it’s good for your business,” explains Dougal.
In large businesses, the return on investment for investing in wellbeing is approximately $5 for every dollar spent, Dougal says.
“The same principle applies to small businesses. If people are more rested, more mentally well, there’s a better quality of work versus just pushing, pushing, pushing.”
At the heart of maintaining wellbeing as a business owner, is the ability to separate life and work.
“You might be trading out of the house, with a home office and that bleeding together of work and home life happens much more readily among SME owners.”
The emotional investment in your own business can stop you from thinking clearly about its effect on you, Dougal adds.
“You’ve invested your life savings, your ideas, time, effort, so much more than someone who’s an employee. While that makes for great passionate investors, for business owners, it can be your downfall.”
The Umbrella CEO believes business owners can find support from industry bodies and groups which enable them to share their experiences with others who are doing something similar.
He's also a big advocate of business owners regularly getting away from work to nurture their wellbeing.
“It’s about rediscovering things you love which you may have lost when the business becomes all-consuming,” he says.
Look after yourself first
Finding an outlet for yourself may seem selfish but you have to sort yourself out before supporting others, advises business mentor Di Foster. Because if you don’t look after yourself, no one else will.
“The mentality that someone is going to save us, if we work too hard and burn out, isn’t going to work. You have to save yourself, and be the heroine or the hero,” says Di.
Strip back to what you need versus what you want, she says. “I think we’ve glorified hustle and it’s weird. Diets, extreme exercise, extreme working, when 99% of us are in the middle.”
She says you may need to push back on the supposed norms.
“It’s about knowing yourself ‘What do I have to do today?’ vs ‘What do I think I have to do today?’ Strip it back so you only do what you have to do for a week to give yourself a breather,” she suggests.
We aren’t designed to work all the time.
"If you own your own business, one of the pros is if you take an hour off to watch your son’s sport, you might be the person working at 11 p.m. and that’s fine.”
And people need to recharge daily, says Di. A big part of what we’re missing is getting in touch with nature and social connections.
Take your shoes off and stand on the grass at lunchtime. Instead of hoovering food down, sit, she suggests.
Create healthy boundaries
A 2022 report from Deloitte: “The C-suite role in well-being” found that 70% of executives would leave their job for one that supported their wellbeing more.
Business owners don’t have that luxury, says Kate Billing, business coach and small business owner of Blacksmith.
Business owners can’t go on Seek and look for another job that comes with less stress, she says.
“We all have three principal forms of daily well-being and performance 'currencies,' – time, energy and attention," Kate says.
“Understanding what we’re doing each day to build capital in these currencies and then how we’re spending or investing in them, helps us become more conscious of how we’re living, leading and working.”
As a coach, Kate gets business leaders to identify where they can create healthy boundaries around their time, energy, and attention both at home and work.
“Deciding on clear beginning and end times to our daily work windows is important to help draw those boundary lines,” she says.
"As an SME owner, you can choose. You may be an early bird and you can set the time between 6.30 am and 10 am as a work window, then you use 3 hours to do other things, and then you’re back into it."
Kate uses mornings to think and connect, not checking emails until 1 p.m. and then in the afternoons does admin, report writing and so on.
“Creating, communicating and holding your healthy boundaries around work windows and technology sends a positive message to your people that this is what leadership is about,” she says.
One of the benefits of working for yourself and building a small business is the ability to design your life and business to work for you, despite the risks involved.
For those facing burnout, there can be this idea that if you’re busy, you must be doing all right and be safe, but this can lead to creating unnecessary work that drains you but gives the illusion of being productive, she warns.
Practise what you preach: create healthy boundaries and stick to them.
Don't push yourself to the limit
Some entrepreneurial business owners are building their companies to sell for ‘lotto-like’ numbers and may opt to work in unsustainable ways because they know it’s for a limited period, says Kate.
Dr Jenny Douché is the Startup and Founder Product Manager at Callaghan Innovation, which has recently set up free counselling for startup founders, a recognition of the high pressure and extremes that these business owners experience.
As a former startup founder herself, Jenny explains: “Startup founders are generally passionate about what they’re doing and are having to constantly put themselves out there. They must have strong self-belief in what they’re doing despite inevitable knockbacks.”
As a founder, you have such a strong internal driver, you’ll go on despite the impact on your wellbeing, she adds. And as a leader in the early days of the start-up, you’re doing a whole lot of things that you’re not confident about.
“It can be really hard to keep up that level of confidence and drive for things you’re inherently not good at. It’s a roller coaster, the lows can be really bad and the highs beyond anything,” Jenny says.
Her own startup business was one of the first cohorts to join the business incubator, Creative HQ, in the early 2000s. There they shared space with other resident companies, and she says that the peer support was hugely helpful.
In a recent Horizon Research study done for Callaghan, the biggest wish by startup founders was to have peer support, says Jenny.
In the study with 258 Kiwi entrepreneur respondents, 70% said they were experiencing anxiety versus 37% of respondents in a similar international study of startup founders. A staggering 55% of Kiwis felt they were experiencing burnout compared with 37% internationally.
NZ founders were more open about the fact they were feeling this stress, says Jenny.
Learning to live with stress
You don’t want stress to be debilitating so that it affects your ability to function; you want to be accepting of stress in certain situations, says Kris de Jong, executive coach from Eclipse Life Coaching.
The normal human response to stress can be useful, there’s an adrenaline increase to help with performance, but if it goes too far then it’s crippling, he adds.
It’s about managing or reducing stress and having resilience.
“Resilience is about being comfortable with being uncomfortable, having expectations that stuff is going to go wrong, that your plans aren’t going to go perfectly. It’s about having a mindset, that dealing with disruption and failure is part of the plan, not ruining the plan,” explains Kris.
The two most important things for stress management are physical activity and practising mindfulness, says the coach. Initiatives like Surfing for Farmers incorporate both of these things.
Going and doing a mindful activity like surfing, takes you outside of everything, you’re in nature, and you’re focusing on the wave, says the coach. You’re using your body, doing a physical activity, and you’re with a group of people.
“Mindfulness is about using your physical senses of taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight, consciously when doing an activity. The more mindful moments you have, the happier you’ll be,” says Kris.
