MBA1993 Guest Teacher – Kayla Kozan – How to Take Care of Your Employees’ Wellness as a Busy Entrepreneur

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Practical Powerful Business Lessons Single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Kayla Cozen and she's going to be teaching us how to take care of your employees wellness as a busy entrepreneur hey listen, I know it's hard to think about putting something else else on your plate, but your team's wellness well being is an investment you should make because it's going to help your business not only thrive but be prepared for the long run. Business is a long term game and you need to make sure you pace yourself. You and your team and companies that don't prioritize the wellness of their employees often pay the price sooner or later. Let's make sure your team has a wellness program. Now this doesn't have to be costly or time consuming. It actually is going to enhance your team's productivity and help your bottom line because this is so important. That's why we brought on Kayla to teach today's lesson. She's going to show us exactly what to do, how to get started to make sure our employees wellness is not forgotten and that our team not only sees we're trying, but actually sees the effects of of these activities. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you Think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico. You could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

I'm so happy that we got the chance to have Kayla Cozen on today's episode. Kayla is a well known keynote speaker, mental health advocate and the founder and CEO of Peak Wellness. Her clients include Amazon, KP&G and Netflix. And now she's here to help your business. So listen up, take notes. You're going to love what she has to offer. I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my insights and my takeaways. But for now, take it away. Kayla.

Wonderful. Thank you for that introduction, Omar. My name is Kayla Cozan. It is an absolute pleasure to be here with you today. I am such a big fan of this podcast. I know it is so important to keep our session today light, practical and importantly, something you can get started on right away. As a busy entrepreneur, you don't need any more work on your plate. I know that. And so let's look at ways to look at the strategy and the wellness for our team in three simple steps. So I'm the founder of Peak Wellness. We've hosted wellness classes and initiatives for teams such as Netflix, Amazon and HelloFresh. And along the way, I've noticed three things that high performing leaders consistently do when it comes to their wellness strategy. So it doesn't seem to matter the industry or even the company size. These three fundamentals stay the same. Building Peak Wellness is my true passion. Helping stressed out, burnt out professionals find balance in their lives. But before I started Peak Wellness, I actually was doing a little bit of stand up comedy. That was a hobby of mine and I gave it a shot. And I know we've only been here for a minute or so, but you may be thinking, Kayla, you don't seem funny at all. And that's why I don't do it anymore. So this is my absolute passion. This is what I love to spend my time doing. And many people really struggle to maintain wellness practice practices in their spare time. So we want to make sure that we're able to bring the wellness practice to them at work. So we have three steps we'll be covering here today. Step one is actually a question. So step one question One, and this was really, really important. If you don't do number one, it doesn't matter how many times you do number two and three, you just won't achieve that ROI that you're looking for. The first question you need to ask yourself is, do you have your own wellness foundation under control? Not that you need to be a bodybuilder and meditate for two hours every day, but just reflecting on your own wellness. Where are you at? And remember, there's four pillars to wellness, so physical, mental, emotional, and social. And while none of us will have each of those kind of full to the brim at any given time, it's really important that we're finding a balance between all four. And no particular category is really suffering. And so it's just so important because if you are continuously, consistently 10 out of 10, stress, you don't move from your desk all day, you skip lunch, you're sending emails at 2am Any wellness initiative you put into place will fail to be adopted because it won't feel genuine. It's kind of like giving someone driving lessons and then telling them that you don't even have a car. So we at least need to have a foundation for personal wellness before we start telling our team, you know, you need to walk more, sleep more, take breaks. We want to make sure that we're setting an example that we're proud of in the wellness space at and so really taking care of ourselves, checking in on those four quadrants this may take, you know, depending on where you're at, this could take weeks or a month or two to kind of just get back on track before we go to launch this initiative. And just knowing, of course, that we are kind of projecting that wellness example for our team. So if we don't want our team sending emails at 2am, we'll kind of keep in mind that we don't want to be showing that behavior either. And so once we've got step one under control, we're going to go to step two, go beneath the surface and check in with your team. I like to use the analogy here of a swimming duck. The reason I like the swimming duck analogy is because especially now with less of us getting together and working together in person. So we have a lot of remote, perhaps we're fully remote hybrid. We're just not seeing as many people as normal when it comes to kind of our working lives. For so many of us, it can feel like to a new manager or a new entrepreneur, they're kind of looking at their team from afar. And above. And just like a swim duck from above, the team looks just fine. You might be hearing things about, you know, the stress and the burnout just across all industries right now. But looking at your team and thinking, seems like we're doing okay. Of course the wise entrepreneur will look a little deeper beneath the surface. And we know a swimming duck beneath the surface. Although they may look good from afar, some of us are really finding ourselves kind of floundering. We're just trying to stay afloat and maybe we're kind of unraveling a little bit beneath the surface. And so the wise entrepreneur will really tap into that and really look beneath the surface before you start to put any wellness initiative in place. So this will depend a little bit on the size of your team. If you manage five people that may come up in conversations, one on one, in check ins, you know, how are you doing kind of inside and outside of work. Again, looking at those kind of four quadrants, mental, physical, emotional and social. And I have a number of questions to get us started on the types of questions to ask. If you have a team of 500, let's say you may need to rely a little bit more on some technology or tools or have a wellness team or a wellness committee beneath you. But it's really, really important that we're kind of firsthand involved in this wellness planning. It's really important that we personally understand the wants and needs of our team. So some of those questions to ask when we're going beneath the surface are, do you feel like we're doing enough to prevent burnout? Are there classes or seminars we could add to the day to relieve stress? What wellness topics interest you? What wellness activities do you already enjoy? Do you have a wellness plan for yourself? And how can we help you to feel better physically, mentally, emotionally and or socially? And so again, you're really going to want to personally review this data, personally review what comes back. Even if it's just kind of a high level executive assistant summary, it's really important that we understand where the people on our team stand and how we can support them the best. All of this strategy is absolutely essential right now, perhaps more than ever. And so we actually have some new data that came out just a few days ago. We had a sample size of over 300 employers in this study. And so what we found is that 86% of US employers said that mental health, stress and burnout were top priorities, but Only about a quarter, 25% had already articulated and adopted a well being strategy. So whenever you See that kind of hovering just around 25%. What that says to me as an entrepreneur is that that's actually a competitive advantage for us. It really becomes essential when it comes to recruiting, which is so valuable in today's job market. And so wellness programs benefit your team and your bottom line. You can imagine how they can improve focus, boost morale, decrease stress relief, decrease absenteeism, importantly decrease presenteeism when we have our employees at work, but they're just not able to perform at the levels they'd like to for any given kind of wellness concern. And at the end of the day, this all rolls up, of course, to profitability. And so it's not just a nice thing to do. Your human resources are your most valuable and important resources. Keeping them healthy and happy is a competitive advant. All right, we've made it all the way to step three. So step three. Select activities that align with what your team already enjoys and attend the launch of your program. So most of the really popular wellness themes that we've seen kind of skyrocketing over the past year, two years here, and I've put them in order of just what we've been able to see with the teams that we work with. Mindfulness and meditation, walking challenges, stress management training, resilience training, financial wellbeing, accessible low impact exercise programs, so like mat yoga or chair yoga and cooking classes. And so among this kind of selection of different wellness activities, you should be able to get an idea of where you think you should at least get started with your team. So seeing what's already aligned with that they already enjoy. You want to make sure that you're giving your team more resources for something that they enjoy instead of making them sit through something that's not a fit for them. Variety can be really helpful early on when you're starting your first program or just testing out a few things, you can always kind of do those later surveys to figure out what's being well received, what would your team like to see more of or what would they like to see less of? And so just making sure that these are aligned. And again, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We don't need to get everyone on this new plan. It's very likely that team members already have some sort of wellness strategy in place for them as individuals. So just giving them a little bit more time to spend with those wellness activities during the workday. The last thing I'll say, the most important part of this entire strategy is that you personally attend the sessions or at the very least, attend the launch of your wellness programming. Leadership support is the highest driver of participation in all wellness programs. Your team needs to know that they have your support as well as your permission to attend wellness programming during work. These are the keys to success in supporting your team's wellness as a busy entrepreneur. If your team members feel like they don't really have permission to attend or that if they are busy they shouldn't attend, it can really be valuable to say that it's in your personal best interest so you would like to personally see them taking time to take care of their health. So there you have it. Quick three steps to checking in with your team and supporting them As a busy entrepreneur yourself. Hopefully these are tips you can get started on right away. If you would like more guidance around launching your first programming or improving the wellness initiatives you already have, you can find us at www.peakwellnessco.com. so that's Peak P E A K Wellness W E L L N E S S We have consultants on our team. They can answer questions or just give you some advice or build out a program, a comprehensive program for you from scratch, depending on how much time you have for yourself to get started on this. And it is just such a good time, more now than ever, to really lean into and nurture that wellness of your team. So I hope that was helpful for you. I'm going to pass it back over to Omar. Thank you once again and good luck with your wellness program. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk?

