In today’s workplace, discussions about well-being often revolve around burnout, work-life balance, and mental health. However, one area that deserves more attention is the experience of employees with chronic health conditions. Chronic health conditions can significantly affect an employees’s ability to thrive in their job. Today, we break down recent research highlighting the impact of managing energy, through proactive vitality management, in helping employees with these conditions feel better and do better at work.
What is Proactive Vitality Management?
Proactive vitality management involves taking a proactive approach towards managing your physical and mental energy to optimize functioning at work. It’s about understanding what your future work demands look like, what your goals and needs are, and taking intentional actions to preserve and enhance your energy. Importantly, this looks differently for everyone. Each employee needs to define what this looks like and it may change over time.
For example, someone may recognize that without a full night’s sleep, they are ineffective when building slides and narratives for a presentation. With that in mind, this person may focus on getting enough sleep especially if they know they will be working on slides in a given week. Alternatively, an employee may find that they get an energy boost following an afternoon break that includes listening to their favorite music. This employee may block 15 minutes on their calendar each afternoon to make time for this break.
The important thing here is that these strategies are proactive and purposeful. To practice proactive vitality management, you need to understand what you are trying to accomplish and leverage strategies that you know work for you. It may take some trial and error, but understanding what works for you is worth it!
Reducing Exhaustion, Increasing Engagement
So, why is it worth it? Proactive vitality management can help employees with chronic health conditions reduce exhaustion and increase engagement. By reducing exhaustion, employees are able to focus more, get work done, and are less likely to call in sick. In addition, when employees feel more engaged, they feel more creative! All of this can ultimately make employees with chronic health conditions feel better at work.
A quick note – leveraging proactive vitality management can help all employees. However, there’s an extra special boost found for employees with chronic health conditions.
The Role of Self-Insight
Self-insight, or understanding one’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, plays a crucial role in effective proactive vitality management. This research finds that employees with high self-insight are better able to understand their needs and practice proactive vitality management. Thus, employees with chronic health conditions need to build an awareness of how they feel physically and mentally and when the situation may impact their well-being. This makes a lot of sense. If you aren’t fully aware of how you are feeling and what makes you feel better, how can you be proactive in managing your energy? An important first step in developing your proactive vitality management skills is to understand yourself better.
So, What Can Leaders Do?
Empowering employees with chronic health conditions to manage their resources effectively is so important. Organizations can provide employees with training on how to be more aware of their needs, how to monitor their energy, and how to find strategies to conserve their energy. But, more importantly, leaders need to provide flexibility to allow employees the space and the time they need to manage their energy. As with everything, when employees are overworked, they cannot leverage strategies to support their wellness. This seems to disproportionately impact employees with chronic health conditions. To create an inclusive and sustainable workplace, leaders need to provide all employees with the ability to manage their energy, through proactive vitality management.