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

I loved Kayla's lesson because, hey, let's be honest, these last two years have been incredibly stressful for all of us and we need to be mindful that, you know, we don't want to get to burnout. We don't want our team members to feel neglected and little things like these exercises can make a big difference. I love the idea of the outdoor walks, but even if you run a remote team doing some online chair yoga or Just yoga in your office or maybe even just some games getting online and just de stressing together as a team, playing some multiplayer games. We've done this in our team and it actually makes a big difference. It brings the team together, this camaraderie, and we all kind of just feel better. We feel like, okay, we get work done, but at the same time we have some fun and we recognize that, hey, stress, we got to keep it at bay. Even if you're a remote team and you want to do that walking activity as a group, you can do some sort of group accountability for the amount of steps you have every day. There's a lot of apps where you can just plug in your data from your watch or your phone and you can have like a leaderboard so you can have a little friendly competition about how many steps you get in every week. Having a business and having a team is a privilege. So we need to make sure we honor that privilege and take care of our people. And I'm going to take a moment just to say, from a practical point of view, this makes business sense because it's so costly to get new employees to have turnover, to put up job positions and screen candidates and interview and make offers. It takes forever and it's really time consuming. And it's in the best interest of the company to keep your employees happy and healthy. Thank you so much, Kayla Cozen for that great, great guest teacher lesson. If you would like more guidance in launching your first wellness program, just head on over to peakwellnessco.com that's peakwellnessco.com and Kayla and our team will be there to help you. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss another episode. By hitting subscribe or follow, you make sure that when the next episode gets published, it's right on your phone. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There's a big reason why big companies like Google and Facebook spend hundreds of millions of dollars on wellness programs, on free massages, on volleyball, on meditation rooms. Because they know that this is a good investment. That yes, they want their team to do good work, hard work, but they understand that there's limits. And in order to get better work out of them, to continue to get work out of them, we gotta let them recover and let's give them the tools to recover and deal with the pressures that we are in as an industry. Now, you may not be able to provide free lunches and free massages. But any effort, any kind of program that you can put together, like we mentioned in today's lesson, is a step in the right direction. We're looking for progress, not perfection. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then then. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico. You could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Oh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.